According to the authoritative American scholar David Rodowick, “‘photographic’ realism remains the Holy Grail of the digital image”. Why then has the affirmation of digital gradually fueled the opinion that cinema is losing touch with reality and with its own inclination to reproduce and narrate it? The high degree of manipulation introduced by digital has in fact determined a reflection in which cinema appears as an absent defendant at its own trial, and where the main charge brought against it concerns the abdication of the role of photographic reproduction of reality. Today, however, cinema must inevitably be contextualized in an era in which, as the media scholar Peppino Ortoleva writes, a gap has been created between objects and symbolic meanings such that “it is almost obvious to write the word reality in quotation marks”.
Leonardo Gandini was born in Bolzano in 1961. He teaches Cinema Iconography at DAMS in Bologna and Film Rhetoric at the Faculty of Communication Sciences at the University of Modena – Reggio Emilia. He is the curator of the Conference Memory and Mass-Media, which is organized every year by the Historical Museum in Trento within the Memory Project. He is the author of several publications on contemporary and Hollywood cinema. Among his most recent publications are Il film noir americano (2008), Cinema e regia (2006), Ventuno per undici. Fare cinema dopo l’11 settembre (2008).