Numbers at the movies
from 24 October to 27 November 2014
There's no point in trying to deny it: for most people, maths was, is and always will be the school nightmare par excellence. Our daily lives may be totally digital today, but numbers continue to be a mystery for our brains. The cinema has taken hold of this seeming contradiction in terms, something of an unresolved trauma for contemporary man, and filled some of the best films of the past few decades with numbers, with mathematical geniuses and with conundrums to resolve. Helping to patch up our relationship with numbers, movies of astonishing narrative and visual fantasy have told the story of brilliant and creative minds - belonging to great scientists, to thinkers and to child prodigies - or of destructive and criminal minds driven by faulty logic like seemingly indecipherable mathematical puzzles. Maths in the movies has been allowed to give free rein to its fantastic capabilities and, through the chaos of mankind's activity, has pointed the way to possible future scenarios. Now the room darkens, like in a mathematical nightmare... but don't be afraid, it's only great cinema!
24 October, 9.00 pm
A Beautiful Mind
directed by Ron Howard. USA, 2001, 134 min., original version with Italian subtitles
Can mathematics in the cinema whip up audience enthusiasm or even move an audience to tears? This masterpiece with its myriad Oscars certainly can, thanks to Russel Crowe's memorable portrayal of brilliant and crazy Nobel prizewinner John Forbes Nash Jr.
25 October, 9.00 pm
Good Will Hunting
directed by Gus Van Sant. USA, 1997, 125 min., Italian version
Another shower of Oscars and of mathematical brilliance underpins the relationship, recounted with sensitive emotional depth, between a bewildered child prodigy and an atypical psychologist, with a masterful performance from Robin Williams.
26 October, 9.00 pm
Cartesius - Descartes
directed by Roberto Rossellini. Italy, 1973, 154 min.
The great master of cinema gave television audiences the benefit of his extensive knowledge in the early 'seventies by telling the story of some of the leading figures in the history of science, such as Descartes, the father of modern thought and a mathematical genius in his own right.
29 October, 9.00 pm
Death of a Neapolitan Mathematician
directed by Mario Martone. Italy, 1992, 108 min.
The last few days in the life of Renato Caccioppoli, one of Italy's most important and eccentric mathematicians, are portrayed in this memorable performance by Carlo Cecchi, a spirit haunting the alleys of the sick city of Naples. The film won the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival.
30 October, 9.00 pm
Cube
directed by Vincenzo Natali. Canada, 1997, 90 min., original version with Italian subtitles
Mathematics as perfection but also as a threat lie at the heart of this breathtaking thriller that combines science fiction with geometry: caught in a Kafka-style claustrophobic nightmare, a group of people trapped in a mysterious, gigantic cube have to discover the mechanism to open it so that they can escape.
31 October, 9.00 pm
Drowning by Numbers
directed by Peter Greenaway. UK, 1988, 118 min., Italian version
This ironic noir comedy tells the story of three women murderers - a grandmother, mother and daughter who drown their husbands out of sheer boredom - which the master of visionary cinema fills with numbers as a rhythmic counterpoint to the mystery of human activity.
1 November, 9.00 pm
Enigma
directed by Michael Apted. UK, Germany, 2001, 117 min., Italian version
A gripping spy story set in World War II sees Britain's leading scientists racing against time to decipher the encrypted communication code used by the Nazis. The lead role is based on the figure of Alan Turing, one of the founding father's of the modern computer.
2 November, 9.00 pm
Blaise Pascal
directed by Roberto Rossellini. Italy, 1972, 136 min.
This film recounts the life of the great French scientist and philosopher as interpreted by the master of Italian Neo-Realism, who reviews Pascal's short life and the development of his thought right up to 1662, the year in which he died at the age of only thirty-nine.
