The lost cinema of Piero Bargellini (1966-73)

trep · Mensaje por **trep** » Dom 02 Jul, 2006 09:42

[quote]Piero Bargellini was born in Arezzo in 1940. An agronomist, film lover and amateur filmmaker, he joined
the “Cinema Indipendente” Cooperative in 1968 and became one of the most important figures of Italian
underground cinema. His films are intensely poetic and reflect artisanal wisdom, based on his scientific
knowledge of optics and chemistry. He made films like Morte all'orecchio di Van Gogh, Fractions of
Temporary Periods, Trasferimento di modulazione, Gasoline, Stricnina, between 1966 and 1973, in a total
identity of art and life. These works tell “the history, in its own way exemplary, of one of the secret
protagonists, and of the famous victims, of the revolution of 1968.”
Ideally conceived as a dialectic interface between the Italian Competition and Detours, this tribute
(curated by Fulvio Baglivi with the help of Adriano Aprà) is also the way we have chosen to remember
Marco Melani on the tenth anniversary of his death. Marco, who was a friend and collaborator of
Bargellini’s, and who continues to be our inspiration and a "hidden" prompter, organized for the first
festival in Torino (1982) a commemoration of his friend, who had recently passed away. His intent was to
remove the label of “experimental”: “his cinema was cinema tout court, like that of Rossellini, Hawks,
Bertolucci, Schifano, Brakhage and all the other filmmakers he loved.”[/quote]

Possibly the most powerful and abstract italian experimental filmaker of the late sixties, there are predictably close to no information on him around.

I previoulsy shared a (subless) documentary about him and the his brethren, Schegge di Utopia

Again thanks to JeanMarie/Luce, who gave me the DVDs, I'm now able to share rips of most of his movies.

All but one come almost straight out of projector, so the quality is very good given the rarity of the material.

"Trasferimento di modulazione" is impressing in its special way. It's a porn movie left in an early stage of developement. The colors and blots you will see are "not actually there", they are the effects of the reaction of the projector's light with the salts on the film. Obviously, a film like this changes and dies away a little at every show. So what you're seeing is a three-dimensional slice (widht-height-time of the movie) of a four-dimensional movie (width-height-time of the movie-time of the consuption).

Enough babbles! The links

Morte all'orecchio di Van Gogh

Imagen