Bruno Surace

Bruno Surace
Università degli Studi di Torino | UNITO · Dipartimento di Studi Umanistici

Doctor of Philosophy
Researcher, University of Turin

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43
Publications
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27
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Introduction
Film and Media Studies Semiotics Cultural Studies

Publications

Publications (43)
Article
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The article explores the context of contemporary media, with particular attention to the TikTok universe, identifying a sort of "Twilight Zone" in which contents for adults and new generations mix. Through the analysis of specific cases (the "creepypasta" of Slender Man, the TV series Squid Game, and the film Terrifier), the problematic effects of...
Article
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The notion of "Snapchat Dysmorphia", which we extend here to a more generic "Selfie Dysmorphia", has been under discussion online for at least a couple of years. It concerns the increasingly widespread inability to accept one's own appearance and the spasmodic need to control it through filters and post-production effects with the smartphone. This...
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oggi tendenza assai diffusa quella di considerare i cuccioli, umani o animali che siano, come sorte di vite in potenza, la cui caratteristica essenziale è una primigenia illibatezza d'animo. Così ad esempio i bambini in fasce, liberi dal giogo della socializzazione, sono letti e divulgati nei termini di una speranza primordiale, ancorché vessati in...
Article
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The Uncanny Valley, hypothesized by Masahiro Mori in 1970, theorizes about a sensation of discomfort evoked in humans on exposure to anthropomorphic artificial bodies that preserve some mechanical features. The aims of this paper are multiple. Firstly, to confirm the truth of this hypothesis, which has often been the subject of controversy but whic...
Chapter
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Akira Kurosawa's  Rashōmon is unanimously considered one of the masterpieces of film history. It has been treated far and wide, and continues today to attract interest from cinephiles and scholars. It is a genuinely open work, which among others has been dealt with by Ugo Volli who decided to focus on its pre-eminently metacommunicative aspect....
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With a bang or with a whimper V I C, B S, M T * . Nomen omen Ad inizio , come parte di un gruppo di dottorandi e ricercatori (compo-sto dai sottoscritti, Simona Stano e Marta Millia) iniziammo a discutere di un convegno sul senso delle catastrofi e sul catastrofismo, osservando con interesse tale important...
Book
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Objective of this paper is that of investigating fridge magnets, significant souvenirs but also relevant existential devices, in an attempt to capture not so much their representational as their evocative appeal, which is held to lie at the base of the success of the objects in question. The essay consults the tools of visual semiotics, highlightin...
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Martyrs is a 2008 film by Pascal Laugier that has since gained a niche cult following of enthusiasts of this genre and is considered to have pioneered a kind of Nouvelle Vague in contemporary French horror films. Right from the title the category of martyr is central to the film, but Martyrs presents a significant re-articulation. While classical m...
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The Greimasian semiotic perspective defines the sentient subject's perception of the world as, first of all, a narratological operation. Thus not only are "canonically" narrative texts (novels, movies, comics, etc) decodified as Stories, but also the places we live in, the clothes we wear, and finally the objects we encounter during our lives. Semi...
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Author Bio: Bruno Surace is a PhD in Semiotics and Media at the University of Turin, Post-Doc Research Fellow with the ERC project FACETS, Adjunct Professor of Cinema and Audiovisual Communication at the University of Turin. He is the author of the monographs I volti dell'infanzia nelle culture audiovisive: Cinema, immagini, nuovi media (Milan, Mim...
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Cinema and contemporary TV series seem to have firmly embraced a new "genre", the biopic, as an audiovisual story of individual lives that extends more and more towards subjects once outside the criteria of common "biographability". If until a few decades ago the audiovisual biography was in fact reserved to characters whose noteworthiness was cons...
Article
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That of filmic enunciation is an open and never entirely closed problem. Film as a specific does not lend itself to the tendency of the classic semiotic theory of enunciation based on a glottocentric matrix. Furthermore, the film, as a syncretic and constitutively multi-authorial and multi-level text, is an act of parole far more complex than a ver...
Chapter
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There exist texts, often of a ludic or manifestly artistic nature, that seriously query the univocal relationship between signifier and signified, the epistemology of the expression-content type. They are texts written in "impossible" languages, a-semic alphabets indecipherable by statute, which are however able to emanate enormous amounts of meani...
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Quelle del cibo e del gusto sono sfere esplorate con vigore negli ultimi anni, in tutte le dimensioni che esse coinvolgono, o quasi. Fra queste infatti ne esiste una che pare sistemicamente elusa. È la dimensione terminale ma necessaria del cibo, quella in cui esso si trasforma naturalmente da meraviglioso testo nel piatto in massa fecale. Sulla ca...
