Anne-Violaine Houcke

Anne-Violaine Houcke
Period: 2015-2016
Profession: Art historian Anne-Violaine Houcke was born in 1980.  She graduated from the École Normale Supérieure (Ulm) and the Sciences-Po (Political Science) Paris. She also has a degree in Classic Literature (the Agrégation). In 2012, she defended a thesis on cinema,
Les inventions de l’antique dans le cinéma italien moderne (‘The Inventions of Antiquity in modern Italian Cinema’), where she studied the poetics of ruins in the work of Fellini and Pasolini (forthcoming in 2016). Fascinated by this “secret rendezvous” between the archaic and the modern, described by Giorgio Agamben in
What is the Contemporary?, she works on modern-day images of antiquity, especially audiovisuals. She also explores the cinema’s ability to “invent” forms, stories, representations and past realities surviving in the present. After her thesis, she co-led a research project entitled
Antiquité 2.0 (‘Antiquity 2.0’) concerning audiovisual performances of antiquity since 2000, and received a post-doctoral fellowship on Pasolini and criticism. Anne-Violaine Houcke has lived in the United States where she taught at Yale University, and Italy, in Pisa and Rome. The research project of Anne-Violaine Houcke, entitled
L’invention du réel : l’œuvre photographique et cinématographique de Cecilia Mangini (‘The invention of reality: the photographic and cinematographic work of Cecilia Mangini’), concerns the work of Italian photographer and filmmaker Cecilia Mangini. Born in 1927 in Puglia and now resident in Rome, Cecilia Mangini began her career in the 1950s as a critic and photographer.  She worked for magazines such as
Cinema nuovo then devoted herself to documentaries and has worked with Pasolini, Fortini and Micciché. This project will foster the knowledge (or recognition) of the author and her work, in its totality and in its own esthetic and political specificity within the Italian documentary scene and cinema in general. On the other hand, the project aims at contributing to the writing of the history of Italy and, finally, to participate in theoretical reflection on the documentary.