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Giuliana Bruno is a scholar of visual art and media. She is currently the Emmet Blakeney Gleason Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University. [1] She is internationally known as the author of numerous influential books and articles on art, architecture, film, and visual culture.
Bruno first arrived in the United States from her native city of Naples in 1980 as a recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship as part of the Cultural Exchange Program between Italy and the United States. In 1990, she completed her PhD thesis Streetwalking on a Ruined Map: City Films of Elvira Notari(Italy: 1875-1946) at NYU, under the supervision of art critic and film scholar Annette Michelson. She served as assistant professor at Bard College from 1988 to 1990. Professor Bruno then joined Harvard's Visual and Environmental Studies Department in 1990, became a full professor in 1998, and assumed her endowed chair as Emmet Blakeney Gleason Professor in 2014. Professor Bruno also has an active role at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, serving on the doctoral degree committee in Architecture, Landscape Architecture, and Urban Planning and is an Affiliated Faculty member in the Masters in Art, Design, and the Public Domain program. [2]
Professor Bruno is a Founding Member and former member of the Governing Board of the International Association for Visual Culture. She has served on the Editorial or Advisory Boards for a number of American and international journals and publishing houses, including: Screen (former editor), Lapis , and presently at the Journal of Visual Culture , Estetica , Vesper, Venti Journal, Mimesis publishing house and others. A Senior Researcher at metaLAB in the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University since 2011, she has served as a member of the editorial board for its metaLAB Projects book series.
In addition to her scholarly work, Bruno is active as a cultural critic in print and media, and as a public intellectual. She also often collaborates with artists and art institutions, and has written extensively in exhibition catalogues published by, among others, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, [3] the Museum of Modern Art, [4] the Museo Reina Sofia, [5] [6] the Venice Biennale, [7] and the Whitney Museum. [8]
In 2017, along with nine other international artist-scholars, Bruno participated as a curator in the “Carta Bianca: Capodimonte Imaginaire," an art exhibition at the Museo e Real Bosco di Capodimonte in Naples that was based on the curators’ personal and creative interpretations of the museum's internal holdings.
Bruno's work has been translated into a dozen languages, and has been influential in various creative circles, in and beyond academia. Her books have inspired the Map of Tenderness couture collection that Alessandro Michele designed for GUCCI, an award-winning couture collection of the designer Marios Schwab, and the creation of Aria Magazine based on her theory of affective mapping. Her writings have also inspired Michael Nyman's music scores for urban silent films, and the work of numerous artists, including Renée Green’s Some Chance Operations (1999); Constanze Ruhm’s X Characters / RE(hers)AL (2003-4); Jesper Just’s trilogy A Room of One’s Own, A Voyage in Dwelling, A Question of Silence (2008); [9] Roberto Paci Dalò’s Atlas of Emotion Stream (2009); Charles LaBelle’s Public Intimacy (2010-11); Rachel Rose’s Palisades in Palisades (2014); and Carola Spadoni's "Archiving the Peripatetic Film and Video Collection" (2021-).
Bruno’s first book, Off Screen: Women and Film in Italy (Routledge, 1988), and her second book, Immagini allo schermo (Rosenberg & Sellier, 1991), two essay collections co-authored and edited with Maria Nadotti, established critical connections between Anglo-American and Italian feminist film theories, promoting a dialogue that enriched their different perspectives.
Bruno’s third book, Streetwalking on a Ruined Map: Cultural Theory and the City Films of Elvira Notari (Princeton University Press, 1993), elaborated on this theoretical basis with an interdisciplinary study of early Italian cinema and urban visual culture as projected in the work of prolific filmmaker Elvira Notari (1875-1946). Combining extensive archival research with theoretical inventiveness, Streetwalking forged a feminist media history that superseded the modalities of textual analysis and authorial monograph, more common at the time. Confronted with a landscape of suppressed knowledges, Bruno created a cultural archaeology, working on the margins, with a processual method that emphasized the gaps and the unfinished. A series of “inferential walks” through literature, photography, art history, urban studies, and the history of medicine as well as film history widened the horizon of feminist and media studies. This intellectual tapestry introduced transdisciplinary methodologies and topics that Bruno would continue to revisit throughout her work, in particular a “kinetic analytic” emphasizing cultural mobility. In this early work, her embodied and mobilized approach to space and spectatorship takes the form of a female psychogeography oriented around a flâneuse traversing sites of modernity such as cinemas, arcades, and trains.
