20
Italian Experimental Cinema: Art, Politics, Poetry1

Sandra Lischi

Italian experimental cinema is more than 100 years old. This is reflected not only in critical contributions on the subject but also by exhibitions, retrospectives, and festivals, such as the recent event at the Austrian Film Museum in Vienna from November 23 to 30, 2011. “The Night and the Day: Italian Experimental 1905–2010” was curated by Giulio Bursi and Federico Rossin, and organized in collaboration with several Italian film libraries and archives.

Of course, it is only possible to identify this vast time frame and the rich variety of the selected and presented pieces—more than 80 films—if the term “experimental” is understood in a clear and articulate sense, from the avant‐gardes of the early twentieth century to electronic production. The definition needs to include the many different terminological efforts that have characterized the international debate on the topic, and to incorporate the different fields of practice: art film (and video production); abstract, underground, research‐oriented, and avant‐garde cinema (historical and neo); “different cinema” (cinema differente), new cinema, “other cinema” (altro cinema), expanded cinema—with distinctions within these categories—and many more. Such a definition needs also to comprise the differentiations, the contrasts even, between “avant‐garde” and “experimentalism,” as expressed by Umberto Eco, prompted by the literary experience of the “Gruppo 63.” Eco (1985) argues that the goal was to mark a difference in emphasis, the importance of practices and poetics, internal and external provocations (the relationship of art production to society), and the relationship between author and reader. Even within the career of a single artist, there can be moments characterized as radically “avant‐garde” (to synthesize: those that question the very idea of art) and moments characterized as “experimental” (the presence of innovative language in the work of art). Cosetta Saba (2006, 33) made this point in joining the debate, drawing her conclusion with particular regard to the relationship between the Italian cinematographic and video avant‐gardes and technology. She chose “independent cinema” as a flexible and inclusive term for a long, uneven trajectory, signifying work that is “external to the cinema industry, to its production and reception mechanisms,” including—and not as a secondary factor—the audience in its new, different (experimental) attitude. The choice of the term “independent” also seems to indicate a political value in its widest sense.

Avant‐garde, Independents, Experimentalists: A Premise

Nevertheless, the notion of independent cinema (in itself much debated) does not necessarily imply avant‐garde or experimental attitudes, as proven by a large part of very important Italian documentary production in which the research of different expressive forms or languages does not always come first. What does get often explored in the case of documentary are new avenues that have been censored or removed from the media’s reach. There is also engagement with so‐called nonfiction and often with unusual methods of distribution (and, thus, ways of relating to the spectator). To speak of documentary in this sense is to speak of independent works, but are they also experimental? Again, Eco (1985, 96): “If to experiment means to operate in an innovative manner with respect to settled tradition, every work of art that we celebrate as significant has been in its own way experimental.”

Dominique Noguez, in Eloge du cinéma experimental (1999), makes a precise graphic choice, starting from the cover and then continuing throughout the book: every time the word “experimental” appears, it is “erased” with a large, horizontal “X,” as though annulled in its connotation of apartness, of difference and marginality. With this gesture, so‐called experimental cinema reclaims its central relationship to cinema tout court, and at the same time lays itself open to question. At the beginning of the book, Noguez explores terminologies (pure cinema, rhythmic, integral, absolute, essential cinema, poetry cinema, young, new, independent, visionary, creative cinema, and so on), with their limits and ambiguities, pausing then on two of the most frequently used terms—avant‐garde and experimental. He selects “experimental,” nevertheless stressing its incompleteness: that is, the discomfort that derives from the implicit reference to a transgression with respect to a presumably perfect norm. And so the use of the term and, with it, its deletion: “I propose to exclude it and maintain it at the same time, deleting its twelve letters, like Heidegger and later Derrida deleted the word ‘being’” (24).

In his theoretical analysis of the distinctive traits of this style of cinema, Noguez arrived at this consideration:

We could say that every time that a film is less interesting for what it shows or narrates than for how it shows or narrates it; every time that the screen seems to tell us, “Look at the rectangle that I am, at the picture that I am, at the whiteness that I am—look at how shapes are linked on my surface, how they move”; every time that colours seem to say, “Look at my splendour or at my plainness”; every time that the film seems to tell us: “See my grain, or my opaqueness”; then we are being confronted with the triumph of poetic function, and thus with experimental cinema (35–36).

This is one of the most important aspects: the triumph of the poetic function (to recall, with Noguez, the phases of communication identified by Roman Jakobson) over the phatic and referential functions. But the boundaries are flexible and jagged, and if this mode of discrimination appears overly restrictive—just as “independent cinema” sometimes appears too broad—analysis of the pieces of work and the identification of modes of expression and themes comprise, in fact, an extensive and diversified geography that makes it hard to formulate a theory and puts to harsh proof the methodologies of critical and textual analysis.

If we compare certain categories or forms of international and Italian cinema, we can find areas of correspondence, if not coincidence, some interferences, some dissonances—as well as the coexistence of opposing tendencies, which can be seen in the case of artists who work in complete solitude and autonomy, or on the other hand, as part of a group, a collective, a movement, a cooperative.

In general, among the characteristics unanimously attributed to experimental cinema, we find, on the socioeconomic and technical side, low budgets, the artistic/artisanal nature of the bricoleur, resourcefulness in inventing machines or modifying devices, and the material or chemical manipulation of the filmstrip itself. Filming takes place far from the classic set and studio, making use of real or virtual places, mostly with nonprofessional actors, often with friends or family members (more or less extended families), or with people filmed in real contexts, often without their knowledge. In films that use found footage, the actors are, “at one remove,” lifted from old films and carried back to the set of a new film construction—or perhaps they are the effects themselves: formal adventures rather than the adventures that happen to the actor. The filmmaking is marked at times by a strong gestural component, improvisational and performative. The editing is at times absent, at times frenetic, at times constructed according to formal principles, but always distant from the conventions of linear narrative development, identification, and credibility.

With regard to language (the aesthetics and techniques), works that are nonnarrative, “dis‐narrative,” or openly antinarrative predominate. They follow the musical, poetic, and/or pictorial models; they play with temporality (altering, slowing down, accelerating time); they experiment with the single image, with the celluloid (drawn, painted, engraved, burned, scratched), with the framing—the very meaning of which tends to dissolve. Formal inventions and effects abound: collage, fragment, flux; pre‐existing materials are employed; the audio dimension is often far removed from dialogue or speech—attentive to the musical, to noise, disturbance, silence, asynchronism, and the aurally aleatory.

As for the presentation of films, we find unexpected distribution networks, festival sections, cine clubs, biennali and art galleries, noncanonical spaces; but also poli‐visions, overlapping screenings, projections on surfaces different from the traditional screen, screenings modified in real time, interventions by and/or directed toward the audience (by and/or directed toward the artist, by and/or directed toward the actors), projections that include a strong live performance component, screenings with the diffusion of aromas.

