| 1. |
- Audissino, Emilio, Senior Lecturer, 1981-
(author)
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2 Broke Girls: Flattening Kat Dennings into Max Black : Screenwriting and Character Complexity in the Sitcom Format
- 2019
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Conference paper (other academic/artistic)abstract
- The CBS sit-com 2 Broke Girls – aired for six seasons from 2011 to 2017 – represented a watershed in Kat Dennings’ career. Up to that moment she had been consolidating a resume as ‘indie rising star’ with a gallery of rebellious and emotionally-complex leading characters – for example, Nick and Nora’s Infinite Playlist (2008) or Daydream Nation (2010) – interspersed with comedic supporting roles in mainstream films – for example, The House Bunny (2008). And when she landed the principal role of Max Black in the CBS show she had two very different films in the pipeline: on the one hand To Write Love on Her Arms (2012), an indie drama about addiction and depression; on the other hand, the supporting comic-relief role in the Marvel kolossal Thor (2011). Dennings brought to 2 Broke Girl this dual screen-persona that she had been honing: talented dramatic actress plus witty comedian. The mix soon proved too complex to handle for a sit-com, particularly for a conservative/traditional one like 2 Broke Girls that neither sought the formal experimentations of Arrested Development nor would manage to give its characters the depth and development arc as The Big Bang Theory managed to. Throughout the six seasons, the Max Black character made a journey from complexity to simplicity. In Season One Max is a young woman with a traumatic childhood, working two minimum-wage jobs and still struggling to make the ends meet, hiding her desperation behind a facade of cynicism and sarcasm. In Season Six Max has turned into a hollower stand-up-comedian-like type, a stereotypical street-smart slacker dispensing one-liners about booze, sex, and her own breasts. The writers kept the facade and dropped the inner anguish that was originally hidden behind it. Dennings gradually had to flatten out her original multifaceted persona into a more mono-dimensional type. The paper surveys this transformation process across the show, tracing how this ‘involution’ and ‘flattening’ may have been determined by the constraints of the traditional live-audience multi-camera sit-com format, as well as by some overly-formulaic writing and short-sighted decisions in both the planning of the multi-season development and in the design of the character arc – which might have had some weight in the eventual cancellation of the show.
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| 2. |
- Audissino, Emilio, Senior Lecturer, 1981-
(author)
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A Gestalt Approach to the Analysis of Music in Films
- 2017
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In: Musicology Research. - Derby, UK : University of Derby, UK. ; 2:1, s. 69-88
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- In the field of Film-Music Studies, Cognitive Psychology remains perhaps the stronger approach as an alternative to Post-Structuralism and Cultural Studies. Yet, Gestalt Psychology has recently seen a revival of interest. Gestalt can offer enlightening concepts not only to theorise how music and visuals combine in an audiovisual whole, but also productive tools to analyse concrete instances in films. While Cognitivism tends to be concerned with single mechanisms of how the brain processes the perceptual data and gives much salience to the higher cognitive operations, Gestalt is concerned with the holistic nature of our experience and attributes more importance to the lower perceptual operations. As Donnelly points out, the combination of sound and visuals into an audiovisual whole has not so much to do with cognitive elaborations as with that hard-wired orientation of our mind towards completeness and stableness that is studied by Gestalt.Employing the Gestalt concepts of Isomorphism, Prägnanz and Dynamic Self-Distribution, I propose an approach to the analysis of music in films based on the similarity/difference between the configuration (gestalt) of the music and that of the other cinematic components (cinematography, editing, acting, lighting, colour palette...). A stabilised experience of the audiovisual whole – the basis for both a formalistic analysis and a critical interpretation – is reached when their encounter makes the gestalts of the cinematic components reciprocally reconfigure and fuse to produce a wider all-including gestalt: the macro-configuration of the audiovisual experience. This Gestalt approach – being based on the fusion of the aural and visual factors into a whole that is 'different from the sum of its parts' – is also helpful to supersede the long-standing visual bias that influences Film Studies, which leads to think of music as something that is externally added to either reinforce or subvert what is already there in the visuals.
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| 3. |
- Audissino, Emilio, 1981-
(author)
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A Matter of Form, Style, and Monsters : A Comparative Analysis of Reazione a catena and Friday the 13th
- 2020
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In: L'avventura. International Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Landscapes. - Bologna : Societa Editrice Il Mulino. - 2421-6496. ; 6:1, s. 3-22
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- The Italian filmmaker Mario Bava was an influential master of genre films. Perhaps his most seminal contribution was to the American slasher films of the 1980s, in particular the Friday the 13th series, which paid overt homage to Mario Bava’s Reazione a catena (1971). While the similarities and borrowings have already been discussed elsewhere, this article examines the differences, through a comparative formal and stylistic analysis, between Friday the 13th (S.S. Cunningham, 1980) and Reazione a catena. It focuses specifically on the impalement scene in Friday the 13th Part 2 (S. Miner, 1981), which was borrowed almost verbatim from Bava’s film, but which makes substantial and meaningful changes.
