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Underground visions: David Lynch’s cinema
From being almost unknown at the beginnings of his career, with the 1976 cult film Eraserhead (confined in the night screening circuit for four years), to the front pages of international magazines, thanks to the unexpected success of the TV series Twin Peaks (about 12 years after), David Lynch’s cinema is quite variegated: between near and far, universal and individual, his look is lost in visual-narrative-chiasmic endless structures. Since his beginnings (his first “painting films” – Six Figures, 1967 and The alphabet, 1968) his cinema is imbued with a poetics that makes of ambiguity (semantic, visual, narrative) a permanent mark of visual construction. The nightmare of his visions is constantly measured with the strength of a narration that never fades, instead it gets entangled in a visual universe full of extremes: from intense light (electric discharges, sudden flashes) to cosmic darkness. Cortopotere chose six short films (made with different techniques, from pixilation to live action) and his masterpiece feature from 1976.
The alphabet, 1968, 4' The grandmother, 1970, 34' The amputee, 1973, 4' Eraserhead, 1976, 85' The cowboy and the frenchman, 1987, 25' Lumiere, 1995, 1' Haptic visions: Peter Tscherkassky’s cinema After Stan Brakage, Maya Deren and Patric Bokanowski, the 6th edition of Cortopotere dedicates a tribute to the experimental cinema of the Austrian Peter Tscherkassky (Vienna, 1958), who was at Cannes Film Festival last year in the “Quinzaine des réalisateurs” section with its last work “Instructions for a Light and Sound Machine”. In this retrospective, we present 7 short films that move inside a fragmented poetics (reminding us of Dziga Vertov), a perpetual investigation within that borderline, never defined, between the things we see (the image) and the act of seeing itself (the look of a camera). Disturbing, double and twisted images, within the construction of a ‘flickered’ universe (the disturbing flicker we find in his works) in which the cinema’s ‘material’ is literally pulsating. Then the filmstrip imposes its presence, way before letting the audience being carried away by the story (the director often uses some old filmstrips – found footage – that he manipulates and overexposes taking it into a new dimension of meaning).
Manufraktur, 1985, 3’ Tabula Rasa, 1987/89, 18’ Parallel Space, 1992, 18’ L’arrivée, 1997/98, 2’ Outer Space, 1999, 10’ Dream work, 2001, 12’ Instructions for a Light and Sound Machine, 2005, 17’ Hybrid bodies, distorted visions: Chris Cunningham Musician, video-maker and author of some memorable and unscrupulous TV spots (Mental Wealth, for Sony Playstation), Chris Cunningham (Reading, 1970) embodies the new generation of authors with that hyper-technologic taste which is connected, in this specific case, with a reflection on human body and its deformations and mutations. Cunningham stages the “imaginary fantasy” of that comics’ world he was born in (he drew the histories of Judge Dredd, then he was technician of special effects for Clive Barker – Cabal, 1989, for David Flincher – Alien, 1992 – and for Stanley Kubrick, who will then need him in 1995 for the preparation of A.I.). Cortopotere will screen the 7 video clips (among others, the ones for Madonna and Björk) that made him famous.
Come to Daddy, Aphex Twin, 1997, 6’ Only you, Portishead, 1997, 4’ Frozen, Madonna, 1998, 5’ Come on my selector, Squarepusher, 1998, 7’ Windowlicker, Aphex Twin, 1998, 11’ All is full of love, Björk, 1998, 4’ Italian anthropological cinema (3): Ernesto de Martino Going on with our trip inside the world of ethno-anthropological documentaries (the retrospective for Vittorio de Seta four years ago and the one of Luigi di Gianni a couple of years ago), this 6th edition of the festival peeks one more time in the magic and ritual world of southern Italy, a universe full of traditions often disappeared, ‘sunken’ or ‘chocked’. So the ‘50s-‘60s southern Italy is the subject of investigation of the ethnologist Ernesto de Martino (who defined himself “an ethnograph wandering around Southern Italy”), also working as a scientific consultant for some documentaries about mystic, ritual and religious realities of those lands (noteworthy was his investigation on the Apulian’s ‘tarantismo’ – the ritual which is supposed to heal people from the poisoning bit of the mythical spider ‘taranta’). Programme: five documentaries about De Martino’s magic-ritual world and two other documentaries, one about the rediscovery of Campania’s ancient traditions (Gabriele Palmieri), and the other about nowadays persistence of some cults of fertility (the last documentary from Luigi di Gianni).
Stendalì, Cecilia Mangini, 1960, 10' La passione del grano, Lino Del Fra, 1960, 10' La taranta, Gianfranco Mingozzi 1961, 17’ Il ballo delle vedove, Giuseppe Ferrara, 1962 Meloterapia del tarantismo, Diego Carpitella, 1959 I battenti, Gabriele Palmieri, 1967 La Madonna in cielo e la "matre" in terra, Luigi Di Gianni, 2006 Digital looks in European short filmsAn overview on the European scene: eight recent short films (Cortopotere joined the European Coordination of Film Festivals, choosing one of the eleven programmes proposed) that have lately made their appearance in some of the major European and international festivals. The leitmotiv is a substantial intervention of authors on the role and function of images: this eight directors work indeed to obtain a sort of visual hybrid, through more or less ‘intrusive’ digital techniques.
Home road movies, Robert Bradbrook, 12' Obras, Hendrick Dussollier, 12' Le conte du monde flottant, Alain Escalle, 24' Fear less, Therese Jakobsen, 4' Oh dear! , Nicolas Provost, 1' Dad's dead, Chris Shepherd, 6' Fast film, Virgil Widrich, 14' Simone Massi, artisan of ‘sunken animations’ Simone Massi was born in Pergola (Pesaro-Urbino) on May 23rd, 1970. Graduated in Animation Cinema at the Istituto Statale d'Arte in Urbino, he then gets an internship at the Studio Bozzetto. In 1996 he starts working as an independent animator in different production companies (Officine Pixel, Rainbow, Haiku, Caramanica, Puntomedia, Carrano), where he collaborates to the production of CD-ROMS ("Il furto della Rotonda", "Omnia Junior", "Base Terra" ediz. De Agostini; "La storia della Stampa"; "Tommy & Oscar"), video ("Join In"; "Non toccate i diritti dei bambini") and TV series ("Sopra i tetti di Venezia"). As a director, he realized some animation short films that got some retrospectives (Perugia, Fano, Bergamo, Messina, Berlin, Rome, Ancona), TV appearances ("Sushi" di MTV; "TGR" and Rai Tre’s "Blob”), the selection at Animania, international retrospective commemorating the centenary of animation’s films (Pesaro, 1998) and many other awards. “I mainly draw men. I’m interested in silences, details, in the things you can see in people only by looking at them closely: faces and hands full of lines, marks that tell endless beautiful stories; their eyes, that reveal their thoughts. I’m also fascinated by the early 1900’s, Eastern Europe and silent cinema . And then the sky, fields, free trunks and still life, but I’m respectful and intimidated by their strength, so I barely draw them; I keep them out of focus, like I’m trying to exalt something bigger than me and I know it’s stupid to try and put that on paper. I draw men then, but, if I were able to, I would draw clouds and lands.”
Tengo la posizione, 2001, 4' Piccola mare, 2003, 4' Io so chi sono, 2004, 3'
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