Francesco Casetti

For YSoA, Francesco Casetti teaches a seminar on Semiotics that explores the intersection of media and space and the ways in which the former “give meaning” to the latter.

Casetti is the author of six books, translated (among other languages) in French, Spanish, Czech, and Korean; he is also co-author of two books and editor of more than ten books and special issues of journals. During the 1970s and 1980s, his research has been mostly focused on semiotics of film and television, in particular about genres, intertextuality, and enunciation. His major achievement was an extensive study on the implied spectator in film (Inside the Gaze, Indiana, 1999, or. 1986) and an edited book on television and its imagined audience (Tra me e te, 1988). During the ‘90s he increasingly moved toward an original combination of close analysis and ethnographic research of actual audiences, introducing the notion of “communicative negotiations” (L’ospite fisso, 1995, on media consumption in 32 Italian families, and Communicative Negotiation in Cinema and Television, 2002, on the idea of “communicative pact” and “communicative situation”). He then explored the role of cinema in the context of modernity (Eye of the Century. Film, Experience, Modernity, Columbia, 2008, or. 2005) and the reconfiguration of cinema in a post-medium epoch, comparing this shift with the rise of cinema at the beginning of 20th Century (The Lumière Galaxy: Seven Key words for the Cinema to Come, Columbia, 2015). His most recent work (Screening Fears. On Protective Media) analyses the anxieties that media intercept, shape, and spread, as well as the fears that they raise, through an innovative archaeology of the screen, starting from the Phantasmagoria of 18th Century to the contemporary mobile handheld devices.

He has also significantly written, and still writes, on film and media theories (Theories of Cinema. 1945-1995, Texas, 1999, or. 1993, and the anthology Early Film Theories in Italy. 1896-1922, AUP 2017).

Francesco Casetti has taught in Italy at the University of Genova, of Trieste, and the Catholic University of Milan. He was visiting professor at Université de Paris III - la Sorbonne Nouvelle (1977), at the University of Iowa (1988, 1991 and 1998) and Harvard (2014). In 2000 he was the recipient of the Chair of Italian Culture for a distinguished scholar at the University of California-Berkeley. He was William P. Evans Fellow at the University of Otago (New Zealand) in 2011, and Fellow at the IKKM, Bauhaus University Weimar in 2012, and at the Bildevidenz and Cinepoetics research groups at the Freie Universität Berlin in 2019 and 2023.

He is member of the Advisory Boards of several film journals and research institutions. He is a member of the Historical Accademia degli Agiati, correspondent member of the Historical Accademia delle Scienze (Bologna), and foreigner member of the Historical Accademia di Scienze Morali e Politiche (Naples).

With Jane Gaines (Columbia University) is the co-founder of the Permanent Seminar on Histories of Film Theories, an international network of film scholars aimed at a systematic exploration of the field of film and media theories (see the website: http://filmtheories.org/).