The spectator, as previously mentioned, often takes on a role in the work both active and programmed, becoming in different ways the “subject,” or rather the screening device, singled out by various forms of direct interpellation. But the spectator is also considered (and provoked into becoming) the protagonist of an uneasy experience since he/she is deliberately tasked with assignments requiring audiovisual patience, the endurance of disturbance, arduously long time frames, and the frenetic or entirely static pace of the camera. Sometimes—in its most extreme manifestation, as in the style of Peter Kubelka—there can be an (apparent) absence of anything to see.

Several scholars have explored and systematized these characteristics of experimental cinema (as far as is possible, considering the topic’s unruliness), among them Italy’s Adriano Aprà, who made a vast contribution to the diffusion of the New American Cinema in Italy. One of the most perceptive observers and active supporters of nonfiction cinema, experimental and independent, both nationally and internationally, he pointed out (1986, 12)—as Noguez would do later, albeit differently—that “cinema is one, even if production methods and the audiences differ, and categorical divisions do no benefit at the level of creativity.” Aside from aspects of style and language, technical devices and their reinvention, and the poetic and distribution choices made, it is also possible to identify a body of attitudes and thematic preferences: the intimate and journal‐like; the biographical and autobiographical (“the integration of cinema into life” Aprà called it [13]); the oneiric; the purely abstract; the voyage (both inner and actual, or the everyday and the elsewhere, in Saba’s terms [2006, 49]); the train; the city and the metropolis; the portrait and self‐portrait (but also the disguise, writes Noguez [1999, 220–21]); the body; eroticism and sex; birth and death; the live—although mediated by the recording on film and magnetic tape; memory, collective or individual and at times present through found footage; the attention to media, to society, to politics—although in ways distant from classical enquiry and documentary.

It is impossible to outline here precise correspondences or to summarize a debate on the avant‐gardes. Many of the characteristics articulated by different scholars can be found in Italian experimental cinema to a greater or lesser degree. As we will see, however, some specific features develop out of the national panorama, while Italian experimental cinema remains quite impermeable and indifferent to certain forms present in the international sphere (such as structural film).

The Italian Panorama: From the Futurists Onward

In terms of Italian and international experimental cinema, the first element to consider, at least until recent decades if not the last few years, is a certain laziness and indifference on the part of critics and the entire historiography of Italian cinema with regard to this field of audiovisual creation. There are few texts on avant‐garde cinema, in general, and explorations on Italian experimental cinema are more often than not linked to retrospectives and homages by specific festivals rather than to independent in‐depth analyses. Although nonnarrative cinema has recently managed to win a larger space than in the past, in part through publications on the documentary and on animation, there still exists no historical–critical text that examines Italian experimental film production as a whole. One must rely on a few monographs by specialist authors; the catalogues of cultural events; the occasional essay in Italian cinema publications; the excellent work of Raro Video, with its release of DVDs and books dedicated to cinema and video creation; and to some Italian experimental artists.2 This tradition of “deafness” toward the nonnarrative sphere clearly reflects the global predominance of mainstream cinema and a television output in which fiction and entertainment still maintain the monopoly. But in Italy it also corresponds to the resistance of television broadcasters to different audiovisual forms,3 the lack of funding for nonhomogenous cultural activities, a certain indifference within a large part of the academic world, and a crisis in the network of cine clubs and festivals that had spread knowledge of Italian and international experimental production for decades.

Nevertheless, certain studies and events (see Aprà, Bertetto, Di Marino, Enzo Ungari, Farassino, among others)4 have brought to light a lively field that stretches across an entire century of dialogue between the Italian and international cinemas, with important roles ascribed to directors, artists, independent authors, and experimenters with techniques and devices that often moved (even within one piece of work, or by the same artist) between the figurative and the realistic dimensions, avant‐garde and social gaze, documentary and abstraction—giving life to forms of association, manifestos, proposals, spaces for creation, and even training.

Recent interest in experimentation in Italy is due, I think, to two main factors. On the one hand, there is the gradual emergence of an increasingly relevant amateur and independent nonnarrative presence. This is thanks to growing interest in video and video art, to new generations becoming used to different rhythms and modes of expression (also spread by advertising and music videos), to digital technology, and to new forms of sharing and distribution. Publications about art cinema (often considered a sphere apart, quite distinct from experimental and underground cinema) certainly are much concerned with the current idea of cinema esposto (exhibited cinema), a cinema that migrates from theater to gallery, to places such as the Venice Biennale, in short, to diverse exhibition spaces. On the other hand, historical excavation has also played a part, particularly research into the early 1900s, thanks to celebrations (conferences, exhibitions, meetings) in 2009 and 2010 marking the centenary of the first futurist manifesto (1909).5 In other words, it is both the gaze toward the future of images and the gaze into their past that have opened a window on noncanonical forms of cinema in Italy. These windows include projects by cinema archives and cultural institutions to recover and restore films, starting particularly under Adriano Aprà’s direction at the Cineteca Nazionale in Rome from 1998 to 2002, and continuing to the present.

A committed focus on futurism has been especially important; studies and conferences have multiplied recently in Italy. Clearly, the obligatory reference point (and most often used, since the films no longer exist or never went further than projects) is the Manifesto of Futurist Cinematography of 1916, with its antinarrative and antiliterary character and its proposal of poli‐expressive solutions that would give the status of actor to letters of the alphabet and to numbers; exalt the simultaneity and interpenetration of different times and spaces; promote unreal reconstructions of the body, as well as linear, chromatic and plastic equivalences; foreground the dramas of objects; and so on. Comparison with other manifestos and declarations is enlightening (the ideas on theater, dance, radio)—with a legacy of the futurist poetic right up to recent experimental digital productions. The prevailing reference is to the researches by Ginna e Corra (the brothers Arnaldo and Bruno Ginanni‐Corradini), prefuturist in a certain sense, “in advance of the projects and experimentations of abstract films (from Schoenberg to Survage, from Eggeling to Richter)” (Costa 2002, 166). It is clear that both futurist poetics and the artistic practice of performance and provocation; the use of “sound‐making” machines; and the exaltation of energy, luminous vibration, and speed; all anticipate the shape of the international avant‐gardes (Lista 2011), tracing a route of controversial relationship with art and the arts that many artists and authors of the Italian experimental cinema will follow. The dialogue with other arts, starting from painting and music, is a distinctive trait that profoundly marked a good deal of Italian experimental cinema. “The Italian cinematographic experimentation of the 1930s is inevitably a continuation of futurist aesthetics,” writes Bruno Di Marino (2006, 145). An artist such as Corrado D’Errico, with his audiovisual research in the 1930s, in works such as Stramilano (1929), Ritmi di stazione, impressioni di vita n. 1, (1933), and La gazza ladra (1934), followed this aesthetic tradition, with an emphasis on the city, automobiles, and speed.

