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One of the early short films of Italian underground director Fabio Salerno.

This film was constructed using the so-called “photo-finish” technique employed in sporting events. The same principle was applied, precisely, to the motion picture camera. The subjects are explored and self-explored using a thin slit arranged horizontally halfway along the aperture plate as they enter the motion picture camera itself. The images then are formed as an extremely dense series of lines as in a primitive video screen, such as the Nipkow. The cinematic rhythms of the film vary with the accelerations and decelerations imposed beyond the synchronism between movie camera and subject: with motion from top to bottom, or else with the movie camera lying sideways, (in that case the line is vertical) then, from left to right and vice versa. Of course without a shutter or claw [in the camera]. This filmic technique is well known in scientific cinematography, and it is this very combination that I most urgently desired to encompass in my graphic compositional concerns.

Angela is a woman of thirty who lives in Milan, but decided to return to her native Calabria, where her father still lives. During the journey by car, she meets a very different girl from her, and younger, who is also called Angela.

Preserved and digitized by the National Film and Business Archive

The history of the activities of the Culmv (Compagnia Unica dei Lavoratori Merci Varie) in the Port of Genoa, spanning from the 14th century to the present day. The documentary is structured in three parts: "Caravana e Camalli," "Compagnia Unica Lavoratori Merci Varie," and "Il Sacco e il Container." It was broadcast by Rai on January 19th, January 26th, and February 2nd, 1981. The program alternates between dramatized reconstructions (such as the formation of the company in the 14th century or the resistance and sabotage during World War II) and a television investigation

A documentary made with archive footage and photographs alternating with recent film footage; the choice of texts is taken from Mario Rigoni Stern, Emilio Lussu, Piero Jahier, Filippo Sacchi, and Nuto Revelli.

Raphael, Yervant Gianikian's father, survived the Armenian genocide in 1915 in Eastern Turkey. In April 1988, while living in Venice, he sat for his son's camera and read an excerpt from his memoirs, translated from Armenian into Italian.

John Gabriel Borkman, a former bank director, was imprisoned for fraud but believes he was wrongly convicted. He had invested clients' money in a major industrial venture but was reported by his friend Hinkel, who was in love with Borkman's former fiancée, Ella Rentheim. Borkman now lives on the first floor of the house, with his estranged wife, Gunhild, living on the ground floor. He occasionally receives visits from his friend Wilhelm Foldal, who supports Borkman's delusion that the bank will reinstate him. In his youth, Borkman betrayed his love for Ella by marrying her twin sister Gunhild to advance his career. After his conviction, Ella took care of their son Erhart and now wants him to live with her and take her name. Borkman agrees, but Gunhild refuses to let her sister take their son.

From Palazzo Barberini in Rome, flutist Marzio Conti and pianist Gloria Belli will perform: “Cantabile et presto” by George Enescu; “Fantaisie, Op. 79” by Gabriel Fauré; and “Suite Paysanne Hongroise” by Béla Bartók.

A procession of Disney characters are followed into a TV broadcasting Station located inside of a sequoia tree.

Lori Saint-Just, a master jeweler shattered by his wife’s death, relocates and becomes obsessed with Cona, a prostitute who first entices then rebuffs him. Driven to possess her, he robs and accidentally kills his benefactor to inherit a $30 billion fortune, gives Cona a replica necklace, and she enacts a staged murder-suicide to destroy them both while sparing him guilt.

Vincenzo and Luciano, after having witnessed the successful performance of a Japanese ensemble in Rome, return to Turin with the firm intention of putting on a concert, baptizing it "Electronic Granita" and producing themselves as dancers. It’s the story of two friends, Vincenzo and Luciano, who want to set up a show centred around Japanese allures. But Cristina's aggressive love threatens to divide them. Luckily, they run away together to Berlin, escaping the strength of femininity and re-establishing, at least ideologically, a virile and homosexual domination.

A tribute to experimental cinema of the '60s and '70s.

Realized in 1980 for Rai 2, it recalls the main phases in the life of Giorgio Colli.

Raoul Duval is a physiotherapist in Cannes, dissatisfied with his marriage to the wealthy and capricious Véronique. When a notary informs him that he has inherited a fortune from an unknown biological father, Raoul sees it as a chance to free himself from his wife. But his joy is short-lived: a serious car accident leads him to discover an unknown woman in the hospital, hovering between life and death. He decides to take care of her, but soon realizes that she is connected to Véronique and that both women are involved in a complex scheme to deprive him of the inheritance.

