Il mnemonista

A worn record by Lou Reed, clips of film, texts that run on the video and are erased: traces of D. Sounds and images collected and rearranged, which recompose a simulated portrait, perhaps not resembling its original, but in which an attempt has been made not to lose that found charge of poetry and provocation. This film was made in 1982, on randomly recovered Super 8 material, shot by D., a seventeen-year-old boy, between 1977 and 1978, and completed with texts taken from interviews recorded in the same period. We have tried to transform forgotten finds, made of hallucinated and lucid self-portraits, significant of an original way of experiencing the condition of youth into active and narrated documentation.

Shot in the span of a few hours at a party held in Milan in 1979, the film takes the form of a reflection on a fragment of a lost youth reality in search of new references. Young people who, emerging from years of intense political activism and profound social and cultural changes (the 70s), are about to enter a new decade (the 80s) lived under the banner of rampantism and hedonism. A document attentive to individual behavior, to original ideas, to communicative intentions that go beyond parched languages. Facce di festa is built by assembling material collected with different cinematographic techniques: hidden camera, behavioral interviews, descriptive images. In the film, there is an attempt to create a delicate but tenacious interference between the author's narration and the viewer's perception. The camera becomes a vehicle for forcing the cinematographic narration by seeking a new space in the presence of the spectator.