Film Studies Speaker Series: Silvia Casini (Reader in Film & Visual Culture Aberdeen) "In Search of a Format between the Wondrous and the Ordinary: The International Festival of Scientific and Didactic Film 1956-1975"

This talk will analyse the case of the International Festival of Scientific and Educational Film 1956-1975 (hence IFSEF) organised by the University of Padua in collaboration with the Venice Film Festival. This festival is representative of a broader, international phenomenon of useful film festivals, which are understudied in the literature, attracting entries from around the world as scientists, entrepreneurs and educators competed to create compelling cinematic presentations of the natural and industrial world. How did the format of IFSEF, which spatialised knowledge along the two axes of wonder and evidence, challenged or reinforced epistemic boundaries between disciplines, expertise, institutions, audiences? To tackle this question, I rely on Oliver Gaycken's concept of ‘literary devices' (Gaycken 2015: 4) which includes technologies and the various contrivances (debates, structural decisions, programming choices) that, in the case of IFSEF, stimulated organizers' search for a distinctive format across the exposition lifespan. In short, to avoid fetishizing the individual films, I shall address what John Durham Peters, referring to film festivals in general, calls ‘the basic, the boring, the mundane, and all the mischievous work done behind the scenes (…) that enable communication, exchange, and contact' (Peters 2015:33). This approach can create the conditions for a better understanding of films' fruition, circulation, and afterlife once they have left their production site.

Silvia Casini is film and visual culture scholar working at the intersection of visual culture, cinema, science and technology studies, and aesthetics. She is the author of numerous articles and chapters and her book Giving Bodies back to Data. Image-makers, Bricolage and Reinvention in Magnetic Resonance Technology was published by MIT press in 2021, with research supported by a Leverhulme Trust grant. Dr Casini coordinate the undergraduate medical humanities degree at Aberdeen and co-direct the George Washington Wilson Centre for Visual Culture. This talk departs from a new project on science film festivals, Visualising Science on Screen and Dr Casini has recently published on IFSEF in the journal Science as Culture.