What are you looking for?

Blom, Ivo

Blom, Ivo

Individual Fellow

Visual Arts: Italian Silent Cinema in Transmedial and Transnational Perspective

Research Question

How did Italian silent cinema appropriate visual arts and popular visual culture? And what does this tell us about generic, transmedial and transnational perspectives on film and art history?

Project Description

This post-doctoral research focuses on Italian silent cinema and its diaspora. The resulting monograph will not be just an overview of the most notable genres (Antiquity film, diva film, comedy, travel film, strong men film), but each chapter connects a genre with either high art (painting, sculpture) or with popular culture (travel literature, gymnastics, circus, and music hall). While mainly historical, this study is embedded in a theoretical framework around issues of transmediality and transnationality. The resulting monograph will be the culmination of research and publications in & outside of Italy and is much awaited by international experts.

Selected Publications

Picturesque Pictures: Italian Early Non-Fiction within Modern Aesthetic Visions’, Acta Universitatis Sapientiae: Film & Media Studies, 19, 2021, pp. 49-65.,

All the Same or Strategies of Difference: Early Italian Comedy in International Perspective’, in: Giorgio Bertellini ed., Italian Silent Cinema. A Reader (New Barnet: John Libbey, 2013), pp. 171-184.,

Gerome and Quo vadis. Picturale invloeden in de film’, Jong Holland, 4, XVII, 2001, pp. 19-28.
Personal page