Nowadays, the disaster movie is a confirmed cinematographic genre and, as such, subject to parodies, which may be seen as forms of critical spirit in relation to one or other ideology. Catastrophe as a standard is, in fact, the perfect terrain for the cultivation of ideologemes, a term — currently fallen into disuse — deriving from the Russian formalists (first and foremost Michail Bachtin) which was subsequently amply developed by Julia Kristeva. Ideologemes may be thought of as traces of ideology in the “grain” of the text, in that the latter is an intrinsically inter–textual device and, what’s more, is connected to a determined socio–historical context. The task of parody, burlesque, satire, farce, mockery and so on is precisely that of “defusing” the ideologeme, paradoxically optimizing its presence until it degenerates (a kind of systematic reductio ad absurdum). Such practices consequently amount to meta–textual processes, pinpointing the areas in the text which formalize the genre in order to emphasize its mechanisms as much as possible, with the purpose of rendering them visible. It is, indeed, a matter of identifying that “tension of desire” which is the recurring cause of the pleasure deriving from ideology. In the era, therefore, of the consecration of catastrophe as a heuristic for the interpretation of many world events, often to an aberrant extent (one can think of the programmatic diffusion of conspiracy theories on the Web), it is more useful than ever to investigate the forms of its deconsecration. This will be done starting from an analysis of a series of parodies of cinematographic catastrophe, with the objective of locating within the cinematographic tragi–comic, and the laughter that results therefrom, the awareness of the ideological tissue underlying the canon.

Da morire dal ridere. Ideologemi della catastrofe cinematografica e sue declinazioni tragicomiche

bruno surace
2018-01-01

Abstract

Nowadays, the disaster movie is a confirmed cinematographic genre and, as such, subject to parodies, which may be seen as forms of critical spirit in relation to one or other ideology. Catastrophe as a standard is, in fact, the perfect terrain for the cultivation of ideologemes, a term — currently fallen into disuse — deriving from the Russian formalists (first and foremost Michail Bachtin) which was subsequently amply developed by Julia Kristeva. Ideologemes may be thought of as traces of ideology in the “grain” of the text, in that the latter is an intrinsically inter–textual device and, what’s more, is connected to a determined socio–historical context. The task of parody, burlesque, satire, farce, mockery and so on is precisely that of “defusing” the ideologeme, paradoxically optimizing its presence until it degenerates (a kind of systematic reductio ad absurdum). Such practices consequently amount to meta–textual processes, pinpointing the areas in the text which formalize the genre in order to emphasize its mechanisms as much as possible, with the purpose of rendering them visible. It is, indeed, a matter of identifying that “tension of desire” which is the recurring cause of the pleasure deriving from ideology. In the era, therefore, of the consecration of catastrophe as a heuristic for the interpretation of many world events, often to an aberrant extent (one can think of the programmatic diffusion of conspiracy theories on the Web), it is more useful than ever to investigate the forms of its deconsecration. This will be done starting from an analysis of a series of parodies of cinematographic catastrophe, with the objective of locating within the cinematographic tragi–comic, and the laughter that results therefrom, the awareness of the ideological tissue underlying the canon.
2018
I discorsi della fine. Catastrofi, disastri, apocalissi
Aracne editrice
I saggi di Lexia
28
131
147
978-88-255-1346-2
Ideologeme, Disaster movie, Parody, Metacinema, Semiotics of cinema, semiotics, semiotica, cinema, film, film studies, catastrofe, ideologema
bruno surace
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Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/2318/1675680
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