Videos by Francesco Sticchi
An Analysis of Cinema and Audiovisual Experience as Inherently Posthuman associated with consider... more An Analysis of Cinema and Audiovisual Experience as Inherently Posthuman associated with considerations upon the tension between trans and posthumanism in Horror and Sci-fi contemporary screen culture 3 views
Books by Francesco Sticchi
Palgrave Macmillan, 2021
This book examines a corpus of films and TV series released since the global financial crisis, ad... more This book examines a corpus of films and TV series released since the global financial crisis, addressing them as emblematic expressions of our age of precarity. The analysis of the motifs and characters of these case studies is built around notions originating from Mikhail Bakhtin’s literary theory and, in particular, the concept of chronotope, affirming the material and dynamic connection between form and content in artistic experience. The text observes how precarious lives are enacted in forms of spatio-temporal compositions which carry conceptual and ethical challenges for their viewers. This book falls within the film-philosophy framework and, although primarily directed to an academic audience, it provides an interdisciplinary account of the notion of cinematic precarity. It puts the embodied analysis of viewers’ ethical participation in close dialogical relationship with a philosophical and sociological examination of current dynamics of inequality and exclusion.
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Routledge: Advances in Film Studies, 2018
This work outlines a new methodology for film analysis based on the radical materialist thought o... more This work outlines a new methodology for film analysis based on the radical materialist thought of Baruch Spinoza, re-evaluating contemporary cognitive media theory and philosophical theories on the emotional and intellectual aspects of film experience.
Sticchi’s exploration of Spinozian philosophy creates an experiential constructive model to blend the affective and intellectual aspects of cognition, and to combine it with different philosophical interpretations of film theory. Spinoza’s embodied philosophy rejected logical and ethical dualisms, and established a perfect parallelism between sensation and reason and provides the opportunity to address negative emotions and sad passions without referring exclusively to traditional notions such as catharsis or sublimation, and to put forth a practical/embodied notion of Film-Philosophy. This new analytical approach is tested on four case studies, films that challenge the viewer’s emotional engagement since they display situations of cosmic failure and depict controversial and damaged characters: A Serious Man (2009); Melancholia (2011); The Act of Killing (2012) and Only Lovers Left Alive (2013).
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Papers by Francesco Sticchi
Empedocles: European Journal for the Philosophy of Communication
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Canadian Journal of Film Studies, 2019
Pour bon nombre de linguistes contemporains, le film L’Arrivée ( Arrival — Denis Villeneuve, 2016... more Pour bon nombre de linguistes contemporains, le film L’Arrivée ( Arrival — Denis Villeneuve, 2016) met au premier plan les coordonnées interactives de la communication. L’auteur s’inspire de Baruch Spinoza et George Lakoff pour analyser cette dynamique et démontrer que L’Arrivée pose un défi éthique et linguistique, fonction de la capacité des spectateurs à reformuler leur propre façon de percevoir le monde. Les théories de Spinoza et de Lakoff sont fondamentales à la démonstration de la corrélation entre l’empathie et la simulation incarnée d’une part, et l’interaction linguistique-conceptuelle d’autre part. Cette approche expérimentale repose sur l’hypothèse selon laquelle le film est un phénomène incarné et dialogique auquel les spectateurs, comme le démontre l’interprétation de Hesselberth du chronotope de Bakhtin, participent également en réélaborant constamment les notions de temps et d’espace. L’auteur examine donc comment, dans L’Arrivée, la participation des spectateurs ama...
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Empedocles: European Journal for the Philosophy of Communication, Volume 13, Number 1, 1 June 2022, pp. 3-9(7), 2022
The following introduction to the Special Issue addresses the problematic definition of the notio... more The following introduction to the Special Issue addresses the problematic definition of the notion of precarity by highlighting its multifaceted value and possible interpretation in relation to the moving image. It also aims, at the same time, to show some directions in which, in accordance with the work of many scholars, it is possible to come with effective transversal modes of adopting and applying the concept. In this sense, the introduction also shows how the various papers of the Special Issue are capable to contribute to this understanding in unique and productive ways.
