In this article I will analyse three case studies – Chronicle (Josh Trank, 2012), Unfriended (Levan Gabriadze, 2014) and The Visit (M. Night Shyamalan, 2015) – starting from a premise and posing a question. The premise: the gaze on the world of the so-called iGeneration (or post-millennials) is more and more mediated by technical proxies – portable devices, wearable technologies, virtual reality – which redefine viewing paradigms and production/consumption/sharing models of moving images. Our sensorial experience is indeed more and more mediated by the software as cultural interface which keeps on evolving, and less and less by ‘machines’ as hardware...

Terzo fascicolo del 2019

While the tension between cinematic and television storytelling may be explored from a variety of perspectives, I am going to focus on the particular experience of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (David Lynch, USA-France, 1992, 135 min), the cinematic extension of the cult multi-tiered narrative television series. Perceived mostly as an excessively celebrated television movie at the time of its release, more recently Fire Walk with Me has been reappraised, its aesthetic value and narrative connections with the TV show having been accurately reassessed on the occasion of the 2017 revival...

Fargo (2014), the TV series created by Noah Hawley and executive-produced by the Coen brothers, constitutes both a prime example of a recent trend in US quality TV and a successful adaptation of a film text, the 1996 movie of the same title made by Joel and Ethan Coen. It is our understanding that the achievement of the TV series springs from a creative design that allows the viewer to recognize in it an unmistakable resemblance with its predecessor, while at the same time becoming an enjoyable narrative in its own right, as an autonomous text. Thus, fans of the film can take pleasure in the recurring thematic, tonal, aesthetic and narrative links that the series establishes with the movie, and at the same time be captivated by a brilliant new plot and characters...

Each industry has its own way of crafting stories for TV. Different organizational models in the task of breaking down stories; the influence of titles which have been successful in a particular market; the unique viewing attitudes of a domestic audience… all these factors make screenwriters adopt a combination of writing techniques peculiar to each country. Even if the US writing school has imposed itself as a universal standard – the “orthodoxy” – deviations from its lessons – slight or significant, depending on the case – define the originality of an industry’s storytelling...

This article works on the confluence of time travel and identity in stories, under the perspective of Paul Ricoeur’s understanding of the concept of “interior time”, that he takes from Augustine. The study deals with the first season of the German TV series Dark (Netflix, 2017). The “time travel” topic has been frequent in the movies, as also its development in plots of duality of lives or in films that affect the own identity. In Dark, however, the time travel arises in the confluence between freedom and identity, which provides an especially profound narrative analysis...

We analyze what some of the main screenwriting experts say about the inciting incident (also called inciting event, catalyst, big hook, among other terms) underlining the limitations of the various approaches and trying to arrive at a new view of the topic, which can apply to both cinema and television...