Set in the spaces of the Osservatorio, the project comprises more than eight hundred items created from the late 1920s to 2024 by over 50 authors among film directors, cinematographers, visual artists, graphic designers, animators, choreographers, and other collaborators on film and video production.
Georges Méliès was one of the first film directors who engaged preparatory and detailed drawings as a way to pre-conceive the scenes of his fantasy and science fiction movies, including his masterpiece Trip to the Moon (Le voyage dans la lune, 1902). However, the storyboard’s proper origins can be traced to the early 20th century and are intertwined with the development of animation. From the 1930s, Fleischer Studios and Walt Disney Productions, and in the 1940s United Productions of America, commissioned artists to create strips of sketches and other visuals while developing a story’s narrative and characters. In the same years, storyboards became invaluable tools in creating any cinematic work, whether animated or live-action, tangible and systematic visual representations of the unfolding story. Decades later, animated projects continue to be storyboarded, as the presence of Hayao Miyazaki’s and Studio Ghibli’s preparatory drawings in the exhibition testifies.
As explained by Melissa Harris, “For many, storyboarding is an integral part of the process: visually setting a scene and then plotting out its ebbs and flows may help the film team consider relationships between characters, figure out how to advance the narrative, or realize how to convey the essence of a particular segment. It may also help to troubleshoot, say when something does not seem quite convincing in a character or a physical interaction, or even provide visual references for the actors. More technically, storyboards can help the filmmaker to determine the most effective angles for lighting and shooting or the best use of dissolves and other potential special effects.”
The set design of this exhibition, conceived by Andrea Faraguna of the Berlin-based architecture office Sub, takes inspiration from the storyboard, a cornerstone of cinematic creation and a physical tool for composing and communicating the filmmaking process. By focusing on its role in filmmaking, the exhibition reinterprets the working environment of storyboard artists, transforming it into a spatial experience. At the heart of the design are tables inspired by classic drafting desks.
‘A Kind of Language’ features storyboards from the films of: Muzaffar Ali, Pedro Almodóvar, Wes Anderson, Charles Atlas, Matthew Barney, Ericka Beckman, Martin Bell, Ingmar Bergman, Bernardo Bertolucci, Luis Buñuel, Charlie Chaplin, Tan Chui Mui, Sofia Coppola, Alex de la Iglesia, Cecil B. DeMille, Jonathan Demme, Walt Disney Productions, Federico Fellini, Fleischer Studios, Terry Gilliam, Jean-Luc Godard, Renny Harlin, Alfred Hitchcock, Alejandro González Iñárritu, John Irving, Joan Jonas, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Isaac Julien, Akira Kurosawa, Hagai Levi, Yang Lina, Jia Ling, Hayao Miyazaki, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Sally Potter, Satyajit Ray, Jerome Robbins, Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, Andrew Stanton, Sarah Treem, Lee Unkrich, Agnès Varda, Carrie Mae Weems, Wim Wenders, Robert Wise, San-ho Yeon, Jia Zhang-Ke, and Fred Zinnemann.
From February to September 2025, the Cinema Godard at Fondazione Prada dedicates one of its screening sections to “A Kind of Language”, presenting a selection of films connected to the project. The exhibition is accompanied by an illustrated publication in the Quaderni series, published by Fondazione Prada. It includes a text by the exhibition curator, Melissa Harris, and a visual essay by Sub.
