This article is published in number 23 of Vanity Fair on newsstands until June 8, 2021
One evening last year I was locked up all night inside Cineteca of Bologna. And there, alone and surrounded by silence, I saw Lights of Variety, a 1950 film directed by Alberto Lattuada and Federico Fellini. I was shooting a TV show in which I had to hide and I chose the Cineteca as my refuge. In some ways, the Cineteca was my refuge in the years of my youth, when I frequented the affiliate Cinema Lumière in via Pietralata and did not miss an appointment in Piazza Maggiore, where masterpieces such as The leopard o 2001: A Space Odyssey. But the Cineteca, with its priceless collection of films, its unparalleled experience in restoration (I don’t know how many awards they have received in Venice!), Is not only a point of reference for nostalgics of the cinema of yesteryear: it is also a look at present and bet on the future.
Artistic director Gian Luca Farinelli, for example, is the soul behind Alfonso Cuarón’s Italian distribution in Rome. As well as the one who, two years ago, managed to have Martin Scorsese guest of honor at the opening of the summer season. And it is always thanks to him that, from time to time, long conversations took place late into the night between internationally renowned filmmakers such as Marco Bellocchio or Bernard Tavernier. The Cineteca is the expression of a Bologna that dares, that looks at the world as its own habitat, that loves confrontation with the different.
And who is not afraid to shape dreams. I do not think it is a coincidence that my region, Emilia-Romagna,
is the homeland of personalities such as Bernardo Bertolucci, Federico Fellini, Liliana Cavani, and who still today realize dreams on wheels that bear the name of Ferrari, Lamborghini, Maserati or Ducati. We Emilians and Romagna are people forged by fog: as children, the mist prevented us from seeing clearly the boundaries of things. And therefore it stimulated us to complete reality with fantasy, leaving room for dreams. Here, cinema, in my opinion, is one of the most absolute versions of the dream.
And it is something that we humans absolutely need. We all realized this during
the closing months: we cannot do without art and culture, because they are subjects that have to do with
contact, empathy, exchange. Man is the only living being who makes a show: for us, the dreamy transposition of reality is needed to live. Everything else is just survival. For this reason, if I could contribute to the restart of the Cineteca di Bologna, I would bring a monologue that I have been thinking about for a while and that I was waiting for the right opportunity to make.
I would simply call it Cinema. Behind me, projections of film clips that have made history. Next to me, the orchestra of the Teatro Comunale di Bologna playing live. From my words, a declaration of love to the seventh art that, like perhaps nothing else in the world, allows us to dream.
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