TONINO DE BERNARDI. Il cinema senza frontiere
An exhibition celebrating its avant-garde cinema
The National Museum of Cinema celebrates Tonino De Bernardi, an avant-garde filmmaker, with TONINO DE BERNARDI. Il cinema senza frontiere (Tonino De Bernardi. Cinema across boarders) an exhibition that explores his influence on the panorama of national and international experimental cinema.
An iconic figure of independent cinema, deeply connected to the city of Turin, De Bernardi is a storyteller who was able to capture the essence of life with his free and never banal cinema. The exhibition will offer a complete immersion in De Bernardi's creative universe in a multi-layered project that combines different formats tracing sixty years of experimental cinema.
The exhibition, organised in synergy with the Museum' Film Archives and Cinema Massimo, offers a complete immersion in De Bernardi's creative universe and is part of an articulated project that includes: the preservation and digitalisation of his works (to date, more than a hundred films); an exhibition, a live performance, the publication of an inedited volume and a retrospective. Sixty years of the history of a living and exciting cinema.
Divided into two sections, “The Home” and “The World” — or “Here and Elsewhere” — the exhibition offers a dual perspective on De Bernardi’s cinematic poetics. The first section reveals the director’s more intimate side and his early work, through a collection of close-ups and portraits that highlight his artistic and deeply human sensibility. The second explores the journeys and experiences that shaped his cinema, with a more documentary approach: his complex relationship with productions, his unrealised projects and photographs from the sets, outlining a clear and distinctive identity marked by an unconstrained stylistic signature. Connecting the two sections is the display of his working equipment — film cameras, video cameras and editing tables — which introduces visitors to the material and stripped-down nature of independent cinema through 60 years of technological evolution.
Hosted from 24 April to 9 September 2024 on the ground floor of the Mole Antonelliana, Tonino De Bernardi. Cinema across borders is curated by Alberto Momo.
Free entrance during museum opening hours. The exhibition is made accessible to visitors with sensory disabilities thanks to an introductory video in Italian Sign Language (LIS) and audio content in Italian and English accessible via QR along the exhibition itinerary.
To accompany the exhibition, the catalogue Tonino De Bernardi. Cinema Without Borders, published by Silvana Editoriale, completes the project. Edited by Alberto Momo, the volume brings together the voices of the many people who played an active role in the making of his films: actors, actresses, fellow filmmakers, family members, directors, scholars, and chance encounters that Tonino De Bernardi made precious through his keen, perceptive gaze. From Isabelle Huppert to Bernardo Bertolucci, from Enrico Ghezzi to Mario Martone, from Iaia Forte to Filippo Timi.