Bruno's fourth book, Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film (Verso, 2002), was a pioneering work of visual studies, advancing an interwoven theorization of art, architecture, film, and philosophy within a personal framework. Conceived as a scholarly travelogue, the book has been widely recognized for its poetic wordplay and conceptual intersections, for instance, in the blurred meanings of optic and haptic, motion and “e-motion,” sight and “site.” Drawing widely from varied methodologies and philosophies, and creating its own, the book inventively links concepts from classical film theory, art history, architectural modernism, cultural geography and cartographic thinking, phenomenologies of embodiment and haptic experience, and affect theory as well as feminist thought. Close analyses of urban visual practices and modernist media spaces constitute the book's nonlinear structure, including sections on the arcades, phantasmagoria, pre-cinematic viewing devices, cabinets of curiosity, memory theaters, movie palaces, the “theatrical” anatomy table, urban panoramas, site-seeing voyages, and the city symphony. In a 2018 review of the book, media theorist Jussi Parikka reflects on how the book's combinatory, media-genealogical approach in 2002 prefigured “some of the infrastructures of theory and method of contemporary contexts,” including the field of media archaeology. [10]
Bruno's fifth book, Public Intimacy: Architecture and the Visual Arts (MIT Press, 2007), was an essay collection published as part of the Anyone Corporation's Writing Architecture series. It continues Bruno's engagement with the form and figure of the architectural promenade through writings on the material textures of cinema, fashion, the museum, and everyday life. With studies of the relation between cinema and the museum, the art of Jane and Louise Wilson, Rebecca Horn, Rachel Whiteread and Mona Hatoum, and the films of Andy Warhol and Tsai Ming-Liang, the book reconsiders medium-specific histories of artistic development through its notion of “public intimacy.” Bruno conceives of this intimacy as the “tangible, ‘superficial’ contact” through which “we apprehend the art object and the space of art.” [11]
Bruno's sixth book, Surface: Matters of Aesthetics, Materiality and Media (University of Chicago Press, 2014) offers a dynamic and densely philosophical archaeology of surface. Surface charts a textured and materialist course through screen history and contemporary exhibition practice as a response both to the historical devaluation of the superficial and ornamental as well as to contemporary claims that technological transformations produce increasing dematerialization. The book interweaves poetic reflections on screens, stains, skins, dust, films, canvases, fabrics, façades, and volumetric installations of light with theoretical engagements with Deleuzian folds, Einfühlung and empathetic projection, and experiential and materialist philosophies to argue for a new materialism based on an expanded field of surface contact. Readings of artists include Anni Albers, Matthew Buckingham, Tacita Dean, Tara Donovan, Olafur Eliasson, Isaac Julien, Anthony McCall, Sarah Oppenheimer, Gerhard Richter, Do Ho Suh, Doris Salcedo, Lorna Simpson, James Turell, and Krzyztof Wodiczko.
Bruno's seventh book, Atmospheres of Projection: Environmentality in Art and Screen Media is forthcoming from University of Chicago Press. Tracing the histories of projection and atmosphere in visual culture, this book reveals their relevance to contemporary artistic practices that engage environmentality. Moving across the fields of psychoanalysis, history of science, architecture, and environmental studies as well as visual art and moving-image culture throughout time, Bruno performs an excavation into the expansive history of projection and atmosphere, theorizing them as mediums and milieus, intermedial sensory processes, transitional and relational sites. A series of case studies of contemporary artists and architects, ranging from Robert Irwin to Peter Zumthor, Chantal Akerman to Diana Thater, Cristina Iglesias to Rosa Barba, then shows how today's projective media constitute environments, modifying our capacity to sense variable elemental conditions. Conceptually addressing “the projective imagination” with a form of “atmospheric thinking,” this book reveals how atmosphere is formed and mediated, how it can change, and what projection can do to modify a site. Ultimately, it demonstrates why we need these sites of the transmission of energies and intermixing between human and nonhuman entities. In this way, Bruno's notion of “environmentality” —an ecology of interrelationality—produces new sites of contact and vital exchange.
