Italian art as part of the "Cinema Night - 2021" campaign at the Pushkin Museum

Date: August 28 at 20:00.

Pushkin Museum im. A. Pushkin will again join the annual action "Movie Night", which will be held in Moscow on Saturday 28 August. Excerpts from films by Roberto Rossellini, Franco Zeffirelli, Pier Paolo Pasolini and other Italian directors will be screened in the Italian courtyard of the museum.

This year the action was prepared jointly with the Moscow School of Cinema.

An important part of the evening will be a discussion in which the chief researcher of the department of old masters of the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts will take part. AS Pushkina, Doctor of Art History Viktoria Emmanuilovna Markova and film critic, Doctor of Art History, teacher of the course "History of Cinema and Cinema Theory" at the Moscow School of Cinema Natalya Ilinichna Nusinova. The topic of conversation is religious issues in Italian art. The conversation will be moderated by Addis Gadzhiev, curator of the Artistic Production program at the Moscow Film School.

Religious painting, including painting of the Sienese school, presented at the exhibition at the Pushkin Museum, played an important role in the culture of Italy as one of the conductors of Christian spirituality and the Catholic faith. Thus, over the course of many centuries, a national mentality has been formed, the worldview of artists who worked in various types of creativity, including cinema. An example of this is the work of Federico Fellini, which reflected the director’s complex relationship with Catholicism; Reflections on religious themes in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s films The Theorem, St. Matthew Passion, Birds Big and Small, and in contemporary Italian cinema, for example, Paolo Sorrentino in the TV series Young Pope addresses the issue of faith and religion.

Particular attention is paid to the role of the Franciscan Order, its teachings, which had a great influence on Italian painting and cinema. For example, the story of Francis of Assisi (the founder of the Catholic monastic order) is interpreted differently in the films of Roberto Rossellini (Francis, God’s Minstrel, 1950), Franco Zeffirelli (Brother Sun, Sister Moon, 1972), Liliana Cavani (Francis, 1989). What is the difference between the author’s concepts? This is one of the topics that will be touched upon during the conversation about the religious roots of Italian cinema.

Admission to the show with free tickets upon prior registration.

Also, on the day of the action, there will be an opportunity to join the online broadcast of the discussion, which will be held exclusively on the VKontakte platform. After the event, the video can be viewed on the museum’s pages in social networks.