Discover Movies

Scratched film with sensory effects.

A young employee in a large industry. Its identity breaks away from the harshness of a system determined by power and hypocrisy. It struggles in the quicksand of everyday banality, and even its private life crumbles under the steamroller with inexorable rules.

The use of new methodologies in the Lograto institute for handicapped children.

Doing the America thing: riding around in a car, looking out at the landscape (desert, trees and bushes, cities), observing the driver, enjoying the ride as a pure, almost primeval cinematic act. All bookended by phantom rides through the bright lights of Las Vegas. – Olaf Möller

A film by Valentina Berardinone

Playing with yourself, asking yourself questions and giving yourself answers. With the video delude yourself that you are not alone.

In this video performance I used one of the most basic features of the video recorder, i.e. the possibility of retransmitting the recording immediately after making it.

Explanatory example of how the video loop works. I have used this device for many of my videos since 1978.

OihccepS = Mirror.

Closed in an empty room, a young artist gradually creates a sculpture made of air, which is then given as a present to the world by blowing it out through the door’s keyhole.

Structural film conceived as an architectural construction where compositional rigor slows down and incorporates a Dionysian feeling of existence, wants to represent through almost physical blocks of frames a feeling of horror for the violence that pervades the contemporary world: lifeless bodies abandoned in cars lost in the bush, the advance of a marching army, a face that deforms into an expressionist scream, other faces, alternation of positive and negative frames: visual leitmotifs that recur obsessively.

A game, maybe a dream, an exchange of identity with Dalibor Martinis, Sanja Ivekovic and Goran Trbuljak. But who is Luigi Viola? The man who is praying, the man who is shaving, the man who is drinking, the blonde girl who is playing ping-pong? This is just a starting-point.

The artist comes over and sits down, blindfolds himself. A woman holds onions to her eyes and cries. The artist and the woman, taking turns at the blackboard, write Usura (Usury) and Amore e Misericordia (Love and Mercy). The artist, still blindfolded, moves toward the comer; the woman then plays on the harmonica the words they have written. Hearing the sound, the artist picks up two carafes of water. The second man stands up and rhythmically marches in place. His cadenced steps provide a reference point for the artist, who reaches the chairs, climbs onto them, and tries to pour water over the fish. After descending from the chairs he moves toward the marching man, takes a vial of chloroform from his pocket, inhales it, and passes out. The blindfolded woman on the bed urinates on the mattress and, turning over her hand, writes Canto Sospeso (Suspended Song) on the blackboard. The man continues to march and the child continues to play his note on the accordion.

Based on the homonymous story by Andrea Granchi in the form of a parodied biography, the film retraces and uses, on the edge of a marked and sometimes bitter irony, that heterogeneous accumulation of materials, documents, images and objects that represent a life starting from childhood. The key to the work lies in the inversion of the natural relationship of youth-old age, in the paroxysmal and comic-pathetic exorcising of 'passing time' and in the paradox of a reverse 'career' in which, in the name of conventional and deceptive ideals of success and health, the protagonist progressively loses pieces of himself, declines and transforms until the final rhetoric epilogue.

In this film we are shown the interior of the old Paris apartment where the artist's mother still lives, surrounded by the magnificent pictures by her husband Michel Loffredo, a painter of Neapolitan origin. At the same time we see a crane outside demolishing the house opposite, and the protests – which are often hand-written on the walls by the people living in the neighborhood – against property speculators and the 'renovation' which is being imposed with the violence of a mechanical digger. The camera pauses powerlessly before the equipment and the magnificent portraits in the apartment, then it moves on to look at the inhabitants of the area, the little cafés, and oblique views of Montparnasse which still retains its pleasant bohemian ambiance.

This documentary takes its cue from the death of Padre Pio and from the atmosphere of intense popular mourning, so as to examine the birth and development of one of this century's most exceptional myths

The exploits of Umberto Nobile’s expedition to the North Pole remembered, after 50 years, with the survivors in Adro (Brescia).

Photographer Giorgio Bergami captures Genoa in 1977. A poetry of images, voices, and music that intertwine in the Genoa of those years.

It is a 15-minute black-and-white short film produced in Italy in 1972. It was scheduled for screenings in mid-December 1976 in Italy, appearing in both evening and late-night slots of Kinomata retrospective.

1973. Giorgio de Chirico, by then 85 years old, is captured in his studio by the RAI program How a Work of Art Is Born by Franco Simongini. On the canvas, "The Sun on the Easel" gradually comes to life.

