Country: Italy
Year: 1969
Duration: 4'
A portrait of a friend, Nelda. A film that is exposed-developed in continuous spontaneity, an act of love. I perceive Nelda: womanmatter-energy, or her Unity… I exclaim: oh! the consciousness of being the real present, divided; oh! presence turned into a bio-cosmic fraction in the flash of marvel; oh! turns on a light bulb, the vibrations that shake my being; oh! the jolt the pulsation… oh! the modulation of the heartbeats, the musical organ; oh! I am happy! I lost the body, loving it… It’s a film that until today I had trouble shooting and developing… A year ago, one afternoon, after a few minutes spent in my studio talking with Nelda, in the space of a moment the entire film flashed before my eyes (in projection, the film is only a spatialtemporal dilation of that flash). After having mentally reviewed those initial images one by one, with Nelda, about Nelda, filming her, editing the entire film in the machine, sequence by sequence. And all this time I had to remember the numbering of the frame counter for each series of start-stops, in order to obtain the right superimposition and the exact number of frames necessary. While Nelda sometimes had to remain motionless at the stops or get back into the exact same position as before, and this for two whole hours (which is how long the filming lasted). For Nelda, the developing is the continuum, she is one with the shooting, that is, the tournage and the developing indicate the relative instruments I used, that act expressively and are indivisible Unity; and the one is the other and its continuum; they are the focal points of the act of love between Piero and Nelda. The developing technique is the one that was experimented in Trasferimento di modulazione, here it is accented, applied with scientifically responsible – experimental – conscientiousness. Two months after it was made I projected Nelda and it provoked in me a series of exclamations that were used for this passage. A few days after the projection I sent the film as an act of greeting and love to Adriano Aprà, a dear friend. (P. Bargellini) The film was shot in invertible 16mm and thus there is only one single positive copy (no negative). Bargellini intervened during the developing stage with startstop techniques and illumination of portions of the images, following a principle similar to the one used in his film Trasferimento di modulazione. (Adriano Aprà)
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)