Tattoo and the Moving Image

Area 10 – Scienze dell'antichità, filologico-letterarie e storico-artistiche

The deep connection between the tattoo and cinema would appear obvious in the present, given the variety of artistic and pop–cultural expressions that repeatedly invoke this relationship. With digital tools, it is possible to ‘animate’ the immaculate skin of Hollywood stars, subverting their mediatic iconography, while in contemporary movies, tattoo often stands for a moment of mise en abyme that questions the logic of the moving images. But what is at the heart of this mutual attraction? Is it possible to interpret, from a genealogical perspective, cinema and the tattoo as two versions of the same ‘stage’ of the analogue image? And what happens with digital culture? This book explores both the early phase of tattooing’s dissemination in Europe — emerging alongside the experiences of pre–cinema — and the contemporary, ‘high–tech’ context, with its experimentations in electronic and projective tattoos. Between these two poles, the collected essays discuss the subversive value of female tattooing, between attraction and therapy; the imaginary of the skin as a quasi–photographic matter; and, in parallel, the skin’s story as a site for identification, that in contemporary culture produces a paradoxical conflict between tattoos and fingerprints; a contrast which, in the end, reflects our perpetual oscillation between the body that we are and the body that we have.

SINTESI