the italianist 32 · 2012 · 285-291 MISE-EN-SCÈNE DVD commentaries: Three points of view Notes on DVD commentaries Robert S. C. Gordon The experience of recording a DVD or Blu-ray Disc (BD) commentary as an academic specialist has a strange feel to it, at once cutting-edge and antique. The contemporary feel comes from various intersecting and unusual forms of contact. There’s the studio technology; there’s the sense of direct participation in the digitalization of ilm as a medium and of its proliferating paraphernalia, of which DVD extras were one of the relatively early manifestations. And there’s contact with the distinctly commercial drive behind ilm distribution in the commissioning of such material (driven largely by a loss-leading principle, though, since the academic commentator accrues prestige and forms of seriousness and cultural capital to a given product, but is hardly likely to boost sales). In academic terms, narrowly speaking, the experience talks also to very contemporary issues and anxieties (certainly in the UK) about scholarly research in the humanities needing to justify its on-going existence by reaching out to and having ‘impact’ upon audiences, well beyond the ideal community of scholars, studying collectively, in dialogue with each other and reining knowledge as they go. All this can make for a slightly disconcerting encounter between industry and academia. From my own experience, a irst inkling of this came in a simple diference in conceptions of time and money: when irst asked if I would be interested in doing a commentary – requiring a body of closely detailed material the equivalent of, say, two academic articles – I was told there was no particular hurry for the production team, they could give me anything up to four-to-six weeks to prepare. I had recently made a grant application to research and produce two articles over a period of nine months.