4 November, 9.00 pm
Rain man
directed by Barry Levinson. USA, 1988, 130 min., Italian version
Four Oscars, a Golden Bear award in Berlin and a huge box-office success, this enthralling road movie is both moving and amusing as it tells the story of an unscrupulous car dealer and his autistic brother, a mathematical genius, in an outstanding performance by Dustin Hoffman.
5 November, 9.00 pm
Möbius
directed by Gustavo R. Mosquera, Argentina, 1996, 88 min., Italian version
Mystery in the metro: at the Borges tube station in Buenos Aires a train full of passengers simply disappears into thin air. This rare gem of Latin American sci-fi, rich in suspense and brilliant expedients is a product of the creativtity of Argentinian scientists.
6 November, 9.00 pm
Flatland
directed by Michele Emmer, Italy, 1982, 22 min. - animated cartoon
Introduced by the author
A gem of Italian animation adapting Edwin A. Abbott's fantasy tale for the screen, the film offers a highly original interpretation of the concept of a world on more than one dimension thanks to the direction of mathematician Michele Emmer, a master at promoting the encounter between mathematics and art.
continued...
The Decalogue 1: I Am the Lord Thy God
directed by Krzysztof Kieslowski. Poland, 1988, 55 min., Italian version
Krzysztof Kieslowski sets his intense transposition of the Ten Commandments in a suffering and highly problematical contemporary environment. In the first chapter of his Decalogue he reflects on the clash between faith and science, and on man's tragic failure to develop the rational control of reality.
7 November, 9.00 pm
The Bank
directed by Robert Connolly. Australia, Italy, 2001, 103 min., Italian version
This merciless and gripping movie explores of the world of high finance populated by unscrupulous bankers and by a mathematical genius who has devoted his life to the study of the theory of fractals and to the search for a formula capable of predicting disastrous crashes on the stock market.
8 November, 9.00 pm
After Midnight
directed by Davide Ferrario. Italy, 2004, 90 min.
Turin's Mole Antonelliana provides the magical backdrop for a story of rare delicacy about love for the cinema and a problematic sentimental life, with Fibonacci's sequence of numbers fuelling the leading player's hopes of a universal order.
9 November, 9.00 pm
The Little Archimedes
directed by Gianni Amelio. Italy, 1979, 82 min.
Set in the dazzling Tuscan countryside, one of the best Italian films for television ever made probes the gap between innocence and culture through the eyes of a farming couple's young son who, while totally illiterate, has an outstanding gift for mathematics and music.
12 November, 9.00 pm
Manhattan by Numbers
directed by Amir Naderi. USA, 1993, 86 min., original version with Italian subtitles
Naderi, an Iranian who now lives in the United States and is without question one of the most original international movie directors, probes the bewilderment of contemporary man in the ordeal of his leading player as he roams Manhattan desperately searching for money and ends up trapped in the numerial labyrinth of the metropolis.
13 November, 9.00 pm
Agora - Mists of Time
directed by Alejandro Amenábar. USA, Spain, 2009, 125 min., Italian version
A superb reconstruction of the life of Hypatia, the first woman scientist in history, who championed freedom of philosophical thought in 4th century AD Alexandria and eventually succumbed to the violence of religious fanaticism.
14 November, 9.00 pm
Memento
directed by Christopher Nolan. USA, 2000, 113 min., Italian version
Christopher Nolan's visionary masterpiece, a psychological thriller, tells of an enigmatic story that the leading man, who is suffering from amnesia, needs to reconstruct if he is to discover his wife's murderer, just as he, and indeed the audience, need to overcome man's prejudiced, partisan approach to reality.
15 November, 9.00 pm
Last Year in Marienbad
directed by Alain Resnais. France, Italy, 1961, 95 min., Italian version
In a sumptuous hotel, a man seeks to persuade a woman to remember her promise to run away with him. Even in Resnais's masterpiece, which won the film the Golden Lion award at the Venice Film Festival, reality is enveloped in a dreamlike plot and exposes the incantatory failure of human memory.
