VENICINEMA:
CITY
of THE FUTURE

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VENICE, CITY OF THE FUTURE?

"The first anti-Euclidean city and thus a model of a city that has more future ahead of it because it has an extra dimension, that of water." Italo Calvino in conversation with Ivo Prandin “Archetype and utopia of the aquatic city” (1968).

The theme of Venice as the City of the Future will be central to the course, re-interpreted through the medium of cinema ‘In films, one can explore the spaces of the past, in order to better anticipate the spaces of the future’ (Patrick Keiller 2003). ECA offers this unique course to coincide with the Venice Film Festival and to complement this year’s Venice Biennale of Architecture 2023 theme ‘Laboratory of the Future’.

You will begin the program by studying how fiction films have expressed the characteristics of Venice and then move on to using cinematic montage to create your own observational films with a soundtrack. The transferable skills you'll learn will be applicable to your own cities and towns when you return from Venice.

The interdisciplinary program then uses film, moving images and sound to help you understand and explore cityscapes, spaces, places, and social history. Whether you're an undergraduate, postgraduate, or early career practitioner, VENICINEMA will help you expand your research interests in architecture and urban planning.

And then there’s the magic…of attending the ‘Floating Cinema’ on the lagoon and walking the red carpet at the Venice Film Festival.

No previous experience in filmmaking is necessary.

Participants from a wide range of academic disciplines
Undergraduates, Master, PhD and Post-Doc students
Early-years practitioners

WHAT YOU

will GET

Use film as medium

Acquire an understanding of the study of everyday life through the medium of film

Explore new "creative geographies"

Experiment with the manipulation of screen time and space to explore cityscapes.

Learn to organize your film narrative

Analyze fiction films in order to comprehend how narrative is spatially organized.

Make a short film

Use the montage tradition to make a short film in the city symphony tradition, addressing one of the studio themes. engage with the moving image as an aid to reasoning and thinking through urban scenarios.

Studio themes

Spatially organised narratives, observational cinema, city symphonies, montage, everyday urban life, spatial ethnography, urban taxonomies, Venice as a 15-minute city, cinema as a form of urban modelling, creative geographies, mapping, climate change, local versus global.