Mlab Doctor of Arts programme, MA students are more than welcome as well.

Angela Dalle Vacche: The Difference of Cinema in the System of the Arts

In this lecture I will argue that the arts, especially literature, theatre and painting, are useful to answer Andre Bazin’s famous question “What is Cinema?” The place of architecture and design in regard to cinema will also be discussed.

However, the scientific origins of this medium are, in the end, even more crucial than its aesthetic ones. Based on illusion and belief, the cinema is also how and where the world can record itself in the image of itself, because the non-human eye of the camera, instead of the human hand, is in charge of the tracing.

In the end, by grounding cinema into science and technology much more than in the arts, the cinema is really about the problem of the human soul, the oscillation between religion and science, absence and presence. For “What is Cinema?” After all, nothing more nor less than the flickering produced by still photo-grams running through the sprockets of the projector at 24 frames per second.

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Angela Dalle Vacche is a specialist in the intersection of aesthetic theory and film history, Angela Dalle Vacche was born in Venice, Italy and came to the United States in 1978. She has graduate degrees in American Studies and in Film Studies from Mount Holyoke College and the University of Iowa. She has been the recipient of a Fulbright Travel Grant, a Mellon Fellowship, a Rockefeller Bellagio Grant, and a Leverhulme Distinguished Professorship at the University of London, Birkbeck College, History of Art. Her retrospective: Italian Silent Divas: Passion and Defiance, for the 2000 New York Film Festival was voted as “Best Event Of The Year” by Art Forum. Dalle Vacche regularly works with the Cineteca di Bologna, The Nederlands Film Museum, Anthology Film Archive in New York, and DAMS/Gorizia in Italy. She has also lectured in Dublin, Vienna, Paris, and Portugal.