Editorial

Abstract

While the effects of COVID-19 have been glaringly unequal throughout the world, the trials of pandemic and social isolation have touched nearly every community around the globe since early 2020, bringing with them many lessons. As some countries and communities begin tentatively to emerge from the devastation inflicted by the virus, as well as the social cautions it has warranted, we have the opportunity to take stock of what was lost, and what was learned. One theme that emerges from the necessary isolation of these past many months is the importance of togetherness: of banding together to combat health crises, to provide resources to struggling neighbours, to speak up for equal access and social justice, and to continue doing the important work of education, intellectual exploration, and affective connection. This has been a togetherness recognised in both practice and absence, as those of us who were able to do so stayed safely in our homes. Often, we found ourselves tucked behind screens, learning new ways to stay connected as we carried on with our work as scholars and teachers – adapting lesson plans, reaching out to far-flung archives for digital materials, binging on all manner of media, and sharing notes with colleagues over Zoom lunches and happy hours. Through all of it, we have both yearned for and relied on the process of collaboration, the theme of this current issue. In emphasising collaboration, we take inspiration from and reach out in conversation to our editorial colleagues at gender/sexuality/italy, whose recently published issue no. 7 (2020) is also dedicated to ‘collaborations’. In the call for papers for that issue, the editors of g/s/i offered a series of useful handles for thinking through the substance of collaboration, so often taken for granted as an alchemical process beyond analysis; they asked how affect and performativity, for example, might structure our understanding of collaboration, and posited collaboration as an explicitly decolonising and feminist practice. With this issue of The Italianist we seek to extend those lines of inquiry to think about ways in which the screen industry prompts uniquely collaborative forms of production (and consumption and distribution), as well as scholarship and pedagogy. Making screen narrative is defined by its collaboratory nature: from production and fundraising, through scriptwriting and casting, to coaching and performance, costume and location scouting, camerawork, sound and editing, the multiple stages that are interwoven into the complex process put individuals into close and intricate interdependency. Conducting research on films and television can also be a highly collaborative process, and increasingly, groups of scholars are pooling resources to manage large-scale investigations into film history or media operations. With this special issue of The Italianist we investigate these two ‘co-laboratories’, of film-making and of researching or teaching through film, both as practice and in theory, in a set of reflective essays followed by a collection of ‘conversations’. Whilst collaboration can exclude as much as it includes, making its operations a significant, and under-examined, manifestation of soft power, we understand the ‘co-laboratory’ as the space opened up in the dialogue between two or more practitioners or researchers that allows for experiment and exchange, play and possibility to