Chair: Merse Pál Szeredi
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Éva Fisli
Press prints on the table
In my paper I raise questions on the spread of visual information in the 1930s by the cross-border network of photographic agencies. How and where the reproductible press prints arrived from the editorial tables of Hungarian journals and picture magazines? How were the selected photographs used by the editors? Were they cut or retouched? How were they re-captioned? What kind of (geographical) areas are visually displayed on the pages? What is the proportion of local and foreign pictures in the illustrated issues? Are the notions of centre and periphery apt for understanding the transnational dissemination of press prints? My paper will rely on the rich international collection of press prints kept at the Historical Photo Department of the Hungarian National Museum and will have a special focus on the editorial features of Pesti Napló in the 1930s.
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Fabio Guidali
How to survive a media epidemic: The Italian press coping with HIV/AIDS
It is well established that the HIV/AIDS crises – besides involving health related matters – influenced the re-shaping of sexual, political and religious identities. Being notoriously a “media epidemic”, it allows us to look into the relationship between global and local issues, but also, as regards the press, to assess the role of “centres” and “peripheries” in both the representation of and the fight against the disease. Considering that in the 1980s newspapers still circulated in vast sectors of the Italian society, acting as authoritative opinion leaders and guaranteeing a high level of granularity of local information, they are the main and indispensable tool for tracing the construction of the image of AIDS in the country and reflect the wider reaction of the population. First, the paper will consider some of the major Italian newspapers to analyse them from a linguistic and iconographic point of view, in order to study how the reports on the disease have contributed to shaping its image. A comparison will be drawn between national and local pages, underlining the different ways of covering the news and the relationship between the center (State institutions) and peripheries (local institutions and grassroots organisations). Secondly, the paper will focus on the groups that at first were mistakenly believed to be the only carriers of HIV – gay men and people injecting drugs – to investigate how these categories were marginalised in the press, according to what criteria and methods of representation this happened, and how the portrayal of these categories changed over the course of the 1980s.
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Stefano Locati
Mediating between Hollywood, Europe, and Autarky: Ideas on cinema in the Italian illustrated magazine Tempo during the Fascist regime (1939–1943)
Tempo was an Italian weekly illustrated magazine published by Mondadori. It was founded in 1939 as a response to the founding of Oggi by Rizzoli in the same year. Both magazines followed the short-lived experience of Omnibus (1937–1939), which was closed by the fascist regime. These three magazines were the first Italian examples of illustrated news magazines based on a large use of photography, thanks to the rotogravure printing technique. Tempo was inspired by the American illustrated magazine Life and it used a complex graphic design to convey a cultural agenda to a large and generic audience. The link between Life and Tempo poses a question on the complex relation between the U.S. and Italy during the fascism, which has always had an ambivalent stance towards American culture. The paper is aiming at investigating this relationship through the case study of cinema, therefore analysing how cinema was presented in Tempo’s cultural pages, what was the consistency in the debate over American, Italian and European films and what was the idea of cinema promoted by the magazine. Tempo is significant also because, since 1940 and until 1943, it had different foreign editions, subsidized by the fascist regime, with a translation of the magazine into different languages (i.e. French, German, Spanish, among others). Thus, it functioned also as a bridgehead for the spreading of Italian culture and fascist ideas in Europe, positioning itself at the centre of an exchange between the autarky in Italy, and America and the rest of Europe.
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