Magazzino Italian Art will present the 6th iteration of the Cinema in Piazza series, presented in partnership with the Cold Spring Film Society and Artecinema. Entitled Rome: A Visual Journey, this year’s film program, curated by Magazzino’s 2022-23 Scholar-in-Residence Dr. Roberta Minnucci, will be devoted to a cinematic exploration of the city of Rome from Neorealism to the present day.
In the years following WWII in Italy, Rome experienced a historic, artistic, and cultural evolution—caught between their contemporary society, Fascist past, and ancient history. Whereas in cities like Milan and Turin the postwar years brought about rapid industrialization, Rome’s modern era emerged through cinema. Though constructed during Mussolini’s rule, Rome’s Cinecittà film studios ushered in the mid-century economic boom in Italy and came to be known as “Hollywood on the Tiber.” Using the surrounding city as a set, emerging filmmakers established a unique genre which came to be known as Neorealism, a new wave of Italian cinema that depicted the dramatic existential condition of the poorest sections of the population in the postwar years. In these years and through the following decades, Italian filmmakers engaged with other aspects of Rome—alongside the reality of life in its suburbs—drawing inspiration from the aesthetics intrinsic to the city’s urban mythology.
This film series will explore the city of Rome not only as a place, but as an idea and a metaphor. Viewers will embark on a visual journey filtered through the perspectives of various directors from different periods of the country’s social, cultural, and political history. Themes covered throughout the program include Pier Paolo Pasolini’s dramatic depictions of the postwar condition, Fellini’s Rome as a site of artifice and disguise, Nanni Moretti’s exploration of Roman nostalgia and longing, and Paolo Sorrentino’s surrealist homage to the city’s avant-garde forefathers. In these films Rome—far from a mere backdrop for the unfolding plot—assumes the role of the protagonist. Evidenced by this unique journey through the moving image, the city’s recent and ancient ruins, layered temporalities, and metaphysical urban landscape provide an endless source of inspiration for a visual investigation that unites art and cinema.
All films in the series will be screened at dusk, around 8PM. Doors open at 7PM. Tickets are available here.
Saturday, July 22, 2023
Pier Paolo Pasolini, Accattone, 1961 (117’)
Declared a hallmark of neorealist cinema by Jannis Kounellis, Accattone—referencing the protagonist’s name and translating to Beggar—was Pasolini’s directorial debut. The film follows Vittorio Accattone, a man who has never worked a day in his life, leading him to a hand-to-mouth existence on the margins of society: prostituting women, scrounging, and exploiting. When his most successful sex worker Maddalena is jailed, his fortunes begin to dwindle, forcing him to confront his own existence.
Sunday, July 23, 2023
Federico Fellini, Roma, 1972 (128’)
A lesser-known film by Fellini, Roma is a love letter to the city in spite of, and motivated by, its many contradictions. Suspended between an obscure past and problematic present, Fellini recounts his youth in Rome. With snaking traffic jams, guesthouses inhabited by Mussolini lookalikes, liturgical fashion shows, and visits to both palatial and dilapidated brothels, the film offers vignettes of paradoxical subcultures in the city—a frenzy of empire, fascism, luxury, poverty, Catholicism, and eroticism.
Saturday, August 19, 2023
Nanni Moretti, Caro Diario, 1993 (100’)
In this narrative triptych—translated as Dear Diary—Nanni Moretti takes the viewer on three disparate journeys. First, the filmmaker rides through Rome on a scooter while he muses on cinema, welcoming chance encounters with strangers and celebrities such as the actress Jennifer Beals. Next, he and his friend Gerardo tour a number of islands searching for a peaceful place to write a screenplay. Finally, hampered by a nagging skin rash, Moretti goes from doctor to doctor looking for the right diagnosis.
Sunday, August 20, 2023
Paolo Sorrentino, La Grande Bellezza, 2013 (142’)
In Sorrentino’s Roman fantasia, the city is captured through the eyes of Jep Gambardella—a sixty-five-year-old, but young-at-heart, journalist—whose awe for the capital is filtered through surreal encounters with friends, artists, and tourists. A pastiche of Fellini’s fantastical odysseys, the film reverberates with the strobe of Rome’s decadent high life, a cesspool and sanctuary for the carnal and sacral. Simultaneously desperate and divine, Rome is unveiled for its eternally evolving beauty.
Magazzino Italian Art | 2700 Route 9, Cold Spring, NY
July 22 & 23, 2023 | 7-10PM
August 19 & 20, 2023 | 7-10PM
