Gabriele Pedullà (Rome, 1972) is professor of Contemporary Literature at the University of Rome 3 and visiting professor at Stanford. He published a book on the partisan-writer Beppe Fenoglio (2001), and a monograph about Machiavelli's theory of conflict (2011). His anthology of partisan short stories, "Racconti della Resistenza" (Einaudi, 2005) was a best-selling book in Italy. With Sergio Luzzatto, he also edited a three volume "Atlas of Italian Literature" ("Atlante della letteratura italiana", Einaudi 2010-2012). For his first book of fiction, the prize-winning collection of short stories "Spanish Made Simple" ("Lo spagnolo senza sforzo", Einaudi 2009), he was selected as one of the 10 best Italian writers under 40 by the literary supplement of "Il Sole 24 Ore". He's currently working on his first novel.Judgements about "In Broad Daylight":For readers numbed by a decade-long succession of books about the so-called death of film and the migration of cinema to new media platforms, Gabriele Pedullà’s In Broad Daylight will be a welcome shift in focus. Inverting the priority habitually given to the film object and its ongoing transformations, he examines the displacement of the movie theater as the exclusive site for film viewing. In his compelling archaeology of this darkened spectatorial space, ranging back to Greek antiquity and the Renaissance, he explores the hybrid social and perceptual conditions of the now marginalized or abandoned movie theater. Not least of all, Pedullà shows how the spectral persistence of “the dark cube” and its lost collectivity haunts all our proliferating forms of digital cinema consumption.JONATHAN CRARY, Columbia UniversityTechnical reproducibility of the work of art and anatomy of the society of the spectacle: Gabriele Pedullà’s book is the first to take a real step forward from the analyses—at times repeated like a conforting mantra—of Walter Benjamin and Guy Debord.PAOLO VIRNO, author of "A Grammar of the Multitude"In productive dialogue with literature, art, theatre, and architecture, Pedullà examines the new scopic regimes that films enter once they escape from the movie theater. A surprising journey between present and past, theory and history, places and narratives, this book casts new light (daylight?) to show where post-cinema stands today.FRANCESCO CASETTI, Yale UniversityIt all started with psychoanalytic and Marxist readings of the movie theatre as Platonic Cave. Or did it? According to Pedullà in the beginning was the darkened cube of 16th century Italian drama and melodrama, producing a silent immobility of spectators empathizing cathartically with the transcendent destiny of visualized persons. That is also the normative phenomenology of cinematic vision. Then, in the last few years, something new happened. With the advent of the individual media—portable, multifunctional small screens—the traditional cinematic habitat exploded and the “post-Vitruvian viewers”, distracted as never before in their consumption of the new art, were born. On the heels of Serge Daney and Stanley Cavell, Pedullà develops a novel film theory, driven by questions. What comes of a film audience, not gathered in a darkened room, but streaming their videos “in broad daylight”? What social use do we make of films shrunk to the dimensions of a twelve-inch screen? Thanks to the reasoned revelations of Pedullà we see just how challenged—if not endangered—audiovision has become in the century before us.THOMAS HARRISON, UCLA