Proiezione: Venice. Infinitely Avant-garde

From an original story by Didi Gnocchi, written by Sabina Fedeli, Didi Gnocchi, Valeria Parisi, Arianna Marelli, directed by Michele Mally, this documentary film takes its cue from Venice’s immense heritage to describe all the palaces housing masterpieces and historical objects, the connections to art and culture, the visual links across the ages that compose a portrait of a futuristic city. Just as in Giandomenico Tiepolo’s fresco “Il Mondo Novo” (The New World) at Ca’ Rezzonico, showing 18th Century Venetian society flocking to admire the cosmorama, a sort of “magic lantern”, all crowded together to marvel at and feed off the wonders of the world to come, in a series of perspective pictures and optical illusions.

Bestowing the memory of the city on us is a task that falls to Carlo Cecchi, master of Italian theatre who has studied, met and worked with all the great intellectuals, directors, writers and actors of 20th Century culture. Moving around Venice, besides Cecchi, we see a young, talented Polish pianist, Hania Rani, a musical prodigy on the international, modern classic scene: she is looking for inspiration and influence in order to compose the film’s soundtrack, through the museums, the typical, narrow streets or ‘calli’, and the wonders of Venice in a game of cross-references and an interplay of reflections. Keeping the thread between these two different viewpoints and, above all, between two different generations, is narrator, Lella Costa, a female voice, underlining the fact that Venice has always been a woman.

The Canal Grande, the Museo Correr, Canaletto’s landscapes, works by Francesco Guardi, Pietro Longhi, Giambattista and Giandomenico Tiepolo, Vittore Carpaccio, and of course those by Bellini at the Gallerie dell’Accademia, and Tiziano, Tintoretto, and Veronese. And again  Ca’ Rezzonico | Museo del Settecento Veneziano (the museum dedicated to 18th Century Venice), the Grand Tour, Canova’s sculptures, the classic pictures by photographer Carlo Naya that took Europe by storm, old trades and professions seen in photographs by Enrico Fantuzzi, the Palazzo Pesaro degli Orfei, Emilio Vedova and his battle to save the Magazzini del Sale (salt warehouses), Carmelo Bene reading the Futurist Manifesto “Contro Venezia passatista” (Against an Antiquated Venice), transgressive behaviour at the Carnival, the age-old furnaces that have now become Adriano Berengo’s experimental laboratories, the arrival of the Togni Circus and its elephants over the city’s historical bridges, plays by Goldoni, amazing Art Nouveau style villas, elegance and style at the Lido, Venetian style parties at the house of American composer Cole Porter and his wife Linda, the jazz era, high society events held by American journalist Elsa Maxwell, Banksy’s mysterious art works, John Ruskin’s diaries filled with appointments, the contemplative, colourful vibrations of water expressed by Turner, the tombs of Sergej Djagilev and Igor Stravinskij, the attraction  of the Giudecca, the Caffè Florian and the birth of the Biennale exhibition, the Venice Film Festival and the first nude in the history of the cinema, Wagner’s sleepless nights in Venice, the artists Giulia Lama and Rosalba Carriera, and the first woman to receive a university degree Lucrezia Cornaro Piscopia, the strong- mindedness of the ladies of court, Murano glass and Giuseppe Lorenzo Briati’s masterpieces, Casanova’s escapes, the MOSE and environmental emergency, Hugo Pratt’s love for the city, Napoleonic plundering, the Empress Sissi’s stays in the city, inlay work by Andrea Brustolon whom Balzac used to call the “Michelangelo of wood”, Mariano Fortuny and his wife Henriette’s fabric and clothes, the Marchesa Casati Stampa, the fabulous, unpredictable, eccentric Peggy Guggenheim, the splendour of the Fenice Opera House, one of the world’s  most beautiful temples of music.

Venice has never become fossilized in preserving one, single historical identity, but has always let itself be continuously reinvented with rebellious flair, through the ingeniousness and creativity of passing travellers, as well as its own inhabitants. This is the great challenge the future holds – to solve emergencies and problems, to be a city at the cutting edge of culture, creativity and sustainability in the future.