dr. Ivo Blom

On September, 28th, 2006, the seminar Visconti and the Visual Arts/ Visconti e le arti visive took place in the lavish ballroom of the Palazzo Visconti in Milan, the former home of Luchino Visconti. Goal of the conference was to open up new interpretative area's on Visconti's films under the light of: intermediality, artistic appropriation, hypertextuality, and migration of images. This meant a major emphasis on cinematography, costumes, architecture, and settings of Visconti's films. After a welcome and the launch of a prize for the best thesis on Visconti & intermediality by Federica Olivares, Ivo Blom spoke about key images & quotations, re-inventing, and the exchange between private life and work, as a selection from his bilingual text published for the conference by Olivares Edizioni. Next followed Elena Dagrada (Università Statale, Milan), Marco Pistoia (University of Salerno), Gianni Rondolino (University of Turin) and Francesco Casetti (Università Cattolica, Milan), who subsequently spoke about the photography-like final scene of the episode ANNA in SIAMO DONNE, the painterly cityscapes in ROCCO E I SUOI FRATELLI, the director as art director, and the monumentality of Visconti's films. In absence of Visconti's former setdesigner Mario Garbuglia, Marco Pistoia showed a fragment of a documentary on Garbuglia's setdesign for L'Innocente, after which followed costume designer Piero Tosi, live interviewed by Ivo Blom, and Caterina D'Amico (Centro Sperimentale, Rome), editor of several publications on Visconti, guardian of the Visconti archive (Istituto Gramsci) and organizer of many exhibitions on Visconti, including a future one at the Auditorium in Rome (opens 12 October 2006). Last speaker was Giampaolo Letta, Amministratore Delegato of Medusa Film, who surprised everybody with the announcement of the dvd of SENSO (1954), to be distributed by Medusa in Spring 2007. The conference concluded with the premiere of the restored print of Visconti's magnificent color film SENSO, starring Alida Valli, Farley Granger and Massimo Girotti. The projection was preceded by speeches by film director Liliana Cavani, Vittorio Sgarbi (art critic and alderman of culture for the city of Milan), and Ivo Blom.

The conference was co-organized by Edizioni Olivares (Federica Olivares), Ivo Blom (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) and sponsored by Medusa Film and Publitalia. Anyone interested can buy Ivo Blom's publication 'Visconti e le arti visive' (text in English and Italian) at Olivares Edizioni.

Edizioni Olivares
Via Borgogna, 7
20122 Milano
Italy
Tel. +39 02 76003602
Fax +39 02 76018474
olivares@edizioniolivares.com

dr. Ivo Blom
Comparative Arts Studies
Faculty of Arts
Vrije Universiteit
De Boelelaan 1105
1081 HV Amsterdam
The Netherlands
Tel. 00.31.20.598.6489
Fax.00.31.20.598.6500
il.blom@let.vu.nl