A Special program by Carlo Montanaro
At the Ca’ Foscari Short Film Festival, the forays into the past come back, curated by Carlo Montanaro, who this year will accompany the spectators of the Auditorium on a journey through the films set in Venice from the origins of cinema to the present day, to witness and comment on the technological and linguistic progress experienced by the Seventh Art in the last century.
In fact, an era has ended and it is time to take stock. 125 years later, cinemas have been subjected to change. The thousands of silver and pigmented stickers are no longer distinguished on film out of transparency. Everything has become digital, compressed, virtual and built in the very fast succession of millions of points, or pixels, inside a very orderly and minute grid. That of projection is only the last link in a chain that is transforming the most direct language among those invented over the centuries by man. The other link of the chain- shooting, editing, special effects, reworking and reproduction of sound – have now undergone radical transformations that often have meant progress. Perhaps, then, this transformation-revolution is definitely worth, to understand where we started, how the cinematographic language was born and how its grammar first, and its syntax then, have evolved thanks also to technological development.
All this will be From silver to pixel: “Silver”, referring to the lost “materiality” that, starting from the progress of photography, allowed the birth of Cinema at the end of the 19th century. “Pixel”, referring to the simplification of digital, leading to the second fundamental revolution in the history of the Tenth Muse. Only the introduction of the sound, with the rebuilding of the soundstage, the completely reworked production models, the replacement of the equipment and the renovation of the cinemas, and, finally, with the dispersion of a large part of the works (only 30% of the world production of the first thirty years survived) considered outdated and no longer economically productive, had similar consequences. It is good to begin to draw some balance on the pros and cons of this democratization of the audiovisual which allows a too widespread access to the form of information-show that has changed the knowledge of the world. And to do this, it is worth understanding whether the technological change corresponds to real content progress.
