Curated by Giulia Simi
Talk Series
Memorie in Pellicola: un archivio sammarinese tra famiglia e istituzione
With Maria Elena D’Amelio and Umberto Baldacci (Università della Repubblica di San Marino)
Memorie in Pellicola promotes and brings to light the amateur, family, and institutional film heritage of the Republic of San Marino, preserved at the Archive of San Marino Multimedia Memories (AMMS) at the University of San Marino. The project brings together five collections – four family collections (Rossi, Pelliccioni, Stacchini, and Ercolani) and one institutional collection (Barducci), comprising almost 38 hours of footage shot between 1955 and 2005 on Super 8, 8mm, VHS, 35mm, and 16mm film.
Alongside the historic centre, Mount Titano, and its towers – which almost exclusively dominate San Marino’s official tourist imagery and are also prominent in the Barducci collection – the family collections offer glimpses of less frequently represented residential and peripheral areas, including Dogana, Montegiardino, Borgo Maggiore, and Falciano, as well as scenes from the everyday lives of San Marino emigrants in New York. Amateur and family film memories thus make it possible to construct an ideal timeline and an archive open to the interplay of contemporary memories within a highly homogeneous community, bound together by extensive kinship networks, such as that of San Marino.
Building on this heritage, the project aims to develop a range of dissemination, educational, and participatory initiatives, with the goal of making the archive an active tool for knowledge, engagement, and connection with the community.
I film di famiglia tra contestualizzazione ed estetica: una ricerca multidisciplinare
with Alessandra Gribaldo and Vittorio Iervese (Università di Modena e Reggio Emilia)
The presentation will reflect on the relationship between the historical, socio-anthropological, and contextual dimensions of home movies and their aesthetic dimension, which points to a representation of “us” that is at once shared and unsettling. The research project 80MM, from the collection of materials to their presentation to the public, provides an opportunity to reflect on the status of a form of documentation that is inherently unconventional.
Souvenir pompeiani: film di famiglia all’ombra del Vesuvio
With Massimiliano Gaudiosi (Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II)
The presentation, focusing on the research project “Pompeii on Screen”, currently underway at the University of Naples Federico II, will examine a selection of audiovisual materials preserved by the Home Movies Foundation and the Institut national de l’audiovisuel (INA). The home movies depicting the city of Pompeii span a period from the mid-1920s to the 1970s, offering an opportunity to trace the evolution of the ways in which a place has been represented that, since archaeological excavations began in the mid-eighteenth century, has never ceased to inspire a fascination with the ancient world.
La passione di Giovanna: rabbia femminista e archivio secondo il collettivo Dear Rageuses
With Chiara Grizzaffi (Università IULM) and Flavia Mazzarino (Università della Svizzera Italiana)
Stigmatised, publicly condemned, and repressed, women’s anger is often rendered invisible, while its expressions are reduced to clichés and pathologised by mainstream media. And yet, anger can be a powerful political tool and a vital force in feminist struggle.
Drawing on the experience of the feminist research retreat organised by the «Dear Rageuses» collective and the making of the film The Passion of Giovanna, this presentation will focus on our relationship with images, archives, and memory. What can we do with the images that clutter our lives, weigh us down, and stand in our way? What do we have the right to destroy? Can the very images that oppress us, once transformed, become a means of emancipation?
Viaggi attraverso i film di famiglia: valorizzazione, re-uso, sguardi incrociati
With André Habib (Università di Montréal), Edouard Arnoldy and Sonny Walbrou (Université de Lille)
In this presentation, Sonny Walbrou and Edouard Arnoldy will introduce a number of ongoing research projects at the University of Lille, developed through close collaboration with institutions and associations. These projects stem from a desire not only to make archival materials accessible, including films and non-film materials such as manuals, notebooks, club bulletins, and equipment – but also to encourage students to engage directly with these archives and conduct research into the various forms of amateur cinema.
Particular attention is devoted to practices of reuse, ranging from documentary, essay, and experimental filmmaking to initiatives aimed at bringing these materials to wider audiences. Through these different approaches, the projects seek to rescue films and documents from the obscurity to which they are still too often consigned.
