In 2014, the Luce Institute celebrated its 90th anniversary.
To celebrate this anniversary, some of our cinema's most acclaimed new authors were invited to make a short film, each featuring 10 minutes of footage from the Archive, selected from the thousands of hours of footage it contains. The result is an album of diverse narratives.
The films tell of the first day of a war, and of pleas for peace; of collapses and reconstructions; memories of landscapes and (perhaps) lost realities; miracles, superstitions, and dreams. They speak of the condition of women, of sexuality, of the meaning of a song, of the moon.
There are fables and diaries, fantasy stories and poetry, the words of great writers alongside the voices of ordinary people. With real and historical figures, and characters of pure fiction. A heterogeneous picture, a combinatorial interplay of intersections, contrasts, analogies. With the common thread of archive images. And perhaps more.
There's a lot of talk and seeing of something that might be called Italy. Not a historicized country, but Italy as it is (or isn't) today, seen through sequences often filmed before the directors were even born. The country of the present with images of its past. You can do many things with a treasure. You can bury it and show it off, you can spend it or squander it. Or you can draw a map of it.
The game of 9×10 Ninety draws a map to enter the immense treasure of the Luce Archive, explaining how it is not only an essential reservoir of knowledge of history, but also of fantasies, and of cinema.
