Three decades away from these insights we start again to talk about nostalgia as the hallmark of many contemporary narrative works, especially in the field of television series in which some scholars actually find a strong trend towards the nostalgic. In this trend there were also movies which connect past and present (Body Heat, Blue Velvet, Something Wild), showing “a collective unconscious in the process of trying to identify its own present at the same time that they illuminate the failure of this attempt, which seems to reduce itself to the recombination of various stereotypes of the past”. In the narrative arts there was a trend of works based on “list of stereotypes, of ideas of facts and historical realities” in the field of cinematographic productions, Jameson called this kind of movie “nostalgia film”, citing American Graffiti and Chinatown as exemplary cases of movies set in another era, as historical films, but that cannot be confused with them because the “nostalgia film” focuses on “imaginary style of real past”. One of the most effective insights of postmodern theory of narrative was that “nostalgia for the present” defined by Jameson in Postmodernism. ![]() Nostalgic trends in contemporary TV series. The spectator cannot directly experience the perverse pleasure of death on film, that is permitted just to the vicarious characters that incarnate his gaze: after all there is no need to see the corpse, if the act of filming it is so deeply connected with the act of killing. It is important to notice that in these movies (such as in the ones directly involved with the idea of snuff movie as an urban legend) the moment of death is, quite surprisingly, not directly represented. The same complexity is involved in different documentary movies, or in films that directly reflect on the act of filming (Peeping Tom, Michael Powell 1960 L’occhio Selvaggio, Paolo Cavara, 1967). In all these movies, all the intricacy of the act of shooting reveals itself: to film a death does not barely mean to testimony it, but to provoke it again and again. A possible starting point is provided by those early “attraction” films that directly depict a killing that happens in front of the camera, such as in Electrocutioning of an elephant (Edison, 1903). Moving from the assumption that this etymology can reveal itself to be a useful tool for a re-consideration of tendencies that cross the history of cinema, the paper will discuss the notion of “snuff” as a problematic genre in which this semantic overlay is particularly evident. In fact, it also identifies the act of killing, mainly with a fire-arm. The expression “to shoot”, crucial concept in the grammar of cinema, remind us of a sometimes-overlooked connection. ![]() By considering these regularities as independent units of analysis, crossing films and companies, and coming from different backgrounds (different areas of knowledge, but also different media) it is possible to write their history, a history completely independent from sponsors’ and institutions’ singular intentions – a history of the visual conditions of possibility for the uses of media by corporations. These visual regularities (or patterns of montage, of space and time editing, of stagings of the body, etc.) work as the aesthetic conditions of possibility for the managing procedures in which films are integrated. Instead of analysing films in their integrity, or the specific contexts in which they appear, one can assume the broader perspective of “corporate culture” (Hediger, Hoof, Zimmermann), and define a research corpus by the identification of the visual regularities circulating in the corporate communication networks. Assuming that corporate films are films “without authors”, different criteria for the definition of units of analysis can be stipulated from the usual criteria of auteur theory. This paper was a first account of the methodological framework I am trying to develop for the analysis of corporate films.
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