Cinema Lessons – Reality, Visions and Interpretations

For “Reality, visions and interpretations“, eighth edition of the Cinema Lessons project, appointment Saturday, November 30, 2024, at 5.00 pm – Auditorium Museum of Natural History in via Roma, with DREAMS ARE WISHES. THE MOST BEAUTIFUL DREAM IN CINEMA HISTORY. Speakers Marco Vanelli and Pier Dario Marzi.

Luis Buñuel claimed that the movie screen was a huge eyelid on which dreams coming from our unconscious were projected. The film-dream pair is as old as cinema itself: nightly dreams, daydreams, utopian dreams, erotic dreams, nightmares, and visions have always populated the films of great authors (Fellini, Kurosawa, Bergman, Hitchcock), but also those of the more popular, genre, and animated ones.

In this meeting, Pier Dario Marzi and Marco Vanelli will try to identify a certain number of the most beautiful, bizarre, disturbing, and evocative dreams in the history of cinema, attempting to interpret them but also to be fascinated and attracted by them. After all, as Cinderella said: “Dreams are wishes…”.

Marco Vanelli was born in Lucca where he lives and teaches Literature in a middle school. He also teaches Cinema and Theology at the Higher Institute of Religious Sciences in Pisa. For years he has been a part of the national association Cinit – Italian Cineforum, of which he is vice president, and he directs the journal “Cabiria – Cinema Studies” published by Cinit. During his historical research on Italian cinema, he rediscovered and restored a film considered lost by Mario Soldati in 1945, which, in fact, together with Rome, Open City, is the first evidence of neorealism in cinema. Recently, he has written about Vittorio Storaro (G.M. Rossi and M. Vanelli [eds], Lighting Plans. The cinematography of Vittorio Storaro, ETS, 2017), Totò and Fabrizi (Alberto Anile [ed], Guards and Thieves, Iacobelli Editore, 2018) and Alberto Sordi for the monographic issue of “Bianco&Nero” (n. 592, September-December 2018).

Pier Dario Marzi, a teacher of History and Philosophy at the Vallisneri high school in Lucca, is an expert in the language of cinema and in this field, he promotes and curates cineforums, cinema meetings, he is vice president of the Cineforum Ezechiele 25.17 in Lucca, collaborates with the specialized magazine Cabiria and the magazine OreUndici, has made over a hundred short films in the educational field and documentaries that have won awards in several competitions (his latest work is The Wandering Coach, a documentary about the coach Ernst Erbstein) integrating them with training courses on the language of cinema, the didactics of which he has been promoting in schools for more than twenty years.

Cinema Lessons is organized in synergy between 50&Più Livorno, Centro Studi Commedia all’italiana, Erasmo Libri Editore, and the Kinoglaz Cinema Club, with the patronage of the Province of Livorno, the Municipality of Livorno, and ConfCommercio Livorno.

Cost of each lesson: € 7.00 full price; € 5.00 reduced for members of 50&Più, Centro Studi Commedia all’Italiana, and Circolo Kinoglaz, young people up to 25 years old.

Students participating will receive a certification to use any school credit.