In the docu-film Con il mare negli occhi (With the Sea in Your Eyes 2021 71′) written and directed by Paolo Magris, a girl from southern Italy tells her friend of her recent trip to far-away Gorizia, on the trail of a certain Carlo Michelstaedter, a striking poet and philosopher who died very young in 1910. In Italian with English subtitles.
REGISTER HERE to receive a link and password to see the movie May 10 -17, 2022 on Vimeo
Director Paolo Magris will join Thomas Harrison (UCLA), Valerio Cappozzo (University of Mississippi), Andrea Capra (Stanford University) and Nina Bjekovic (UCLA) for a live discussion of the movie and to talk about the life and work of Carlo Michelstaedter, an important but not well known exponent of the Jewish and Italian culture of the 1900’s who left a singular mark on the Italian culture of our times.
REGISTER HERE to attend the webinar on May 18, 2022 at 11 am PT on Zoom
Co-organized by UCLA Department of European Languages and Transcultural Studies and the Italian Cultural Institute Los Angeles
Paolo Magris Born in Trieste, he still lives and works in the seaport city in northeastern Italy.
In 2011 he wrote, together with Giorgio Pressburger, the screenplay for the film “Behind the Dark” (critical award for best soundtrack) presented at the Venice International Film Festival in September 2011. In 2016 he worked as assistant director in Pupi Avati’s TV movie “Laura’s wedding”. He wrote and directed the following short films: “A te sola” (presented at the Rome Film Festival in 2016), “Su questo bench”, “The challenge”, “Fiorellino”, “Sandra”, “I asked the night. “
Thomas Harrison is Professor of Italian at UCLA and author of the book Of Bridges: A Poetic and Philosophical Account (University of Chicago Press, 2021). He has also written a study of European expressionism across the arts called 1910: The Emancipation of Dissonance, and Essayism: Conrad, Musil and Pirandello. He has edited Nietzsche in Italy and The Favorite Malice: Ontology and Reference in Contemporary Italian Poetry, and, with Gian Maria Annovi, a broad study of contemporary Italian poetry called Ends of Poetry. His fields of specialization include modern intellectual history, Italian critical theory, music, aesthetics, the modernist novel, and poetics.
Valerio Cappozzo is Associate Professor of Modern Languages at the University of Mississippi. His research focuses mainly on medieval and modern poetry, in which fields he has published numerous scholarly articles, edited books, and book chapters. His monograph called The Medieval Dream Dictionary. The Somniale Danielis in Literary Manuscripts (Leo. S. Olschki Editore, Florence 2018) presents an edition of the widely circulated dream manual from the ninth century to 1550. He is also co-author with Jacques Dalarun and Sean Field of A Female Apostle in Medieval Italy: The Life of Clare of Rimini, which is now in press with University of Pennsylvania Press. He has also edited volumes on Carlo Michelstaedter, Storia e storiografia di Carlo Michelstaedter (University of Mississippi, 2017), on Giorgio Bassani, and on the Italian Risorgimento. He is the President of the Associazione Amici di Leonardo Sciascia, the vice-President of the American Boccaccio Association, and co-Editor-in-Chief of the scholarly journal Annali d’Italianistica.
Nina Bjekovic is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Los Angeles where she also received her BA and MA in Italian. Nina’s research explores postwar literary approaches to questions of difference and belonging in northeastern Italy and the Balkans. Her dissertation, entitled The Other Others: Negotiating Alterity in Postwar Triestine Literature, examines how the ethnopolitical crises of the twentieth century diversified and problematized the notion of a localized Triestine identity, and how these issues are rendered articulate in the works of Claudio Magris, Boris Pahor, Giuliana Morandini, and Giorgio Pressburger.
Andrea Capra is currently Ph.D. candidate in Italian literature at Stanford University, and will join Princeton’s Society of Fellows in September 2022. He works on the phenomenology of horror, the storytelling surrounding computational technologies, and technological utopianism in far-right and/or libertarian political movements of the Silicon Valley. Some of his most recent publications have appeared, or are about to appear, in Studi novecenteschi, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, and The Cambridge History of the American Essay. Andrea wrote his dissertation at the Università degli Studi di Milano on the annotations in ancient Greek written by Michelstaedter on his edition of Giacomo Leoopardi’s Canti. He has also published studies of Carlo Michelstaedter’s poetry.