From its origins, cinema has opened - regardless of the intentions of its inventors and those who frequented it from the end of the nineteenth century considering it an adventurous opportunity to navigate the magmatic and unstable territories of modernity - the long tormented path that marked the disappearance of what has been defined as the Gutenberg galaxy. Up to that moment (the surroundings of the early twentieth century) the press had represented the first communication system of industrial society, developed by producing profound changes on the cultural and economic, social and personal fronts. A system that the growing dynamism that was characterizing the new era of progress driven by science and technology was making increasingly insufficient.

The metropolitan masses that had abandoned the countryside and who often migrated leaving behind ancient regional and national identities needed a culture and forms of communication suited to the changed conditions, more in tune with the peculiarities of the society that was taking shape. Cinema seemed to respond to this need and the masses immediately recognized themselves on the screen, with their aspirations and dreams. The theorists of what was celebrated as the seventh art reasoned in a linear manner (these were times in which the future was thought of as a set of innovations that would inevitably redeem human beings from all the miseries of previous eras) along various directions. Cinema could be the linguistic and aesthetic synthesis of all the artistic forms with which civilizations had expressed themselves until then, but at the same time it could investigate and physically document reality with an objective eye, scientifically more accurate and effective. Cinema was finally the technical means that could pragmatically give unity to what had been born in painting and literature, in dance and music, in architecture and sculpture with specific different identities, which had consolidated over the centuries and which had shattered on impact with the recurring challenges of contemporaneity. Challenges that had upset the specificities of individual art forms and dried up their ability to propose vital paths of meaning on the basis of which to orient oneself in the territories of a present that appeared increasingly fragile and inconsistent. The wait was finally over. Cinema became at the same time the art of all arts and the creator of a culture for all that everyone could understand.

As we know, this belief full of optimism (like many others throughout the short century) has proven to be simplistic and fallacious. Also due to the affirmation of new media, languages ​​have multiplied and differentiated. The search for different syntheses has highlighted the impossibility of arriving at an art of arts and a language for all. Yet the interweavings and contaminations continue to be practiced, experimented, abandoned, exhumed and reworked. Indeed, they have become the way of being of contemporary aesthetics and cultures. It is a perennial search at the same time influenced by the moods of the moment; aimed at identifying some effective tool to extricate oneself from a complex, unstable and confused present, which continually exorcises the predictable disappointments that it will encounter when it tries to decipher the horizons of the future: Futuro Presente. Festival delle arti contemporanee has always been essentially a fascinating exploration of the results of some of these researches.

Throughout its history, cinema has had to reconsider its ambitions. When it had to be admitted that it was one of the many possible media of modern society and that the television screen would replace it in some of its functions, people began to talk about a crisis and

then, with the affirmation of electronics and telephony for and with the images of their screens, of death. Not only that, it seemed to many that the new image technologies would devour cinema and with it the languages ​​that it had tried to make its own by offering them a new possibility. And instead, for the umpteenth time, it is developing an original mutation towards a future with multiple screens of which it will represent only a part. With SCREEN. The screens of the future, with the all-round work (or rather, all-screen) of Greenaway, with the contribution of many others (filmmakers, musicians, scholars) we will be able to venture into this universe certainly full of surprises, the next stage of a journey that began five years ago.

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