Creator’s Statement

On our first day at the “Reframing the Argument” workshop, I had just finished designing my research on the post-media migration of images and their relationship with migrating subjects. I had initially imagined that during our week at the University of Notre Dame I would work on a videographic essay focusing on the disembodiment and fragmentation inherent to placelessness as experienced by displaced subjects and disoriented spectators. Placelessness and the loss of home were to be related to different socioeconomic situations of privilege and to the level of agency of the subjects involved. Since I was still referring to the media my research would dwell on quite broadly—including digital archives, documentary film, social media, and audiovisual art—the videographic exercises we were presented with led me to seek interaction with a more defined category of content. Having thought long about the infrastructure that serves to show notions of displacement, as well as the politics associated with images that are almost entirely manipulable, I became interested in using my own ability to reshape those images to engage with traditional channels of information and the space they are built in. The exercise “the [in]visible sentence,” posed a significant and generative constraint to my work: in the effort of making an unwritten and yet clear statement, I saw the evident need to articulate a contrast between disorientation and fixed and canonically embodied media environments. I started editing those environments to include images antithetical to standard television viewership and experimenting with sounds that could disrupt the sanitized order of television news.

With the exercise “the videographic dissection,” partly due to technical difficulties I experimented with voiceover and found a somewhat humorous voice to well manifest my attempt to reimagine tones and perspectives we employ to talk about the placeless other. In the exercise I was comparing Italian televised content created across different decades with the aim of surveying tones and images used. I came to appreciate an apparent shift in emphasis in more recent talk shows, which led me to build a particular focus on a specific political commentary talk show that has been airing on Italian national television for the past three years: Il cavallo e la torre (The Horse and the Tower, 2022—ongoing), hosted by journalist Marco Damilano. The reason for choosing it as the object of my final project resided mainly in the structure of the show: one journalist, Marco Damilano, reports almost exclusively one story every episode. The show is intended to sensitize the audience to current events by employing a somber yet informative style of storytelling, few images, a calm and almost meditative set, and a recognized professional with manifest sensibility and awareness. It has a clear impact on the viewer. I started thinking of “Phenomenology of Marco Damilano,” as a concept and title, because the elements I was taking note of reminded me of a famous writing by Umberto Eco that I often think about, Phenomenology of Mike Bongiorno (1963). Starting to select the material for my project, I immediately had some technical issues with my software, which forced me to edit outside of my usual environment and meant that—once I left the University of Notre Dame—to polish the end result the video needed to be remade from the start. This is relevant for two aspects: the material chosen and my editing process. Having to remake the project forced me to consider the possibility of updating the contents I was using, so I decided to use the news from September 8, 2025, the first day of the present season of Il cavallo e la torre. It was a significant episode because, indicative of the type of news selected by the production of the show and similar to the one I had selected when first making my final project, the stories were centered around relevant cases of displacement: the departure of the Global Sumud Flotilla from Italian harbors was the main focus of the episode, the Palestinian genocide was discussed, and there was a brief comment on illegal immigration in the United States. As it usually happens in the show, very few pictures were shown. As for my editing practice, switching software would have been less of an option outside of the context of “Reframing the Argument,” which certainly provided me with great mentorship and peer relations, but also gave me an incredible opportunity to focus on my creative process as I benefitted from the use of dedicated spaces and tools. The change in editing software, which I must thank the mentors for, was critical for the development of the resulting piece: editing choices that were not as obvious in my usual environment became self-evident, forcing me out of the space I had conceived the project in. My editing itself had become displaced; the changing digital space I was interacting with put me in the position to reimagine my relationship to the screened spaces in front of me.

These circumstances, paired with the direction my work had taken during previous exercises and my interest in studying space in its political dimension, affected my decision to not only analyse the host’s movements and the structure of the set, but also to take it apart, to experiment with the alteration of those structures. If Eco identifies in Mike Bongiorno a host that displays mediocrity to make himself unthreatening and tolerable to the viewer (Eco 1963), what I see in Marco Damilano is an anti-Bongiorno: his professionalism, cultural preparation, and refinement mediate unsettling realities that would otherwise be unpalatable and hard to watch. The spectator participates in a humanitarian discourse that resonates emotionally with them and creates mechanisms of pity that serve to mobilize the public’s moral sensibility but runs the risk of numbing it (Chouliaraki 2013).

Since few images are shown, the majority of what appears on screen is an authoritative man establishing a definite point of view on tragic world events, hence my need to destabilize this dynamic using a humorous tone that seems sharply out of place. By reciting a sort of love letter to the talk show host, I make a statement on both the effect his narration has on the spectator and on the sanitized and orderly way of conveying troublesome and dislocated realities. The goal is to make the frame in which death and war are discussed apparent, thus calling attention to how perceptible reality has been restricted by the frame itself (Butler 2009). When the voiceover ends, humor is replaced by the pure encounter with images and sounds from those realities that have only been mentioned. At that point my role becomes that of a sort of killjoy—as formulated by Ahmed (2023)—and to eliminate the narrative frame that had previously been destabilized to expose the viewer to a less reassuring informative content, one that interacts with its protagonists rather than narrating them.

