Teaching Italian Film and Television and Videographic Criticism

The Ohio State University in Autumn semester 2019, during which time the two of us co-taught a graduate seminar.In our initial discussions on the content of the seminar (comprising fourteen modules of 2.5 hours each), we had planned to offer a broad but standard introduction to Italian film and television, and had imagined the syllabus might present a kind of critical 'greatest hits' in Italian film and television history and theory.This plan changed when Alan attended the two-week workshop on videographic criticism, 'Scholarship in Sound and Image', at Middlebury College in June 2018. 1Fresh from this experience, Alan asked if we might consider a different type of seminar, one that took stock of videographic criticism-the audiovisual analysis of audiovisual media, often in the form of videoessays-in the context of Italian film and television studies.And so we put together an exploratory syllabus designed to interrogate the affordances of the videographic mode as critical scholarship, with Italian film and television as our content focus and case study.As an approach to analytical work on film, videographic criticism is increasingly practiced within as well as beyond the academy and can be considered a growing part of digital humanities. 2 As set out below, the types of video-essays produced range from the illustrated lecture to abstract or poetic meditations, and the number of video-essays produced has multiplied exponentially over the past decade in both academic and popular forms.As we quickly realized, there is no agreement yet on the proper form that videographic criticism should take in order to qualify as scholarly practice, something that can generate excitement but also anxiety in practitioners, students and teachers ('is what I am making legitimate scholarship...?').Our seminar was not intended to establish what we might How can the traits and rhetoric of a traditionally text-based scholarly work, characterized by academic lucidity and traceability of information and argumentation, be optimally incorporated and streamlined into an autonomous, audiovisual container? 4

Art · Criticism · Literature · Multimedia · Computer Science · Educational and Social Studies · Italian Fascism and Post-war Society · Italian Literature and Culture

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