As a filmmaker and photographer, my artistic practice often allows me to work fluidly within the confines of both media, sometimes on the same project. This was the case for My Dad Is 100 Years Old, which I produced. The process of the film, and its writer/single cast member, Isabella Rossellini, inspired me as an artist to take the photographs in this exhibition.
These photographs explore the process of Isabella Rossellini’s deeply personal cinematic tribute to her father, the father of neo-realism, Roberto Rossellini. The photographs are intimate moments during the literal and metaphorical transformations Isabella undertook in her attempt to save her father’s work from fading into oblivion.
They reveal glimpses of self-doubt as an artist takes on a new role for herself; the preparation of the mask she assumes before revealing herself to the motion picture camera and ultimately movie theatre screens across the world. They capture the playful, almost child-like, creativity of the iconic daughter of two film icons, and reveal Freudian moments steeped in nostalgia such as Isabella (playing herself) gazing longingly at (herself playing) her mother, Ingrid Bergman.
Using available light and natural set-ups in the neorealist tradition – an ode to her father, Roberto Rossellini – the photographs refuse to glamorize the icon and the icons she portrays. They show unromanticized, yet imaginative, versions of the characters in her father’s life – Chaplin, Hitchcock, and David O. Selznik. Those faces were attached to the memories that allowed Isabella to offer up a very personal and honest tribute to her father. And that territory between the honesty of an artist and the artifice of filmmaking is what I explored with these photographs.
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