A Lost Masterpiece of the Underground
Mario Schifano was the main italian pop-artist, the dark star of 1960s in Rome: Schifano’s work soon came to the attention of others: Ettore Rosboch, who is now a film producer, met him with Cy Twombly, the expatriate American artist. “One day we went to meet this young Italian artist,” Rosboch says. “Cy said ‘I love these paintings’. The first exhibition he did, he sold everything.” Schifano was using popular imagery but making it painterly. He was voracious for images, voracious for the new. As Andy Warhol, Schifano was promoting a music band (Le stelle di Mario Schifano) and he had another connection with Warhol, films. “Mario and I wanted to make a film,” say Rosboch. Anita Pallenberg had met Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones and had become close to the group (she later became Keith Richards’ common-law wife). “Anita proposed Mick Jagger and Keith to produce the film. We went to London. That was ’67, ’68. I was then 21 so I inherited some money. I said why don’t we do it together? We’ll do a co-production.” Schifano’s first film was called Umano Non Umano (Human Non-human). “Jean-Luc Godard said it was one of the most interesting films of ’68,” Rosboch says.
A brief description of the film: a young man, after a projection of a Godard’s film, reaches the screen and tears off it. The underground cinema theorist Adriano Aprà speaks about the social function of cinema. In the center of Rome, in piazza Colonna, many workers speak about a the long occupation of their factory. A borgeois party whose voices are taken off. The great italian writer Alberto Moravia walks lonely along the sea shore spelling english words. The workers’ demonstration takes place again. A quarrel between two youngsters. Dazed images of Vietnam War, Mao Ze-dong at a state event in China. Carmelo Bene with his lover rolling on a bed. The italian poet Sandro Penna reading his poems and talking about his work in his studio. A nude girl rolling on the screen. A farmer painting a hammer and sickle on his empty field. In Piazza San Giovanni a massive labor demonstration takes place.
Though beyond the chronological scope of this show, the film is a powerful expression of the artist’s aesthetic and his attachment to the world. As in the paintings, the images move inexorably into and mill about in an already established screen, even more urgently focused there by the fact that the film is being shown on a TV monitor rather than a larger screen. The viewer (artist) potentially becomes the subject, and object, of everything going on in the world, and therefore somehow responsible to it, politically, socially, humanly. With television particularly, images crowd into our lives. For Schifano television was like a spoken presence within a private space.
Schifano has been arrested for the first time in 1966 and was in jail for months. It was forbidden to use hashish and marijuana. It was just the beginning of the long story with the drugs. He had a very problematic life, he died of a heart attack aged 64 full of cocaine. He used to say that the only rational part of his life was his work. The rest was rather schizophrenic. He developed agoraphobia and became incapable of leaving his palazzo. Many art careers have survived worse. Consider Modigliani. And the fact that Schifano never actually had a career outside Italy may no longer be a problem in a time of global marketing. But he was a great artist, maybe one if the best of the 60s.
Umano Non Umano (Mario Schifano 1972 - ITA no subs XviD).CiNEMAGROTESQUE.avi 
Coming from my collection but ripped and shared by 3p and cinemagrotesque group!