Giovanni Bogani

Interview

• "Peter Greenaway and Digital Cinema" (Rome, 18/12/96)

Biography

Born in Florence 3 May 1963, Giovanni Bogani studied the history of cinema at the Università degli Studi in Florence. He continues to live in Florence where he has been working as film critic for the Italian daily ‘La Nazione’ since 1987. He is in charge of the screenwriting course of the Immagina video school in Florence and a video course for schools in San Giovanni Valdarno. He co-ordinates and presents the projection of films for prisoners in the Sollicciano jail in Florence.

He is one of the founding members of the Spaziouno cineclub, where he is responsible for arranging reviews and visits from directors and actors. He also organises the Handycam short film festival. He has contributed to the Festival dei Popoli in Florence, and to the Prague Film Festivals of 1996 and 1997, where he was responsible for Italian films and staged a retrospective of films of Peter Greenaway, in the presence of the director.

Bogani has made several videos. The first, Wim Wenders. Le tracce dello sguardo, on the photographs Wim Wenders took during the shooting of his films, was shown at the 1995 Festival dei Popoli in Florence. Mi spoglio, maestro? Dipingere il cinema about Silvano Campeggi, was shown in 1996. Kiss! was in competition at Antepria independent cinema, Bellaria 1997. He has just completed his latest video, Dear Phone, starring Corso Salani.

In 1986 he won the Ferrero Prize for film criticism with an essay on Wim Wenders and the film "Tokyo-ga". A contributor to publications such as Segnocinema, Quaderni di Cinema, Margini, Michelangelo, Palomar 2000, Cinema & cinema, FilmTv, Vivilcinema and Moving Pictures, he has also published essays on Wenders, Peter Greenaway and Tarkovskij.

He edited the Italian edition of the "Dictionary of Film" by Georges Sadoul, published by Sansoni in 1990. He has contributed to several books with essays on a variety of subjects: Italo Calvino in "Le avventure di uno spettatore" (Bergamo, Lubrina); Andrej Tarkovskij in "Il fuoco, l'acqua, l'ombra" (Florence, Mediateca regionale); Wenders in "Wim Wenders, il cinema dello sguardo" (Firenze, Loggia de' Lanzi). His book "Peter Greenaway" was published by Il Castoro in 1995.