Luca Barra

This essay investigates the presence of Italian cinema in United States television schedules (on networks as well as basic and premium cable channels) and in the libraries of America’s main on-demand digital platforms...

In the long history of the enduring connection between Italian cinema and national television, recent years have brought several new developments. Due to the economic crisis, and hence a quest for creative and production methods to achieve greater return at lower cost, the ‘border’ between film and TV has become the arena for several textual and productive experiments, with varying degrees of success, contributing to the foundations of a new model...

SUMMARY During the Eighties, commercial television has been a driver of deep innovation into the Italian media system, mainly thanks to the complex figure of media entrepreneur (and then tycoon) Silvio Berlusconi. However, a closer analysis show how, after a short “rupture phase” necessary to enter a new market and conquer the TV audience, with originality and a strong conflict with PSB, often the new Fininvest commercial channels started to more easily adapt to their competition’s common routines, thus becoming a conservative force using its new power to reinforce the system’s stability. The essay shows, following the case histories of commercial TV news, scheduling and financing, how this dynamics of innovation and conservation have been carefully implemented and defended since the beginning of Silvio Berlusconi’s media activity. RIASSUNTO Negli anni Ottanta, la tv commerciale è stata un elemento di profonda innovazione nel sistema dei media italiano, principalmente grazie alla complessa figura dell’imprenditore (e poi media tycoon) Silvio Berlusconi. Una più attenta analisi, però, mostra come, dopo una breve fase “di rottura” necessaria a entrare in un nuovo mercato e a conquistare l’audience televisiva, con elementi di originalità e un forte conflitto con il servizio pubblico, spesso i nuovi canali commerciali Fininvest cominciarono ad adattarsi in modo più piano alle routine più comuni dei loro competitor, diventando una forza conservatrice che usa il suo nuovo potere per rafforzare la stabilità del sistema. Il saggio mostra, seguendo i casi di studio dell’informazione televisiva commerciale, della programmazione e delle forme di finanziamento, come questa dinamica di innovazione e conservazione è stata attentamente perseguita e difesa fin dalle prime battute delle attività di Silvio Berlusconi.

Numerosi prodotti di importazione arricchiscono sempre più spesso l'offerta dei media italiani, tv compresa: in questo modo, n

This essay tries to demonstrate the relevance of the very first phase of Italian television, using the relationship between the TV institution and its audience as a fil rouge to discover innovative attempts and crossroads, later suppressed by the prevalence of a unique interpretation of the audience. It is only a first step towards further research projects, which we hope would fulfill the difficult task to map extensively the mechanisms of TV institutionalization in Italy and, finally, to contribute to a broader cultural history of the medium.

Non esiste una ricetta per produrla, ma la qualità non è un lusso e va pretesa. Alcune riflessioni sui criteri per “misurarla”, dai test della Bbc al Qualitel italiano, sulle differenze fra palinsesti, fra pubblico e privato, fra tv generalista e pay tv.

Le città contemporanee sono spazi multisensoriali, multimodali, multimediali: i media invadono non soltanto le case, le tasche, le mani, ma anche le strade, le piazze, i centri commerciali, le zone dedicate a socialità e cultura, le stazioni.

In times of aesthetic and cultural convergence, in the countries of origin, and especially in the USA, more and more serials are accompanied by ancillary texts (short films, novels, summaries, videogames), enriching and ‘decorating’ the hypothetical world staged by serials. The essay analyzes the strategies and tactics used by the Italian television networks (or by more or less organized fan groups) to translate or adapt also in Italy this rich quantity of para-texts. Analyzing the serial Lost in its details and declinations, the work tries to outline a double typology. First it goes back over the TV film extensions according to their function: from the instruments helping to orientate in the serial world, to the narration continuation in other media, and to the forms allowing playing with settings and personages. Secondly, it assesses the translation options chosen (and hypothetical) for each paratext: from the realization of an Italian edition, to the translation choices of the organized fandom; from the impossibility to translate effectively to the re-creation of similar texts, customized for the Italian audience. The Italian experience of the text – or better, of the texts composing the story and the hypothetical world – will be inevitably different from the ‘original’ one.