While the historical definition of experimental films as highly personal works, marked by unconventional economic and aesthetic norms remains fundamentally unchanged, the context within which they are produced has evolved through the years. This article argues that the contemporary forms of experimental filmmaking are shaped by an artist’s personal fears and hopes as dictated by ideologically concomitant and traumatic events. A Self-conscious Mise-en-scène is such a work, and the subject and tools of this investigation: the making of the film amounts to a way of negotiating a communicative crisis, a study of the tendency to misrecognize the bewildering nature of pre-existing realities and disassociate oneself from them before re-inventing and appropriating their meaning and purpose.

Researchers should cite this work as follows:

• Cristiano, A., (2025), "A Self-Conscious Mise-en-scène: Experimenting with 'Disownment and Appropriation’", HSSCommons: (DOI: )

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1. Quaderni d'italianistica

Original publication: Cristiano, Anthony. "A Self-Conscious Mise-en-scène: Experimenting with 'Disownment and Appropriation’." Quaderni d'italianistica 28 (1): 2009. 151-166. DOI: 10.33137/q.i..v28i1.8554. This material has been re-published in an unmodified form on the Canadian HSS Commons with the permission of Iter Canada / Quaderni d'italianistica. Copyright © the author(s). Their work is distributed by Quaderni d'italianistica under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. For details, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/.