Thesis title: Schermi e politica. Culture e pratiche audiovisive dei comunisti italiani e francesi (1968-1984)
The dissertation investigates the relationship between the Italian and French Communist Parties and the audiovisual sphere between 1968 and 1984, a period marked by profound transformations not only in politics (the crisis of the international communist movement, the Eurocommunism formula) but also in ideology and technology (the end of the broadcasting monopoly and the rise of private television, the advent of videotape and the idea of guerrilla television). Drawing on a wide corpus of archival, audiovisual, and printed sources, the research develops along four main axes: the theoretical elaborations through which the Italian and French communist political cultures conceived of the audiovisual field as a highly strategic tool for the democratization of mass communication systems; the practices these same cultures implemented in their attempts to interpret the ongoing technological and ideological revolutions at both national and global levels; the strategies of adaptation to the languages imposed by the mainstream, which in those years steered political communication toward a more personalized and spectacular form; and, finally, a comparison between the two case studies, aimed at understanding whether and how differing approaches to the audiovisual sphere influenced the historical trajectories of the two most important Western communist parties. Ultimately, by illustrating both the complexity and the richness of this intricate interplay of theoretical elaborations and practical experiments, the dissertation seeks to move beyond a long-standing historiographical paradigm that has for too long attributed the decline of the communist experience to its alleged inability to comprehend mass culture.