THE FUTURE OF CINEMA. THE CINEMA OF THE FUTURE

From 22 June to 7 September 2023 the National Museum of Cinema presents IL FUTURO DEL CINEMA. IL CINEMA DEL FUTURO (THE FUTURE OF CINEMA. THE CINEMA OF THE FUTURE), an installation on the helicoidal ramp of the Mole Antonelliana, which is home to temporary exhibitions. The occasion presented itself in conjunction with the air-conditioning works in the areas at the top of the ramp, needed in order to host future exhibitions.

In this moment of transition, the idea was therefore to tell the history of cinema in a new way and to try imagining its future thanks to 24 phrases by as many directors who bear witness to the great technological changes in the Seventh Art: the advent of sound, colour, television and home-video, the transition from film to digital and streaming.

As an art more closely linked to technological and industrial development, cinema often underwent challenges and moments of transition; it contaminated itself with other media and languages to the point of reinventing itself in new forms and ways of fruition and representation.

With this exhibition the National Museum of Cinema aims to offer visitors a moment to reflect on the future of cinema, which inexorably runs much faster than in the past, and to envisage future scenarios.

At the top of the helicoidal ramp, the exhibition invites visitors to reflect on Artificial Intelligence, which seems to be bursting into the film sector and is destined to disrupt its production and distribution practices to date. Currently AI can contribute to all stages of filmmaking: pre-production, production and post-production, as well as distribution, allowing it to suggest content to users of streaming platforms.

The first room, curated by Simone Arcagni, is dedicated to POST CINEMA and focuses on a specific question: can software challenge creativity, which until recently was an exclusively human asset? Can software make a film?

A single-channel vision offers three significant examples in a loop: Zone Out, Another Life and The Mass short films that have taken up this challenge to human creative genius, using the new Generative Artificial Intelligence softwares.

AI also disrupts the creative work of screenwriters and in America the WGA (Writers Guild of America), the trade association of American screenwriters, has gone on strike and demanded for its use to be restricted to the drafting of raw literary material only. The second room then offers the practical experience of producing a film story, thanks to ChatGPT.

Visitors can set a series of fixed parameters and see their own cinematic story realised. At the end of the experience, lasting a few minutes and curated by Synestesia, visitors will be invited to reflect on the authorship of the content produced by answering three questions.

The exhibition ends with an audience survey, created by Robin Studio, with the aim of understanding and detecting the trends, tastes and expectations of visitors to the National Museum of Cinema.

Directors:

• Auguste & Louis Lumière
• David Wark Griffith
• Pierpaolo Pasolini
• René Clair
• Charlie Chaplin
• Alfred Hitchcock
• Rouben Mamoulian
• Michelangelo Antonioni
• Federico Fellini
• Roberto Rossellini
• George Cukor
• Peter Greenaway
• Orson Welles
• George Lucas
• David Lynch
• James Cameron
• Alice Rohrwacher
• David Cronenberg
• Nanni Moretti
• Stanley Kubrick
• Zerocalcare
• Alejandro González Iñárritu
• Steven Spielberg
• Clarence Brown

All press material can be downloaded from the link (ITA): https://drive.google.com/drive/u/1/folders/18s1Pc-HfYyWQoVULz1DA_zEagXc5BBtL