Little Histories of Cinema. The Illusion of Movement: Photography in the Cinema

Programme

Saturdays 4 and 18 October, 8 and 22 November, at 5.30 pm

The screenings last for approximately 45 minutes.

4 October
FASTER, FASTER
The obsession with the photographic snapshot. Cinema can finally capture movement, which photography can only suggest. For all that, cinema goes back to photography in order to create the effect of compressed time. The screening includes examples of the 19th-century pioneer Étienne-Jules Marey, creator of chronophotography (a cinematic precedent consisting of photographing all the phases of a movement), plus montages based on photographic collage and films shot using pixilation (a technique of filming frame by frame in real settings) by artists such as Paul Bush and Ana Husman.

18 October
CITY SYMPHONIES
Cinema and photography see in the city a modern setting for a new kind of representation that is a far cry from the landscape tradition of painting. The screening includes "urban symphonies" like A Bronx Morning (1931) by Jay Leyda and Daybreak Express (1953) by D.A. Pennebaker, along with contemporary representations of the city by Tim McMillan, inventor of the "dead time" technique (popularized by the "frozen" 360º shot in The Matrix) and Hillary Harris, the cameraman and essential collaborator of Godfrey Reggio on Koyaanisqatsi (1982).

8 November
THE CONQUEST OF THE LANDSCAPE
From the explorer to the tourist. We begin creating the great album of the world. The screening extends from documentaries "showing the world" like Meet Me Down at Coney Island (1932) to the more acid view of tourism by contemporary photographer Martin Parr. Morten Skallerud takes a whole year and a journey along an abandoned road in Norway to compress the beauty of the landscape in ten minutes, while an aged Buster Keaton crosses Canada from coast to coast in a subtle comedy filmed in natural landscapes.

22 November
HOMEMADE MOVIES
My life's also worth recounting! First with photography and then with cinema, attaining immortality in images is no longer an affair of the famous. Children are every bit the protagonists of this screening. Extraordinary documents that display the value of play. The screening includes the first film of a child (by the inventors of cinema, the Lumière Brothers), plus hundreds of childlike gestures which thanks to cinema have conserved their innocence, despite the passage of time. Documentaries like One Potato, Two Potato (1957), made by a non-professional filmmaker who was a great connoisseur of children's games of the time, possess an artistic as well as anthropological value.

[Program subject to last-minute changes]