La striscia

A woman sits, smokes, and reads in various states of 16mm exposure.

Amateur footage, filming of dubious origin, chromatic alterations and hard-core details in an alienating and curious collage with sinister and gloomy voices reciting poems of the beat generation.

To me, to go to the window and look outside is like watching a film. Filming is a way to draw out the condition of spectator and alienate it. I made this film very instinctively, naturally. Now I am beginning to learn to watch it. The very idea of something that moves, like a bird in flight… movement. The sensation of an object in space, like the light on a screen… space. The speed of the sun… time… the opposite of an image or perhaps its absence/essence. Some advice: go see a good Hollywood film: a melodramatic, sentimental story. (P. Bargellini)

While touring in Italy, a recently-widowed American opera singer has an incestuous relationship with her 15-year-old son to help him overcome his heroin addiction.

The story: the death of a dog, filmed subsequently, a violent death because it is caused in a veterinarian’s clinic; a man in a white coat injects the strychnine… The film: afterwards there’s a moment when the animal’s eye emit violet-blue flashes, then nothing, but only apparently. Now everything is sweetness, what continues is death: the voyage into death – the transfiguration – the images that return, only to disappear from memory, emerge from the recollections in a purifying vortex that take them back to their essence. It’s the gradual breaking down of the image into form and then into colours and then into light and finally it’s the beginning: the vibration that is the matrix of sound of light of life. It’s the cosmos that makes that meat good to eat for a million years.

Part of Piero Bargellini's Lost Cinema

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.

Short film by Paolo Brunatto with Roberto Benigni performing a fake political rally in Capalbio. Shot for the Italian television.

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.

Unfinished feature film by Piero Bargellini.

Film fragment shot by Piero Bargellini to be featured in "Erinnerung An Die Zukunft".

A very young Marco Melani is divided between reading cinema magazines and watching car racing on TV.