The films of that age have been forgotten for a long time, having become somehow invisible. And yet, some films have survived. The work of many film archives and cinematheques in the 1970s and the 1980s understood the value of that forgotten heritage, and they undertook an endless activity of research and restoration that is responsible for drawing new attention to early cinema. At the same time, scholars realized the importance of those films. They discovered that they could retrieve and analyze the ongoing shaping of the film language by revealing traces of a primitive editing, framing, and the beginning of narration by images.

The focus of the Udine Conference will be "Cinema and Other Arts." The speakers will address the variety of relationships that cinema established not only with literature, painting, and theatre, but also with comics, architecture, fashion, and advertising in cinema's feverish attempt to gain artistic legitimization and cultural acknowledgment.

There will be more than fifty speakers, including Tom Gunning, Jacques Aumont, Mel Gordon, Richard Abel, André Gaudreault, François Jost, Raymond Bellour, Roger Odin, Pierre Sorlin, Francesco Casetti and Giampiero Brunetta. This list highlights just some of the scholars who have marked the traditions and methodologies of film studies over the last several decades.

Daily sessions, devoted to lectures and discussions, will be flanked by evening screenings in which a selection of rare films recently restored by European cinematheques will be presented to the audience.