Enrico Terrone (Turin): Filmmaking the Social World. Normativity in Depiction and Narration

Abstract

Normativity arguably is the glue of society. Therefore, in order to contribute to shape society – to filmmake the social world –, films should exhibit some kind of normativity. Since films ultimately are narrations made of images, I shall address the issue of film’s normativity by addressing two basic questions. First, how can images be normative? Second, how can narrations be normative? I will argue that both images and narrations can be normative by virtue of their repeatability. Images turn the experience of space into something repeatable, and narrations turn the experience of time into something repeatable. While ordinary perception represents absolutely singular events, a film, understood as a narration made of images, consists in a spatio-temporal structure that can be perceived many times, just as a law can be applied many times. Repeatability makes cinema closer to the universality of law than to the singularity of ordinary perception.

Assoc. Prof. Dr. Enrico Terrone

Curriculum Vitae

Enrico Terrone studied at the Politecnico of Turin, where he received his B.A. in Electronic Engineering. From 2008 until 2012, he taught Film History and Criticism at the Università del Piemonte Orientale. From 2011 until 2013, he was a PhD student in Philosophy at Università degli Studi di Torino and was a visiting student at McGill University, Montréal, from January until May 2013 (under the supervision of Prof. David Davies) and at the University of Sheffield from July until August 2013 (under the supervision of Prof. Robert Hopkins). In 2014, he received his doctoral degree from the Università degli Studi di Torino with a thesis entitled “Instances of Cinema. An Ontological Account of Depiction”. Enrico Terrone holds a National Scientific Qualification as Associate Professor in Film Studies and currently is a Post-doctoral Fellow at the Laboratory for Ontology, Department of Philosophy, University of Turin. As a philosopher, he primarily deals with the ontology and aesthetics of film. Since October 2014, Professor Terrone is a Fellow at the Käte Hamburger Center for Advanced Study in the Humanities “Law as Culture”.