Anne-Violaine Houcke

Anne-Violaine Houcke
Period: 2015-2016
Profession: Art historian Anne-Violaine Houcke was born in 1980. She is a graduate of the École Normale Supérieure (Ulm) and Sciences-Po Paris. She also holds an agrégation in Classics. In 2012, she defended a thesis in cinema,
Les inventions de l’antique dans le cinéma italien moderne , in which she studied the poetics of ruins in the work of Fellini and Pasolini (to be published in 2016). Fascinated by the “secret rendezvous” between the archaic and the modern, as discussed by Giorgo Agamben in
Qu’est-ce que le contemporain? she works on contemporary images of the ancient, particularly audiovisual ones. She also explores cinema’s capacity to “invent” past forms, histories, representations and realities surviving in the present. Following her thesis, she co-directed a research project entitled
Antiquité 2.0 on audiovisual representations of antiquity since 2000, and was awarded a post-doctoral fellowship on Pasolini and criticism. Anne-Violaine Houcke has lived in the United States, where she taught at Yale University, and in Italy, in Pisa and Rome. Anne-Violaine Houcke’s research project, entitled
L’invention du réel : l’œuvre photographique et cinématographique de Cecilia Mangini , concerns the work of Italian photographer and director Cecilia Mangini. Born in Apulia in 1927 and now living in Rome, Cecilia Mangini began her career in the 1950s as a critic and photographer, collaborating with magazines such as
Cinema nuovo , before turning to documentaries and working with Pasolini, Fortini and Micciché. The aim of this project is to raise awareness (or recognition) of this author and his work, in its entirety and in its aesthetic and political specificity within Italian documentary and cinema in general. It also aims to contribute to the writing of Italian history, and to contribute to theoretical reflection on documentary.