AGE-C participates in the 4th International Congress of Interdisciplinary Studies on Comic Books at the University of Zaragoza
AGE-C member Luis Freijo represented the research group at the IV International Congress of Interdisciplinary Studies on Comic Books at the University of Zaragoza, which took place on the 10th-11th of April 2024. The theme of this edition of the Congress was the relation between cinema and comics, and it featured four panels on the topic plus three keynote addresses from Gonzalo Pavés, from the Universidad de La Laguna (Tenerife), with a proposed theorisation of the relation between the two media; David Almazán, who discussed Japanese artist Katshushika Hokusai and his relation to the future medium of manga, and Fernando de Felipe, who discussed his career as both an academic, a comic book creator and a screenwriter.
In this context, Luis Freijo presented a paper at one of the panel sessions and explored how ageing masculinity might be understood in the intermedial relation between cinema and comics. To do so, Freijo’s paper used the concept of remediation proposed by Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin as its critical framework, and the reworking of the notion that Dru Jeffries conceives in the context of adaptations between comics and cinema to propose the idea of “comic book film style”. The paper then applied the framework to the Italian graphic novel 5 è il numero perfetto, created by Igor Tuveri “Igort” in 2002, and its film adaptation, directed also by Igort in 2019 and starring Toni Servillo. 5 è il numero perfetto tells the story of Peppino Lo Cicero, a retired hitman for the Neapolitan mafia who must come back to action when his son is murdered and, with the help of former associate Salvatore, puts the ecosystem of criminal families into disarray through violence.
The paper focused on the depiction of Peppino’s body and its existence in a certain space, which is articulated differently through the languages of comic books and cinema. In the graphic novel, the body of Peppino and the space of Naples is depicted through a more abstract and indicative style, in which the situation of bodies against their backdrop is not very clear and in which the body is drawn in a more neutral way in which ageing is not embodied. In the film, the aesthetic changes to a hyperrealist one, in which the pastiche noir conception of space through saturated colours and the performance of Toni Servillo ground the character’s masculinity in an embodied sense of realism in which the old men dominate these spaces of violence. The conclusion of the paper compared how the graphic novel discarded realism to enable a higher degree of freedom in the conception of ageing masculinities, whereas the language of cinema allowed for less freedom but a more intense sense of what an ageing body can do. In both media, however, there is a political suspicion towards the dominance that older men hold in relation to younger generations in the context of an ageing population. Participation in the congress was therefore a positive experience for AGE-C, which permitted the exploration of the advantages and limits of the language of cinema in relation with other media in the depiction of ageing.
Written by: Dr. Luis Freijo
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