Project curated by
Azienda Speciale Palaexpo and La Farfalla sul Mirino
 

Event promoted by
Roma Culture
 

Acknowledgments
Park Circus (London), Lab80 Film
 

Media partner 
Quinlan.it 

For all movie fans, the cinema of the “Pre-Code” era was a unique, once-only season in the history of Hollywood and it is still capable of astonising cinemagoers today with its deep unconventionality. If we look closely, we can see that we are only talking about the few years, from 1930 to 1934, that elapsed between the triumph of sound and the infamous Hays Code with its standards of self-imposed censorship dictating what could and couldn’t be shown or narrated in films. Yet they were crucial years, especially on account of the social tensions in the United States following the collapse of Wall Street in 1929. The cinema that flourished in that brief window was an aggressive and shameless cinema in which numerous sensitive themes were addressed head on and with a freedom that did not return to Hollywood before the 1960s. From sex and violence to racism and from criticism of the jail system to the world of crime and women’s emancipation, there was not a single controversial issue that the American cinema failed to explore in those years, with a mood and a tone far in advance of its time and showing little concern for the audience’s so-called “moral standards”. The films’ epoch-making character was also a product of the genius of such directors as Lubitsch, Hawks, Sternberg, Curtiz, Fleming and Capra, to name only a few, with the aid of a group of extraordinary leading ladies such as Marlene Dietrich, Mae West, Barbara Stanwyck and Jean Harlow who embodied the new model woman, at once ironic, determined and uninhibited. The result is a cinema of unbridled creativity that never ceases to amaze, or to remind us once again that freedom from censorship is the formidable driving force behind every form of art.
 
 

Info
Palazzo delle Esposizioni - Sala Cinema
Admission via steps in via Milano 9a
ADMISSION FREE WHILE PLACES LAST – RESERVATIONS ARE REQUIRED
Reservations may be made on this website from 9.00 am on the day before the chosen performance until one hour before the performance is due to begin.
If for any reason you are unable to come, please remember to cancel the reservation in your basket so that someone else can book the place you’re freeing up.
Please show up at least 10 minutes before the performance starts, otherwise your reservation will no longer be considered valid and your place will be given to the first person waiting in line at the entrance.
 

CINEMA ON SHOW
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