An important example to bear in mind is Luigi Veronesi, the subject of a recent major exhibition and a rich catalogue of essays: in‐depth analyses and profiles that duly illuminate the work of this painter–filmmaker–illustrator–graphic artist from Milan (Bolpagni, De Brino, and Savettieri 2011). Connected in certain ways, though problematically, to the futurist experience and, in others, to the great international experiences of abstract art and animation (from Lázló Moholy‐Nagy to Len Lye to Norman McLaren), with films that combine at times abstract images and live recording, Veronesi wanted to imprint movement in his painting. His long cinematographic history, with emphasis mainly on time and rhythm, is typified above all by his research on the chromatic representation of music and by the abstraction of the shapes painted on film. This relationship with painting is a tendency that links to the international scene and that in Italy constitutes a relevant corpus of works and artists to the present day.

Veronesi’s cinema stretched from the 1930s to the 1980s, passing through years in which experimentalism seemed almost to have disappeared in Italy (or to have occurred only in rare Italian episodes abroad), reaching a more fecund period in the 1960s. The work of the brothers Silvio and Vittorio Loffredo from the 1950s to the 1980s, initially in Paris, should also be mentioned: a blend of amateur and artisanal techniques (such as hand‐sewing celluloid frames), of Mekas‐styled aesthetics—the camera as diary and notebook—and of film‐collages starting from found footage.

The 1960s and Beyond

In general, the 1960s were years rich in the echoes of international experimentation, of new cinemas, of the polemical wave confronting classical cinema, genre cinema, and a kind of conservative French cinema that, among the French New Wave, acquired the pejorative name cinéma de papa. Socially and economically, they were eventful years, rich in stimulation and tension, growth, and wealth—demanding years still open to a positive idea of progress.

The Italian scene offered a wide variety of expressions of experimental cinema, between art and engagement, partly in response to the stimulus provided by the first exhibitions of New American Cinema in Spoleto in 1961, then in Porretta Terme and Rapallo (1964 and afterward), in Pesaro (1967), and in Rome and Turin (at various times, with Taylor Mead, Jonas Mekas, Gregory Markopoulos, and Jack Smith). One should not forget that in 1961 The Living Theatre arrived in Italy, where the group remained for a long time, and that two nonconformist feature filmmakers/auteurs, Jean‐Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, also settled in Rome in 1969.

Among the many prominent figures defying the conventional European and American scene were Gianfranco Baruchello and Alberto Grifi, whose film, La verifica incerta (1964–1965), is now a classic of experimental cinema, and not only Italian: in Paris it won the attention and praise of Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, and Max Ernst. It is a complex work that cannot be reduced to a simple montage of Hollywood film clips—anticipating today’s trend of found footage—in which pieces of film saved from the shredder give life to a “symphony” organized only partly in a casual and performative manner. “Décollage, objet‐trouvé, provocations in perfect Dada‐Situationist style,” writes Bruno Di Marino (1999, 47–48) of the film. “… in reality La verifica incerta, in its sequential structure, can be read as a metafilmic essay that highlights … situations and styles that are recurrent in Hollywood genre cinema, as well as an explicitly political détournement …. In fact caesura, inversion, repetition, asynchrony, and association are the elements of this capsizing of filmic language that ultimately gives Baruchello‐Grifi’s film its hysterical harmony.”

The political also attaches itself to the experimental, although differently, in Anna (1972–1974), another classic of Italian independent cinema. Or rather, of video, because the two artists, Grifi and Massimo Sarchielli, start by shooting the story on film and then experiment with the then‐new technology of video recording, with extended takes, tracking shots, close‐ups, hand‐held camera, and an intimacy with the character that unhinges the classic rules of the set, the traditional cinematographic division of labor, and the role of the director‐master. Anna was shot in the early 1970s and then transferred to film for diffusion in the network of cine clubs (thanks to the “vidigrafo,” a device Grifi himself invented). It was presented at the 1975 Venice Film Festival.

The political is also present in the work of Alfredo Leonardi, an artist who knew New American Cinema directly. Family, images of police surveillance, everyday life, news, war and urban spaces, popular icons, artistic presences—assembled with techniques of juxtaposition, breakdowns, blurriness, and alternating speeds—all comprise a portrait of contemporary society in which music plays an important role (as in Amore amore, 1966). Leonardi is often inspired by the music and theater scene—giving life to a portrait of The Living Theatre, starting with some shows in Living and Glorious (1965) and in J. & J. & Co. (1967). Still of a theatrical character is Se l’inconscio si ribella (1967), which also contains elements of play, eroticism, childhood, and a free and creative life in the ideal setting of an extended family of friends and artists.

Like Leonardi, Massimo Bacigalupo (later a scholar of Ezra Pound and a professor of American literature) had direct contacts with the New American Cinema, but he started to shoot experimental films in 1961, when he was very young and before he went to the United States. His work is characterized by fragments of daily life captured by a free, moving camera; found footage and photographs; multiple exposures; excursions into unknown, faraway lands; and literary echoes: a “cinematic palimpsest,” as Bruno Di Marino (1999, 77) termed it. Bacigalupo (2003, 17) also wrote and theorized on that era. On the occasion of a retrospective organized in 2003 by Rome’s Filmstudio, the historic cine club that had supported independent cinema and research since its foundation in 1967, he wrote:

As in the USA, the world of Italian filmmakers touched on worlds different from everyday culture: homosexuality (present as a theme in De Bernardi as in so many American works, celebrated by Leonardi as liberating in his beautiful Libro di santi di Roma eterna, 1969); drugs (that were, in certain ways, muse for Bargellini and “sister death” for both him and Mario Ferrero); and, in general, promiscuity: a certain presence of nudes was perhaps not the last reason for the attraction—insofar as it existed—exercised, not only in Italy, by experimental cinema …. In other words, everything came together in experimental film; there was a half‐sought, half‐imposed sense of marginalization.

At the distribution level, modeled on the Filmmaker’s Coop of New York, the Cooperative of Independent Italian Cinema (1967), of which Leonardi was a promoter, organized various festivals to highlight the Italian scene. In Rome, Filmstudio was at the heart of a golden age of underground Italian cinema (Di Marino 2006), a cinema that dialogued continuously with the musical, theatrical, and literary vanguards of the time.

