MILAN (ITALPRESS) – Iulm University has awarded an honorary master’s degree in Storytelling Arts. Literature, Cinema, Television to Vincent Lindon, best actor at the Venice Film Festival 2024 for the film Noi e loro (Jouer avec le feu), in theaters next Feb. 27. The French actor was welcomed by the Rector of the Athenaeum, Professor Valentina Garavaglia, who recalled that Vincent Lindon “is an extraordinary actor of the contemporary. Conferring on him the Master Honoris causa in the Arts of Storytelling means recognizing the value of an art that helps us understand our time, and Lindon succeeds in this arduous task, which is to narrate the present, with lucidity, courage, sensitivity and an extraordinary ability to restore, through his interpretation, the complexity of reality. His cinema is a magnifying glass on the tensions that run through Europe today: the social fractures, the ambiguities of power, the new geometries of human and professional relations. Lindon does not just play a role; he inhabits the stories and becomes the vehicle for a profound investigation of the human condition, its shadowy areas and its hopes. In this, his art approaches the mission of our Athenaeum. Iulm also has a duty to keep up with the present, to interrogate contemporaneity through education, research, and dialogue with the professions of culture and communication. And, here, we put this into practice every day. We engage our students to be critical observers and to tell the story with awareness, without settling for superficial readings. Vincent Lindon embodies precisely this same attentive and never discounted look at reality, and today we welcomed him with great pride into our academic community, reaffirming the value of storytelling as a tool for knowledge and transformation.” The Rector of Iulm University read the motivation for the conferral of the Honorary Diploma: “With his highly mobile and charismatic face, combined with a voice that knows how to modulate all the emotional states of a human being, from tenderness to sorrow, Vincent Lindon has been one of the most influential, beloved and appreciated references in European cinema for a few decades now. Grandson of the founder of Editions de Minuit and son of a fashion journalist, considered in France as the natural heir of actors such as Jean Gabin and Yves Montand, in the 1980s and 1990s he worked with the greatest French directors of the turn of the millennium, from Bertrand Blier to Claude Sautet, Claude Lelouch and Coline Serreau, but it was with writer Emmanuel Carrère’s debut feature L’amour suspicion that he gained international fame and stature. During the Laudatio, Professor Luisella Farinotti, professor of Aesthetics of Cinema at Iulm University, said that “Lindon has the extraordinary ability to appropriate the minute, everyday gestures of ordinary men, the inadequate and awkward movements of our being in the world. No gesture is loaded, nothing is magniloquent or emphatic, everything is natural and true in his acting style, measure and limitation are the figures,” and again, “Lindon is celebrated first and foremost for his roles related to a sorrowful and resilient humanity, committed to untangling itself in the disorder of our times.” During his Lectio, Vincent Lindon confessed that he was very moved by the honorary Master’s degree awarded to him by IULM: “Every gesture and every action we perform is often unconsciously to please our parents, a father and mother who brought us into the world and who in some cases are no longer on this Earth. And every story of every human being in life, every struggle they make in life is in some way to prove to their parents that they were not wrong to bring us into the world. And,” the French actor continued, “when these parents are gone, we struggle for our children to realize that they were right to be born and that they are proud of the parents who gave them life. He then read the text that Albert Camus delivered in 1957 when he received the Nobel Prize for Culture, which, according to Vincent Lindon, expresses the role of women and men in this world, the oppression that this world often affixes to its inhabitants and the importance of cultivating culture. Professor Gianni Canova, former Rector of the Athenaeum and professor of Film History: “With his charismatic presence and unmistakable voice, with his intense and profound gaze, Vincent Lindon is one of the greatest interpreters of contemporary European cinema. Heir to that great tradition of French cinema that goes from Jean Gabin to Lino Ventura, actors who knew how to make the common man epic, knew how to turn the ordinary man into a hero or anti-hero, capable of playing any kind of character. Lindon,” Canova continued, “did The Time of Apples 3 and Titan, did comedy and did experimental films like Alain Cavalier’s Pater. And above all, in the three films in which he was directed by Stèphane Brizè, he was the one in contemporary Europe who best embodied the contradictions of conflicts, the follies that the new forms of labor are taking on in late capitalist society. His latest film, Us and Them, which won him the Coppa Volpi in Venice, takes him to play a character he has done before, the father – here grappling with two sons, one growing up according to the rules he has given him, the other, on the other hand, who is getting closer and closer to extreme right-wing groups, bordering on illegality – and the contradiction that Lindon embodies in his body, in his gaze, in his gestures is that of a father who cannot stop loving a son, whom at the same time he is forced to hate. He must, thus, make love and hate cohabit within every tiny detail of his acting for a creature you have brought into the world and who is totally different from what you would have wanted him to be. This ambiguity belongs only to Lindon and confronts us with a man who does not compromise even at the cost of giving up the affections that come from blood with a character with whom, I believe, anyone can identify. Character that absolutely earned him the Coppa Volpi,” Canova concluded. Iulm University also awarded an honorary Master’s degree in Storytelling Arts to Professor Roberto Vecchioni in 2019 and to cartoonist Bruno Bozzetto in 2024.(ITALPRESS).
Photo: Iulm Press Office