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Sinefilozofi, 2022
The aim of the paper is to contribute to the discussion and debate on Denis Villeneuve's Dune: Pa... more The aim of the paper is to contribute to the discussion and debate on Denis Villeneuve's Dune: Part One by using a film-philosophical approach, which will take into account how particular aspects of the storyworld, stylistic patterns, and specific chronotopes inform the film's singular take on the famous story/saga. The article contends that the film puts forth an operatic aesthetic of disenchantment and misrecognition and strategically uses ambiguity and uncertainty as existentialist motifs to deconstruct ideas of heroism and predestination. These affective dynamics provide the storyworld with an eerie tension stressing lack, loss, mourning, and powerlessness. Concurrently, the cinematic chronotope of the desert presented in the film, in contrast with that of classic epic movies such as Lawrence of Arabia (1962) by David Lean, exists as a living and immanent organism embodying an unresolved dense field of possible ethical experimentations.
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Mapping Precarity in Contemporary Cinema and Television, 2021
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Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 2022
Thinking about the dynamics of precarity challenges us to defy and avoid any essentialised and cr... more Thinking about the dynamics of precarity challenges us to defy and avoid any essentialised and crystallised category of exploitation and of the worker in the contemporary chain of value extraction. Indeed, since the neoliberal paradigm is often described as a regime shattering any distinction between life and work, such a productive dimension involves tackling subjectivity at the intersection of class, race, gender, ability/disability. The aim of this paper is to examine the recent The Assistant (2019) by Kitty Green, which, because of its melancholic and disempowering affective patterns, embodies a fascinating critical potential in reversing mythologies and imaginative traps related to dreams of individualised self-entrepreneurship. The film allows us to discuss these same intertwined levels by observing the emotional economy entailed in cultural work and how much this ecology can be connected with more general coordinates and strategies of feminisation and extraction of care-related activities.
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Theory, Culture & Society, 2022
This article aims to investigate the political and conceptual power of the successful and highly ... more This article aims to investigate the political and conceptual power of the successful and highly praised film Bacurau (Juliano Dornelles and Kleber Mendonça Filho, 2019) by inserting it within general trends of contemporary visual culture surrounding the issue of cinematic precarity. The discussion will find its analytical coordinates around the notions of chronotope and dialogism. These tools are notoriously attributed to Mikhail Bakhtin and are intended to investigate regular patterns in aesthetic experiences and to evaluate the differential and subversive potential to be attributed to every case study. The grounding assumption of the following analysis is to understand cinematic experience as an ecological encounter and an affective and conceptual interaction in which viewers find the opportunity to explore and experience complex ethical systems: a productive interrelation that allows us also to connect the discussion with reflections upon general dynamics of neoliberal governance and with trajectories of resistance and revolt against it.
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The Deuce observes the transformations of the notorious 42nd street of New York across the 1970s ... more The Deuce observes the transformations of the notorious 42nd street of New York across the 1970s and 1980s. Aim of this paper is demonstrating how the series enacts this urban mutation through the integration of the affective and experiential texture of the story-world into a unitary, yet multifaceted and transformative, ecology. The analysis will be carried out by drawing from Mikhail Bakthin’s notions of chronotope and dialogism, demonstrating the pragmatic power of artistic experience in enacting space-time dimensions characterised by an intrinsic emotional and conceptual polyphony. These concepts will be examined within the framework of an enactivist and film-philosophical understanding of cinematic experience addressing the ethical power entangled in viewers’ aesthetic engagement. I will resort to these ideas to discuss how The Deuce offers a complex and critical enactment of the socio-economic dynamics of the Neoliberal Turn, metonymically embedded, in its conflicts and contradictions, within the series’ mutating environment.
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Mapping Precarity in Contemporary Cinema and Television
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Film-Philosophy 25, 2021
This article considers Nanni Moretti's We Have a Pope (Habemus Papam, 2011) and Alice Rohrwacher'... more This article considers Nanni Moretti's We Have a Pope (Habemus Papam, 2011) and Alice Rohrwacher's Corpo Celeste (2011) via the notion of lines of flight as developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. We argue that, in spite of stylistic and thematic differences, the two films present clear similarities since they highlight and address conflicts and tensions existing within the contemporary Catholic religious order. Both films present cracks and horizons of becoming within the institutionalised Catholic Church, tracing possible paths of transformation for viewers aligning with and following the two main characters. We argue, concurrently, that Corpo Celeste-because of specific formal and conceptual choices-engenders a complete reimagining of the transcendent realm within a miraculous or animist materialist and immanent paradigm.
