Crises can become engines of change that reveal mechanisms internal to cultural processes, combining innovation with the known and settled values of a social group. Instrumental to the adoption of such an innovation is visibility, the social prestige and the satisfaction derived from it. This explains why established celebrities can be promoters of innovation while they experience new forms of self-constructions as a response to crisis. Their self-presentation in a condition of imperfection, or in an unconventional, or defective position, helps us to understand societies’ conceptualization of critical conditions, including systemic crisis. This can also contribute to a sustainable mindset, one that overturns the notion of marginalization: a vision of projectable future, based on strategies that avert termination and prevent the depletion of resources.

My lecture on Rossellini latest public persona posits a cultural and conceptual continuity between our era of pronounced preoccupation with the longevity of certain stars and the concurrent rise of sustainability as a cultural discourse. Fears of obsolescence, and of time/utility running out, fuel both. In sustainable ecosystems the peripheral and central are interconnected. Elderly celebrities have experienced prominence and have been experts in centrality and conspicuousness. Some of them are examples of affirmative marginality and triumphant flexibility. A peculiar emphasis on their bodily decay – (i.e. Maggie Smith’s Loewe Campaign) – plus humor about their marginalization (i.e. The Kominsky Method) helps reframe cognitive, psychological, and social vulnerability, turning the dynamics between preservation and disposal — of bodies, contents, values — into new inspirational entertainment.

In the last decade Isabella Rossellini has reinvented her public persona along peripheral trajectories (including her rebranding on Instagram) that involve anti-glamorization, over-exposition of her plump silhouettes and wrinkles, and a bucolic imagery defining her new identity as an ethologist. At the same time, her role in 2018 as Lancôme's testimonial, almost twenty years after her dismissal, offers a narrative of ageing female empowerment. Rossellini’s conscious exposure of a social schizophrenia that demands both naturalness and artificiality, her embracing the stigmatization of a critical condition in life and career, is both subversive and validatory. But it is a model for younger generations concerned with sustainability and pliability as a broad ideal. Because it contrasts with the Fordist model of ever-increasing productivity, embracing instead reuse, resilience and connectivity

Sara Pesce is Associate Professor in film studies of the University of Bologna. Her research is published in journals and edited collections: on acting, performance, celebrity culture and fashion, on the historical roots of Hollywood industry, on memory and digital culture in the contemporary global context. She is curator of a series of public interviews to major Italian actors. She is co-founder of the Italian Research Network on Celebrity Culture. She is the author of books on Hollywood Jewish founders (2005. Dietro lo schermo); on World War II and Italian Cinema (2008. Memoria e immaginario); on Laurence Olivier (2012 Laurence Olivier nei film). She is editor and author of two books: on film melodrama (2007. Imitazioni della vita) and on time, memory and paratextual media: (2015, The Politics of Ephemeral Digital Media.)