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We can hypothesise that greater effectiveness in favouring the establishment of a cosmocentric paradigm is to be sought in at least a basic factor inherent in the aesthetic experience of the audio-visual image of the landscape: the “introjective” or “immersive” vision, which implies the symbolic overcoming of the threshold of representation by the spectator and their fusion with what is represented, a perception of the environment not as an external surrounding space, but as a place in which one is included and of which one is part.

This Focus presents a collection of essays from the conference “Looking at the City: Filming City-scapes as a Multicultural and Multidentity Experience” (January 2019 - Florence University). The collection highlights ways in which migrants are portrayed in cinema and traditional media, with particular attention to the dynamics of self-representation in its interaction with city-scapes or urban landscapes.

Through the lens of visual culture studies, images can be investigated according to their “positions” on contemporary history as political instruments of human understanding. Images of borders, in particular, acquire special importance in the dialectics between visible and invisible – subjects and objects, ego and alter – and can shape a symbolic relation towards the otherness. Within the European culture and the various representations of migrants, media can contribute to rebuilding the notion of heterotopia by avoiding iconoclasm while implementing an ethical gaze and authentic comprehension about those global individuals that are reorganizing our World-Society.

The escalation of population movements – migratory flows, tourism, business or training travels etc. – is affecting the human experience in the global culture. The main implications and impact of this transformation underway can be traced through five macro-areas of concern: the different forms of the journey, the relationship between photography and travel, the interpretation of migration flows, the liquid passage between photography and migratory phenomenon and, lastly, the increasing movie tourism. In what we may define a metamorphic era, the notions of “border”, “stranger”, “identity” are being called into question by a complex interrelation system among these areas.

Recensione di Alberto BARACCO, Hermeneutics of the Film World. A Ricœurian Method for Film Interpretation, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017

The essay presents a study of Beckett's Film in the light of Film Theory and Phenomenology, so as to reflect on Beckett's concern with perception from various perspectives.