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INDIANA UNIVERSITY
BLOOMINGTON
Fabio Benincasa is a doctoral student
in Italian in the Department of French & Italian. The lecture will
be given in English, to be followed by discussion and refreshments.
If you have a disability and need assistance,
accommodations can be made to address most needs. Please call 855-5458. |
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This lecture will focus on the role played by hotels in
classic and contemporary films from Welles to Fellini through Hitchcock,
Resnais and Truffaut. For the first fifty years of its existence, cinematography
remained divided between its exigencies of visual rationality (the catalogue
of images of the Renaissance and Baroque tradition) and the awareness of
the evanescence of vision (the “treachery of images” evidenced
by the 20th century avant-gardes). After WWII, and after the experience
of the avant-garde, the ideal epiphany of lives and images in films
could no longer be restrained in a museum-like catalogue. Film makers adopted
the hotel as a transitional space, the cinematic development of Don Quixote’s
inn. Therefore the hotel became an illusory place, a non-lieu built
on a metaphysical border. Because images were interiorized and constantly
floating, the hotel, a typical space of triumphant post-modernity, became
a set where they could preferably rest and slowly fade. |
