BELLE SPERANZE: IL CINEMA ITALIANO E I GIOVANI (1948-2018)

January 30 - March 15, 2019

La Pelanda
admission free

Created by Fondazione Ente dello Spettacolo along with Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, the exhibition Belle speranze: il cinema italiano e i giovani (1948-2018) gives us back, through movies, the experience of the Italian young people over 70 years of history.
 
From Outcry, directed by Aldo Vergano, one of the first and most brilliant evidence of the Italian Resistance, to Couch Potatoes, by Francesca Archibugi, a chiaroscuro portrait of the teenagers whose future has been stolen by their fathers, the exhibition is a multimedia journey through the different identity strategies carried out “by and upon” young people in the different periods analysed – the post war period, the ‘60s, the ’68 and the Years of Lead, the years of disillusionment and retreat into the private sphere, the millennials – and starting from the work carried out in the cinema.
 
Set pictures and frames, generational cult films and blockbusters that have always understood, caught, enhanced, stigmatised, provoked, mortified the feeling of an individual and collective season, that illuminate a moment that belonged to someone by fixing the moment in which the current of the generations becomes Sense and History. Then, the objects that have accompanied them in this journey, giving life to a horizon of revindications, expectations, strong sensuality. The jeans, the Vespa, the pinball machine, the juke-box, until the mobile phone and the playstation. But also books, poems and songs, texts that, like films, have been able to speak to different generations and have given them a voice, a dialogue, a clue – perhaps an inheritance – for the future generations.
 
Therefore, the surprising video essays made by some students of the Cattolica University, which can be seen in the last section of the exhibition, take us on a journey from the 1980s to nowadays, to try to respond to a question: how do the young people portrayed in the films – from Romolo to Salvatore of Poor but Beautiful to Piero of Ovosodo, from Adriana of I Knew Her Well to Mignon of Mignon Has Come to Stay, only to mention some – show personality traits and themes that question today’s generations?