Participation in academic research
2016-
Member of the scientific committee, Mass Media and Society Research Center: History and Criticism of Public Opinion, Università degli Studi dell’Insubria
2014-
Responsible and coordinator of the activities of the Multimedia Lab, Università degli Studi dell’Insubria
2004-2006
Participant in D1 (ex Murst 60%) - Research from the Department of Communication and Entertainment Sciences, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore di Milano: The Future is Already Here. Reality and Imagination of Digital Television. Research manager: Prof. Ruggero Eugeni.
2002-2004
Participant in Miur/Cofin (ex Murst 40%), Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore di Milano: Cinema Technologies. Technologies in Cinema. Research manager: Prof. Francesco Casetti
2003
Participant in “research of relevant University interest”, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore di Milano: The Television Representation of The Crime. Research manager: Prof. Gabrio Forti
2001-2002
Participant in D1 (ex Murst 60%) - Research from the Department of Communication and Entertainment Sciences, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore di Milano: Cartography Of The Italian Film Genres. Research manager: Prof. Francesco Casetti
Main research areas:
- History and audio-visual storytelling
The most recent research area concerns the relationship between history (historical events placed in particular in the second half of the 1900s) and audio-visual representation: cinema and serial fiction. The research thesis concerns the possibility of overcoming the classic categories of nostalgic film and fiction, and of heritage and post-heritage (characterized by interrogation, subversion, subjectivity, self-consciousness and ambiguity), to face a production characterized by a critical rereading of the past oriented towards understanding the present, and increasing attention to diversity. In contemporary audio-visual, according to a line that, starting from founding titles such as Deadwood (2004) and Mad Men (2007) goes from Stranger Things (2016), Mindhunter(2017), The Deuce (2017) and Chernobyl (2019) to in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019, Q. Tarantino), the detailed reconstruction of the setting, very far from an alleged surface realism, acts as a radical deconstruction of the concept of nostalgia. Hyperrealism acts as a form of rewriting, an alternative to dystopia (Westworld, 2016; The Handmaid's Tale, 2017), a form of reconstruction and reification of the past, according to a suggestion (theoretical as well as narrative) that the most recent Tarantino's films (but in reality all his cinematography) acts as a real manifesto: if the past can be perfectly reconstructed, then it is possible (symbolically and metaphorically) to "change" it, in the sense of re-reading it critically, to reveal its social, political and cultural ambiguities , subjecting it to a thorough investigation, where representation can dialogue with historiography.
This perspective represents one of the programmatic principles that led to the conception and institution of the First Cycle Degree in History and Stories of the Contemporary World, and was inaugurated with the conference The Big History and the Small Screen. About the Period Drama.
In the near future it will find a first formalization in:
- Once Upon a Time in the History. Deconstructing Heritage, in A. Bellavita (edited by), The Big History and The Small Screen. About the Period Drama, Mimesis, being published
- Making 70’s. Mindhunter: The Story, A Story, The Stories, in A. Bellavita (edited by), The Big History and The Small Screen. About the Period Drama, Mimesis, being published
- The Post-Heritage Storytelling Of The Cold War in Contemporary Complex TV Narrations, accepted proposal for S. Pisu, F. Pitassio, M. Zinni (edited by), Re-Thinking the Cinematic Cold War: The Global Struggle for Hearts and Minds, being published
- Contemporary audio-visual storytelling: evolutions, perspectives and new paradigms in cinema and TV series
The investigation on the new forms of audio-visual storytelling, at the basis of the teachings currently covered (Storytelling and TV Fiction, Factual Entertainment and Audio-visual Translation), and conducted in parallel with the film and television review activity (Segnocinema, Film Tv, Film Tv Rewind, Otto e ½, cineforum.it), will find an editorial formalization in A. Bellavita, A. Bernardelli (edited by), Narration in Film, Carocci, Roma, 2020. Within this area of research, a particular form of television storytelling, the mythology series, which implies some essential characteristics: a radically new experience on the part of the viewer, based on an immersive enjoyment and on the recognition and sharing of the starting mythology; direct control by the director of all episodes; the presence of a previous, coherent world, indissoluble by its creator, which is poured entirely into a "long" product (different from the film), that is, to an exorbitance of content that cannot be enjoyed together, but must be necessarily parcelled out. About:
- A. Bellavita, Is It the Past or the Future? How Not to Build an Orientation Map in Twin Peaks, inSegnocinema, 208, November-December 2017
- A. Bellavita, Mythology Series and Immersive Fruition. Too Old to Die Young as a New (possible) form of Serial Storytelling, in Segnocinema, #220, November-December 2019
- A. Bellavita, Twin Peaks: The Return. The Dawn of the Mythology Series, in 30 Years of Twin Peaks. The Origin of Modern Seriality, and the First "black mirror" of Our Time, Elephant&Castle. Laboratorio dell’immaginario, #23/2020, being published
- Cross-media adaptation in contemporary tv series
The adaptation of texts (cinema, books, comics, TV series from other territories, remakes, reboots, sequels) in TV series is one of the most relevant phenomena of the contemporary media ecosystem. This research area will find editorial formalization in the volume The Children of Betrayal are the Most Loved. Cross-media Adaptation in Contemporary TV series (in progress), which will deal with the most peculiar and articulated forms of re-writing, beyond simple transposition. Among these, the crossover fiction, and in particular the meta-fictional ucronia, in which characters belonging to a previous fictional tradition become the protagonists of a new narrative, which follows articulations and alternative settings to the original one. In the two essays in the bibliography (Meta-finctional Ucronia: Penny Dreadful and Once Upon a Time. Hypertextuality as the Dominant Character of Contemporary Serial Fiction; Character, Myth, Icon. A League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and Penny Dreadful) a development is deepened alternative to the individual diegetic apparatuses of the hypotexts (the Victorian novel), based on the convergence (the encounter) of the main characters, which deviate from their original narrative path (always accepted as parallel, or at least preceding the plot in question) to lead to I finish a new group narrative project.
- Cinema and psychoanalysis
The application of hermeneutic categories of Lacanian psychoanalysis, to study contemporary cinema, characterizes a line of research inaugurated with the Phd project and merged into a monograph (A. Bellavita, Perturbing Screens. For an Application of the Unheimlich Concept to the Film, Vita & Pensiero, Milan, 2005) and in numerous essays that appeared in the following years, up to a radical rethinking and reformation, in A. Bellavita, From Language to Speech. A (New) Proposal of Aesthetics of Psychoanalysis Implicated in Film, N. Ranieri (edited by), Desire Destinies, il melangolo, Genova, being published.
Since 2017 this area of research has led to stable collaboration with KUM! Festival. Curate, educate, govern, Ancona, directed by Massimo Recalcati, for the contextualization of the audio-visual text within the various scientific activities.