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Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Film and Media Studies, 2018
In this essay I analyse Matteo Garrone’s Tale of Tales (2015) within the perspective of embodied ... more In this essay I analyse Matteo Garrone’s Tale of Tales (2015) within the perspective of embodied cognition. I consider film experience as an
affective-conceptual phenomenon based on the viewer’s embodiment of the visual structures. Baruch Spinoza stands at the foundation of my analytical approach since his thought was based on the absolute parallelism between the body and the mind. This paradigm redefines anthropocentrism and rejects dualism; however, the criticism of the rationalist ideal is also one of the main characteristics of the film Tale of Tales: by staging baroque and excessive characters, it allows the viewer to embody a notion of subjectivity that is performative and relational. Therefore, by combining the cognitive analysis of the film with my theoretical framework I will present a radical criticism of abstract rationality and present an ecological idea of the human.
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Projections: The Journal for Movies and Mind, 2020
Since the emergence of embodied cognitive theories, there has been an ever-growing interest in th... more Since the emergence of embodied cognitive theories, there has been an ever-growing interest in the applic ation of these theories to media studies, generating a large number of analyses focusing on the affective and intellectual features of viewers' participation. The body of the viewer has become the central object of study for fi lm and media scholars, who examine the conceptual physicality of the viewing experience by associating body states with parallel intellectual and moral constructions. In this article, I contribute to the study of embodied cognition and cinema by drawing upon Baruch Spinoza's philosophy, especially from his process-based notion of the body. I will put this ecological and dynamic concept of the body in connection with recent studies on enactive cognition, and defi ne a radical enactivist approach to be applied in the discussion of the experiential dynamics of Lynne Ramsay's You Were Never Really Here.
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Mimesis Scenari: Rivista Semestrale di Filosofia Contemporanea, 2019
This essay addresses Personal Shopper as an essential case study to
examine the radical transform... more This essay addresses Personal Shopper as an essential case study to
examine the radical transformation of subjectivity taking place through
the relation with digital technology and screens in our everyday life.
The discussion will be mainly directed on how the film describes the
psychological and emotional conflict embodied by the main character,
Maureen, as the result of a complex entanglement with spaces, technological,
and material surfaces. The decentring of Maureen on the physical
context surrounding her, reveals her identity as an ecological notion, an
immanent and enworlded process of continuous remediation with the
environment. Employing Giuliana Bruno’s work and Mikhail Bakhtin’s
notion of the Chronotope, I will demonstrate how Personal Shopper, far
from describing technological developments as the accomplishment of
a humanist ideal, allows us to tackle, without conciliating answers, the
radical crisis of the human characterising our age.
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Screen Bodies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Experience, Perception, and Display, 2018
In this article, I analyze Park Chan-wook’s The Handmaiden (Ah-gassi, 2016) by addressing its puz... more In this article, I analyze Park Chan-wook’s The Handmaiden (Ah-gassi, 2016) by addressing its puzzle narrative and complex interactive dynamics as embodied and affective categories. In particular, I employ Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the chronotope together with Giuliana Bruno’s work on media theory and Steffen Hven’s notion of the embodied fabula to show how the film, in all its aesthetic complexity, enacts a creative and transformative experience based on the continuous subversion of the power dynamics I describe. Furthermore, I demonstrate how this semantic and experiential reconstruction couples viewers’ alignment with the two main characters in their rebellion against patriarchal power and obsessive male fantasies. Ultimately, then, in this article I aim to connect the experiential and affective engagement of the film with a critical reading of power dynamics as ecologically situated structures to be challenged and revolutionized through a creative process of becoming.
