Cinema&Cie

The recent phenomenon of pandemic has highlighted how the current visual and audiovisual production has not simply favored phenomena of re-sematization of reality, thanks to the dissemination of images and narrations devoted to the fragile bodies of the pandemic, but it also has engendered social practices and symbolic actions useful to orient the intersubjective process, self-perception and the perception of the other through physicality or its simulation. Within this framework, this special issue wants to provide a new reading of some theoretical concepts and methodologies in order to reconstruct/reopen the debate posed by visual culture applied to Trauma Studies and Medical Humanities/Medicine Visual Culture. Both fields appear as frayed lines of research, but are useful enough for a broad comprehension of the profound transformations that assailed on the one hand the representation and conceptualization of corporeality; on the other hand, the ways of conceiving the living body and its vulnerabilities (disease, anesthetization, perceptive distortions and alterations, affective lacerations, relational fractures, spatio-temporal discontinuity). In this sense, with the aim to analyze the media products that will be identified and selected, it is necessary to develop a new interdisciplinary methodology suited to grasp emotions, material dimensions, bodily practices, performative dynamics, intersubjective systems that, as a whole, consolidate the mise en discourse of the body as an object of care.