23.SEP.2004 09.NOV.2004
YURI ANCARANI,
MASSIMILIANO E GIANLUCA DE SERIO,
NICOLAS DEVOS, CAROLINA GONÇALVES
MAKING MOVIES
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YURI ANCARANI, MASSIMILIANO E GIANLUCA DE SERIO, NICOLAS DEVOS, CAROLINA GONÇALVES Making Movies
“Making Movies” presents the work of 5 artists born in the 1970s, united by being active both in the world of film production and in that of video art. But the boundaries of these genres are too limiting and these artists in fact work in the mixed and morphologically uncertain terrain of free play of the imagination in movement, which mainly follows narrative suggestions. Literary, musical and autobiographical seductions interweave among themselves, triggering a semantic and emotional proliferation that characterises the particular nature of these works.
The work of Yuri Ancarani (Ravenna, 1972) focuses on the complexity of the geological and cultural landscapes of the Romagna Riviera, not the one of sparkling holidays but the one of swamp-like industrial suburbs. Influenced by the ‘musical’ writing of Tondelli, who has reserved some of his best pages for the micro-world of the Riviera, Ancarani’s gaze poses on men and things with a languid and attracted air. It is impossible to say whether Vicino al cuore (2004, 3’20’’) is an art video or a film short. It is simply an intense and passionate gaze on a night-time excursion in a boat, on the extreme outskirts of the factories that surround Ravenna, where the sea begins. In an unforgettable place of an ambiguous and spectacular attraction, made of wisps of smoke and blazes of light, this weighing anchor takes on the ancestral flavour of voyage and myth, in a totally emotional dimension that leads directly back to evocations in Tondelli’s writing.
The poetics of Gianluca and Massimiliano De Serio (Turin, 1978), filmmakers, is centred on memory and identity. The subjects of their stories are people marked by uprooting and nomadism, marginal figures whose notion of identity is reduced until it loses itself in the anonymity of metropolitan space. Winners of the Kodak Short Film Award for the best Italian short on film at the Turin Film Festival 2003 and chosen for the 2005 short film Oscars at Los Angeles, here they present Il giorno del santo (2002, 17’). Produced with the support of the Turin Film Commission, it narrates the story of the last working day in Turin of a Kurdish-Iraqi girl. The images and the girl’s first person story of her life as an emigrant are accompanied, in ideal unity, by fragments of old super 8s from the 1970s that document the hard work of Italian labourers, also obliged to emigrate to search for a better life.
A French flea-market, an old 8 mm film, an unknown name (Maxime Soufflet), and a date (1942-1962). Starting from these different elements, Nicolas Devos (Dunkirk, 1975), filmmaker and eclectic composer, has put together Di marmo siete voi (2003, 17’), produced by the prestigious French visual arts centre Le Fresnoy. Everything that one knows about Maxime Soufflet and the places filmed can only be deduced by supposition from the images of the film. Holiday scenes are glimpsed, a wedding, children. Devos’ art making lies in an attempt to give new life to the visual diary of a forgotten man, restoring narrative vigour and emotion to the images through the music he himself has composed. The artist is freely inspired by the scores of the German 17th-century composer Heinrich Schütz, and, indeed, his work took its name from the title of a madrigal by the German musician: Di marmo siete voi. It signals a challenge: to give dignity and solid ‘marble’ testimony to the images of a life, which could be those of anyone, forgotten in the general oblivion on a suburban market stall.
Carolina Gonçalves (São Paulo, 1977) works mainly in the film world, but with an attention for details and for the ‘weight’ of each single image which has led to much appreciation for her work. Also produced by the French Le Fresnoy centre, Clairelumière (2003, 15’) presents moments in the daily urban life of Claire, a girl who has been deaf since birth. The artist grew up with a deaf mother and since infancy has learnt naturally to live in the particular sensorial universe of those who lack this sense. This work narrates this personal experience, through a subtle and delicate narrative register. Various deaf-born children were involved in the project as actors, which helps to make the boundary between fiction and reality in the work indefinite and ambiguous.