a project promoted by
Azienda Speciale Palaexpo and Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia - Cineteca Nazionale
 

We resume our journey back in time through the decades of great Italian cinema, and after the feast for the eyes provided by Cine70, Cine60 and Cine50, we are bringing back to the silver screen the masterpieces of the most dramatic decade of the last century, the 1940s. The Fascist regime, the War, the Occupation, the Resistance, the Liberation and the Reconstruction: how is our country's history reflected in the films of the period?  During the war, the cinema was asked on the one hand to entertain audiences with a ceaseless flow of sentimental stories, elegant settings, laughs, adventures and duels, while on the other it was told to exalt the patriotic effort by pressing down hard on the pedal of propaganda. But the life that the regime shut outside the door of content often crept back in through the window of style, with such genius filmmakers as De Sica who brought naturalism to drama, Rossellini who observed the war with the documentary stringency that was to become such a hallmark of his future masterpieces, and Visconti who overturned the morality of the day with the disturbing force of his realism. When the war and totalitarian untruths came to end, the libertarian revolution of Neorealism exploded on the screen: the wreckage, the atrocities, the faces, voices and identities of the men and women in the streets, every aspect of life that had been swept under the carpet until that moment invaded the screen, shocking audiences around the world with the expressive potency with which our film directors denounced the barbarity of history. The three filmmakers mentioned above, who produced some of the absolute masterpieces of cinema history in the space of a few years, were joined by other greats such as Germi, De Santis, Lattuada, Zampa and Castellani who probed the condition of life in Italy, burning with suffering and a desire for change, reviving genres and seeking stimuli in the great international movie industry. This never-to-be-repeated season in our country's cultural history produced legendary films to discover or rediscover in the auditorium, to remind our own era of the vital urgency of truth.

Info

Palazzo delle Esposizioni - Sala Cinema

admission via steps in via Milano 9 a, Roma

ADMISSION FREE WHILE PLACES LAST

Seats assigned from one hour before the start of each screening.  Reservations may be made by membership cardholders only.  There will no further admission once the event has started.