It was a period rich in echoes, meetings, debates, festivals, and artists engaged in intense dialogue—a time of groups and collectives, as well as of obstinately solitary work. It is impossible to recall here all the protagonists of a time that witnessed, among other things, the creation of the first feminist cinema collective, promoted by Annabella Miscuglio, one of the founders of Filmstudio and an experimental filmmaker, author of courageous films of political denunciation, and organizer of festivals of women’s cinema. Like her, other female filmmakers, organizers, and promoters of culture and experimental art were very active in these years and beyond: Rony Daopoulo, Pia Epremian, Loredana Rotondo, Giosetta Fioroni, Ketty La Rocca, Rosa Foschi. Among the festival promoters one must mention Ester De Miro in association with annual meetings and screenings at the festival “Il gergo inquieto” in Genoa (1977–1985).

The decisively experimental dimension of visual research, of flânerie between musical impressions and fragments of private life, often links, in the work of the same artist or group, to a social and political dimension. As Amerigo Sbardella (2003, 9) wrote:

In Italian independent cinema converge not only the desire to emulate the American model, but also the influences of other arts (especially painting, theatre, and music), the amateur film experiences of other creators, the events of ‘68, and the alternative life‐style models of the counterculture. All this interacts and stimulates the emergence of an original creative process that will develop a poetics independent of the American one, and the Italian underground experience, if compared to the German or French in the same years, will reveal a far superior inventiveness, strength, and authenticity.

The boundary between private and political is often blurred, and the argument between making films that are expressly political or making films in a political manner, that is to say with an approach that is different and irreconcilable with the dominant outlook, was extremely passionate. The coming and going of some filmmakers from a political to an experimental approach should be understood in this light. Alberto Grifi’s body of work is exemplary in this sense, but the “Videobase” experience (begun in the 1970s, already in the era of electronic technology) of Alfredo Leonardi, Anna Lajolo, and Guido Lombardi, is as well. Lajolo and Lombardi’s work, particularly on film, takes shape as a “poem in the form of a critique,” developed out of the “need to rethink cinema, not only as a document for the transformation of people and objects in relation to a social context, but as an analysis of the modification of cinema itself in its development” (Di Marino 2002, 65). The boundaries of documentary, social engagement, and experimental research become blurred (as in Paolo Brunatto’s films). The same artists (Brunatto, Nato Frascà, Ketty La Rocca, Leonardi‐Lajolo‐Lombardi, and others) are sometimes able to dialogue with public television, providing portraits of places, events, and personalities; behind‐the‐scenes documentaries; and so on.

In some filmmakers, we find references to the films of Rossellini; Zavattini is the other most cited figure, for his work—of precisely these years—with “free” or independent newsreels (cinegiornali liberi), his collective projects, his interest in videotape and “minimal intervention films,” his idea of a “cinema of haste” and of rapid intervention. It is one of the happy paradoxes of Italian independent and experimental cinema: encompassing the unreal, the visionary, and the visually experimental as well as a documentary push toward witnessing, to engagement. But it is only an apparent paradox; the two poles seem to find unified ground in tiny points of intersection with the poetics of the everyday, of being a man and woman in the world, of singing life in its flow, harmonious or conflicted—and in the rejection of a narrative and fictional construction.

The dialogue with auteur Italian cinema in these years, nonetheless, is not easy and the clash between the curiosity, interest, and will to dialogue of certain nonconformist directors, such as Valentino Orsini, Bernardo Bertolucci, the Tavianis, and the radicalism of certain experimental filmmakers, was well documented at the round table organized in 1968 by the magazine Cinema & Film, the most sensitive in those years to the work of the nontraditionalists. Interesting also were the problematizing, critical, sometimes hesitant, reactions of Pier Paolo Pasolini, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Luchino Visconti: auteurs who, in different ways (like Marco Ferreri), crossed paths with some experimental artists and took their work into consideration with an open mind.

Boundary Crossings: Pathways in Artist Cinema

During these years so rich in debate, an important role was played by that part of experimental cinema often defined as “art cinema” to distinguish it—although the boundaries were not always clear‐cut—from militant or underground cinema. Rapport with other arts (music, theater, and above all painting), which had the effect of enshrining film as another art form, had, as we have seen, been a notable tradition of Italian cinema from the beginning of the twentieth century. Indeed, it was frequently contemporary art critics (Vittorio Fagone, Germano Celant, Enrico Crispolti, to name a few) who studied and spread the word about film and the experience of artist filmmakers.

Baruchello, Schifano, Fabio Mauri, Luca Patella, Ugo Nespolo, and Pino Pascali are among the artists who worked at the intersections of art and cinema—but, at times, also of video and television (Pascali with set designs, jingles, and animated adverts for public television). In some of these artists, as well as others, were intertwined forms of cinema esposto, pioneering a trend widely exploited today. Such was the case of Michelangelo Pistoletto, who in 1968, at a solo exhibition at the Gallery “L’Attico” in Rome, used film‐screening display environments for his pieces. Mauri projected famous films onto bodies and objects (often of the director himself as in the case of Pasolini, who became the screen for images from Il Vangelo secondo Matteo [The Gospel According to St. Matthew], 1964, at a performance at the Galleria Comunale d’Arte Moderna in Bologna, 1975).

There was interest not only in the apparatus of projection that went beyond the conventional setting of the cinema and the two‐dimensional screen, but also in the universe of media as a whole—as material for investigation, not just expression. One frequently finds references to media in the works of Baruchello and Schifano, which contain excerpts from television programs, as well as assemblages, re‐placements, and elaborations that make up a discourse that shrinks from ideological taglines and, in the case of Schifano, is testimony to a passionate and omnivorous curiosity. Schifano started as a painter, the most important artist in Italian Pop Art, and was also a maker of photographs, drawings, films, and videos, interesting himself as well in early forms of the Internet and the use of computers. He produced a series of short films between 1964 and 1967 and a trilogy of features in 1968–1969: Satellite, Umano non umano, and Trapianto, consunzione e morte di Franco Brocani. As De Martino (1999, 105) puts it:

Schifano’s cinema proceeds by accumulation, a layering of sounds and images. The intersecting fade‐outs and pulsating sequences filmed for television … immerse us in a state of absolute visual instability…. In Satellite, which could be easily read as an immense audiovisual installation … the images of the external world burst into the living room at home, on the curtains and the walls. The waves on a beach crash against the leather sofas and carpet….

In the same trilogy, the social and political worlds break into the private, often through blurred, low‐definition TV images. But the television images are also manipulated through photography and painting processes in the nonaudiovisual pieces.

