Department of English

• Thursday, November 6, 2025 - 5:00pm to 8:00pm

4017 Walnut St

“In the cinema, a society that has lost its gestures tries at once to reclaim what it has lost and to record its loss... For human beings who have lost every sense of naturalness, each single gesture becomes a destiny.”— Giorgio Agamben, "Notes on Gesture"

Join us at Public Trust for The Space of Gestures, a series of film screenings on Thursday, November 6, 2025 from 5-8:00pm revisiting the work of Italian filmmakers Cecilia Mangini and Pier Paolo Pasolini. The screenings will be followed by a lecture by Professor Noa Steimatsky connecting Pasolini and Mangini to explore how cinema reimagines history, politics, and the body.

Presented in partnership with the Departments of Francophone, Italian, and Germanic Studies, Cinema and Media Studies, and the Center for Italian Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. With support from Cineteca di Bologna and Penn Libraries.

About the Program

In 2025 we mark fifty years since the death of Pier Paolo Pasolini, one of the most radical voices in Italian and global art cinema. Poet, novelist, and filmmaker, Pasolini’s artistic trajectory was driven by a desire to render visible — in language and on screen — the lives and bodies marginalized by the political logic of Western modernity: from the peasants of Northern Italy to the sub-proletariat of Rome’s peripheries, and the dispossessed communities of the global South. His cinema is inseparable from his acute attention to gestures — everyday movements, postures, and faces — through which history itself inscribes its trace.

This program places Pasolini’s work in dialogue with that of Cecilia Mangini, the first Italian woman documentary filmmaker, whose lucid eye captured the transformations of a country undergoing rapid social and anthropological change. Ignoti alla città (Unknown to the City, 1958) and La canta delle marane (The Ballad of the Marshes, 1962), both of which will be screened at Public Trust, confront the realities of Roman youth on the margins, where gestures of survival and resistance speak louder than words. Pasolini collaborated with Mangini as writer of La canta delle marane, bringing his own poetic sensibility to her militant documentary vision. Alongside Mangini’s shorts, Pasolini’s La terra vista dalla luna (The Earth Seen from the Moon, 1967) will also be screened. Starring Totò and Ninetto Davoli, the film recasts the popular comic tradition as a fable of poverty and dispossession. Its carnivalesque rhythms of movement and ritual expose the persistence of marginal lives within Italy’s so-called economic miracle, staging death and survival as collective conditions of existence on the edges of modernity.

The screenings will be followed by a talk by Professor Noa Steimatsky, a leading voice in film studies whose work has profoundly redefined how we understand cinema’s relation to space, place, and the human face. From her groundbreaking study of film locations in postwar Italian cinema to her influential writings on the visage as a site of history and aesthetics, Steimatsky has opened new ways of thinking about the politics and poetics of the moving image. Steimatsky will trace the threads connecting Pasolini and Mangini, showing how their films, read together, turn gesture into a language through which cinema reimagines history, politics, and the body.  Steimatsky's talk will be followed by a discussion moderated by Filippo Trentin, a Senior Lecturer in Italian at the University of Pennsylvania, who has also organized this program.

This program inaugurates the Robert Cargni Lecture, in memory of a beloved figure who for more than three decades enriched Philadelphia’s film and Italian culture. As a curator, Robert introduced audiences to rare and exceptional art films from across the world, fostering a community of cinephiles and opening windows onto traditions often absent from commercial screens. The series honors his devotion to independent and international cinema by bringing together screenings and critical reflection in his spirit.