Bruno's books have won numerous awards and recognitions. Streetwalking on a Ruined Map: Cultural Theory and the City Films of Elvira Notari was cited as best book in film studies in 1995, winning the Society for Cinema and Media Studies’ Katherine Singer Kovács Book Award and Italy’s Premio Filmcritica-Umberto Barbaro. Atlas of Emotion won the 2003 Kraszna-Krausz Moving Image Book Award, [12] a prize awarded to "the world's best book on the moving image,” and was also recognized as an Outstanding Academic Title by the American Library Association, [13] and named a Book of the Year in 2003 by The Guardian. [14]
She is the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship, the Jay Leyda Award for Academic Achievement, and a Ph.D. honoris causa awarded by the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts. [15] In 2019, she was the Louis Kahn Scholar in Residence in the History of Art at the American Academy in Rome. [16]
Aesthetics is the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature of beauty and the nature of taste; and functions as the philosophy of art. Aesthetics examines the philosophy of aesthetic value, which is determined by critical judgements of artistic taste; thus, the function of aesthetics is the "critical reflection on art, culture and nature".
In European academic traditions, fine art is made primarily for aesthetics or creative expression, distinguishing it from decorative art or applied art, which also has to serve some practical function, such as pottery or most metalwork. In the aesthetic theories developed in the Italian Renaissance, the highest art was that which allowed the full expression and display of the artist's imagination, unrestricted by any of the practical considerations involved in, say, making and decorating a teapot. It was also considered important that making the artwork did not involve dividing the work between different individuals with specialized skills, as might be necessary with a piece of furniture, for example. Even within the fine arts, there was a hierarchy of genres based on the amount of creative imagination required, with history painting placed higher than still life.
Visual anthropology is a subfield of social anthropology that is concerned, in part, with the study and production of ethnographic photography, film and, since the mid-1990s, new media. More recently it has been used by historians of science and visual culture. Although sometimes wrongly conflated with ethnographic film, visual anthropology encompasses much more, including the anthropological study of all visual representations such as dance and other kinds of performance, museums and archiving, all visual arts, and the production and reception of mass media. Histories and analyses of representations from many cultures are part of visual anthropology: research topics include sandpaintings, tattoos, sculptures and reliefs, cave paintings, scrimshaw, jewelry, hieroglyphics, paintings and photographs. Also within the province of the subfield are studies of human vision, properties of media, the relationship of visual form and function, and applied, collaborative uses of visual representations.
Lev Manovich is an artist, an author and a theorist of digital culture. He is a Distinguished Professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Manovich played a key role in creating four new research fields: new media studies (1991-), software studies (2001-), cultural analytics (2007-) and AI aesthetics (2018-). Manovich's current research focuses on generative media, AI culture, digital art, and media theory.
Visual culture is the aspect of culture expressed in visual images. Many academic fields study this subject, including cultural studies, art history, critical theory, philosophy, media studies, Deaf Studies, and anthropology.
Elvira Notari was an Italian film director, one of the country's early and more prolific female filmmaker. She is credited as the first woman who made over 60 feature films and about 100 shorts and documentaries, quite often writing the subjects and screenplays, inspired by Naples. The Elvira Notari Prize is named after her.
Doug Aitken is an American multidisciplinary artist. Aitken's body of work ranges from photography, print media, sculpture, and architectural interventions, to narrative films, sound, single and multi-channel video works, installations, and live performance. He currently lives in Venice, California, and New York City.