Multimedia artist Luca Patella moves among painting, photography, films dealing with the environment, video installations, and digital art pieces. “With regard to the media and openness to the sociological, we are becoming increasingly aware (I have been for quite a while, I can say in all modesty) of how fundamentally ahead of their time (of almost everything!) the futurists were. In their multimedia experiments begin our experiences, which, not wanting to be repetitive, are able—inside and outside art—to combine art and science, conscience and the unconscious!” (Patella 2002, 198).

Nespolo’s artistic work also displays a trajectory through different media: painting, ceramics, graphic art, advertising posters, film (from 1964 onward), and design objects, combined with a deconstructive, playful approach. “With cinema it is possible to demonstrate the futurist simultaneity of actions and space. Nespolo accomplishes it and retransmits it to painting” (Fiorletta 1998, 10) in a career that modifies the two arts in an exchange of processes. Nespolo’s cinema displays a high formal complexity, with accelerations, dynamic and frenetic editing, scratches, stains, drawings on film, as well as live footage; his “imaginary living museum” (Bertetto 2002, 201) produced through cinema mixes the faces and bodies of an extended family of artists with witty and bizarre portraits and references to Alfred Jarry’s pataphysics and Man Ray’s work.

If artist cinema often becomes a synonym for the pure and simple documentation of actions and performances, the special attention it gives to the image is notable (from shooting techniques and editing to mode of presentation/projection), even if multiple exposure, toning, and collage often are combined with fragments of real documents about artists, places, and events.

Alchemies, Memory, History

Still in this fruitful period of Italian experimental cinema—but beyond the scope of what is defined as art film which, as noted, has somewhat jagged and fluid boundaries—Paolo Gioli and Piero Bargellini confronted the technical aspects, cinema as instrument, the cinematographic apparatus, often in extreme ways. Bargellini starts with the chemical aspect of film in its encounter with the existential—amid reproducibility, consumption, and death. He exalts the materiality of film, highlighted by its own corruptibility, combining found footage and live recordings with complicated camera editing techniques and superimposition. In Fractions of Temporary Periods (1969), “a free exercise in affectionate voyeurism” (Di Marino 2006, 163), the artist follows with his camera the appearances of a young girl on the balcony opposite, and mixes them with captions, alternating images in positive and negative. Bargellini takes a structuralist approach to cinema (shooting in 8 mm and 16 mm) and is one of the few in Italy to do so. However, he brings a “warm” approach—not just existential but loving and desperate at the same time—to the rigor of the structuralist filmmakers and their theorematic exploration of the materiality of their medium. “His can be defined as the work of an alchemist, although he returns to alchemy after a voyage through chemistry, so to speak…. Bargellini’s work is positioned as a recovery of craftsmanship after technology” (Aprà 2006, 182–83).

In Paolo Gioli, cinema and photography endlessly confront each other and “it is difficult to separate … the various forms of expression, so that themes, subjects, and motifs are infinitely repeated in all their variations from one means to the other: oil paintings, charcoal drawings, serigraph canvases, photographic prints, photographs, film” (Di Marino 2006, 165). Again, we find the attention to the filmstrip; the mixing of 8 mm, 16 mm, and 35 mm (e.g., in his first feature, Commutazioni con mutazione, 1969); the invention of filming methods; and the transformation of technical components—working on development and printing, even in the transition from Polaroid photographs to canvas to paper. His attention to technology is also reversed in a sense, in a backward journey toward precinema, the darkroom, cinema without a camera, and experimentation with natural shutters.

Photo of a filmstrip displaying images of a man and a woman.

Figure 20.1 Commutazioni con mutazione and the importance of the filmstrip. Paolo Gioli, 1969.

Courtesy Paolo Gioli. (Rights secured by author.)

Gioli reinvented and employed the pinhole camera (stenopeico in Italian) and, using the pinhole process, exposed images on a piece of film by means of light passing through his fist (or other perforated objects). As alchemist of the image, he exalts the frame and inverts positive and negative and fadeouts and superimpositions—and even constructs structures for his own screenings. Artist, scientist, craftsman, and inventor, Gioli literally brings the body back to the center of cinema, and the existential act of filming.

Photo of a film displaying 3 identical images of a man’s face.

Figure 20.2 Filmstenopeico (l’uomo senza machina da presa), Paolo Gioli, reninventor of the stenopeico, 1973, 1981, 1989.

Courtesy Paolo Gioli. (Rights secured by author.)

Existential cinema, though in a different way, is also the sphere of Tonino De Bernardi, who was deeply marked by The Living Theatre and his experiences with the American underground, which had struck him like a thunderbolt at the excellent retrospective at the Turin festival of 1967. Particularly influential were meetings with Jonas Mekas, Taylor Mead, Allen Ginsberg—and then Stephen Dwoskin and Gregory Markopoulos—as well as the idea of cinema as writing, painting, the music of life.

Photo displaying Jonas Mekas holding a camera facing to Tonino de Bernardi, with another man at the back also holding a camera and filming the two of them.

Figure 20.3 Tonino de Bernardi and Jonas Mekas, Lucca Film Festival, 2008. Photo by Elena Marcheschi. (Rights secured by author.)

De Bernardi was a member of the Cooperative of Independent Cinema (CCI), founded also in 1967. His cinema is lyrical, somehow classical, but at the same time primitive; it contains, as Jonas Mekas (1995, 35) wrote, a “rare sense of spontaneous and permanent innocence.” A true filmmaker and true “amateur” in the sense intended by Stan Brakhage (2001), and hailed as Italy’s representative of underground cinema with his 8 mm Dei (1968–1969), De Bernardi films the universe of the family, then addresses its myths, rites, and manifestations dating back to classic antiquity, lived in the everyday. In his 1988 video Viaggio a Sodoma, “all the themes dear to Tonino find a form that is serene, contemplative, and mature: space and time, the divinity of man and nature, Greek wisdom and peasant patience, enduring glances, [and] classical literature revisited with the candor and simplicity of a school master who is reading it ‘for the first time’ with his pupils” (Aprà 1995, 40). Through 8 mm, 16 mm, and 35 mm, until he reaches video, his rich filmography—from 1966 to today—is a love song exhibited and rewarded at serious international festivals, a diary constructed with an extended family of actors, intimate presences, artists, intellectual friends, and accomplices. This is exemplified in his 35 mm Piccoli orrori (1994), “a pocket‐dictionary film … a pocket‐tourist guide to Italy, a film made up of many musical variations, a film like a fifteenth‐century polyptych with multiple compartments; that is to say, a film‐fresco partitioned into many areas or sections …” (Francia di Celle and Toffetti 1995, 93).

Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi are among the best‐known Italian experimental filmmakers in the world, pioneers of a cinema based on found footage. The two film artists had various personal shows and publications all over the world (including MoMA in February 2009); they perform a truly archaeological excavation in the archives and collections of old films (amateur films included) and thus provide us with an impeccable and at times disquieting portrait of attitudes, modes of behavior, and ideologies of entire periods. At first they worked only in film, then in video, and more recently also in the form of installations (as at the 2001 Venice Biennale). From the minute and detailed rereading and recreation of strips taken from old government films, but also from old travel films or old nonfiction movies that appear to be innocuous, there emerges an anthropological picture, a portrait of classes, as well as a denunciation of colonial invasions and ideological manipulations. (See Lischi 2002.) Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi’s oeuvre, whose first films date back to the 1970s and the “perfumed cinema” experience, is an artisanal‐scientific cinema, attentive to now‐abandoned formats, a cinema that reshoots the celluloid, analyses it, slows it down, subjects it to toning, and isolates, zooms, and selects certain details. This kind of work functions as a sort of microscope, an analytical film camera, a philology and anthropology of the gaze, with no explanatory or didactic railing for the spectator to grasp, thus leading him or her “inside” the image, to discover the totalitarian violence, the oppression, the vandalism hidden within apparently innocent and conventional recordings. Some of their recent works, such as Prigionieri della guerra (Prisoners of War, 1995) and Su tutte le vette è pace (On the Heights All Is Peace, 1998), reread film documents from twentieth‐century conflicts, to the musical accompaniment (live, at times) of famed singer‐songwriter and musical ethnographer, Giovanna Marini.

Animations, Research, Theater

Although it is impossible to cite all the contributions, a part of Italian animation cinema, like all other international cinema, is fully experimental. After all, some areas of animation constitute a kind of abstract cinema, move into artist cinema, entail the use of graphics and painting, circumvent the need for recording equipment, and call on musical research rather than the spoken word. One artist who should be cited in this regard is Cioni Carpi, who from the late 1940s lived and travelled among Paris, the United States, and Canada, and was influenced not only by Norman McLaren but also by his encounter with Maya Deren in New York.

Another subtle boundary of Italian experimental cinema is industrial cinema, as experienced in Luigi Veronesi’s unconventional documentary on the Olivetti companies, and the research films of the studio Monte Olimpino, which saw close collaboration between the film animation artist, Marcello Piccardo, and master of design Bruno Munari. Monte Olimpino began with pieces for Pirelli, Fiat, Olivetti, Tissot, and Ferrania in 1962. Avant‐garde films—often accepted but sometimes rejected by the commissioners—they were presented in festivals and awarded prizes. This experimental laboratory was established close to Lake Como, in northern Italy, “staffed” by extended families, artists, and friends, who explored cinema from scratch, using animation, temporal alteration, sound research, and effects both filmic and natural. It retained close contacts with foreign filmmakers, including the elderly Hans Richter, Jonas Mekas, and Andy Warhol. Piccardo and Munari curated screenings of Warhol’s films at the Museo d’arte Moderna di Torino. In this type of cinema, there is great technical mastery alongside artisanal expertise and a refreshing attitude of curiosity and discovery. The scope of the independent filmmaker expanded to include all aspects of the film, from initial project to final distribution. From 1967 to 1977, Monte Olimpino also pioneered films made by children in school: a cinema as distant from media stereotypes as it was from those of alternative media, but strongly marked by experimentalism precisely for its “pure,” almost structural, conception: uninterested in plot, open, based on the young artists’ visual and mental associations, but never improvised or spontaneous. In fact, it was based on rigorous theory and an accurate assessment of the films’ preparation and production phases. Inspired by Zavattini’s project for youth‐made television, Piccardo became involved in 1977 in an experiment by local TV channels with projects made by young boys and girls.

Music, painting, design, but also theater: the trajectory of Italian experimental cinema through the arts continued with the theater, blending performance elements in the presentations of cinema esposto, documenting theater events, becoming itself performance, or happenings. At the same time, playwrights and artists, such as Carmelo Bene, came to filmmaking. An ingenious protagonist of twentieth‐century theater, an actor and author (also of radio and television pieces) who was both classic and subversive, rigorous and excessive, Bene chose cinema as another possible form in which to articulate his thinking and actions: “I don’t make films. I make art pieces. I don’t write, I sing …. When I talk about directors, I think of Borges, Joyce, of Gounod …. I think of music as cinema. Not the soundtrack, but the music of images…” (quoted in Saba 1999, 7–8). His was an iconoclastic cinema, “irrecoverable, politically ‘non‐organic,’ scandalously on ‘the wrong side,’ out of context” (Saba 1999, 39), unreconciled with ideologies (dominant or oppositional) of the end of the 1960s. It was a low‐budget cinema attentive to the materiality of the medium, which had at its center the body (of the actor and the film), color, make‐up (of the actor and of the celluloid itself). It was indifferent to classical plot and at the same time nervous: characterized by camera moves, leaps of editing, shaky points of view, blow‐ups, the loss of a center in the frame. Nostra Signora dei Turchi (1968) is marked by acceleration and slowing down, the coloring of the celluloid, and direct manipulation of frames; Hermitage (1968) by the use of colored glass, filters, and textiles to modify light. Cinema is an “unstable place, transient, liquid, sensual, in constant decomposition (through disintegration of the image), a place of metamorphosis and fragmentation. Of obsessive repetition of words and sounds, of visual reiterations … of narration and melodrama” (Di Marino 2006, 161).

The Passage to Video

Many of these figures experienced the transition from cinema to video in the early 1970s: Anna, by Grifi and Sarchielli, begun with celluloid but then shot on video tape, is in this sense at the juncture of the two technologies. The most important centers of video activity were Art/Tapes/22 in Florence (where Bill Viola worked as a technical supervisor in his youth), Venice’s Gallery of Cavallino, the Videoteca Giaccari in Varese, and the Centro Video Arte del Palazzo dei Diamanti, in Ferrara. Experimental creators, such as Fabrizio Plessi (figurative artist, sculptor, and filmmaker), and Gianni Toti (poet and writer), became the protagonists of video art; underground filmmakers, such as Roberto Nanni, turned their hand to video; independent documentarists (Silvano Agosti, Daniele Segre, Giuseppe Baresi) chose the more affordable, intimate medium of electronic production; and artists, musicians, and sculptors discovered the versatility of video. Studio Azzurro (video art, installations, and “sensitive” interactive environments) developed from the Collettivo di Sperimentazione Militante in Milan in the early 1980s. The Pesaro Festival introduced Italy to L’altro video (“other video”) in 1973 and, in the following years, assigned space to this new form of expression, as did the Salso Film Festival (Salsomaggiore), regularly under the direction of Adriano Aprà, in the 1980s.

