Do we love the old movies the same way we love industrial frames ruins, vintage clothing, and perhaps Fifties and Sixties design? No doubt on the fact that many artists in these days are claiming a sort of nostalgia for the cinema of the origins, those rudimental and magic moving images for the first time were able to create another world, another visionary and mesmerizing reality. But cinema was moreover the place of dreams and illusions, where personal and collective utopias were placed, and then the portrait of their collapse and failure.
If museums are more and more fascinated in the idea of exhibit the work of big directors- recent shows have been conceived about David Lynch (Fondation Cartier and Triennale di Milano), Werner Herzog ( Fondazione Sandrett), Wim Wenders (Fondazione Merz), Stanley Kubrick (Palazzo delle Esposizioni)... -, contemporary artists seem to take great inspiration by the memories of a cinema age that is now so far away but extremely seminal for our imagination. Starting from the very beginning of its history, that of magic lantern shows and painted images on glass to be projected, media artist Ernie Gehr (now on display at MoMA until 24 march 2008) set up video installations that uses 87 original slides and views selected from his personal collection and that of pre-cinema collector David Francis. Brightly coloured slides, depicting fantasy figures and landscapes, were once presented with those archaic movie projector called magic lantern, made up of oil lamp and lens allowing for superimposed and dissolving views, during the second half of the19th century. This was the dawn of the motion picture entertainment, whose dreamlike fascination is precisely one of Runa Islam’s favourite themes. Her exploration of the cinematic language, modeling her videos on the basic rules of the classical movies, almost following step by step the structures of directors of the past, often recurring to plain quotations, achieves the result to alter reality through the camera eye. Islam is the protagonist, toghever with Tobias Purit, of an exhibition on display at Galleria Civica di Modena (25/1/08 - 30/3/08), entitled “Lost Cinema Lost”, that focuses precisely on this nostalgia towards the cinema of the ancient times. While Islam’s work tryes to expand the athmosphere and the expressions of emotional states of certain movies, missing out the carachters and the narrative development, Tobias Purit combine a strong interest toward architecture with the drama of human existence, by finding in the old cinemas a phisical place where people used to go in order to forget their troubles, to dive their lives into another dimension. Motion pictures were a way to achieve a surrogate of personal fullfillment, and that's the reason why Purit decided to create his work in the form of sort of praticable environments for entertainment and mental escape, recolling the plushy architecture of the Twenties: the very image of the failure of modernist utopia, soon to be knocked down by the 1929 Slump.
Probably the first sex symbols of the modern age, the stars of the silent movies can be the subject of a sort of personal and at the same time cultural archeology. In her most recent work, on show at Pinksummer (Genova), Georgina Starr re-creates the silent actress Theda Bara, protagonist of a few movies realised beetwen 1915 and 1923, in a sort of single-shot filmed performance, where the artist runs through a series of codified expressions akin to the silent era performer. Starr’s Theda has the sensual and illusionistic emphasis of still life: splendor and misery coexist in the chiaroscuro excesses of her film. As an allegory of Vanitas, in fact, these early representations of ‘womanhood’ were frozen still lives; the embodiment of metrical speech and idealized/idolized form. In respect to history Starr gives back an atmosphere in which psychology is presented in tight relation with mysticism and the magic and as occultism was considered a key to understand the alterations of personality. The Fox Studios in Hollywood promoted an exotic and evasive identity of Theda Bara, who was called "snake of the Nile", encouraging the actress to discuss of occultism also during interviews. But it is not only for philological love that Starr presents Theda in an environment initiated to mystical symbolism, like in the scene of the spiritualist séance, but to connect mystery to the phenomenon of the dissociation of the self. She seems to multiply in an infinity of expressions, roles, interpretations that reflect the disintegration of identity. Theda is decomposed with horror in the two-faced portrait that foreshadows the old age. The veil of time is lifted to confuse. The shadow of the double is insanity, oblivion, loss, or simply the non acceptance of becoming. In this representation of representation, personal memories – such as when the artist, child, was used to make up her mother – and primordial cinematic experiences are mixed toghever to find eventually a subjective view, held hostage by the gestures and expressions she is trying so precisely to communicate.