Carmel Film Festival

I just returned from the Carmel Film Festival, my first film festival, and you can imagine the sleepless nights of anticipation. But the audience put my fears to rest because they were equally enthusiastic about appreciating “Mona Lisa” to better understand Leonardo da Vinci's masterpiece.

 

 Nola Rocco, John Cooper, Caroline Cocciardi

 

Carmel is hoping the festival's response will be favorable.  John Cooper, the director of Sundance, came out from Utah and gave CFF his blessing.

 

 
Rocco, Tom Burns, Cocciardi, Joanne Storkan

 I don’t believe it would have come to pass without the excellent organization of Tom Burns.

 

Clint Eastwood, Caroline Cocciardi 

 

Dina Eastwood, another organizer of the festival, held a wonderful reception dinner a the Eastwood's Mission Ranch.  I meet Clint Eastwood, which was pretty fun.

Unlike many of his movie roles he has played, Eastwood is soft-spoken, gracious and unassuming.

 

The National

Moving pictures
Liza Foreman, August 31. 2009

A number of recent films have used art to great effect. Think Julie Taymor’s Frida Kahlo and Persepolis, for example. Now new technologies are taking the exploration of art on film to another level, as seen in several new productions, including Lech Majewski’s The Mill and The Cross, Caroline Cocciardi’s documentary Mona Lisa Revealed, and Paulo Henrique Fontenelle’s Brazilian biopic, Loki: Arnaldo Baptista.

With Mona Lisa Revealed, Cocciardi sets out to show how the development of a multi-spectrum camera, which uses a resolution of 240 million pixels, has been used by the French structural engineer, and its inventor, Pascal Cotte, in a series of ground-breaking photographs, which show what Cocciardi calls the “real” Mona Lisa behind its thick glass panel and the effects of ageing.

“When I first saw Pascal’s images, I realised I had never seen the painting,” says Cocciardi, a long-term Mona Lisa aficionado. “Did you know there are seven veils Leonardo painted on her? Her dress is green, not black, and the interlocking embroidery thread on the bodice is intertwined in crimson red and ochre yellow. Through Pascal’s photos we give people a chance to see what it would be like if you had the chance to be up close and personal with the painting.”

Cocciardi’s film also documents her fascination with the passion of Cotte who declared as a young boy that he would one day create a camera to capture the picture in all its glory. “When I met Pascal, the first thing I wanted to find out from him was how did he get access to the Mona Lisa?” said Cocciardi. “It would be easier for you and I to have tea with the Queen than to get a private showing.”

Another point in making the film was to show that experts and scholars are not always right. “For the last five centuries scholars and experts of Leonardo da Vinci concluded that he did not paint the Mona Lisa with eyebrows and eyelashes so when Cotte discovered that he did in 2007 it was a major story that circled the globe,” she says.

Cocciardi’s own interest in the Mona Lisa began because she wanted to know what the connection was between the painter and his sitter. She has since read every book written on Leonardo da Vinci and travelled to eight countries to make the film and meet the experts to get to the bottom of the story.

The curious can decide for themselves with Cotte’s 36 Mona Lisa photographs part of a travelling exhibition Da Vinci – the Genius, which can currently be seen in Singapore, Canada, South America and Europe. Negotiations are under way to exhibit the images in the Emirates next year.

Link

Listening to every breath he takes

Leah Garchik

Friday, June 12, 2009

By the calculations of a Florentine scholar, Monday is the 530th birthday of Mona Lisa. In keeping with that, San Jose filmmaker Caroline Cocciardi and the owners of the Mona Lisa restaurant in North Beach are holding a $55 birthday brunch, which includes five courses and the DVD of Cocciardi's new movie, "Mona Lisa Revealed."

The film is touted as breaking some big Mona Lisa news, including that she was painted originally with eyebrows and eyelashes. Also, says Cocciardi, there's much in it about her relationship with Leonardo da Vinci, her portraitist.

Relationship? I asked. Wasn't he gay? "That's another documentary," she said.

The question preying on my mind, I turned to Google, which directed me to listings that said, for sure, he was a vegetarian.

Link

Mona Lisa Revealed- A Virtual Love Story

Can science prove a love story- the story between the maestro Leonardo da Vinci and his Mona Lisa?

This docu-drama intertwines Pascal Cotte’s virtual restoration of the painting technically following Leonardo’s construction and execution of  his masterpiece.  Audience will be dazzled to see the original colors of Mona Lisa!

But even with Cotte’s technology will it be an exact duplication or is there a Leonardo signature in the painting that can never be replicated?

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High resolution image hints at 'Mona Lisa's' eyebrows - The "Mona Lisa" has long been shrouded in mystery, including one long-standing question about the famous lady: What happened to her eyebrows and eyelashes?