Video art in Italy is less rich than in other countries of Europe (France, above all), but no less interesting and, in some ways, still a pioneer. In 1952, Lucio Fontana produced an experimental, visually abstract broadcast, of which scarce photographic traces remain since recording was impossible at the time for public television. (Despite moments such as these, public television only began regular broadcasts in Italy in January 1954.) Aside from the flowering of studies and exhibition spaces during the 1980s, the first experiments in modifying the television signal date back to 1969, with Vincenzo Agnetti and Gianni Colombo.

The evolution of Studio Azzurro is emblematic of the narrative of audiovisual production in Italy from cinema to video and beyond, intertwined with the other arts but simultaneously attentive to other forms of discourse and to social and ethical engagement as a whole. The earlier openly militant work on media moved toward the use of the mechanical eye to enhance anthropological enquiry. The film Facce di festa (1980), produced by the core of what would become Studio Azzurro (Paolo Rosa, Leonardo Sangiorgi, Fabio Cirifino, with Gianni Rocco and Armando Bertacchi), studied a group of young people, in transit from the political utopianism of the 1970s to the consumerism of the 1980s, thronging a party in Milan. It is experimental in the use of candid camera; in the intimacy it establishes with the characters; in the almost imperceptible shift in the actors, creators, and spectators who will characterize the activity and theoretical perspective of the group up to the present. Studio Azzurro produces video environments and “sensitive environments” (interactive), but also, from the 1980s, performances that remain classics of video theater, with the active presence of the monitor in the scene, and actors, orchestra, and variable screens arranged in an unconventional way. The group’s work is tightly woven together with design, figurative art, music, and with a mixture of avant‐garde and classicism—enacting (and questioning) the relationship between reality and representation, the body and technology. In the interactive environments, tools and devices are hidden; the interaction is “organic,” composed of gestures, steps, voices, and whispers; the use of technology (including new technologies) is poetically explored and politically “deviates” from customary uses such as surveillance, satellite deployment, and infra‐red‐ or X‐ray‐based imaging. This proves true of their most recent museum and exhibition setups and interactive events, in which the image‐in‐motion and the participation of the spectator–visitor become protagonists of a will on the part of the group to have an impact on cultural attitudes and the social context. It is no coincidence that Italy’s first interactive museum, designed by the group, was dedicated to the Resistance in a small town between Liguria and Tuscany. For his part, Rosa carved out his place as an independent filmmaker with a series of personal and research‐oriented films culminating in Il mnemonista (2000), a film inspired by the story of a man with excessive memory capacity (a true account related by neuropsychologist Alexander Lurjia).6

An almost subterranean route, more or less explicit, connects experimental cinema with experimental video. A video artist such as Gianni Toti, who came to the electronic image from poetry and two decisively experimental films, calls to mind the cinema of early avant‐gardes, and Vertov’s and Eisenstein’s search for a poetic–political discourse that passes through art, but also through the planet’s great social wounds. A viewpoint both social and autobiographical characterizes the video work of Theo Eshetu, Alessandro Amaducci, Giacomo Verde, the young group “AuroraMeccanica,” “CaneCapovolto,” “Alterazioni Video,” “Zimmerfrei,” and other collectives that pioneered artistic and expressive research without overlooking political engagement. After all, a submerged but nonetheless important segment of recent Italian cinema, working along the subtle boundaries between documentary and fiction, the real and the representation of the real—and at times absorbing elements of animation—proceeds on a path that can be defined as “experimental.” Other groups, such as FlatForm, Masbedo, and Zapruder, work aesthetically though differently on visual perception, the uncanny, alterations of the gaze, and the uncertainty of perspective, with references to the visual arts and experiments at the level of shooting and editing.

Screen grab from the film Planetopolis, displaying images that are stretched vertically, stretched to form a sphere, and stretched to a ladder form.

Figure 20.4 Planetopolis, video artist Gianni Toti, 1993. Screen grab.

This journey also reaches into the digital world, with implications both for visual effects and for modes of technological interactivity and sharing. The digital format, which has particular benefits in terms of editing, allowed for explorations and elaboration in Italian production that were previously unimaginable, thanks to the quantity and flexibility of visual construction, found footage, still photography, home video, and sampling from the entire cinematographic corpus. As in the international setting, certain Italian directors move among film screenings, cinema esposto, video, and installations—as well as exploring different sites of spectatorship such as the movie theater, the Internet, and the art gallery.

Alongside cinema and alongside reference to painting, which is especially strong in experimental animation, we find the theater, particularly in the “films” produced by author–actor–director Pippo Delbono, a leading protagonist of the Italian scene, with a mobile phone camera. In his feature films, La paura (2009), Amore carne (2011), and Sangue (2013), the tiny camera resembles a prosthesis: an extension of the author’s body that probes itself and its own affects, but also the social body, as in a visual journal, with a ruthless yet tender gaze that purposely distances itself from stereotypes and all formal refinement. Michele Sambin (musician, performer, theater author, illustrator) was among the first to use video in Italy. He explored the dynamics of real time, in the dialogue created, in recording, between the artist’s performance and that of the new recording device, and he now experiments with live interactions of the actor’s body and digital painting. The “video‐theatre” period was one of the most fertile and original in Italy, with people moving among theater, video, and film (Mario Martone is one example).

The list is long, and newcomers, alongside known figures, multiply—online too—with interesting outcomes, despite a certain indifference from television networks, which would seem to offer (the panorama is in continual transformation) the technical possibilities for a great proliferation of channels and an opening out to a variety of greatly varied programming, even if sporadic and marked by caution.

A plethora of film festivals now offers sections entirely dedicated to “anomalous,” unclassifiable works, opening themselves to uncodified artistic/cinematic articulations. From Pesaro, with its traditional focus on experimentation, to Turin, a city that has hosted so much of the most advanced cinema explorations over the decades—and now to numerous smaller film exhibitions and festivals. Even the Venice International Film festival has found spaces and niches for experimental works, as has the Rome International Film Festival of late. It also appears evident that certain “nonrealistic” modes of structuring the image, certain explicit or implicit references to the avant‐gardes, and certain visual metamorphoses now also find a home in nonexperimental forms of film, influencing narrative, mainstream, and spectacular cinema. Critical methodology has to address a hybrid horizon that is constantly changing.

After the blossoming of festivals dedicated to video and video art in the 1980s, exhibitions of electronic art and experimental events both fell and grew at the same time, in the sense that new local initiatives developed alongside the few, long‐standing festivals: Invideo, held annually in Milan since 1990 and devoted to video art and experimental video; Filmmaker, in Milan as well, since 1980, and devoted mostly to documentary and experimental cinema; and the Lucca Film Festival, begun in 2005 in Tuscany. Particularly fertile are events that focus on short films or documentaries, a nonfiction area in which interesting discoveries are to be made in experimentation with audiovisual languages. The advent of the digital era and the disappearance of celluloid film from Italian cinemas—between the end of 2013 and early 2014—has further unsettled distribution strategies already disrupted by online sharing. This root‐and‐branch change (which follows the shift in recording and editing technologies) is not, however, being matched by strategies of production and distribution, which are still firmly anchored to the hegemony of the narrative mainstream film.

