Susan Bridges – Heaven’s Gate

“The exhibition in Todi is a surprise that blends cinephile culture with the language of still photography, capturing the iconographic power of Cimino’s frames and the painterly quality of his metaphysical Western, transforming them, through Susan’s impressionistic eye, into a series of panoramic frames that seem steeped in the atmosphere of nineteenth-century French landscapes, in the pulsating skies with their Baroque volumes, and in bodies that became living sculptures within an electric yet Edenic landscape. Susan Bridges has captured the epic quality of natural atmospheres, the dramaturgy of the human condition, the immensity of the open frontier, the anomalous details concealed by the filming, and the intensity of events that mingled art and life in one of those rare moments of total symbiosis, when a mythology is being created with the attitude of legendary virtue. […] 

An exhibition that is a journey within a journey, a photographic eye following Cimino’s traces in order to double the optics and invent a visual novel on photographic paper. The exhibition space itself emphasizes the horizontality of the panoramas, the length of the frontiers, that forward movement which the photographs convey with vivid sensations. Panoramas, portraits, and group scenes provide us with the film’s visual cadence in an exhibition synthesis of the fixed moment, the moment that does not flee but instead takes root in the time of the negative and becomes an archaeological photography for the near future. […] 

Susan Bridges has treated the elements of the set with a harmonic and melodic sensibility, capturing the iconographic intensity of the frame, the instant of the climax held in balance, the seamless current flowing between places and gestures. Here are the actors and actresses who would later become Oscar-winning faces, supporting actors and extras whose physiognomic acuity recalls the perfectly chosen types of Fellini, sheds and other interiors pulsating with nomadism and titanic challenge, the weather itself, which might have deserved a credit in the opening titles… and then the cinematography of Vilmos Zsigmond, onto which Susan’s parallel vision was grafted: a magnificent photographic double which, in this case, with a rare and precious quality, produced unique and extraordinary images, now transformed into an exhibition and a book.”

Curated by Gianluca Marziani