Italian film adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft's "The silver key"

Inspired by the short story Aurélia (1854) by Gérard de Nerval, which will influence André Breton and the Surrealists, the film tells, with a contracted rhythm and visual accelerations / dilations, the daily experience of a woman projecting her into an interior dimension where reality and myth are mixed and fused by a dreamlike syntax. In the "descent into hell" of consciousness, Aurélia ends up by detaching herself from her identity as a woman of today to take on the multiple features prefigured, from time to time, by her imagination. Aurélia's frenetic final dance serves as a ceremony to exorcise evil, the furious rediscovery of the “double” savage buried within each of us, the abrupt awakening of the possessed bacchant, liberated vitalism, myth, explosion of fantastic energies. Aurélia faces a discourse on filmic time: real time is decomposed analyzed accelerated in lightning-fast mental paths from a stream of consciousness.

An essay on contemporary Italian poetry with the works of Dario Bellezza and Amelia Rosselli.

A playful La Linea short in which Mr. Linea encounters themes of attraction and romantic curiosity through visual comedy and minimalist line animation. Using clever visual gags and expressive movement, the short explores the character’s reactions to erotic scenarios in his unique world.

One of the early short films of Italian filmmaker Fabio Salerno.

Franco, a young Neopolitan about to leave for military service, promises his fiancee, Maria, to write to her every day. But after two months apart, his comrades meet a general's daughter, and his letters to Maria become increasingly rare.

A film centered on the graphic and pictorial works of the artist Paolo Sardina, whose images have been painted and scratched directly onto the film.

A serial killer’s sequence of events of high aesthetic understanding, in a black-humor-filled tale resulting from Mauro Mingardi’s outlandish talent.

The story of the mafia, who wants to prevent him, with a journalist who prepared a series about drugs and white woman trafficking in his newspaper.

In a miserable, freezing two-room apartment on the first floor of a building, the Ruòppolo family lives in complete poverty. Giovanni, a clerk, struggles against a thousand difficulties to make ends meet, while his wife, Cristina, takes care of the housework.

Young band musicians from the Province of Turin face the idea that they won't ever be famous.

Based on Emmanuel Roblès' book of the same name

Mario Aldara is a state employee; perhaps out of a desire for protagonism, his girlfriend Patrizia has spread the rumor that he is a high-ranking secret service official...

While traveling by car, Alex witnesses a murder. Together with his partner, he wants to find out who the victim is and what lies behind a strange check won during a poker game.

When a love story begins, differences, negative character sides, personal needs, are immolated on the altar of love…. Then, over time, everything inexorably resurfaces on the surface. One rediscovers with amazement one's own individuality, which seemed to have been diluted by love, relentlessly reaching the crossroads of transmutation. Then the veils of sentiment that concealed our tendency to individualism from ourselves become more and more transparent, revealing us sadly selfish and unrealistic beings. At that point comes the "big opportunity". Accept and be accepted for who we are, beautiful or ugly ... good or bad... in short, us. Paradoxically, at that moment we realize that everything was clearer, right from the start.

It is known that Muybridge was at the same time a great photographer and a killer, executioner of his wife’s lover and that into his own station physiologique (to use Marey’s term for his own working laboratory), it seems, not a single black man ever entered. Female servants, the unemployed, artists’ models supplied by the State, musclemen, the infirm and prostitutes were all undressed there. They all ran, people as well as animals under the sun of Palo Alto. In this P. T. Barnum style atmosphere, a melancholy Noah’s Ark, Muybridge himself would appear as a laborer nude.

Excerpts from a collection of 9.5mm films dating from 1900 to 1928—including theatrical films, anthropological documentaries, and home movies—that reveal much about life during the silent-film era. —MoMa

Carmelo Bene reads poems by Dino Campana

Live from La Scala Friday 22 December 1989

I have several English style windows and this and a tree in winter have caused me to think about Fox-Talbot’s window—his first image, perhaps. Carried out, as usual, with the technique—but perhaps it would be better to say the discipline—of the flicker, which is, “the undulation, trembling, quivering, flashing, sparkling weakly” of the dictionary, in short everything of the cinèsi fosforescentica. Drawn from a thin monograph (it’s worth saying from typographic ink where there had been silver salts) I tried to shake my window using his where there had been a tree in winter. Cross-dissolving between real and not-real, between fixed and animated images of his lively works, seemed to me to reconstruct what would have perhaps happened to Fox-Talbot, filming my window in winter.