"Movie Icons' for a journey through film history

Starting from the imagery of six 'fantastic creatures', with costumes from '300', 'Man in black', 'The Thing', 'Armageddon', 'Robocop' and 'I,Robot', to the iconic feather from 'Forrest Gump', passing by the masks of horror films or the helmets of 'War Games' and the Avengers, the suits of Spiderman, Batman and Superman, the gloves of Rocky, Thor's hammer, the bullet of 'The Matrix', the VR visor of 'Ready Player One'. And, again, the dream of Hugo Cabret, the magic of Harry Potter's wand, the fear of 'Jaws'.

Not just memorabilia: the 'Movie Icons' exhibition, hosted at the National Cinema Museum in Turin until 13 January 2025, is a journey. A journey through the history of cinema, its evolution, that of the professions and film production, of costumes, up to the history of collecting, as Domenico De Gaetano, director of the Cinema Museum and co-curator of the exhibition together with Luca Cableri, director of the Theatrum Mundi Gallery, emphasises. The exhibition is promoted by the Museum, in collaboration with Theatrum Mundi, entities from whose collections, as well as Propstore's, the pieces on display come from.

How the entire sector has changed, therefore, with the development of technology and the introduction of virtual and digital, and how important it becomes to study this path, to also understand the importance of reappropriating the physicality of the object, of its realisation, so that it then becomes a concrete part of an imaginary world: the purpose of "Movie Icons" is to make this journey, through one hundred and twenty original props, used on Hollywood sets, to reconstruct it and to attract, at the same time, the younger generations and allow them to enter into this world and its history. The iconicity, the real vision, to appropriate a magical universe: this is the aim of the exhibition, which unfolds through a layout that exploits the other iconicity, that of the Cinema Museum, its lights, the verticality of the exhibition inside the Mole Antonelliana, the magic that is already inherent in the place, to highlight stories and details. Thus, spaces dedicated to films such as the aforementioned "Rocky" and "Forrest Gump" emerge, objects stand out among screens reproducing frames from the films, showcases offering a view of the original superhero costumes: all this, punctuated also by more than one hundred posters and other advertising materials from the Museum's own collection, together with stills, graphic animations and the aforementioned sequences, to retrace the film memory of the last forty years.

"Movie Icons - Objects from Hollywood sets", National Cinema Museum - Turin, until 13 January 2025