Bibliography

Ahmed, Sara. The Feminist Killjoy Handbook. Seal Press. 2023.

Butler, Judith. Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? Verso. 2009.

Chouliaraki, Lilie. The Ironic Spectator: Solidarity in the Age of Post-Humanitarianism. Polity Press. 2013.

Eco, Umberto. Diario Minimo. Arnoldo Mondadori Editore. 1963.

Biography

Benedetta Andreasi is a graduate researcher in Film and Media Studies. Her work explores the production and use of media space, with a focus on how images of migration are constructed, circulated, and perceived in post-media environments. She is interested in phenomenological and practice-based videographic approaches to visual culture, examining how moving images interact with displaced political subjects and reconfigure the conditions of appearance and coexistence. She holds a Master’s degree in Economics and Administration of Arts and Culture from Ca’ Foscari University of Venice and a Bachelor’s degree in Economics and Statistics for Organisations from the University of Turin.

Review by Dayna McLeod, Concordia University

Broken into three chapters, Benedetta Andreasi’s video essay, “Phenomenology of Marco Damilano” uses a playful, tongue-in-cheek, soft fangirl intimacy to analyze the embodied approach to journalism practiced by talk show host Marco Damilano on Il cavallo e la torre, produced for Italian state television. Andreasi’s mischievous voiceover draws the viewer into a phenomenological study that contrasts Damilano’s composed, reassuring embodiment with the sobering, stark, and often fatal realities of the news stories he covers. She situates her own embodiment within her analysis, prompting us to do the same as spectators of both Damilano’s broadcast and her videographic intervention.

Andreasi’s voiceover, combined with visual effects that periodically isolate Damilano’s eyes, hands, clothing, and notebook, guides us to examine and dissect his body and authority as he delivers the news. Using humour, she directs our attention to Damilano’s “understanding” and “compassionate” performances of care and the affective comfort they produce, encouraging us to reflect on how Damilano (or our equivalent substitute) works in our own lives, enabling us to digest genocide, humanitarian crises, and death through the soothing mediatized tones of a television presenter. Humour functions as a destabilizing force, exposing the constructed nature of Damilano and his program and drawing attention to the content, form, and structures of critique at work in both the source material and Andreasi’s video essay, which allows us as spectators to reflect on our own positionality in relation to these stories, atrocities, and geographies.

The formal and affective choices that Andreasi makes demonstrate the video essay’s strength, using humour, embodiment, and phenomenological analysis to challenge passive, comforting modes of talk show news spectatorship. At the end of the video essay, Andreasi stays silent and lets the news footage run without her voiceover intervention or Damilano’s mediated contextualization. This absence sharpens the urgency of the footage now stripped of guided reassurance, compelling a direct encounter with material that had previously been framed, softened, mediated, and ultimately made for television.

Review by Corrado Petrucco, Università di Padova

“Phenomenology of Damilano” succeeds in transforming an “everyday media object” into a genuine critical apparatus. The author does not simply analyze a television program but dismantles it from within, making visible the way television space constructs a reassuring relationship between the viewer and “the other,” the vulnerable, distant subject who is the protagonist of a tragedy. The idea of a deliberately warm, soothing, yet light and somewhat foolish voiceover is a particularly successful choice. It is not merely an ironic device but a conceptual intervention that functions as a lever, prying apart the polished, orderly language of the talk show. It works because it disrupts the ritual of televised empathy and compels the viewer to confront an uncomfortable question: how much comfort are we seeking as we consume video-tragedies of human beings who remain distant from us?

On a technical level as well, the work demonstrates expressive maturity: the editing, the selection of images, and the pacing guide the viewer without weighing down the argument. The author shows a strong command of the language of videographic criticism, and more importantly, the ability to use it to lead us toward a precise interpretation.

The closing minute of silence, which makes space for protesters and for refugees from Gaza, is an effective choice. It does not explain or interpret; it leaves us waiting. It suspends. Here one clearly senses an ethical decision as much as an aesthetic one.

This is a work that does not seek approval, because it is a delayed-action bomb. At first, we accept the video essay in the same way we accept an evening talk show: comfortably seated, ready to consume an orderly analysis of the world. Then something unsettles the calm. We understand the function of the voiceover and recognize the trap. It feels like a kick to the shins—sudden, but necessary—forcing us to acknowledge our own role as reassured spectators … for how much longer?

Licensing

CC by 4.0

Competing Interests

The author has no competing interests to declare.