Prada Studies Film’s Inception.
At the Fondazione Prada in Milan, A Kind of Language invites visitors into the unfiltered origins of filmmaking. This exhibition, more archive than spectacle, peels back the layers of the great cinematic minds of the past century. It presents not the final, polished visions we see on screen, but the first impulses—scribbled notes, unfinished sketches, and intuitive mood boards. It is cinema at its most embryonic, a reminder that even the most iconic films were once only fragments of thought.
Through more than 800 artifacts from over 50 directors and artists, the exhibition constructs a visual dialogue between classic and contemporary cinema. Rebecca and Psycho share space with The Grand Budapest Hotel and The Virgin Suicides. Jodorowsky’s doomed Dune stands alongside The Boy and The Heron. Storyboards, those first renderings of a director’s vision, take center stage. American curator Melissa Harris, who spearheaded the project, describes them as a language of their own, a translation of cinematic thought before it is spoken in film.
Prada’s engagement with cinema here is not new. Prada, and its sexy sister company, Miu Miu (Women’s Tales), has long spotlighted new works like those by Laura Citarella, Janicza Bravo and Carla Simón. The exhibition, built over two years of research, seeks to understand not just film as an end product but the mental landscapes that shape it. The curation is intimate rather than authoritative—feeling, as Harris describes, like a glimpse behind the curtain rather than a definitive history. The process of selection was pragmatic rather than prescriptive, drawn from both high art and Hollywood, from Pixar’s Finding Nemo to Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire.
What emerges is a study in the act of seeing. Harris notes that storyboards are not just technical tools but visual meditations, personal and instinctive. Fellini’s caricatures, Coppola’s delicate sketches of the Lisbon sisters—these fragments of process illuminate the obsessive, sometimes improvisational, nature of filmmaking. For some directors, the act of sketching or composing a storyboard is an end in itself, a way of feeling through the contours of a film before a single frame is shot.
The show will be on display at Fondazione Prada’s Osservatorio in Milan all spring and summer, until September 8.
Text by Dalia Morgan
Bruno Ganz in Wings of Desire, directed by Wim Wenders, 1987 © 1987 Road Movies – Argos Films Courtesy of Wim Wenders Stiftung – Argos Films
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