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| 4. |
- Audissino, Emilio, Associate Professor, 1981-
(author)
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Aha, Ha! Moment : A Gestalt Perspective on Audiovisual Humour
- 2022
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In: Cinéma & Cie. - : Milano University Press. - 2036-461X. ; 22:38, s. 97-116
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- In my previous work about film music, I had adopted Gestalt as a theoretical framework to explain the functions and effects of music in film, from a perspective that did not stem from musicology but from film studies. I developed what I call ‘micro/macro configurations’ analysis. In films, music contributes to the overall form with its specific gestalt (the configuration of the musical structures), and such musical gestalt meets the gestalt of some other cinematic device/s. Besides music, any device (light design, colour schemes, dialogue, acting, camerawork, cutting…) has a specific micro-configuration that can fuse with those of the other devices, and it can be analysed in terms of micro/macro-configuration. The product of the fusion of these micro-configurations is a macro-configuration in which the devices create an audiovisual whole that is ‘something else than the sum of its parts’. In this article I apply this Gestalt-inspired analytical approach to audiovisual humour, more specifically to ‘audiovisual puns’, ‘sight gags’, and ‘perceptual pranks’. The bulk of the examples come from the cinema of the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker trio, whose comedy is largely based on a clash of incongruous micro-configurations, on perceptual accumulation that creates results similar to multistable figures, and even on comical optical illusions. Closing the article is a proposal that links Gestalt to the Release Theories of humour, explaining the laughter engendered by humour as a ‘Aha, Ha! moment’.
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| 5. |
- Audissino, Emilio, Senior Lecturer, 1981-
(author)
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Archival Research and the Study of the Concert Presentations of Film Music : The Case of John Williams and the Boston Pops
- 2013
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In: The Journal of Film Music. - : Equinox Publishing. - 1087-7142 .- 1758-860X. ; 6:2, s. 147-163
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Film music has increasingly populated the concert programs in the last twenty years. Yet, the presentation of the film-music repertoire in concerts is a corner of the film–music field that has received little scholarly attention. Archival research combined with the study of audio–visual documents in particular is the key to reconstruct the story of the presentation of film music in concerts. As a case study, I present the findings of the research that I conducted in Boston, U.S.A., in 2010 and 2011. Its aim was to demonstrate John Williams's seminal contribution to the legitimization of film music as a viable concert repertoire during his tenure as conductor of the Boston Pops Orchestra—“America's orchestra”. The results showed very convincingly that John Williams's association with the most trend–setting and visible orchestra in the U.S.A. has been a major force and a seminal influence for the acceptance of film music as a legitimate concert repertoire.
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| 6. |
- Audissino, Emilio, Senior Lecturer, 1981-
(author)
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Archival Research and the Study of the Concert Presentations of Film Music
- 2015
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In: Audio-Visual Archives conference, the British Library, London, 18 July 2015.
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Conference paper (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Film music has increasingly entered into the concert programmes in the last twenty years, to become now standard repertoire not only of the so-called 'Pops Concerts' but also of the more classical-oriented ones. Yet, the presentation of the film-music repertoire in concert programmes is a corner of the film-music field that has received little scholarly attention – if none at all. Archival research, particularly using audiovisual archives, is the key to reconstruct how film music has been gradually introduced into concert programmes and in what forms. As an example, I propose to describe the methodology and findings of the research that I conducted in Boston, U.S.A., in 2010 and 2011, the aim of which was to demonstrate John Williams' seminal contribution to the legitimisation of film music as a viable concert repertoire. The research was conducted at the Boston Symphony Orchestra Archives – where I compared the concert programmes of the Williams era with the ones from the previous Arthur Fiedler era – and at the WGBH Media Archives – where I watched all the Williams episodes of the TV show Evening at Pops (1969-2004). The archival research was more rewarding that expected, the findings demonstrating my thesis very convincingly. In particular, the videos I watched at WGBH, combined with the study of the programmes at the BSO Archives, were the basis of my classification of the forms and formats in which film music is typically adapted for concert performance. The video materials were also cardinal in showing that Williams has also had a central role in developing the multimedia concert presentations – i.e. an orchestra playing live to projected film clips – in its two formats (“multimedia concert piece” and “multimedia film piece”).
