The main theme of the edition 2010: identity

We live in the continuous search of an identity, we build it over time, or over time we see it slowly changing, sometimes we feel sad for this, sometimes we are slightly satisfied with the feeling of having get rid of a constraint which held us on a lifestyle we did not feel as being ours.
However cinema,  audiovisual art have more deeply experimented the dynamic character of  the developing identity, they have defined the architectures of vision, they have represented, as Casetti has called it, “the eye of the Twentieth Century”.

Cinema has showed us the modification of our faces and our bodies, the ways in which they are in relation to each other- with love or violent gestures – it has taken the camera lens beyond the surface, in order to show the emergence of new characters and to tell, either according to Verdone’s comedy style or Dardenne’s dramatic style, their way of living in our times.
The theme of visual identity does not only consist of the relationship between screen and public, but it justly falls within the construction carried out by the actor, of the identity of the character or, even, in the case of the digital camera, within the tension to transcend the human element , in order to show  its limits and possibilities.  

The net space also seems to offer unlimited possibilities of assuming new identities. Nick names, avatars, allow gender mutations, an imaginary social status, unexpected role plays, inventions of stories to inhabit in a lonely multiple relationship. The net seems to be a new frontier in which bodies, identities become virtual, they do not define but multiply stories and characters, they make us protagonists of a mega-text –this is the famous case of  Facebook – a meta-story to which we belong  for a lapse of time, and from which it is often difficult to escape. We are prisoners of a virtual world, our identity is ethero-directed, it is publicly available, it is uncontrolled.