Brown Bag Lunch: Rose Marie San Juan
Brown Bag Lunch seminars are only open to UCL History of Art staff and are designed to be an opportunity for us to hear about each other’s work, give feedback and engage in discussion. In this seminar, Professor Rose Marie San Juan will be presenting her recent work to colleagues.
Brown Bag Lunch: Rose Marie San Juan
30 Apr 2024, 13:00 – 14:30
Italian film and the ‘economic boom’: reorienting the cinema screen
In the early 1950’s, experimentation with the film screen brought about a new relationship with spectators, calling up the direct experience of lived spaces and new forms of technology. Separating itself from films associated with the fascist regime, imported Hollywood films, and even the recently acclaimed films of Italian Neorealism, the cinema screen at the start of the so-called Italian economic boom initiated a more decisive physical engagement with the disorienting effects of new forms of technology (architectural developments, reformation of social housing, hydroelectric installations, train innovation). In the process, the screen introduced the possibility of conceiving of the moving image differently, proposing modes of interpretation that questioned not only the national promotion of a miraculous economic future but also the denial of a troubling past. The very issues under debate in the public sphere (especially the press, the documentary, the news reel, and the cinema screen itself), entered the screen, destabilising conventions of narrative in favour of a continuous unmaking and remaking of the space of the screen.
Rose Marie San Juan is Professor of History of Art at UCL and has been a member of the department since 2005. Previously she taught at the University of British Columbia in the Department of Art History, Visual Arts and Theory. Her work focuses on Italian art and culture, especially on early modern urban life in Rome, and deals with visual technologies such as print and film in relation to time, movement and urban space. She has published on print culture and urban practices in early modern Rome, on the movement of images between Europe, Asia and the 'New World', on anatomical prints and wax models, on the body and problems of representation, and on film and urban space. She has completed a book entitled Violence and the Genesis of the Anatomical Image, and her new research is on film, documentary and social architectural projects in Italy between the 1930s and 1950s.
Further information
Ticketing
Open
Cost
Free
Open to
UCL staff
Availability
Yes