16 November, 9.00 pm
No More Time
directed by Ansano Giannarelli. Italy, 1972, 105 min.
A portrait of Évariste Galois (1811-32), one of the most fascinating figures in the history of mathematics who, the night before a duel in which he was mortally wounded at the age of only twenty-one, wrote sixteen pages that are still considered even today to provide a brilliant foretaste of abstract algebra.
18 November, 9.00 pm
Little Man Tate
directed by Jodie Foster. USA, 1991, 95 min., original version with Italian subtitles
The unfathomable mystery of childhood genius often lies at the heart of films that address scientific themes, as it does in this excellent debut by Jodie Foster as director (and herself a child prodigy), which probes with delicacy and sensitivity the solitude of a mathematical genius not yet ten years old.
19 November, 9.00 pm
The Oxford Murders
directed by Álex de la Iglesia. Spain, UK, France, 2008, 104 min., original version with Italian subtitles
This thrilling murder story is set in Oxford, with its classic sequence of murders and its illustrious mathematicians bent on deciphering the clues left by the murderer. Between confidence in logic and cynical relativism, reality reveals its unpredictable and murkier side.
20 November, 9.00 pm
Pi
directed by Darren Aronofsky. USA, 1998, 85 min., original version with Italian subtitles
Darren Aronofsky's astonishing debut, which won him an award at the Sundance Festival, is a sci-fi movie aspiring to transcendency, like the mathematical research of the eccentric lead player who is convinced that everything, including the very essence of God, can be explained through numbers.
21 November, 9.00 pm
Proof
directed by John Madden. USA, 2005, 100 min., original version with Italian subtitles
This zany comedy focusing on mathematicians, with Anthony Hopkins in the role of a genius who's gone completely round the bend, reveals their human side, transcending the cliché that all scientists are humourless; they have fun, they quarrel and they have feelings too, just like everyone else.
22 November, 9.00 pm
Zodiac
directed by David Fincher. USA, 2007, 156 min., Italian version
An atypical and obsessive cop movie by the talented director of such cult thrillers as Seven, is based on the acts of a serial killer who terrorised San Francisco and eluded the police for years, calling the force's bluff with mysterious coded messages: out-and-out enigmas requiring expert deciphering.
23 November, 9.00 pm
Le pere di Adamo
directed by Guido Chiesa. Italy, France, 2007, 86 min.
Do modern physics and contemporary social chaos resemble one another? This surprising and innovative documentary suggests that they do as, enlisting the help of weatherman Luca Mercalli, it sets the evolution of clouds and the weather forecast alongside flexworkers' protest movements.
26 November, 9.00 pm
21
directed by Robert Luketic. USA, 2008, 125 min., original version with Italian subtitles
Mathematics and gambling go hand in hand at the heart of 21, a film based on the true story of a brilliant student at Boston's MIT, one of the leading research universities in the world, who broke the bank at Las Vegas with a group of brainy mathematicians.
27 November, 9.00 pm
The Number 23
directed by Joel Schumacher. USA, 2007, 98 min., Italian version
This murky drama inclining towards the noir focuses on the paranoid obsession with numbers that devastates the life of a humble dog-catcher after he reads a novel on the number 23 in which he is convinced that he can detect a threatening link with his own life.
Our thanks for the films go to: Cineteca Lucana, CG Home Video srl, Eagle Pictures, Fandango, Fondazione Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia - Cineteca Nazionale, Fondazione Cineteca di Bologna, IFVC, Lab80, Lucky Red, Mediaset, Park Circus , Rai Teche, REIAC Film, 20th Century Fox Searchlight, Rai Cinema - 01 Distribution, Warner Bros., Universal.
Info
Palazzo delle Esposizioni - Sala Cinema
Admission via steps in Via Milano 9 A, Rome
ADMISSION FREE WHILE PLACES LAST
Seats assigned from one hour before the start of each screening
Reservations may be made by membership cardholders only