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La modernità è un topos fondamentale della cultura occidentale, e in particolare è una categoria fondativa per la configurazione del continente americano e del suo rapporto con l'Europa; e al legame fra le Americhe e la modernità sono dedicati gli interventi raccolti in questo volume. Il saggio introduttivo è dedicato all'esplicitazione del rapporto fra modernità e modernismo, fra dimensione sociale e culturale, fra teoria e storia. Il volume è poi dedicato a una riflessione multidisciplinare su questo snodo teorico così essenziale, che permette di interpretare il Novecento americano sotto nuove prospettive. In particolare, è affrontato il rapporto fra urbanistica, urbanizzazione, cinema e modernità, attraverso saggi con prospettive teoriche diverse e casi di studio provenienti dall'intero continente. Si prosegue poi nella riflessione fra teoria, politica ed estetica, andando a considerare il rapporto fra modernità e linguaggi letterari e cinematografici. Infine, il volume si concentra sulla dimensione più prettamente filosofica, non dimenticando di fare riferimento anche alla complessità degli scenari geoeconomici della globalizzazione. Modernity is an essential trope of Western culture, and it is a seminal category for discussing the relation between the Americas and Europe; the writings collected in this volume discuss the relation between the Americas and modernity from a variety of perspectives. The opening essay focuses on the complex relations between modernity, modernism, and modernization especially in the context of cinema and visual media. In the following essays the issue of modernity and the Americas is explored in relation to specific contexts and examples in the visual arts, literature, the human and the social sciences. Among the topics: the relation between planning, urbanization, cinema and modernity, both in relation to North and South America. The volume then offers a reflection between theory, politics and aesthetics, considering the links between modernity and literary and filmic languages. Finally, the volume explicitly addresses the philosophic dimension, without forgetting the complexities of the geo-economic panorama produced by contemporary globalization.

After decades of oblivion the status of Lois Weber's production has emerged as one of the most important in American cinema of the 1910s. Indeed, recent historical research has made clear that by 1915 Weber had become a popular celebrity whose work was as distinctive as that of Griffith and De Mille. In her most famous and successful films, Weber tackled some of the controversial issues of the period which she treated in a moral fashion. Where Are My Children? (1916) is the first of four films dealing with birth control while Shoes (1916), for example, deals with underpaid female labor. In both cases, as in other films, Weber's social discourse develops along a dual axes, that of gender and class. Though she didn't consider herself strictly a feminist, she thought of her work in line with that of activists and reformers, including feminists such as Margaret Sanger and Jane Addams. It is interesting to note that well before current debates around essentialism and anti-essentialism, Weber was well aware, like many feminists of the time, that women's condition as gendered subjects was not unique and universal, but intimately related to their class.

This conversation with filmmaker Alina Marazzi and editor Ilaria Fraioli took place on April 20, 2012, as part of a conference on found footage cinema at the Arts Department of the University of Bologna. Marazzi and Fraioli were invited to reflect on their work with archival material in films like For One More Hour with You (2002) and We Want Roses Too (2007), by a group of scholars with interests in compilation films, cultural memory, and women's cinema: Monica Dall'Asta, Barbara Grespi, Sandra Lischi, and Veronica Pravadelli.