In the lecture I will discuss Pier Paolo Pasolini’s role both as a TV critic and a TV character. As it is widely known, Pasolini’s disapproval of consumer society in post-war Italy emerged from a lengthy discussion of the role of Italian television as a symbol of so-called “cultural genocide.” In the first part of my lecture, I will define Pasolini’s “organic” thoughts on television; then, I will compare this intellectual assertiveness to the traces of his own presence, whether physical or symbolic, in the Italian television between 1954 and 1975.
The lecture will be followed by a party, sponsored by the French and Italian Graduate Student Association (FIGSA), to honor the publication of Pier Paolo Pasolini, Framed and Unframed. A Thinker for the Twenty-First Century (edited by Luca Peretti and Karen T. Raizen, Bloomsbury, 2018).
Damiano Garofalo (Rome, 1986) is a post-doctoral researcher in Film, Television and Media Studies at the Catholic University of Milan, where he is currently studying the international circulation of contemporary Italian cinema. After having obtained his BA and MA in Modern History at Sapienza University of Rome, in 2015 he earned his Ph.D. in Cultural History at the University of Padova, with a thesis on early Italian television audiences. Between 2015 and 2018 he taught Italian Cinema and Television History at the Universities of Padova, Udine and Sapienza (Rome). He has authored the books Political Audiences. A Reception History of Early Italian Television (Mimesis, 2016) and Storia sociale dele televisione in Italia (Marsilio, 2018).
This event is sponsored by The Department of French and Italian at The Ohio State University and by the French and Italian Graduate Student Association.
