Entangled Spaces in Mid 20th Century Rome: The Cinema Screen and the Lived Places of Social Housing

Social housing, combining utopic architectural design with social engineering goals, was frequently deployed as a favoured shooting location for films increasingly concerned with social adversity. In this exchange, the staircase offers a point of departure, starting with verticality developed through both new uses of a camera no longer tied to the horizontal plane, and new designs for social housing that confronted the problems of shared space. The upward stairs, in contrast to the elevator, becomes the struggle and energy required by the body to survive and reach for something more desirable. The downward orientation became its dark side, a menacing orientation with intimations of death. In films such as De Santis’ Roma Ore 11 (1952), Antonioni’s Cronaca di un amore (1950) and Rossellini’s Europa ’51 (1952) the question of life and death is as much about the upward climb as about the downward fall. How did verticality and other spatial orientations produced between the camera and architecture move urgent debates about shared space from the politicized public sphere (the press, the news reel) to the experience of public space?

The evening before, at 6 pm will be introduced the film Roma ore 11 by De Santis, in continuity with the film seminar: "Il lavoro in città. Spazio urbano, corpi femminili e forme del lavoro nel cinema italiano degli anni ’50 e ’60" : https://www.biblhertz.it/events/33975/2598514

Rose Marie San Juan, Professor in History of Art at University College London, teaches and researches on early modern and modern visual technologies and urban space. Her publications include Rome. A City out of Print; Vertiginous Mirrors: The Animation of the Visual Image and Early Modern Travel; Film and Urban Space: Critical Possibilities and the recently published Violence and the Genesis of the Anatomical Image.

Participation online is possible on our Vimeo platform: https://vimeo.com/event/3173484

Scientific Organization: Malvina Giordana