Empathetic Space on Screen

Amedeo D'Adamo is Professor of Film at the Universita Cattolica, Italy and Visiting Lecturer at the University of Switzerland-Italia, Switzerland. He teaches documentary at the Locarno Film Festival and mentors for the MAIA Producing Workshops and Albascript Plus. A filmmaker whose features have played in top-ranked festivals, he was also the founding Dean of the Los Angeles Film School.

PART I : THE BUILDING CODES OF NARRATIVE SPACE.- 1. Introduction : Welcome to Dantean Space.  Empathy and Space in Singin' in The Rain, Legally Blonde, The Pursuit of Happyness and Aliens.- 2. The Empty Man Of Action VS The Active Heart : DisPassionate & Dramatic Characters from James Bond and Sherlock Holmes to Little Miss Sunshine, Hamlet and The Hobbit.- 3. The Frozen Ones : Dantean Moments, Characters & Space from Aliens to Amelie, Sunset Blvd, Batman and others.- 4. Are We Empathizing with the Situation or With The Character? : A Methodology of Defining Space and Character in films like Little Miss Sunshine, 50 Shades Of Grey, Twilight & Secretary and TV shows like Lego Friends.- PART II : BOUNDARIES VISIBLE AND BROKEN.- 5. The Library of All Stories : Purgatory, Therapy and Character Arcs in Dante and in Great Expectations, One Hour Photo, The Third Man and Sunrise, in Camus' novel The Fall, and in Edgar Allen's Poe's short stories.- 6. Ghosts and Shades and Place : Empathetic Hauntology in Gravity, Lars and The Real Girl & Hiroshima Mon Amour.- 7. On Collapsing Boundaries between Protagonist and Antagonist : Dante's tricks and others in La Vie En Rose and Apocalypse Now and in the documentaries Tarnation, Elena and Waltzing With Bashir.- 8. Alienated Spaces : DeathStarchitecture, Showroom Space and the Dantean Homes of Homeland, Star Wars, Mad Men and The Graduate.- PART III : HOW NOT TO THINK LIKE DANTE ALIGHIERI : THE SOCIAL IMPLICATIONS OF DANTEAN SPACE.- 9. How Not To Think Like Dante Alighieri : Guilt, Punishment & the components of Dantean Space.-10. Escaping Dantean Space : On Creating Zones of Care in the biography of St Teresa, in physical materials and through Cinematography.- 11. How To Create Ecstatic Space : On crafting Zones of Care in Literature, Cinema and VideoGames in the films Amelie & The Secret Garden and in the videogame Wrath Of The White Witch.