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The Mediterranean Noir: Notes on a Spatial Theory

Thursday, October 26, 2023 @ 7:00 pm - 8:00 pm EDT

Alberto Zambenedetti, University of Toronto

In 1998, the late Jean-Claude Izzo published an essay titled ‘Le bleu et le noir’ in the weekly news magazine Le Nouvel Observateur. The piece opened with the following words: ‘In the beginning is the Book. And that moment in which Cain kills his brother Abel. In the blood of thisfratricide, the Mediterranean gives us the first noir novel’ (Izzo, 2013). With this statement, the author suggested a powerful hermeneutical possibility: the recasting of the noir discourse (as an intertextual and transartistic practice) in a fashion that would include an expanded genealogy and an extended geography, well beyond its known Anglofone paths. In the last decade, film scholars have embarked in a profound reevaluation of the anglocentrism of the noir canon in a fashion that is consonant with Izzo’s position (Spicer 2007, Fay and Nieland, 2010, Pettey and Palmer 2014a and 2014b), going so far as to postulate the existence of a contemporary ‘global noir’ arising from ‘transnational filmmaking, cross-cultural influences, and the idea of global culture.’ (Desser, 2012, 628). This lecture proposes a theory of space that sheds light on the cultural specificity of the Mediterranean noir, and that addresses the submerged, repressed histories of the lands touched, and thereby linked, by this complicated sea.

Online with Zoom: https://utoronto.zoom.us/j/89863355866.

Co-sponsored by the University of Toronto Department of Italian Studies.

  

Details

Date:
Thursday, October 26, 2023
Time:
7:00 pm - 8:00 pm EDT
Event Category:

Organizer

CIMS Toronto

Venue

Online with Zoom