Career
Francesco Casetti (April 2, 1947, Trento, Italy) is Professor at Yale University, in Humanities Program and Film Program.
In June 1970 he received a BA (honors) in Humanities at the Catholic University of Milan and, four years later, an Advanced Diploma in Film Studies and Performing Arts (honors) at the School of Communication of the same University. Assistant Professor at the University of Genoa, Associate Professor at the Catholic University of Milan, and Full Professor at the University of Trieste and at the Catholic University of Milan where he served as Deputy Provost from 1998 to 2002 and as Chair of the Department of Media and Performing Arts from 1999 to 2010. Visiting Professor at the Université de Paris III - La Sorbonne Nouvelle, at the University of Iowa, at the University of California – Berkeley (where he taught the “Chair of Italian Culture” in 2000) and at Yale University.
In 2005 he has been appointed in the national board of referees for a general evaluation of the humanistic research in the Italian universities. He has served as a member or as a referee on more than 40 committees for recruitment or for evaluation.
He is member of the Editorial Board of Comunicazioni Sociali (Università Cattolica di Milano), La valle dell’Eden (Università di Torino), Cinéma&Cie (Università di Udine-Université del Paris III), and Cinémas (Università de Montreal). He is also the General Editor of the series "Spettacolo e comunicazione" for the publishing house Bompiani, Milan.
He is member of the Scientific Board of "Istituto Gemelli-Musatti", Milano, and of the "CISF - Centro Internazionale Studi Famiglia", Milano. He has appointed as one of the curators of La Triennale, Milano, for the years 2009-2014. And he is “consultor” of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications, Vatican.
With Jane Gaines (Columbia University) is the co-founder of the Permanent Seminar on History 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 museonazionaledelcinema.it/filmtheories).
He is a member of the historical Accademia degli Agiati, Rovereto.
Scientific interests
His research moves from films, and addresses their stylistic forms, their relation to the cultural forms of modernity, and their spectatorship. It tries to combine studies of texts, studies of context, and studies of audience, interweaving semiotics, cultural studies and reception studies.
The book Bernardo Bertolucci (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1975) reviews the work of the director, highlighting the major themes and the principle of construction in each film. Close analyses are also developed in a series of monographs on Italian films after the Second World War. This includes an analysis of Visconti’s The Earth Trembles ("Per un'analisi testuale", in L. Miccichè (ed.), La terra trema. Analisi di un capolavoro, Torino, Lindau, 1993), De Sica’s Sciuscià ("Lo spazio instabile" in L. Micciché (ed.), Sciuscià di Vittorio De Sica, Torino, Lindau, 1994), and Visconti’s The Leopard ("Dialoghi e cerimoniali" in L. Miccichè (ed.), Il Gattopardo, Napoli, Electa Napoli/CSC, 1996).
He has devoted his critical attention to methodology in film and audio-visual text studies in a number of volumes, largely used as text-books in Italian film and communication programs: Analisi del film and Analisi della televisione (Analysis of Film and Analysis of Television, Milan: Bompiani, 1990 and 1998, both written with Federico di Chio; translations in Spanish).
A large and historical account of film theories is provided by Theories of Cinema. 1945-1995 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999; originally Teorie del cinema. 1945-1990, Milan: Bompiani, 1991; with translations also into Spanish, French, and Hungarian). The study reconfigures the post-war debate about cinema, seeking not only to give attention to its major authors, but to construct a cultural history of the research. The underlying hypothesis is that from 1945 there were three successive and major “styles of thought” about the cinema. They correspond to three major theoretical generations and to the three distinct institutional frameworks within which research was undertaken (film journals, film departments, media and cultural studies). The interest for the history of film theory is also reflected in the large essay "L'immagine del montaggio" ("The image of montage", introduction to Eisenstein’s Montaz 37, translated in Italian as Teoria generale del montaggio, Venice: Marsilio, 1985), and in the more recent essay “Theory, Post-theory, Neo-theories: Changes in Discourses, Change in Objects” (Cinémas, 17, 2-3, Spring 2007, pp. 33-45)
The book Inside the Gaze: The Fiction Film and Its Spectator (Bloomington-Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1999; originally Dentro lo sguardo. Il film e il suo spettatore, Milan: Bompiani, 1986; translations also in French and Spanish, and winner of the Best Italian Film Book Award of the year) is a large inquiry in different forms of gaze provided by film, and a an attempt to answer the question how film addresses and pre-forms its spectator, in a dynamic and open dialogue. The book goes through the analysis of numerous films, as well as through a re-reading of spectatorship theories from ’50s to ’80s.
Linked with this volume there is a research on television, which was published in the collective book Tra me e te. Strategie di coinvolgimento dello spettatore nella neotelevisione (Between me and you. Strategies of spectatorial involvement in new television, Rome: Eri-Vqpt, 1988). The theoretical terrain on which both volumes move was that of audiovisual enunciation. Starting from these premises, during the ‘90s Francesco Casetti addressed also the question of audience’s response to audiovisual texts. Studies largely inspired by ethnography of media reception are collected in the volume, edited by him, L’ospite fisso. Televisione e mass media nelle famiglie italiane (The everyday guest. Television and mass media in the Italian family, Milan: San Paolo, 1995).
The concept of negotiation, explored in Communicative Negotiation in Cinema and Television (Milan: V&P, 2002), provides a general framework in order to understand both the dynamics with which the audio-visual text pre-forms and responds the expectations and needs of a spectator, and the way in which the text inserts itself into a cultural context.
The book Eye of the Century. Film, experience, modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008; originally L’occhio del Novecento. Cinema, esperienza, modernità. Milan: Bompiani, 2005) connects the different perspectives of Casetti’s research. Through a broad-ranging analysis of film and a scrutiny of the film theories prevalent during the first four decades of the twentieth century, the book claims that cinema was able to negotiate between different stances of modernity. The result is a cinematic vision that—in permitting and permeating opposites—is modelled on the figure of the oxymoron. Namely, in the filmic gaze tensions of time found points of compromise—even if these compromises were often unbalanced—and the choices of modernity were “softened.”