Presentation

Every year the Faculty of Communication Sciences of the Università della Svizzera italiana and the Locarno International Film Festival organise a Summer School to analyse fiction and non-fiction media. The Summer School is part of Réseau Cinéma CH, a Swiss university consortium promoting two Master of Arts programs in Film Studies and Film.

To speak of animation today means speaking of many different things. Independent shorts confront television animation, animation techniques such as stop-motion live side-by-side with the innovations brought in by computer graphics and the language of animation contaminates other media, from live-action cinema to videogaming. To account for the hybrid, polymorphous nature of contemporary animation, the X Film Summer School plans to confront the Western scene with that in the East, initiating a dialogue through two of the authors who are most representative of the latest tendencies in animation - Swiss animation director Georges Schwizgebel and Japanese anime director Hiroyuki Yamaga -, enabling a direct comparison between European animation's auteur tendency and the aesthetic and productive models of the most innovative Japanese Studios, but also stimulating reflection on the influence of cultural backgrounds, both on an aesthetic and a thematic level, in current animation production. The comparison is made even more relevant by the fact that both authors, while characterised by their different cultural roots and by the varying methods through which they develop and produce their work, share a tendency towards technical experimentation and an inclination to represent a contemporary world in vertiginous transformation. Can cultural and individual identity still provide an anchorage point among the continuous animated metamorphoses on offer?

Through dialogue and encounters with filmmakers Georges Schwizgebel and Hiroyuki Yamaga, and scholars Thomas Basgier and Marco Pellitteri, the X Film Summer School aims to investigate the different approaches to aesthetics and narrative with which European and Japanese animation have created animated worlds which are as rooted in their cultural heritage as they are alternative and visionary compared to the "real" worlds to which they refer.

The Summer School offers the opportunity to 30 undergraduate and graduate students to explore the techniques of analysis and the processes of film creation and production through the following teaching activities:

Seminars
Four seminar-lectures, coordinated by prof. Giuseppe Richeri and Eleonora Benecchi, will deal with the complexity of contemporary animation in creative and production terms. Guest teachers will include scholars Thomas Basgier (Universität Zürich) and Marco Pellitteri (Università di Trento).

Workshops
The four modules - coordinated by Nevina Satta - will consist of two workshops conducted by renowned filmmakers Georges Schwizgebel (director, Switzerland) and Hiroyuki Yamaga (director, Japan). Using analytical methods, the authors will present their own creative-production processes and the typical features of their relevant market. Laboratory work includes the viewing and the discussion of one or more films, each author’s presentation of his conception and production cycle in its main stages, to conclude with a group discussion with the film director.

The official working languages are English and French.