FOR ICCD

Assignment for the development of a series of publications based on the selection of images from the ICCD Central Institute for Cataloguing and Documentation, Rome (MiBACT, Direzione Generale Educazione, ricerca e istituti culturali), as part of the Digital Library Project. All itineraries will shortly be published online on the ICCD website, as well as on the ICCD Google Arts & Culture page.

The intention was to highlight the peculiarities of the ICCD Collections and, at the same, put the Archive in relationship with a series of movies. These contaminations foster the conversation on the Archive itself. For each publication, a brief text finds its place amidst the images.

One example follows
Villa Valmarana ai Nani
With a link to the movie ‘L'année dernière à Marienbad’ by Alain Resnais, 1961

The first six photographs belong to the Archivio MPI (Ministero della Pubblica Istruzione).
Villa Valmarana ai Nani
With a link to the movie ‘L'année dernière à Marienbad’ by Alain Resnais, 1961

Despite the title ‘L'année dernière à Marienbad’ apparently locates real coordinates, these prove to be fictitious as one enters the vision of the movie: we are not in Marienbad, and we are not even sure of the reality of the present. We perceive that we are inside a huge fortress, with the appearance of an infinite labyrinth, where endless corridors succeed other corridors and mirrors. The narrative of the film is not linear, it leaves room for imagination - space and time are exclusively mental categories. The peculiarity of the movie lies in fact in the mechanisms that move the camera, which seem to follow a logic located in the unconscious, rather than in the cause and effect relationship.

Gilles Deleuze has seen in the work of Alain Resnais the material to formulate what the writer calls “a crystal image”. The universe built by the film is a “membrane that, in the most diverse ways (continuity, but also discontinuity, winding, etc.), matches the layers of the past with the layers of reality”.
Gilles Deleuze, ‘L’immagine-tempo’, Cinema 2, Ubulibri, Milano, 1989, p. 229.