Italian Film Semiotics (1965–2020)

The paper describes the development of film semiotics in Italy, from the early foundation of the discipline to the contribution of recent scholars. In particular, a first change of paradigm occurred during the 1980s, when the focus of the research shifted from the film’s codes to pragmatic issues. In the new millennium, a second turn involved the notion of intersemiotic translation, which anticipated the international debate on intermediality. Italian film semiotics is not to be considered a “school”: it is rather a discussion between different perspectives on the foundation of semiotics (phenomenological, pragmatic, and post-structuralist) in which Italian scholars were actively connected to the international semiotic debate. Since many Italian semioticians avoided specialising in film theory, their work proved to be useful in new research fields such as broadcasting, internet, videogames, virtual reality, informatics, thus contributing to thecross-fertilisation of media studies.