Progress, the apotheosis of the machine, emancipation and the myth of modernity all had a huge impact on habits, morals, fashion, music and lifestyles in the early 20th century, fostering a taste that the less conservative members of society welcomed with enthusiastic cries of "oh, how modern!", which was later to translate into the slogan "New is Beautiful". This absolute faith in the future was immediately reflected, and soon harshly criticised, in the cinema. The no-questions-asked race for progress and easy wealth revealed to the cinema's critical eye the alienation personified by the industrial era and the expectation of a totally dehumanised future in Charlie Chaplin's bitter comedy and Fritz Lang's prison-like metropolis. The emancipation of morals also opened up the cinema screen to the subconscious, revealing the disturbing side of sexuality and the dark, satanic side of a society populated with real villains such as gansters and maniacs or imaginary monsters such as vampires and prehistoric creatures. We will be screening a selection of the movie masterpieces made in the first four decades of the century focusing on aspects of that modernity and the forerunners of genres such as sci-fi and suspense that have withstood the test of time of over a hundred years of film-making. And we will be accompanying these masterpieces from a bygone age with more recent films on the same themes or addressing the same debates, some of them even outright remakes, in a captivating see-saw through time that only the cinema can offer with such clarity, taking audiences on a voyage of discovery to find out what we thought we were or hoped to achieve and what we have actually become, and restoring to the cinema its role as an often premonitory thermometer of the hopes and fears of the modern era.
Our thanks for the films go to: Fondazione Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia - Cineteca Nazionale, Fondazione Cineteca di Bologna, Fondazione Cineteca Italiana di Milano, Cineteca Lucana, Il Cinema Ritrovato al Cinema, Lobster Films, Lucky Red, MPLC, Park Circus, Rai Cinema - 01 Distribution, Universal Pictures International Italy S.r.l., 20th Century Fox Italy, The Walt Disney Company Italia S.r.l., Warner Bros.
Info
Palazzo delle Esposizioni - Sala Cinema
Admission via the 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. There will no further admission once the event has started.