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El cortometraje de Alejandro Pérez El autómata (2016) presenta una serie de instancias relevantes con respecto al tema del rostro transhumano, que se convierte en una alegoría de la relación con la alteridad en sus varias facetas y abre una reflexión significativa sobre la relación que la humanidad mantiene consigo misma en el pasado, presente y fu...
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Da morire dal ridere Ideologemi della catastrofe cinematografica e sue declinazioni tragicomiche B S *  : To Die Laughing. Ideologemes of Cinematographic Catastrophe and its Tragicomic Manifestations : Nowadays, the disaster movie is a confirmed cinematographic genre and, as such, subject to parodies, which may be seen...
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Severely criticized almost unanimously at the time of its release, Francesco Nuti’s “OcchioPinocchio” (1994) represents a rare case of a “cursed” Italian film from the 1990s. It became notorious for its extremely costly and troubled production, whose release was delayed by a year, as well as for the massive flop that followed, so severe that it mar...
Book
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This original and interdisciplinary volume explores the contemporary semiotic dimensions of the face from both scientific and sociocultural perspectives, putting forward several traditions, aspects, and signs of the human utopia of creating a hybrid face. The book semiotically delves into the multifaceted realm of the digital face, exploring its bi...
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Suggested topics for this monographic issue of “Punctum” may include: • Epistemological and typological framework of the topic (lists, corpora, ensembles, categories, classes, collections, archives, canons, and counter-canons). • Pre- and post-digital collecting (of objects or digital semiotic materials). • Collecting as community, identity, form...
Book
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Il volto dell’infanzia è un oggetto culturale tanto carico di significato quanto ad oggi inesplorato. Ciò appare controintuitivo: oggi avanzano con una certa dirompenza face studies che delineano la natura pervasiva del volto in quanto dispositivo comunicativo, retorico, empatico, tuttavia tali approcci sono concentrati quasi esclusivamente sul vol...
Chapter
Until recently the foodsphere was an exclusive domain of the adult world. Except in rare cases, parents’ or caretakers’ beliefs largely determined children’s and adolescents’ nutrition. It was with the Millennials, and later with the so-called Generation Z, that the theme of food first gained prominence in the media, with the multiplication of text...
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Today’s pornography constitutes a semiotic laboratory capable of meticulously describing some characteristics of the cultures from which it comes and for which it is intended. In it, the role of the face is preeminent and assumes relevance both from a diegetic and a formal point of view. A face which makes itself a sign and is articulated in a dial...
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This paper proposes a reflection on the notion of island and on its cultural productivity grounded in its morphological, logistical and symbolical features. First of all, we present a brief overview of the semiotic properties of water, underlining how it affects anthropic spaces such as cities and the way we interpret them. The second paragraph is...
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Second Livestock is the pioneering invention of Austin Stewart, of Iowa State University. It is a viewer for hens, connected to an insulating cabin, which would introduce the latter into a decidedly better virtual world than the one in which they are forced on intensive farms. Of this invention there are only botched traces -images, texts, an intro...
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The neo-horror mockumentary, from the 1990s onwards, has been a genre in constant ascent, rejuvenating extremely codified strands. What unites these strands is undoubtedly a formal commonality since the premise of the genre is that of basing oneself on 'lucky' shots, which imitate a certain amateurism, while being also extremely corporeal. The neo-...
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Seen from a Western perspective, contemporary Chinese cinema seems to be characterized by two interrelated dimensions: a positive tendency to formal experimentation and a stimulating-and maybe symptomatic-obsession with issues related to time. The purpose of my paper is to investigate the relationship between these two features utilizing a comparat...
Book
Le retoriche giornalistiche e gli immaginari mediali ci parlano di un mondo in declino, il cui orizzonte si fa sempre più difficile da scorgere, tormentato da innumerevoli paure e messo in discussione da catastrofi imminenti. Crisi politiche, disastri ecologici, complotti globali, scenari da fine del mondo. Ma qual è il confine tra pericoli attuali...
Article
Sushi has permeated numerous spheres of sense in present-dayWestern society. This Japanese dish, increasingly less exotic and more familiar, has come to constitute a semiosphere of its own which, starting from the semiotic issue of food as a signifying vehicle, now crosses into other universes and assumes the status of a crossmedial vector. This co...
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The illusionist enunciates his texts on the basis of calibrated exercises in self-censorship. He is above all an actor performing a narrative plot and, as such, embodies a dual agency divided between what is concealed - that is, the action really executed for the realisation of the trick-and what is revealed- the moment of conjury effected through...

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