« Blogger Luncheon | Main | Do I look happy? »
April 24, 2009
The weirdest building in Europe?
The Mole Antonelliana, my entry for the weirdest building in Europe. Keep looking up and it keeps getting odder.
Inside is the National Museum of Film, which was splendid and strange, too. The enormous central hall is filled with lounging sofas. Visitors lie back and watch one of two screens (yes, the image of the anaesthetized consumer who can't choose is intentional) running almost continuously. This month there's a Rudolph Valentino show up, so one screen was continuous excerpts from his movies and one was from related movies showing his influence or documentaries from his period. Exceptionally well done.
In side chambers around the main level are permanent exhibitions devoted to emotions stirred by film and tv, like horror, suspense, love, familial fondness - in other words, a way to explore genres.
Then a giant ramp climbs the interior - kind of like the Guggenheim. That's where a massive exhibition of Valentino stuff was. Then in galleries opening off the ramp (again, like the Guggenheim), were incredible exhibitions of the technical aspects of film making and a movie poster collection.
The entire place was spectacular and a spectacle. There is a viewing platform which one (not me) reaches with a glass elevator running through the center of the great space. Periodically, always when an elevator is ascending or descending, all the films stop, all the shades on all the windows around the central Aula rise, the room slowly floods with light and then sinks back into darkness. The soundtrack, which has been a low babel of all the other sound tracks playing, comes together from every speaker in the building with the theme from Bladerunner when the elevator is climbing the side of the Tyrell Corporation. It took me a second or two to remember what it was.
Now I like movies, but I am far from being a film buff or serious or anything - and it took me an hour and a half. Like many public buildings the exit wound back into the same hall as the entry. As one starts down the steps one looks up to a shelf-like area invisible to those entering (well, unless one stops and turn 180 degrees and look, but who does that while walking INTO a museum?). There grinning at us is a golden calf.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at April 24, 2009 8:10 AM