Pistoia Musei celebrates the great director Mauro Bolognini at two locations, 100 years after his birth

On the occasion of the centenary of Mauro Bolognini’s birth, from November 10, 2022 to February 26, 2023 Pistoia Musei presents the exhibition Mauro Bolognini | Un nouveau regard. Cinema, Theater and the Arts, curated by Andrea Baldinotti, Vincenzo Farinella, Monica Preti and Luca Scarlini and set up in the venues of Palazzo Buontalenti andAntico Palazzo dei Vescovi in Pistoia.

For thirty-five years an undisputed protagonist of Italian cinema,opera and theater, Mauro Bolognini was an internationally renowned director and among the greatest of Italian cinema in the 1960s and 1970s. Thanks to his films, famous actors and actresses such as Marcello Mastroianni, Gina Lollobrigida, Claudia Cardinale, Jean-Paul Belmondo, and Catherine Deneuve became real stars.

On display will be about two hundred posters, sketches, costumes, paintings, photographs and props, in order to reconsider Bolognini’s work in a comprehensive way and to expand to the European dimension the research on his work and figurative expression, the result of a sensibility honed in his youth in the shadow of French cinema. Hence also the title of the exhibition, which ideally emphasizes the contribution French culture made to the Pistoiese director’s work.

The exhibition is organized in two separate venues. At Palazzo Buontalenti, where Bolognini’s cinematic story unfolds, the itinerary is divided into six chronological sections: From Pistoia to Rome (with an interlude in France); Bolognini and Pasolini; Between successes and failures: the 1960s; Between political and literary commitment: the early 1970s; Novels, grotesque mirrors and splinters of comedy: the second half of the 1970s; and The last years. Added to these are a focus devoted to ananthology of 19th-century paintings that the director used as cues, and an in-depth look at his personality and tastes with a selection of objects and works that surrounded him in his homes. In a film room specially set up for the exhibition, an original video montage directed by Rocco Gurrieri instead offers a reconstruction of the close relationships between Bolognini’s films and the pictorial and photographic references that inspired their atmosphere and staging, particularly in La Viaccia and Metello.

In theAntico Palazzo dei Vescovi venue, on the other hand, his opera and theater productions are evoked: eight rooms set up in a scenographic manner with sketches, figurines, and costumes intended to evoke his major theater productions. At the opening, avideo installation created by Giovanni De Stefano is presented as a kaleidoscope of images that chronologically retraces the stagings and significant moments of Bolognini’s theatrical work: a magic lantern projected onto two screens placed at right angles, where the images flow accompanying the flow of visitors.

Through the wide variety of media offered and its cross-cutting between cinema and art, music and literature, the exhibition aims to be an invitation to discover Bolognini’s creativity, one hundred years after his birth.

Accompanying the exhibition is a catalog published by Officina Libraria that brings together contributions from the curators and some of the most important Italian and European theater and film critics, art historians, photography and cinema historians.

For the duration of the festival, Pistoia Musei offers audiences of all ages a rich program of collateral activities: conferences, lectures, concerts, a film program related to the director, as well as guided tours and educational activities for schools, families and special audiences. In addition, on December 14 at the Manzoni Theater in Pistoia, an exceptional concert will be dedicated to the music created for Mauro Bolognini’s films by Ennio Morricone and Piero Piccioni.

For info: www.pistoiamusei.it

Image: Installation view of the exhibition at the Antico Palazzo dei Vescovi venue. © Ela Bialkowska / OKNOstudio

Pistoia Musei celebrates the great director Mauro Bolognini at two locations, 100 years after his birth

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