Cinema and bikinis, an exhibition in Lignano Sabbiadoro on Italians at the beach as seen through movies

The city of Lignano Sabbiadoro celebrates the 60th anniversary of the establishment of the municipality and opens the summer season with the exhibition Cinema in bikini. Italians at the Sea: posters 1949-1999, curated by Andrea Tomasetig and Enrico Minisini, set up at the Terrazza a Mare from June 9 to July 17, 2019.

The exhibition, thanks to the large and prestigious Minisini Collection, of which a hundred posters, playbills and photobusts are offered, offers a glimpse of Italy and Italians from the mid-20th century to the threshold of the new millennium through the all-Italian strand of the so-called “seaside cinema.” Looking at publicity materials for films from 1949 to 1999, it is possible to discover works from the “Italian school of film posters,” as Stefano Salis defines it, among the most important and recognizable at the international level, signed by “film painters” such as Enrico De Seta, Sandro Symeoni, Nano (Silvano Campeggi), Anselmo Ballester, Angelo Cesselon, Alfredo Capitani, Giorgio Olivetti, Renato Casaro to name a few names in the exhibition, as well as stimulate a reflection on the role of the film poster, a primary attraction for the eye and curiosity of the potential viewer.

The highly communicative pictorial language of these artists has contributed to constitute an important part of the Italian visual imagination. “They are an explosion of the colors of summer,” declares Andrea Tomasetig, "conjugated to the symbols of seaside vacations: the sand, the sun, the beach umbrella, the sails in the distance, the beauties in bikinis and the lurking males. The original exhibition is an opportunity to rediscover, in addition to a successful strand of popular cinema with famous actors and actresses as protagonists, valuable graphics and a chapter of social and costume history in Italy from after World War II to the end of the 20th century."

The heart of the review is the section devoted to the 1950s and 1960s, an age of more widespread prosperity, of the “economic boom,” fervent for Italian comedy: these are the years of TV, large household appliances, the Fiat 500 and seaside resorts, from the Adriatic Riviera to Ischia, Capri and Taormina. All the famous actors and popular stars, from Alberto Sordi (who will take a house right in Lignano in the Pineta resort) to Ugo Tognazzi, Walter Chiari, Aldo Fabrizi, Totò, Franco and Ciccio, Raimondo Vianello, Vittorio Gassman and many singers in vogue, such as Mina, Ornella Vanoni, Jimmy Fontana, Miranda Martino, Gianni Meccia, Enrico Polito called to interpret the “catchphrases” of the summer (one on all Edoardo Vianello ’s Gun Fins and Glasses in the film Canzoni... in a bikini by Giuseppe Vari in 1963) are important presences in these films, which gradually defined the typical characters of the lifeguard, the womanizing commander, the playboy, the girl looking for a husband, the wives at the beach and the husbands in the city, under the banner of humor and comedy.

With the 1970s, the seaside strand evolved into more sexually explicit films and then into the cinepanettoni, typical of the Vanzina brothers, 1980s and 1990s, and in communication there was a shift from the drawn poster to the photographic poster, just as from the bikini to the topless. The exhibition tour then ends with the poster of a film symbolic of Italian society on a beach vacation in the mid-1990s: Paolo Virzì’s 1996 Ferie d’agosto. The exhibition “is a mirror of the changing Italy seen from the beach,” says Enrico Minisini, but also an invitation “to cast a curious and investigative glance at a mass phenomenon, which contributes to building the collective history of Italy.” An Italy that craves lightness, fun and laughter.

The exhibition is organized by the City of Lignano Sabbiadoro, Department of Culture, Municipal Library and carried out by the Cultural Association “Noi... dell’Arte” in collaboration with Creval; the layout is by Leo Guerra and Cristina Quadrio Curzio.

Deepening the exhibition is a rich catalog with texts by Stefano Salis and curators Andrea Tomasetig and Enrico Minisini, which illustrates the important and significant Minisini Collection in relation to the theme of seaside cinema.

Pictured: the poster for the film 3 nights of love (1964) by Renato Castellani

Source: release

Cinema and bikinis, an exhibition in Lignano Sabbiadoro on Italians at the beach as seen through movies

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