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Canadian Journal of Film Studies
For many contemporary linguists, the film Arrival (Denis Villeneuve, 2016) foregrounds the intera... more For many contemporary linguists, the film Arrival (Denis Villeneuve, 2016) foregrounds the interactive coordinates of communication. This article draws upon Baruch Spinoza and George Lakoff to analyze these dynamics and to demonstrate that Arrival presents an ethical and linguistic challenge based on the viewers’ capacity to reframe their own ways of perceiving the world. Spinoza’s and Lakoff’s theories are fundamental to show the correlation between empathy and embodied simulation on one side, and linguistic/conceptual interaction on the other. This experiential approach implies that film is an embodied and dialogical phenomenon, in which viewers, as Hesselberth’s interpretation of Bakhtin’s chronotope demonstrates, participate also by continuously re-elaborating ideas of time and space. Therefore, we will see how, in Arrival, viewers’ participation constructively integrates the empathic alignment with the characters with the comprehension of the narrative, and involves a Spinozistic ethical effort to use filmic images in the most productive way.
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Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Film and Media Studies, 2018
In this essay I analyse Matteo Garrone's Tale of Tales within the perspective of embodied cogniti... more In this essay I analyse Matteo Garrone's Tale of Tales within the perspective of embodied cognition. I consider film experience as an affective-conceptual phenomenon based on the viewer's embodiment of visual structures. Baruch Spinoza stands at the foundation of my analytical approach since his thought was based on the absolute parallelism between the body and the mind. This paradigm redefines anthropocentrism and rejects dualism: however, the criticism of the rationalist ideal is also one of the main characteristics of the film: Tale of Tales, by staging baroque and excessive characters, allows the viewer to embody a notion of subjectivity that is performative and relational. Therefore, by combining the cognitive analysis of the film with my theoretical framework I will present a radical criticism of abstract rationality and present an ecological idea of the human.
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The aim of this article is to outline a Spinozian-Deleuzian analysis of audio-visual experience a... more The aim of this article is to outline a Spinozian-Deleuzian analysis of audio-visual experience and to combine this account with an embodied cognitive perspective on cinema. Thus, film experience integrates affection and intellection and is not a passive and contemplative phenomenon, but a constructive interaction that involves a creative encounter between the screen and the viewer. Furthermore, I will address the role of sad passions and the problematic relation between creation and resistance, also by drawing upon Primo Levi’s work on memory and on the shame of being human. Consequently, I will argue that my Spinozian-Deleuzian perspective involves an idea of cinema and art as ethically productive events since they allow a creative opposition against all those forces that mortify and enclose existence. Andrei Tarkovsky’s masterpiece Andrei Rublev offers the possibility to develop this discussion; in this biopic, the life of the famous Russian painter is pervaded by problematic questions upon the nature of God, the necessity of Evil, the role of art within a world of violence and misery and, at the same time, the tension and the marvel in the discovery of the real. Following the ideas on spectatorship outlined by Deleuze and combined with Spinoza’s thought, we can say that the film makes us perceive these issues through the embodiment and the engagement of the relations it describes. At the same time, the movie gives us the possibility to re-discuss these terrible questions revealing the active and productive nature of art, as different sequences (like the enigmatic prologue) demonstrate. A further aim of this article is, then, to show how this assemblage of different concepts is possible through the vivid and interactive dimension of film experience.
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Videos by Francesco Sticchi
Books by Francesco Sticchi
Sticchi’s exploration of Spinozian philosophy creates an experiential constructive model to blend the affective and intellectual aspects of cognition, and to combine it with different philosophical interpretations of film theory. Spinoza’s embodied philosophy rejected logical and ethical dualisms, and established a perfect parallelism between sensation and reason and provides the opportunity to address negative emotions and sad passions without referring exclusively to traditional notions such as catharsis or sublimation, and to put forth a practical/embodied notion of Film-Philosophy. This new analytical approach is tested on four case studies, films that challenge the viewer’s emotional engagement since they display situations of cosmic failure and depict controversial and damaged characters: A Serious Man (2009); Melancholia (2011); The Act of Killing (2012) and Only Lovers Left Alive (2013).
Papers by Francesco Sticchi
affective-conceptual phenomenon based on the viewer’s embodiment of the visual structures. Baruch Spinoza stands at the foundation of my analytical approach since his thought was based on the absolute parallelism between the body and the mind. This paradigm redefines anthropocentrism and rejects dualism; however, the criticism of the rationalist ideal is also one of the main characteristics of the film Tale of Tales: by staging baroque and excessive characters, it allows the viewer to embody a notion of subjectivity that is performative and relational. Therefore, by combining the cognitive analysis of the film with my theoretical framework I will present a radical criticism of abstract rationality and present an ecological idea of the human.
examine the radical transformation of subjectivity taking place through
the relation with digital technology and screens in our everyday life.
