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Brown Bag Lunch: Rose Marie San Juan

30 April 2024, 1:00 pm–2:30 pm

black and white image of people looking down from many different levels

Brown Bag Lunch seminars are only open to UCL History of Art staff and are designed to be an opportunity for us to hear about each other’s work, give feedback and engage in discussion. In this seminar, Professor Rose Marie San Juan will be presenting her recent work to colleagues.

This event is free.

Event Information

Open to

UCL staff

Availability

Yes

Cost

Free

Organiser

Queenie Lee – History of Art

Location

Room 104
21 Gordon Square
Gordon Square
London
WC1E 6BT
United Kingdom

Italian film and the ‘economic boom’: reorienting the cinema screen

In the early 1950’s, experimentation with the film screen brought about a new relationship with spectators, calling up the direct experience of lived spaces and new forms of technology. Separating itself from films associated with the fascist regime, imported Hollywood films, and even the recently acclaimed films of Italian Neorealism, the cinema screen at the start of the so-called Italian economic boom initiated a more decisive physical engagement with the disorienting effects of new forms of technology (architectural developments, reformation of social housing, hydroelectric installations, train innovation). In the process, the screen introduced the possibility of conceiving of the moving image differently, proposing modes of interpretation that questioned not only the national promotion of a miraculous economic future but also the denial of a troubling past. The very issues under debate in the public sphere (especially the press, the documentary, the news reel, and the cinema screen itself), entered the screen, destabilising conventions of narrative in favour of a continuous unmaking and remaking of the space of the screen.  


 

About the Speaker

Rose Marie San Juan

Professor in History of Art at UCL History of Art

Rose Marie San Juan is Professor of History of Art at UCL and has been a member of the department since 2005. Previously she taught at the University of British Columbia in the Department of Art History, Visual Arts and Theory. Her work focuses on Italian art and culture, especially on early modern urban life in Rome, and deals with visual technologies such as print and film in relation to time, movement and urban space. She has published on print culture and urban practices in early modern Rome, on the movement of images between Europe, Asia and the 'New World', on anatomical prints and wax models, on the body and problems of representation, and on film and urban space. She has completed a book entitled Violence and the Genesis of the Anatomical Image, and her new research is on film, documentary and social architectural projects in Italy between the 1930s and 1950s.

More about Rose Marie San Juan