Cinepassioni: storie di immagini e collezionismo

Hosted at the prestigious Banchi Loggia in the center of Genoa (near Porto Antico), the exhibition displays a large selection of material from three historic town collections, largely never shown to the public. The exhibition is structured like a journey through the history of cinema: the first part shows the technology, starting from the pre-cinema (magic lanterns and camera ottica) to get to the film-shooting technologies, editing and projection; in this section are exposed both amateur and professional equipments, from the origins of cinema to the mid-twentieth century. A second section ideally leads the viewer from the "factory" of cinema to its products, movies, insisting on the idea of vision, which recalls the beginnings of film - the cinématographe Lumière and the Edison Kinetoscope - and the arrival point, thanks to a position of Virtual Reality. The third and final part of the exhibition focuses on the forms that the relationship between film and spectator can develop, and, in particular, on "material memory" that preserves this experience. Here are exposed hundreds of collectibles: action figures, movie props, memorabilia, costumes, promotional material of any kind, commercial collectibles related to past films (horror of the thirties) and also to contemporary blockbusters. The exhibition aims to immerse the viewer in a rich situation of audiovisual and sound stimuli, thanks to the use of video installations, holographic projections, environmental projections contained Virtual Reality. In short, a trip from cinema, as an industry, to films, with, at the center, the experience of vision, a crucial moment - collective and subjective - of transition from cinema as technological device to cinema as cultural practice.