
Marco Brambilla
The superlatives “genius” and “masterpiece” are often applied overzealously—so we won’t use them here. Yet these qualities suffuse film director and artist Marco Brambilla’s video installation, Heaven’s Gate, 2021, a dazzling achievement that redefines visual splendor. Presented on a vertical, rectangular screen in a dark room, the imagery comprises a mind-blowing quantity of movie scenes, sets, and characters that have been digitally cropped and recontextualized into contiguous animated dreamscapes. Multilayered moments from some of cinema’s most iconic productions—Metropolis (1927), Rocky (