Alfredo Leonardi

With Vampiro romano, Leonardi made his last experimental film before switching to collective videomaking with the group Videobase, which focused on political investigation and counter-information. "We are all vampires. We live and move forward, intellectually and emotionally, thanks to the contribution – the 'blood' – of the people closest to us."

The title Amore amore (Love, Love) defines the primary emotive motor of the film and constitutes the filter through which are selected the materials used - people, things, signs - and determines a good portion of the associations though which the sequences unwind.

The struggle for housing in Rome, in the area of Magliana. Self-organization is opposed to the mediation of political parties, especially the Communist Party, and emerges as the only way for the emancipation and re-appropriation by the exploited.

"The question is, it is either going to be a stoned age or a new Stone Age" - Louis Brigante

A (temporary) leave of many friends who are my truest world, with the attempt of getting them together in an ideal summary conceived to support me during my being far away. –A. L.

Collective manifesto by the members of C.C.I. It is a collective film, the result of an operation devoid of any aesthetic purpose: to verify the existence of any harmony between a fairly large group (twelve people) of members of the independent Cooperative. Someone, who had the idea, turned 60 meters of Ektachrome according to the moods –or discontent – of the moment and gave them to others to see. The others reacted, each with their own piece. It was then thought to call the film “circular letter”. It was not so simple and so quick: the operation, which started in June of ’68, ended in March of ’69.

The documentary deals with the struggle s to obtain decent housing in a metropolis such the capital city of Italy in which the right for all to an acceptable dwelling is met with by all kids of serius obstacles-the chaotic increase of urbanization, the building speculation, the degradayion of suburbs, the magnitudine of slums with their unfortunatle inhabitants whose living condition have been dramatic for years. Starting from the Roman situation, the documentary faces the general housing problem in the country as whole and therefore the problrm of the struggles which people support - also through new structures such as People's Councils and Commitees - on the entire national territory in oder to attain one the primary goals of a decent society: a home whorty of its name for all its citizens.

Documentary about life in Italian working class neighborhoods.

Documentary on the fight for housing in the 70s in Magliana, a popular neighborhood of Rome.

Omsa Sud workers’ struggle to keep the factory occupied. The documentary was partially realized within a project financed by the city of Fermo, which initially included the idea of teaching video shooting techniques as part of a laboratory. Omsa Sud was shot only in one week, an unusual occurence for the Videobase group, and features as part of their methodology the "video within the video" approach.

In the distant future, a spaceship inhabited by a group of young descendants of a "subversive" minority who escaped the destruction of the Earth, recovers a capsule in which the hibernating body of a reactionary warmonger has been preserved, who after having caused war and death, it has abandoned the now unlivable Earth. The visual experimentation aimed at the liberation of the gaze is intertwined with psychedelic visions on the one hand and with the orgone theory of Reichian memory on the other.

The struggles of the workers at Montedison in Porto Marghera, following an accident that resulted in the deaths of three people.

Stories of Italian emigrants in Berlin declined without an ethic of sacrifice and goodism but through a sense of the ferocity necessary to wrest survival from the miserable life that capitalism has offered and continues to impose on us.

Work and life of Musica Elettronica Viva, group of live electronic music, mainly composed by American musicians, active in Rome, Italy. –A. L.

A television experiment, filmed with the first portable video recorders, in the Ligurian community of Carloforte, on the island of San Pietro: for two months, the small crew lived in close contact with the people and their daily lives. They created a collective portrait, featuring former ore carriers, seafarers, salt workers, fishermen, tuna fishermen, industrial workers in the Sulcis area, young men and women from the nautical and teaching sectors, and the women, "white widows," wives of sailors, entrusted with raising their children. Three years later, in light of the changes, that first portrait—comprising life, work, feelings, and hopes, past and present—was shown to the islanders in the streets, squares, workplaces, and schools. Reactions and comments were filmed and incorporated into the final edit, which showcases the process and working method. Video is used as a means of recognition, identity, participation, and horizontal dialogue, a pioneering "street television."

In a construction site near Rome, a Calabrian construction worker dies. The emigrant's hard life is reconstructed through the words of his fellow workers and family, interviewd between Rome and Calabria. One of the first experiments of collective directing that will later turn into the group Videobase.

Prison as the repressed side of an entire society. As such, it flows in the long monologue of an ex-con recorded by the analogue videotape which, still at his dawn, captures it in its integrity.

In this film, as in all my previous ones, there is a direct connection between inner urges and cinematic rendering. I tried to visualize my present aspiration to recover, through the various ways taught by one’s experience, the easiness, directness and ripeness proper to children’s relationships and affective life. This film is maybe a track of this path backwards. – A. L.

In 1969, Leonardi traveled to the United States to write a book about the New American Cinema. Using a Super-8 camera, he made a film-diary of this experience between New York and San Francisco. During his journey, the director’s love for experimental cinema was shaken by overwhelming political events, which forged a profound social conscience.

Motion Vision was originally screened in alternation with slides as part of the rotating installation Rotor Vision, in Rome in 1967 for the seminal group show at L’Attico entitled Fuoco, Immagine, Acqua, Terra with the participation of Mario Bignardi, Mario Ceroli, Piero Gilardi, Jannis Kounellis, Pino Pascali and Michelangelo Pistoletto. In Motion Vision Bignardi constructs a curious repertoire of animal profiles drawn in colour on paper, alternated with pop icons and a sequence of everyday gestures: from the tying of neckties the film passes to walking nude figures in slow motion, alluding to Muybridge and his chronophotography. —Tate Modern

In all of his work, Bussotti makes frequent reference to the body, to sexuality. This to remind musicians — especially classically trained ones — that they are not body-less angels, that they are not just their musical thoughts, that they are still, in the last analysis, flesh and bones. Thus the erotic is not for shocking, but to stress that making music involves the body in a very direct way.

During the 1968 Pesaro Festival, animated by the intervention of the students, riots occurred caused by fascist provocations and the usual police brutality. Following clashes culminating in the arrest of several Festival participants, there was a general assembly of those present in Pesaro, whose firm attitude led to the release of those arrested. The film is a chronicle of that meeting (It is the second of the cycle Seeing is a way of thinking).

The focus of this documentary is the nurses and porters working at the Policlinico universitario Umberto I in Rome, which demand equal treatment within a militan action that follows the steps of the operaist labor struggles in factories.