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Italy may have been unified since the mid-19th century, but visiting just several of its major cities is enough to make it obvious that cultural homogeneity is virtually nonexistent. My mini-tour of the country began in Naples, capital of the southern Campania region and my home base for exploring the nearby archaeological sites and coastal towns, and concluded in Venice, the revered cradle of modern democracy.
Entr'ouvert originates in our desire to integrate photographic images of different origins into diptychs, whose nature is to shed new light on their constituent parts. The combination of the images chosen here shows the relation between man and the urban or rural landscape, the relation between ‘internal’ (the intimate dimension) and ‘external’ (the social dimension). It is our wish to avoid whatever narrative might originate from the single images used in the diptychs : there is no story, there is no text.
Continuing the tradition of films that capture the magic and mystery of the Eternal City, the most famous of which are Federico Fellini’s“Roma” (1972), William Wyler’s “Roman Holiday” (1953) and Roberto Rossellini’s “Rome, Open City” (1945), Woody Allen’s new film, “To Rome with Love,” is his own portrait of of Rome. In an ode to the Italian capital as well as to Italian cinema, Allen adopts a structure more similar to that of Fellini in “Roma” with a series of loosely connected episodes. Through these stories, Allen pays homage to the city’s beauty, energy and its knack for absurd situations
The annual Silent Film Festival (Le Giornate del Cinema Muto) has been attracting increasingly larger and more youthful crowds of silent film enthusiasts to Pordenone, Italy. Inhabiting a media culture in which portable film screens feel more and more like sensory extensions of one’s own body—from the iPod Touch to the all-encompassing, visceral thrills of 3-D IMAX—it is nothing short of spectacular to witness a hand-tinted, science-fiction film from 1902 manage to fill Pordenone’s palatial Teatro Verdi to the limits of its capacity.