Country: Italy
Year: 1974
Duration: 40'
Subject: mere quiddity When an image expresses an idea it can be considered abstract. An idea is abstract; it lives within formalized thought, which is expressed through words: the reduction in genres of organized concepts like math, physics, geometry, etc. Ideas have, and permit, relationships with the imagination, or rather, with a conceptual synthesis of reality. Images are reality. The idea of a thing is never that thing, it has a nonobjective relationship with the thing. When I say “book” I’m not expressing any book, or an image, or a particular book: I’m expressing a generic image of a book, the concept of a book. If I say “3” I’m expressing a concept that doesn’t have any individuality per se, since 3 doesn’t express a conceptreality. This doesn’t mean that the idea can’t be expressed through images, in any type of language: painting cinema music can express ideas like the idea of a dog or of love… Subject: resting in itself The imagination is the product of psychic activity of thought, or better, the self-censoring that represses man’s ability to think freely, degrading and relegating the imagination to an abstract level of fantasy. Since childhood, man is taught to think in terms of fantasy: it is said that children are different from adults because they have lots of imagination. On the contrary, children are born with the magical quality of imagination-hallucination; they live on a creative-real level, which adults violently castrate in them because truth is scary, and they then substitute it, replace it with the abstraction of the fantastic. In principle, the imagination is thought; the hallucination is communication on a visual level, expression through materialized imagesobjects. (P. Bargellini)
Biography
film director
Piero Bargellini
Pierfrancesco Bargellini (Arezzo, 1940-1982), also known as Piero, bought his first movie camera when he was 20 and pointed it at his youthful passions: competition cars and motorcycles. A few years later he met Marco Melani, who became his cinema companion and an actor in his films. He started to make a name for himself in the world of amateur filmmakers and won a prize at the festival of Montecatini. One of the members of the jury was Massimo Bagicalupo, a founder of the Cooperativa cinema indipendente, and he invited Bargellini to enter the brand-new world of Italian underground cinema. While working as an agronomist at the Val di Chiana Irrigation Office he continued to make films in his free time, but shortly afterwards, with the notice and support of the magazines “Cinema & Film” and the group “Filmstudio 70,” he left his job and moved to Rome. Here, during the early 1970s he worked occasionally for RAI and carried on his activity as an independent director in the world of underground cinema. During this period he suffered a series of misadventures with the law and ended up fleeing to Turkey with his wife Oriana and their daughter Rebecca in 1975. After returning to Italy he continued experimenting, jotting down his discoveries in a series of notebooks and fruitlessly trying to find financing for various projects for experimental programs for Rai. Bertolucci and Storaro consulted with him during preparation for La Luna (1981) to try to resolve problems with various special effects. But Bargellini progressively lost contact with the world of cinema and shortly thereafter his troubles with the law began. He was found dead, officially because of an overdose, at dawn on July 10, 1982.
FILMOGRAFIA
Il teschio; La fiera dei sogni; L’incompiuta; Club 3P Battifolle (1965), Anno 2000 (1965), La striscia (1966), ...vi prego di accettare questo semplice bouquet di parentesi appena sbocciate ((())) (1966), Questo film è dedicato a David Riesman e si intitolerà «Capolavoro» (1967), Morte all’orecchio di Van Gogh (1968), Fractions of Temporary Periods I parte: Ovvero Plans- Séquences per una bambina (1965-1968), 360° di cinediario (1968), Tempo-Tempio-Ritratto (1968), Macrozoom (1968), Baraccone (1968), Water-Closet ovvero attesa per una defecazione (1968), Stricnina (1969- 1973), Fractions of temporary periods II parte: Due ore pomeridiane della bambina (1969), Trasferimento di modulazione (1969), Nelda (1969), Un ottofilm di Pierfrancesco Bargellini (1969), Zukie (1970), Gasoline (1970), Bacino Casa del lupo o di Tonino Massimo e Piero (1970, esiste solo in stato di frammento/only fragments), Oracolo (1970-1971, distrutto dall’autore nel 1974/destroy by the director in 1974), Erinnerung an die Zukunft (1970, non terminato/unfinished), Due silenzi e un’armonica (1971), Dove incominciano le gambe (1974)
Dispersi/Lost: Saluto (gennaio/January 1968, 8-16mm, 18fts, sonoro/sound, 3’30’’, bn/bw), Relazione filmata (1968-1970, 8mm, 24fts, sonoro/sound, 13’, col.); Abbandonate ogni illusione, preparatevi alla lotta (co-regia/co-director Marco Melani, Stefano Beccastrini, 1969, 16mm, 24fts, 40’, col.-bn/bw)