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| 7. |
- Audissino, Emilio, 1981-
(author)
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Behold the Newest Technological Sensation! With Music! : The Use of Music in the Silent Cinema
- 2019
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In: <em>Music and the Second Industrial Revolution</em>. - Turnhout : Brepols. - 9782503585710 ; , s. 429-447
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Book chapter (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Cinema was not conceived as a form of visual narrative, and certainly not as a form of art. The moving-image technique was introduced, in the Positivist milieu of the late nineteenth century, as the latest technological marvel, to be used, in the noblest cases, as an instrument for scientific inquiry – for example, to capture and analyse motion, as in Étienne-Jules Marey’s photographic rifle. Or, in more commercial usages, as an attraction at fun-fairs and world expositions – ‘Behold the latest marvel! Animated photographs!’ While the animation of images had a long tradition – for example, the seventeenth-century Magic Lantern shows – the inception of cinema was precisely made possible by recent technological advances: the faster photographic emulsions, the flexible celluloid support, and the feeding mechanism of the industrial sewing machines. While, contrary to the common narrative, it is not sure that some musical accompaniment was regularly present during the first film projections, certainly music came soon to play an increasingly central role in the development and diffusion of film shows. The chapter surveys the changes in musical practices from the early cinema of the 1890s to the standardisation of the classical narrative cinema of the 1920s – a ‘Cinema of Attractions’ that gradually turned into a ‘Cinema of Narrative Integration’ – discussing the principal functions that music fulfilled, its typical forms, its accompaniment strategies, and also some early technical attempts at making synchronisation easier and closer. While the first applications of music typically had a practical rationale – for example, drowning the fastidious sound of the projectors – and music (any music) would be simply used to provide some silence-filler, gradually film-makers realised music’s powerful potential as a narrative tool, and more dramaturgically careful uses of music were implemented, increasingly putting music under the control of the film-makers, to the point that eventually even the performer’s human variable was mechanised, with the adoption of synchronised on-film sound that crystallised the musical performance and made it interlocked with the film-strip and repeatable ad infinitum.
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| 8. |
- Audissino, Emilio, Senior Lecturer, 1981-
(author)
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Bernard Herrmann e il suono della paura
- 2011
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In: Almanacco Horror Magazine. - Rome : Delos Books. ; :1, s. 116-119
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Journal article (pop. science, debate, etc.)abstract
- [Bernard Herrmann and the Sound of Fear]: a celebration of the film works of composer Bernard Herrmann upon the centennial of his birth.
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| 9. |
- Audissino, Emilio, Senior Lecturer, 1981-
(author)
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Bicycles, Airplanes and Peter Pans : Flying Scenes in Steven Spielberg's Films
- 2014
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In: CINEJ Cinema Journal. - Pittsburgh : University of Pittsburgh Press. - 2159-2411 .- 2158-8724. ; 3:2, s. 103-119
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- In Steven Spielberg's cinema the flight is a recurring theme. Flying scenes can be sorted into two classes: those involving a realistic flight – by aircraft – and those involving a magical flight – by supernatural powers. The realistic flight is influenced by the war stories of Spielberg's father – a radio man in U.S. Air-force during WWII – and it is featured in such films as Empire of the Sun (1987), Always (1989), and 1941 (1979). The magical flight is influenced by James M. Barries' character Peter Pan (Peter and Wendy, 1911), which is quoted directly in E.T. the Extraterrestrial (1982) and, above all, in Hook (1991), which is a sequel to Barrie's story. These two types of flying scenes are analysed as to their meanings, compared to the models that influenced them, and surveyed as to their evolution across Spielberg's films. A central case study is the episode The Mission from Amazing Stories (1985), in which the realistic and the magical flights overlap.
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| 10. |
- Audissino, Emilio, Senior Lecturer, 1981-
(author)
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Bringing The Nanny to the Italian Audience : Dubbing as Adaptation and Assimilation
- 2017
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In: First conference of the Journal for Italian Cinema and Media Studies, American University of Rome, Italy, 9-10 June 2017.
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Conference paper (other academic/artistic)abstract
- As widely known in Translation Studies, no translation comes without adaptation: translating means converting a source-language text into a target-language text bearing in mind that the cultural context of the target language is likely to be different. Adaptation is typically at work with those puns, proverbs or idiomatic expressions that are not translatable verbatim and thus require some semantic adaptation that should convey the same meaning under a different form – e.g. the meaning of the English “Touch wood!” is rendered in Italian by “Tocca ferro! [Touch iron]”Dubbing is a popular method of audio-visual translation – or better, of audio-visual adaptation – and the preferred one in such non-English-speaking countries as France, Germany and Italy. The major problem with dubbing is that, unlike subtitling, it replaces part of the film: the dialogue track. An audio-visual product can thus undergo radical and even utterly arbitrary adaptation operations without the audience in the target country noticing it, given the unavailability of the original dialogue track for comparison. Dubbing, more than subtitling, often imposes on the audio-visual product a more or less marked process of socio-cultural “assimilation” – in its original meaning of “making similar.” Through significant changes in the dialogue, the audio-visual work is adapted to make it more relatable to the target audience. In some cases, this assimilation leads to a radical modification of the original socio-cultural context of the work, an extreme “assimilating” adaptation that is often unnecessary semantically – a more faithful translation of the dialogue could have been perfectly understandable even without such drastic changes. In these cases the rationale is market-oriented: the audience may enjoy the audio-visual work better if they recognise in the story familiar elements and a world that is “similar” to theirs.The case study presented is the Italian version of the American TV series The Nanny (1993-1999) in which the Jewish characters were turned into Italian characters. This created incongruous formal consequences – e.g. mismatches between the new dialogue track and the original visual track – but assured a wide success on the Italian television.
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