The discussion will be mainly directed on how the film describes the
psychological and emotional conflict embodied by the main character,
Maureen, as the result of a complex entanglement with spaces, technological,
and material surfaces. The decentring of Maureen on the physical
context surrounding her, reveals her identity as an ecological notion, an
immanent and enworlded process of continuous remediation with the
environment. Employing Giuliana Bruno’s work and Mikhail Bakhtin’s
notion of the Chronotope, I will demonstrate how Personal Shopper, far
from describing technological developments as the accomplishment of
a humanist ideal, allows us to tackle, without conciliating answers, the
radical crisis of the human characterising our age.
Sticchi’s exploration of Spinozian philosophy creates an experiential constructive model to blend the affective and intellectual aspects of cognition, and to combine it with different philosophical interpretations of film theory. Spinoza’s embodied philosophy rejected logical and ethical dualisms, and established a perfect parallelism between sensation and reason and provides the opportunity to address negative emotions and sad passions without referring exclusively to traditional notions such as catharsis or sublimation, and to put forth a practical/embodied notion of Film-Philosophy. This new analytical approach is tested on four case studies, films that challenge the viewer’s emotional engagement since they display situations of cosmic failure and depict controversial and damaged characters: A Serious Man (2009); Melancholia (2011); The Act of Killing (2012) and Only Lovers Left Alive (2013).
affective-conceptual phenomenon based on the viewer’s embodiment of the visual structures. Baruch Spinoza stands at the foundation of my analytical approach since his thought was based on the absolute parallelism between the body and the mind. This paradigm redefines anthropocentrism and rejects dualism; however, the criticism of the rationalist ideal is also one of the main characteristics of the film Tale of Tales: by staging baroque and excessive characters, it allows the viewer to embody a notion of subjectivity that is performative and relational. Therefore, by combining the cognitive analysis of the film with my theoretical framework I will present a radical criticism of abstract rationality and present an ecological idea of the human.
examine the radical transformation of subjectivity taking place through
the relation with digital technology and screens in our everyday life.
The discussion will be mainly directed on how the film describes the
psychological and emotional conflict embodied by the main character,
Maureen, as the result of a complex entanglement with spaces, technological,
and material surfaces. The decentring of Maureen on the physical
context surrounding her, reveals her identity as an ecological notion, an
immanent and enworlded process of continuous remediation with the
environment. Employing Giuliana Bruno’s work and Mikhail Bakhtin’s
notion of the Chronotope, I will demonstrate how Personal Shopper, far
from describing technological developments as the accomplishment of
a humanist ideal, allows us to tackle, without conciliating answers, the
radical crisis of the human characterising our age.
Fare il postumano. Un nuovo scenario della teoria e della pratica artistica a cura di Gabriela Galati
Fare il postumano: Un nuovo scenario della teoria e della pratica artistica
è la raccolta di una serie di articoli dedicati al tema dell’arte e del postu- mano. Originalmente l’idea era di realizzare un unico numero dedicato al tema, ma la quantità di lavori di rilievo ci ha convinto a dedicarvi due numeri, dei quali si presenta il primo.
Questi lavori hanno reso evidente quanto si dimostri pressante in questo momento ri ettere e declinare gli sviluppi teorici e critici del postumano alle diverse aree della pratica artistica. L’accelerazione espo- nenziale nello sviluppo tecnologico durante l’ultimo secolo ha portato a porsi delle domande sui cambiamenti nei rapporti tra uomo e tecnologia, e, quasi allo stesso tempo, sul vivente nel suo complesso. Da una parte queste domande sono state motivate dalla comprensione che l’intreccio costante con le nuove tecnologie stava generando nuovi e più complessi tipi identitari; dall’altro, che la teoretica predominanza umana su altre forme di vita non era più né sostenibile né tanto meno accettabile. Molte delle ricerche al riguardo venivano proposte sotto il nome di postuma- no: una “condizione” che implica un avanzamento dell’interesse verso una visione della contemporaneità più complessa, che mette sullo stesso piano tutte le forme di vita prendendo in considerazione anche i rapporti con l’inorganico.