I started this chapter with references to recent events dedicated to Italian experimental cinema. I end by citing three new initiatives that confirm this renewed interest in a “different” kind of cinema: two large exhibitions at Catanzaro, Calabria, dedicated to video art and artists’ cinema; and the retrospective at the Pesaro Festival 2013, titled “Fuori Norma: The Experimental Way of Italian Cinema,” that shed particular light on the past 10 years.7

These were all rich exhibitions that showed pioneering pieces and installations by both emerging and established artists in the video section, while the cinema component offered a panorama from futurism through the 1960s, culminating in today’s digital film. The breadth of vision on display (along with the theoretical and critical catalogues that rounded out the survey) was evidence of great figurative wealth, with references to art—music, painting, and design—serving as a thread that ties together all Italian experimental audiovisual production. This thread, sometimes visible and exhibited, sometimes hidden and submerged, is also, and often, intertwined with another thread: that of political and poetic engagement.

References

  1. Aprà, A. (1976) 2006. Cinema sperimentale e mezzi di massa in Italia. Milan: Fondazione Angelo Rizzoli Milano (mimeograph copy, limited diffusion). Excerpted in Saba 2006, 177–97. Bologna: CLUEB.
  2. ———. 1986. New American Cinema. Il cinema indipendente americano degli anni Sessanta. Milan: Ubulibri.
  3. ———. 1995. “Il poeta Tonino.” In Dalle lontane province. Il cinema di Tonino De Bernardi, edited by Francia Di Celle, S. and S. Toffetti, 37–44. Turin: Museo Nazionale del Cinema/Lindau..
  4. ———, ed. 2013. Fuori norma. La via sperimentale del cinema italiano. Venice: Marsilio.
  5. Bacigalupo, M. 2003. “Quarant’anni dopo.” Catalogue of the exhibition Il cinema indipendente italiano 1964–1984. Rome, November 17–December 1, 15–17. Rome: Filmstudio.
  6. Balzola, A. and P. Rosa. 2011. L’arte fuori di sé. Milan: Feltrinelli.
  7. Bertetto, P. 2002. “Torino sperimentale.” In Torino città del cinema. Edited by D. Bracco, D. and S. Della Casa et al. Milan: Il Castoro. Reprinted in Saba 2006, 194–204.
  8. Bolpagni, P., A. Di Brino, and C. Savettieri, eds. 2011. Ritmi visivi. Luigi Veronesi nell’astrattismo europeo. Lucca: Fondazione Ragghianti.
  9. Brakhage, S. 2001. “In defense of Amateur.” In Essential Brakhage: Selected Writings on Filmmaking, 142–50. Kingston, NY: McPherson.
  10. Costa, A. 2002. Il cinema e le arti visive. Turin: Einaudi.
  11. Di Marino, B. 1999. Sguardo inconscio azione. Cinema sperimentale e underground a Roma (1965–75). Rome: Lithos.
  12. ———. 2002. Interferenze dello sguardo. La sperimentazione audiovisiva tra analogico e digitale. Rome: Bulzoni.
  13. ———. 2006. “Con (e senza) macchina da presa. Estetica e tecnologia dagli anni ‘30 agli anni ‘70.” In Saba 2006, 145–76.
  14. ———, ed. 2007. Tracce, sguardi e altri pensieri. Booklet with DVD Studio Azzurro. Milan: Feltrinelli Real Cinema.
  15. ———, M. Meneguzzo, and A. La Porta, eds. 2012. Lo sguardo espanso. Cinema d’artista italiano 1912–2012. Milan: Silvana Editoriale.
  16. Eco, U. 1985. “Il Gruppo 63, lo sperimentalismo e l’avanguardia.” In Sugli specchi e altri saggi, 83–104. Milan: Bompiani.
  17. Farassino, A. 1979. “Aspetti del cinema sperimentale italiano.” In catalogue for Cine qua non. Giornate internazionali del cinema d’artista. Florence, December 12–23. Edited by Andrea Granchi, 133–34.
  18. ———. 2000. Fuori di set. Viaggi, esplorazioni, emigrazioni, nomadismo. Rome: Bulzoni.
  19. Fiorletta, L. 1998. “Universo Nespolo. Una riedizione del mondo.” In Tutto Nespolo. Dipinti, oggetti, film, manifesti, edited by E. Crispolti, 9–10. Milan: Skira.
  20. Francia Di Celle, S. and S. Toffetti, eds. 1995. Dalle lontane province. Il cinema di Tonino De Bernardi. Turin: Museo Nazionale del Cinema/Lindau.
  21. La Porta, A. and G. Marziani, eds. 2012. Corpo elettronico. Videoarte italiana tra materia, segno e sogno. Milan: Prearo editore.
  22. Lischi, Sandra. 2002. “Poetico‐Political Audio Visions.” Public 25: 28–34.
  23. Lista, G. 2001. Cinema e fotografia futurista. Milan: Skira.
  24. Mekas, Jonas. 1995. “Un appunto su Tonino De Bernardi e le primule.” In Dalle lontane province. Il cinema di Tonino De Bernardi, edited by Francia Di Celle, S. and S. Toffetti, 35–36. Turin: Museo Nazionale del Cinema/Lindau.
  25. Noguez, D. 1999. Eloge du cinéma expérimental. Paris: Paris Expérimental.
  26. Patella, L. M. 2002. “Interview by Angela Madesani.” In A. Madesani, Le icone fluttuanti. Storia del cinema d’artista e della videoarte in Italia, 182–200. Milan: Bruno Mondadori.
  27. Saba, C. G. 1999. Carmelo Bene, Milano: Il Castoro.
  28. ———, ed. 2006. Cinema Video Internet. Tecnologie e avanguardia in Italia dal Futurismo alla Net.art. Bologna: CLUEB.
  29. Sbardella, A. 2003. “Introduction.” In Catalogue of Il cinema indipendente italiano 1964–1984. Roma, November 17–December 1, 2003, 5–11. Rome: Filmstudio.
  30. Studio Azzurro. Videoambienti, ambienti sensibili e altre esperienze tra arte, cinema, teatro e musica. 2007. DVD. Milan: Feltrinelli Real Cinema.
  31. Ungari, E. 1996. Proiezioni private. Confessioni di un amatore di film. Edited by Adriano Aprà. Milan: Il Castoro.

Notes