Publication

Picturing Intimacy: Mediation and Self-representation in a Boston’s Religious Festivals

Taking as a point of departure the Italian American community in Boston and its process of collective remembrance surrounding Saint Anthony’s Feast, we address the limits and potential of montage.

Author: Federico De Musso and Cristina Grasseni
Date: 06 November 2017
Links: ANTHROVISION (open access)

We argue that the multi-vocality and multi-temporality of social networks can be incorporated into the linearity of a narrated film. We discuss how editing found footage into the film Christmas in August (2013, christmasinaugust.altervista.org) was a way to explore the assemblages of diasporic identity and cultural intimacy for Boston’s Italian Americans. We focus specifically on the significance of social networks as mediators, and of montage as a tool to capture the virtual narratives and identities performed in the Facebook Group Page of St. Anthony’s Feast. We look at the Internet as both an archive source and a field of performance for acts of commemoration and remembering, and argue that montage is the most suited editing technique to reproduce the intimacy and irony expressed by the protagonists in their performance of Italianness.