The Mareorama was an entertainment attraction at the 1900 Paris Exposition. It was created by Hugo d'Alesi (fr), a painter of advertising posters, and was a combination of moving panoramic paintings and a large motion platform. It is regarded as one of the last major developments in the technology of panoramas, shortly before the medium became obsolete.
Robert Stam is an American film theorist working on film semiotics. He is a professor at New York University, where he teaches about the French New Wave filmmakers. Stam has published widely on French literature, comparative literature, and on film topics such as film history and film theory. Together with Ella Shohat, he co-authored Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media.
Griselda Frances Sinclair Pollock is an art historian and cultural analyst of international, postcolonial feminist studies in visual arts and visual culture. Since 1977, Pollock has been an influential scholar of modern art, avant-garde art, postmodern art, and contemporary art. She is a major influence in feminist theory, feminist art history, and gender studies. She is renowned for her innovative feminist approaches to art history which aim to deconstruct the lack of appreciation and importance of women in art as other than objects for the male gaze.
Applied aesthetics is the application of the branch of philosophy of aesthetics to cultural constructs. In a variety of fields, artifacts are created that have both practical functionality and aesthetic affectation. In some cases, aesthetics is primary, and in others, functionality is primary. At best, the two needs are synergistic, in which "beauty" makes an artifact work better, or in which more functional artifacts are appreciated as aesthetically pleasing. This achievement of form and function, of art and science, of beauty and usefulness, is the primary goal of design, in all of its domains.
A film – also called a movie, motion picture, moving picture, picture, photoplay or (slang) flick – is a work of visual art that simulates experiences and otherwise communicates ideas, stories, perceptions, feelings, beauty, or atmosphere through the use of moving images. These images are generally accompanied by sound and, more rarely, other sensory stimulations. The word "cinema", short for cinematography, is often used to refer to filmmaking and the film industry, and the art form that is the result of it.
Colin Gardner is a British film and media studies theorist living in Santa Barbara, California.
Non-narrative film is an aesthetic of cinematic film that does not narrate, or relate "an event, whether real or imaginary". It is usually a form of art film or experimental film, not made for mass entertainment.
Naples is a Song is a 1927 Italian silent film directed by Eugenio Perego and starring Leda Gys, Angelo Ferrari and Giuseppe Gherardi.
Soldier's Fantasy is a 1927 Italian silent film directed by Elvira Notari and starring Geppino Jovine, Eduardo Notari and Oreste Tesorone. It is preserved in the National Film Archive of Rome.
Eduardo Notari (1903–1986) was an Italian film actor of the silent era. Notari came from Naples, and most of the films he starred in were set in or around the city. His parent Elvira Notari and Nicola Notari ran the Dora Film studio. He began his career in 1912 as one of the first professional child actors in Italy.
Murray Smith is a film theorist and philosopher of art based at the University of Kent, where he is Professor of Philosophy, Art, and Film and co-director of the Aesthetics Research Centre. He is the author of three books and numerous articles on film and aesthetics, and the co-editor of three collections of essays. He was President of the Society for Cognitive Studies of the Moving Image from 2014 to 2017, and has served on the editorial boards of Screen, Cinema Journal, the British Journal of Aesthetics, Projections and Series. He has held a Leverhulme Research Fellowship (2005–6), and a Laurance S Rockefeller Fellowship at Princeton University’s Centre for Human Values (2017–18). He delivered a Kracauer Lecture in 2014 at the Goethe University Frankfurt, the inaugural Beacon Institute lecture in 2015, and the Beardsley Lecture in 2018, sponsored by Temple University at the Barnes Foundation.
Giulia Cassini Rizzotto was an Italian actress and film director, kindergarten teacher, novelist, translator and writer. She appeared in many films in Italy including Malombra (1917) and Fabiola (1918).
The history of cinema in Naples begins at the end of the 19th century and over time it has recorded cinematographic works, production houses and notable filmmakers. Over the decades, the Neapolitan capital has also been used as a film set for many works, over 600 according to the Internet Movie Database, the first of which would be Panorama of Naples Harbor from 1901.