72815 - Performance Studies and Audiovisual Media (1) (LM)

Learning outcomes

The course offers an orientation on the existing studies on film and television acting, on the construction of stardom through the industry, on the resources and methods of audiovisual performance, on the phenomena of celebrity separated from specific acting skills and propagated through the new media. At the end of the course students: - possess the necessary tools to understand the mechanisms that regulate the different types of performances; - know and use the necessary tools to understand the actor performance in the audiovisual media.

Course contents

If the study of performance focuses on the collective gaze on the human being, this course investigates how that gaze is embodied in acting practices, in the costumes actors wear, in film narrative, in the ways and places of product circulation

Actors and actresses and celebrity phenomena are the area of inquiry within which students engage in performance analysis.

The course contains a focus on the tradition behind the contemporary realism in acting techniques - based on a twentieth-century notion of realism (complex, ambivalent, stratified characters, recognisable and bearer of neurotic traits that can be shared by the spectators). This notion has its roots in the nineteenth-century novel and theatre, but above all in the revisionist wave that spread from the Moscow Art Theatre to Central Europe and the United States in the first half of the twentieth century. The historical and cultural bases of he Stanislawsky System, of Group Theatre and Actors Studio will be discussed in past and contemporary films, with a  focus on the analysis of specific aspects of the actor's work according to the Strasberg method and some contemporary Stanislavskian acting coaches.

Students are invited to chose the subject of their final paper starting from the 4th class. Reflective performance (ch. 5,6 and 8 R.Schenker) - stories of actors or entertainment personalities - is chosen as particularly suitable for revealing backgrounds and motivations of performance (in audiovisual products, mainly fiction, with forays into other areas of cultural production). 

 

Readings/Bibliography

Introduction to performance studies by Richard Schenker, CUE Press, 2023 (ch. 1, 2,3,4, 6)
Materials uploaded on Virtuale on the topics of celebrity for use by both attending and non-attending students (for the latter, the materials and chapters in the book are mandatory study items for taking a short in-class test to be added to the final paper)

Teaching methods

--Frontal lecture with film examples and use of Powerpoint slides

Assessment methods

Students are required to submit a final paper of approximately 20 folders (one folder is equivalent to 2000 characters, including spaces) on a topic of the student's choice agreed upon with the professor. The paper must be submitted for correction within 14 days of the appeal date in which the exam is to be taken. Attending students will have agreed and discussed the topic already in class. Non-attending students --

Teaching tools

Analysis of audiovisual objects, or material found on web platforms such as youtube. The resources of the web will be used to exemplify ways through which audiences and performers come into contact, but also to exemplify ways of researching informational material about performance and performers

Office hours

See the website of Sara Pesce