Massimo Bacigalupo

On November 26, 1976, Massimo Bacigalupo was in Catania with his 16mm camera, filming the streets of the city at the foot of Mount Etna and the people lingering and strolling about. The movement and the pauses in everyday life —seemingly boring and not particularly appealing— captured the filmmaker’s attention. Bacigalupo recalls those diary-style film shots, edited years later into a film:

Shot between Italy and New York City, Warming Up is the journal of a season of creativity. The film-maker and his characters improvise scenes and sequences, and wonder how to make up a story as they go along. The recurring theme is how to make the world (or read it as) an imaginative place...

A series of migrants who at times narrate and impersonate shards of myths, among them the Great Goddess, the Virgin of Bach’s Magnificat, the Sulamite of Stockhausen’s Song of Solomon (“I am black but comely”), tales by Herodotus, Kafka, Villon (as set to music by Ezra Pound). Third part of the Flower of Eryngium cycle.

The construction of the film is very simple. Most of the time we see faces in close-up. Three pairs of faces, usually, on three different levels of superimpositions. At first, the faces are very theatrical, made-up. It's not clear whether they are men or women. They move only slightly. They are, indeed, godlike. As the film progresses, very unnoticeably, these faces begin to gain more life and masculine and feminine qualities. At the end of the film, after three hours, the faces are very real, and very human, and sexes and ages are very clearly defined: men, women, children.

A conclusion and recapitulation of the Eryngium cycle, Coda deals directly with the theme of self-portraiture. The first shot alludes to the end of Erichvon Stroheim's Foolish Wives, where the corpse of the hero-director is dispatched in a man-hole. Other dramatic self-portraits follow: Caravaggio's Goliath, Dante's Sestina (read by the film-maker), and Dürer's Self-portrait with Eryngium. The abandoned villa of Migrazione is revisited. But the finale is hopeful.

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.

Tonino De Bernardi and Massimo Bacigalupo met in the second half of the 60s and since then they have always remained friends, the two of them and their families. Massimo appears in several of Tonino's films and Tonino is in some of Massimo's films, an uninterrupted relationship, theirs, which has been a source of comparison and sharing for both.

German dancer Angela Kirsten rehearses and dances (from memory) Balanchine's choreography of "Ricercar" by Bach-Webern, in New York 1973 where Massimo Bacigalupo met her before she would become his wife and mother of his two children.