Cinarts

Cinarts is a pan-European project that connects cinema and visual arts, fostering the strong link that has always existed between these two. Cinarts does not start from illustrative references or iconographic similarities but focuses on how cinema and the arts, throughout their history and their reflections on their own languages, have been addressing similar questions and topics.

The aim of the Cinarts platform is to place cinema, and the huge contribution it makes to the representation of the world, within the framework of the arts, highlighting the role of film heritage throughout the 20th century. As an educational tool for teachers and students, Cinarts investigates the wide visual universe narrated by cinema in relation to the efforts and needs of art: cinema as a new language that is finally able to effectively show and tell what Aumont (The Endless Eye, 1998) defines as “the revolution of the sight”.

The platform, that is based precisely on these premises, has been constructed through “Paths” that take their inspiration from the common phenomenological approach of cinema and visual art. Ten questions are therefore the starting point for ten paths that analyse, through the comparison between a film and a work of art, the specific way in which these two languages reflect on certain topics.

Can a work of art represent who you are? How can we share with others what we experience in our inner world? Can reality be magic? These are just some of the questions from which the paths are structured in a synchronic way through the analysis of the historical and social contexts in which the works were produced.

In addition, the paths offer other possible answers to those questions through “other views”, which are made up of the comparison or analysis of other works of art and other heritage films that have in some way reflected on similar topics. These films have been conserved and preserved in the project partners’ film archives, which are the treasure chests of our memory; conserving and preserving cinema means above all continuing to keep it alive and to make it known, offering audiences a chance to get enriched by its beauty.

Each pathway also includes didactic activities designed to experiment and reflect on the topics at school. Those activities ask the same questions about oneself and about the world that have always concerned humanity and that have found a possible answer in art and cinema. The final event of the Cinarts project will be held in Bologna on 14 December 2021 and will be live streamed for teachers, students and people passionate about cinema and visual arts. Cinarts was conducted by the Fondazione Cineteca di Bologna and developed with the invaluable partnership of Cinemateca Portuguesa, Hungarian Film Fund, Cinémathèque Royale de Belgique, Les enfants de cinéma (then Passeurs d’Images) and BAM! Strategie culturali.

Simone Fratini (Cineteca di Bologna)

Check the Cinarts platform