Nicola Maria Dusi

PlayTheCityRE: A visual storytelling system that transforms recorded film memories into visual history

Within social media we find many stories that tell us the world that is around us. Unfortunately, we tend to forget what happened in the past and the young generations are losing a cultural heritage passed down for generations. In the attempt of preserving memories and of intercepting the attention of the new generations, in this paper we propose PlayTheCityRE, a location-based storytelling system that merges private film memories shot from 1940 to 1989 (e.g., 8mm, super8mm) with modern communication technologies to tell the story of our past while walking in city streets. The system is provided with a mobile application that allows people to explore an unusual city through the eyes of amateur film sequences (now historic) and to select different routes that will bring them in the same city places where they were filmed. By merging film memories with modern technologies, our system engages different audiences in specific ways and on multiple levels, allowing them to walk through history. Therefore, our storytelling system may help fostering historical consciousness within our society.

MovieRemix: having fun playing with videos

The process of producing new creative videos by editing, combining, and organizing pre-existing material (e.g., video shots) is a popular phenomenon in the current web scenario. Known as remix or video remix, the produced videomay have new and different meanings with respect to the source material. Unfortunately, when managing audiovisual objects, the technological aspect can be a burden for many creative users. Motivated by the large success of the gaming market, we propose a novel game and an architecture to make the remix process a pleasant and stimulating gaming experience. MovieRemix allows people to act like a movie director, but instead of dealing with cast and cameras, the player has to create a remixed video starting from a given screenplay and from video shots retrieved from the provided catalog. MovieRemix is not a simple video editing tool nor is a simple game: it is a challenging environment that stimulates creativity. To temp to play the game, players can access different levels of screenplay (original, outline, derived) and can also challenge other players. Computational and storage issues are kept at the server side, whereas the client device just needs to have the capability of playing streaming videos.

Intersemiotic translation: Theories, problems, analysis

Abstract This paper draws on Jakobson’s tripartite division of the notion of translation, and Eco’s discussion of the terms in his book on translation, Mouse or Rat? Translation as Negotiation (2003b). It focuses specifically on the issue of intersemiotic translation, questioning and showing what it means to “translate” from one “language” to another, such as from the novel to the medium of film, and to what extent the term translation is used metaphorically or whether it is semantically extended to include a broader notion of translation than that between natural languages.

Don Quixote, intermediality and remix: Translational shifts in the semiotics of culture

In Yuri Lotman’s terms intertextual relationships as active dialogues among texts and cultures should be the starting point for an analysis of the concepts of intermediality, cross-mediality and transmediality. This article considers adaptations and remakes as intermedial processes and remix practices as transmedial ones. The article demonstrates how the processes of transposition, remake and remix may sometimes be only partial, or in other instances they may shift towards entirely different textual systems/levels. At metasemiotic levels, the strategies that build the narrative worlds may either conceal or emphasize the interdependent relations between source and target texts, as well as between their cultural semiotic systems and their emergent ‘metatexts’ of self-description. In the second half of the article brief semiotic analyses will be presented in order to investigate mechanisms of the intermedial and transmedial networks that start from a literary text, Don Quixote by Cervantes, and continue to cinema and new digital media.

Play the City. Geografia della “città amatoriale”: teorie, applicazioni, prospettive

Our article is divided into three connected sections. The first one discusses the image of the city in amateur movies, taking into account the cinematic urban archeology of home movies and operational practices of databases, Geographical Information Systems, maps, installations. We propose the notion of “amateur city” as the synthesis of multiple, located views collected in a long period of time projected onto a map. The second section describes the Play the City app, a digital tool to map and navigate the urban space, between the past and the present, through 120 clips of amateur filmmakers. The third part deals with the idea of mapping the “storyworld” of a city through the app and opens up some theoretical perspectives on film images and geo-located systems.

Book Review. Transmediality and Cultural Semiotics

lishment of independence. The book ends by presenting visions for new fi lms and short ‘greeting cards’ from the Nordic countries. The cooperation between Baltic and Nordic countries might not be overwhelming, but certainly more common than between the Baltic countries themselves. The relations between the Nordic and Baltic region are not as special as 25 years ago when both sides were rediscovering their historical and cultural ties. However, Finland and Estonia have reached a new level of fi lm coproduction with works like Purge (Puhdistus/ Puhastus, directed by Antti J. Jokinen, Estonia/Finland, 2012) and Fencer (Miekkailija/Vehkleja/ ENDEL – Der Fechter, Finland/ Estonia/Germany, directed by Klaus Härö, 2015), both of them Finnish majority co-productions focusing on Estonian history. Stork Flying over Pinewood provides an insight into the Nordic dimension of the Baltic fi lm industries. It not only refl ects on, but also recreates, the concept of Baltic cinema. In the national languages there is hardly any discussion about the Baltic dimension of the national fi lm industries apart from the evident need for cooperation. Jan Erik Holst’s focused vision renders the deeper shared structures of Baltic cinemas visible, based on historical experiences as well as similar understandings of the concept of nationalism and culture. As probably the fi rst book on Baltic fi lm culture to be written in English, it serves its purpose well. The fragmented structure of the book, which constantly requires assistance, explanation and additional interpretation from the editor, refl ects the nature of Baltic cinema itself. The question of the meaning of ‘Baltic’ in the cinemas of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia remains a question about shared identity. Perhaps this identity is as fragmented as the fi lm histories of the three countries – with friendly personal relations, clear similarities, evident gaps and few co-productions. This shared identity is like a boat that we have suddenly found ourselves in, but which we initially did not intend to board. Book Review