Marinella Pirelli

This very short film portraits Luciano Fabro recording the breast of the Florentine art critic Carla Lonzi on a piece of paper, drawing a circle with a pencil, cutting it, producing a cone, wrapping it with a needle. Film, 16mm, digital transfer, colour, silent

16mm film by Marinella Pirelli.

Film installation by Marinella Pirelli.

16mm film by Marinella Pirelli.

16mm film by Marinella Pirelli.

Produced in January 1974, just after the death of her husband Giovanni Pirelli, the last film by Marinella Pirelli, austere and moving, appeared as an attempt to exorcise this event and the elaboration of grief. In the double role of actress and director, the artist records herself in movement without controlling the image. - Érik Bullot 16mm, digital transfer, colour, sound

16mm film by Marinella Pirelli.

A dark screen. The hand of the artist, covering the lens like a mask, rises slowly, revealing an undulating landscape in black and white.

16mm short by Marinella Pirelli.

Having remained wrapped up in a dark basement for over forty years, Marinella Pirelli's 16mm film explorations of light and movement have only recently resurfaced. Active in the 1960s and 70s, and one of the few Italian woman artists working in experimental film, her works traverse numerous thematics connected to the body, the gaze and the relationship with the cinema apparatus/projection event.

The film develops around a series of shots of Gino Marotta's sculptures at the Natural-Artificial exhibition at the Galleria dell'Ariete (Milan, 1968). The images are inserted in a tight montage that alternates natural visions with pure ghosts of shapes-light in motion. The rhythms are marked by the music of Cage. Shapes and colors outline volumes like liquid and bright substances, derived from the intense play of transparencies and overlaps. From a manuscript note preserved in the Marinella Pirelli Archive (Varese), the artist reports: Marotta's sculptures were the pretext I was looking for: they are in methacrylate perspex, transparent and polarizing, with those surfaces made of pure luminous variations: but they were precisely a pretext.

16mm film by Marinella Pirelli.

Pixillation 16mm film by Marinella Pirelli.

The lake, shot with life shots, demonstrates the mastery with which the artist treats film writing. To modern music by Bruno Maderna, the film alternates framing of winter landscapes, at dawn and dusk, with the face of a girl in the foreground. At times the music is mixed with bird sounds or natural sounds, in a discreet, almost imperceptible way. The film favors the intertwining, the tangles of entangled trunks and branches, the foliage, all motifs that are often found in the painting of Marinella Pirelli, which are echoed by the movements of the camera - sometimes convulsive - and the bare feet that advance in the grass crossing the frame.

To music by John Coltrane, the film mixes quick shots of common objects or still lifes and the fragments of a filmed diary showing some friends on vacation in Torcello, in the Venetian lagoon, walking around reading the newspaper, chatting during lunch, cutting vegetables, playing chess. The shots, taken without a tripod, have a decidedly impressive visual intensity: backlit silhouettes, bright portraits, fruit and shells reminiscent of still lifes. In a convulsive and irrepressible way, with the flow of visual assonances, The little boredom intertwines the pictorial formalism of the compositions with the scenes of everyday life.

Pirelli takes close-up details of her body in a diary-like format.

This short animated film plays on the motif of the checkerboard grid in a modernist sense, i.e. favoring the formal and graphic oppositions between the squares, the circle and the square, black and white, recalling familiar avant-garde practices.