All roads lead to Rome

Often life choices are spurred by a film you watched or a book you read. In 1976, a 15-year-old Italian boy got attracted to India and its culture after he watched Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali. Two years later, Andrea Anastasio landed in India for a lifelong romance with Buddhist thought and J Krishnamurti’s philosophy. This week, the noted artist and director of the Italian Embassy Cultural Centre is busy giving shape to a film festival where Delhiiites can watch “Satyajit and Sica in a single time frame to find out how they speak to the world today.” 

Italy is the country in focus at the sixth edition of the Habitat International Film Festival (HIFF), where apart from a bouquet of contemporary films and a homage to Italian star Marcello Mastroianni in his centenary year, 22 classics restored at Bologna, the centre of global film restoration work, will be screened. Under the roof of the auditorium designed by American architect Joseph Stein, the audience can watch the restored versions of Ray’s The Apu Trilogy and Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves and Miracle in Milan.

Alongside, Anastasio is preparing the ground for an unprecedented exhibition of master Italian painter Caravaggio’s iconic work, Mary Magdalene in Ecstasy, at the Centre and Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in April. Currently on display in Beijing, the privately-owned artwork, valued at 50 million Euros, will make a stopover in Delhi on its way back to Rome.

“At a time when artificial intelligence is creating a parallel reality, the importance of an original artwork cannot be overstated,” says Anastasio. Like Indian philosophy, Christianity deals with the mystery of god becoming human. In both cultures, he says, religion played an important role in promoting the arts. “Initially, a tool to present the gospel to those who can’t read the text, during the Renaissance period, the visual artist freed himself to interpret the divinity.”

Deliberating on the dramatic flourish of light and shadows in Caravaggio’s work, Anastasio says the way he realistically uses light gives the body a sensorial dimension that was not there previously. A controversial figure in his timebecause of his delinquent behaviour and sexuality, an x-ray analysis indicated Caravaggio painted Mary Magdalene in Ecstasy around 1606 when he was absconding after being charged with murder. His art, however, had such a strong influence on Flemish painters and subsequent generations of artists that Anastasio describes art history as pre and post-Caravaggio.

Without the mediation of symbolism, in Caravaggio’s work, divinity is expressed through a body from the street. “Reality is an expression of divinity in his work. The emphasis is not on the symbolic use of the body. Suffering and liberation are real in his paintings, not an idea.” The complexity of Caravaggio’s art, he stresses, cannot be grasped by the simple act of looking at the canvas. “I would like to be there asking people what they make out of it. The emotion expressed through the face can probably have endless responses. What you make out of it depends on what that body or emotion recalls in your life. There is no direct religious reference. You only get to know by the title that she is Mary. Otherwise, she is a woman expressing both tears and delight, pain and ecstasy,” he says.

Anastasio sees works of art as “the best cultural ambassadors that help in bridging gaps.” With the colonial hangover waning, he says there is a “growing demand for an ethnocentric perspective of the world” in Europe that “acknowledges the other.” “I feel there is a craving to see in real what a piece of art meant for centuries for another culture. I hope to see Chola bronzes displayed next to masterpieces in bronze from the Renaissance period in Florence.”

The Centre, along with Kiran Nadar Museum, is also toying with the idea of creating “a jugalbandi of Indian and Italian art”, with works of 20th-century Indian painters from Baroda and Santiniketan schools of art displayed alongside Caravaggio’s iconic piece.

The selection of 70 films from 15 countries at the HIFF also indicates the multiplicity of truth. It is coming at a time when the United States is talking isolationism in geopolitics but its cinema continues to influence cinematic tastes and cultures. A recent example is Anora winning both at the Cannes and the Academy Awards. There was a time when Italian cinema was the guiding light with its neorealist narratives.

“Hollywood,” says Anastasio, “is moulding the taste of the masses.”

“Cinema is a political act, and I want to protect it. If we are moving towards one taste, one genre, then it is the end. There is no problem with blockbusters, but the veracity of auteurial voices and the understanding of cinema as a tool to reveal the complexity of reality or triggering a process of imagining parallel realities is very important,” he adds.

Films like The Great Ambition, the biopic of political leader Enrico Berlinguer, who almost led Italy’s Communist Party into power in 1978, and Goutam Ghose’s Parikrama, the Indo-Italian production on development politics, he points out, counter the narrative that equates wealth with happiness. “Europe has to understand its place in a global context. There was a time when democracy was necessary for the free market. Today, It seems capitalism doesn’t need democracy anymore. It is a scary thought,” Anastasio says.

(At India Habitat Centre, Lodhi Road; March 21 to March 30; 11am to 9pm; Entry is free; For full schedule log on to https://www.habitatworld.com/hiff/listing.php)

Published – March 20, 2025 11:13 pm IST