Gabriele Pedulla
Gabriele Pedullà (Rome, 1972) is professor of Contemporary Literature at the University of Rome 3 and visiting professor at Stanford. His books include a biography of the partisan-writer Beppe Fenoglio, a monograph on Machiavelli's theory of conflict, a co-edited three volume Atlas of Italian Literature and a best-selling anthology of partisan short stories, Racconti della Resistenza. For his first book of fiction, the prize-winning collection of short stories, Lo spagnolo senza sforzo (Spanish Made Simple) he was selected as one of the 10 best Italian writers under 40 by the literary supplement of Il Sole 24 Ore.Blog
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Get Out of the Dark
Television encourages passivity; TV viewers are held prisoner; the ubiquity of moving images reduces our ability to resist propaganda: we're so used to hearing such things that we've ceased to ask ourselves if they're true. But the problem is worth further reflection. In fact, if we consider newer individual media – plasma screens, portable DVD players, laptops, videophones, tablets, and television itself – in the context of a longer historical sequence, it's quite easy to see that, in reality, their functioning is characterized by the lack of constrictions that until a few decades ago accompanied the projection of any moving image.
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Gabriele Pedullà’s In Broad Daylight reviewed in Publisher's Weekly and Spectrum Culture
Gabriele Pedullà’s In Broad Daylight: Movies and Spectators After the Cinema has recently received glowing reviews in Publisher's Weekly and Spectrum Culture.
Publisher's Weekly writes of Pedullà’s charting of the transition from a communal cinema experience to a lone individual's dark room and monitor glare:As with so much else, technological innovations have had unintended consequences in this realm, as making films readily available on the small screen affects, inter alia, the experience of viewing them (movies shown on TVs literally run at a higher frames-per-second rate than they do on the big screen). What was once a communal experience in a darkened theater that shut out the outside world is now often a solitary one undertaken while multitasking at home....Insights abound, and the author’s facility with so many different disciplines--from ancient Greek philosophy to 20th century semiotics--will ensure that casual filmgoers and academics alike find something salient to ponder in Pedullà’s treatise.
At Spectrum Culture, Jesse Cataldo appends this with recognition of Pedullà’s accessible application of theory:
While some passages get into knotty post-structural theory, referencing Baudrillard and Lacan, nothing feels beyond the comprehension of the layman. Pedulla is good at building a lucid path toward complex notions, and his best ideas feel earned because he sets them up so well. Some of these have to do with the hypnotic power of television, building off Serge Daney’s seminal ‘80s TV criticism to great effect. Pedulla posits that movie theaters swallow viewers up, holding them prisoner, an effect that eventually results in a kind of Stockholm Syndrome empathy with the characters onscreen.
Visit Publisher's Weekly and Spectrum Culture to read the reviews in full.
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Gabriele Pedullà’s In Broad Daylight reviewed in Sight & Sound and the Guardian
Gabriele Pedullà’s In Broad Daylight: Movies and Spectators After the Cinema has been reviewed recently in both the Guardian and international film magazine, Sight & Sound.
In his Non-fiction roundup, the Guardian’s Steven Poole sets the scene:
Going to the cinema used to be the only way you could watch a film. Now you can do it anywhere. Pedullà's interesting little book announces that the age of the cinema theatre as the form's primary "aesthetic device" is over.
Our age, Pedullà fears, has lost touch with the "tragic", and we are reduced to "docile consumers of à la carte emotions".