The life of Don Giuseppe Parisi, called "The Priest of Ratanate", a well-known magician and healer in Milan in the 1930s, based on the testimonies of two women.

Attempt to express within one's own limits.

New York daily life, from dawn to night; an agonizing portrait of emigration.

Several fragments of life in la Ramats, an isolated village of the Piedmont mountains, between 1973 and 1975.

It is the attempt to initiate an analytical discourse on the image, alternating visual events with written words which reflect on the image [...] and which, on the screen, become images themselves. The relationship between word and image here is often reversed, sometimes juxtaposed, always slightly shifted. In this film, the feeling of the image as a "phenomenon" returns.

Valentina Berardinone is an artist who favors the use of particular kinds of resin in her paintings and 'assemblages' which often represent the freezing in time of a falling drip–at other times it is a whole flow of liquid pouring over a staircase to be frozen in its slow advance. But even in their fixed state all these images refer to movement, either past or potential, for their manner of presentation. And this movement, which is necessarily frozen in the paintings and sculptures, is restored to its origins by Berardinone through the cinema. From her first work, Silent Invasion, she has reconstructed on film the impending descent of a mass of resin down a flight of stairs, this movement being repeated and emphasized through the use of a magnifying glass.

In this video performance, I did not think or look for pleasant sounds or musical origins, but only a performative action carried out in the darkness of the blind person, of the diviner who moves in uncertainty, looking for a contact or a creative event with the material.

My video work Ars Moriendi from 1974 came to my mind during a night with a strong storm charged with electricity. Electric discharges and continuous thunder, flashes of lightning in the short term. In the video performance, the electric wire in which I was wrapped was connected to a button that I held in my fist, thus causing the light to turn on and off.

Ombre mobili from 1971 was my first video work; a first test born from my environmental art project, an exhibition that could be made with lamps and lights that were supposed to stand out against the white walls of Studio 74, the constantly moving shadows of the audience present.

A left and a right arm come together in the center of the image, and both start writing, in Italian, the date on a wall: "oggi è venerdì ventisette marzo millenovecentosettanta" (today is Friday the nineteenth of March nineteen seventy). The left is the mirror image of the right.

The instrument is visually "played" through camera movements. In a second phase, the video composition is set to music with the sounds of the clarinet.

As part of my artistic research, dating back to the years from 1975 to 1978, among the objectives I felt the need to give expressive autonomy to the film medium, understood no longer as a mere reproduction of a performance, a happening or a workshop . Looking, not as a director, but as a visual artist, to a certain underground and independent Cinema, this is the first of his films (in 8mm color film) by direct editing on the camera, with internal and external shots, entirely superimposed.

Roads of a journey filmed through the dashboard of my beetle.

Landscape of Paestum taken up in a kaleidoscope of colored fragments.

Integrative short film for a multimedia theatre play.

Four integrative short films for a multimedia theatre play.

A walk through the streets of the city. Work on the edge of a paradox, because it touches the problem of ideology in its own more ambiguous boundaries, hovering between the message of proselytizing and critical reflection, including the assumption of public responsibility by the artist - here he becomes almost a peaceful militant and political agitator, well beyond his role - and the “secret” size of the politics as entirely subjective passion and enthusiasm for life, but also as a moral obligation.

An image that recalls childhood, frees the verbal stream of memory and the subconscious, reduces words to an indistinct groaning coming from the innermost recesses of the body, as amorphous psychic matter.

An analysis of the nature of this means of communication. The absence of an action on the video does not mean the negation of the video; on the contrary, the less freedom is granted to the image, the greater freedom is granted to the imagination. An attempt to probe into the body of the video to discovery its soul.

In this case taking place means changing places, a complete and mutual transformation, as is seen in the eternal contrast between bios and thanatos. In the video changing places becomes a moment of identification, favored by the ambiguity of a date, 1949 which is the only element two people have in common, since one of them died and the other was born in that year.

A film made up of four long shots filmed in 1973 with a Fuji camera.

"I have always been fascinated by this strange object: a sculpture in the middle of the water." (MS)

Experimental film by Gianni Bertini.

A 8mm b/w film depicting the town of Varese and the director's mother.

"Contemporanea" was an exhibition held in Rome at the end of 1973 in an underground car park down below Villa Borghese.

A filmed performance by Giuliano Sturli.

16mm short by Laura Grisi.

Short by Studio 970/2.