Cinecittà 2006-16

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The photographic series “Cinecittà” showcases how the film studio reaches out of its perimeter and leaves its virtual marks all over Rome, here in form of street name signs, and thereby interconnects the boundless city periphery. The photographs also thematize the cinematic space itself, where the making of a film usually takes place in different locations and separate studio spaces. The movie’s storyline is broken apart in many segments and is shot in an economical and practical related order of production rather than by the logic of the movie’s sequences. The end product, the completed movie, tells the story in a homogenic space, the one of its narration. It comes with the understanding of the cinematic space as a relationship between film, architecture, and the city: An actual deconstruct and reconstruct of a city-space towards a virtual city appearing in the movie. The “Cinecittà” photographic series, depicting streets and places, virtually reconnects the reinventions of the cinema of the everyday life (Neorealismo) with the contemporary surroundings of the descendants of Neorealism’s main characters—and reflects a defining and recurring topic of the neorealist story line. According to Gilles Deleuze, a standard filmic narration is commonly motivated by a situation which urges an activity or as a consequence of it. Though the cinematography of Neorealism would introduce a more optic approach or more likely a condition of motion, the character appears as a seeing one and virtually becomes a remote spectator by itself. This is what compels Deleuze to describe Italian neorealism as a ‘visionary cinema’ in which characters have gained in an ability to see what they may have become excluded from in terms of action or reaction. He or she moves in vain, runs and rushes all for nothing, barely able to intervene in the plot and is extradited to a vision, haunted by it or yet pursuing the lost vision by her/himself.