Roman Holiday blanketed in snow and a Death in Venice by drowning. This is how classic films are reimagined in an ever-closer future.
The killer from Psycho cooling his fiery impulses beneath ten centimetres of snow. Lawrence of Arabia arriving in a literally deserted Pisa. The fil rouge linking these works is a simple question: what would cinema classics look like if they were set today? An original comics exhibition organised in parallel with the 76th Venice International Film Festival, running from 28 August to 7 September, has attempted to answer that question. Once again, on the occasion of the Green Drop Award, it is environmental themes that walk the "green carpet", with the ecological organisation Green Cross Italia honouring, for the eighth consecutive year, the best film on sustainability. The winner is chosen by a distinguished jury, led by Stefania Sandrelli and made up of figures from the worlds of cinema, entertainment, comics, culture and science.
The winner receives the coveted handmade Murano glass drop, containing soil from a place on the planet that is a symbol of an urgent environmental issue.
This year's soil comes from the Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania, and represents a place that interweaves the history of humanity with that of cinema, evoking the migrations that have always characterised human affairs and reminding us that we are merely tenants coexisting with other species. This is, in fact, the area where the first hominids learned to live and cooperate, before migrating to colonise the planet. A landscape that appears arid and barren today once hosted a lake, a forest rich in plant species and a vast grazing area. But the Olduvai Gorge also played a pivotal role in the history of cinema, providing the perfect setting for the opening chapter of one of the medium's milestones: 2001: A Space Odyssey.
It is precisely because of this intrinsic link between the history of humanity and that of cinema that this year Green Cross decided to add an important new element to the Venice Film Festival by organising a comics exhibition entitled "Il cinema rovinato dal cambiamento climatico".
From Visconti to Hitchcock, taking in Chaplin and Lean along the way, twelve celebrated comics artists have reinterpreted cinema classics by asking themselves — and showing us — what certain works might become if no action is taken to halt the advance of climate change.
"The irony of the panels does not prevent a very serious meaning from coming through in each one, calling to mind the problems arising from climate change. The world we must safeguard is also the world that films and comics have so often portrayed with great poetic force, and to which our memories and emotions are bound," said Bepi Vigna, director of the Centro internazionale del fumetto in Cagliari.