Country: Italy
Year: 1969
Duration: 7'
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. (P. Bargellini) By filming the death of his dog, Piero Bargellini pays tribute to Stan Brakhage, who, in his film Sirius Remembered, did pretty much the same thing with his dog Sirius. Stricnina is a film from 1969 that Bargellini had “forgotten” to print; the admiration and the affection of Filmstudio, in an embrace of the deluxe poor, financed a print of the one and only copy in 1973. But Piero believed that developing and printing quite often means revolutionizing the material that was shot and edited in the camera. Stricnina is an exorcism (a bit of magic in the manipulation of the technique) to save the soul of a dog. (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)