I’ve just returned from the Turin Film Festival, where I discovered the best secret weapon any film festival could possess. It’s all very well to supplement your movies with a red carpet roll of A-list stars, as do Italy’s showier film events Venice and Rome. But such grandstanding is not aimed at, or appreciated by cinephiles. On the other hand, around the corner from Turin’s main film venue lies, quite literally, a temple of cinema, a magical place where everyone – whatever your ’status’ in the industry – can sup on the fantasy of film.
Indeed, any lover of cinema (or of magic for that matter) needs to visit the Museo Nazionale del Cinema. You’ll have no trouble finding it, since it’s located in the Mole Antonelliana, the signature monument of Turin, whose spire floats high above the city. Completed in 1889, after 26 years of construction, this exuberant building was originally intended to be the largest synagogue in Italy – hence its spectacular Temple Hall – but when the Jewish community tired of funding it, the City bailed out the project, seeing the Mole as a symbol of national unity.
It is, one might say, a grand folly that took a century to discover its true calling. But when, in 2000, it became home to the city’s already popular cinema museum, it was a perfect fit. The building doesn’t merely house the museum; it is the museum, an Aladdin’s cave for film buffs, whose physical attributes contribute, indelibly, to the experience. Once you walk in here, it’s terribly difficult to walk out.
The museum works on a number of levels, embracing the informative, the enlightening and the sensorial. The exhibit-led ‘archaeology of cinema’ presents the origins of the medium, the centuries of research and experiments, toys and entertainments that led to the Lumieres’ cinematograph. On show is a wondrous collection of shadow theatre, camera obscura, magic lanterns, even peepshows and, of course, Edison’s kinetoscope. This is a tremendous reminder that ‘the seventh art’ (a term coined in 1912, as it happens, by the Italian intellectual Ricciotto Canudo) didn’t simply materialise out of the ether, but was the result of a long fascination for the magical interplay between light and objects, spectacle and the imagination.
This exhibition kicks off the museum, at ground level. High up in the rafters can be found a fabulous poster gallery, as well as an informative guide to the ‘cinema machine’ – presenting all the aspects of film production.
But the pièce de résistance comes in between, with the Temple Hall itself. Here, appropriately for a museum of cinema, the offering is one of all-out entertainment. It’s not for nothing that the building’s architect, Alessandro Antonelli, called his life’s work ‘a vertical dream’.
The domed hall itself is an awesome spectacle, vast and ornate, a craned neck needed to take in its ascent into the heavens. And it has been transformed into a most unusual auditorium. On the floor of the hall are lined rows of chaises longues, all inclined towards two giant screens that play continuous, 35mm montages, not least images of Cabiria, the 1914 Italian silent epic about ancient Rome.
Every now and then there is an intermission, of sorts, as the building itself bursts into life: when the vault of the dome is suddenly awash with images of the night skies; or when shutters open, pouring light into the building; or when a glass elevator glides futuristically into the space, majestically transporting visitors through the void, towards the vault and fantastic views of the city outside. And then, when the lift disappears, or the shutters close, the movies flicker back to life.
And that still isn’t the best bit. Around the hall, spectacle gives way to a certain, wonderful, film buff kitsch, with a sequence of chapels dedicated to the cult of cinema. Within each cutely-designed room, a different genre is essayed through a video medley: in a reproduction of a Torino café, you can sit and watch clips of films shot in the city; in a saloon bar, westerns; for horror, you stand in a crypt, on a glass floor over the actual coffin used by Bela Lugosi during his stage Draculas; for the comedy of the absurd, you enter an over-sized refrigerator door, and choose a pew from two rows of toilet seats; for films devoted to love and death, you recline on a giant, red, heart-shaped bed. Sci-fi films are displayed through the window of a space ship: as you peer over the shoulders of the pilots, humanoid but decidedly ugly, one of them turns and stares straight into your face.
With other rooms devoted to musicals, animations and famous movie explosions, the permutations of a lap of the Temple Hall are endless. My last offered up: Last Tango in Paris and Breathless, Magnolia (the raining frogs scene) and Young Frankenstein, The Omen, The Searchers and The Magnificent Seven, Top Hat and Jesus Christ Superstar, Dark Star and Contact, and Welles’ classic car bomb sequence in Touch of Evil. And on the big screens: Fellini’s Casanova and Bertolucci’s The Conformist. This is the kind of entertainment that every cinephile dreams of giving their pals at home – an endless, exhilarating trawl through the movies they love. What larks it must to be work in this place.
I first encountered the museum, fittingly, in a film – After Midnight, an Italian romantic comedy in which a love triangle is played out in the Mole when the doors are closed, with the guy you’re rooting for the night watchman obsessed by silent movies. Inside oneself, such fanciful ideas seem entirely plausible.
The festival, incidentally, is an excellent affair, balancing the discovery of new indie cinema (especially the American independents) with top class retrospectives – this year’s being on Nicholas Ray and Nagisa Oshima. It’s without the airs and graces of so many others, being aimed not at critics and the film market, but the locals, many of whom are university students, who create a buzzing cinematheque atmosphere.
I would thoroughly recommend a November trip to Turin, taking in the festival and the Mole at once. If that seems a long way off, the bone fide temple of cinema awaits.
