Country: Italy
Year: 1968
Duration: 15'
200 feet for march 31st Most of this film was shot within one day, 31 March 1968, and edited in the camera. It is divided in six episodes following an ancient Indian text, Katha Upanishad, in which a young man, Nakiketa, converses with Death. Every section presents an event of that day and refers to a writer and a painter. The story moves from a room to a garden to a quiet water-surface as the afternoon goes on. Then there is an amorous encounter, a bit of fun among youngsters playing cops and robbers, and a boy and girl quietly awaiting the night. “The six ‘Vallis’ or branches (as they are called in the Upanishad), each ten meters or thirty-three feet long, evoke the excitement of a spring day in which simple events bring to the mind of the implicit protagonist bits from his reading and the visual arts. Thus he is briefly haunted by (1) Ezra Pound and Kandinsky, (2) Stran Brakhage’s images and words, (3) e.e. cummings and Botticelli’s Spring, (4) John Donne, Aubrey Beardsley and Hieronymus Bosch, (5) Lawrence Durrell and Caravaggio, (6) The Upanishads and Piero della Francesca. But, as Andreas Weiland commented in a poem: ‘Let us not talk of how & to whom homage was paid, let us talk of this: / The Discovery of the Word / it is surely something to see’”.
Biography
film director
Massimo Bacigalupo
Massimo Bacigalupo (Rapallo, Genoa, Italy, 1947) produced his first film work for the local Amateur Film Club. For some years he helped organize the Rapallo International Amateur Film Festival. In 1966 his feature Quasi una tangente was awarded first prize in the Montecatini Film Festival. Bacigalupo, who was nineteen-year-old at the time, remembers that he was sitting in the audience with Lillian Gish and Anita Loos, who happened to be visiting Montecatini (Lillian was a friend of Massimo’s parents). Early on, through his personal acquaintance with poet Ezra Pound, Bacigalupo met filmmakers and associates of the New American Cinema, among them Guy Davenport, Stan Brakhage, Gregory Markopoulos, Jonas Mekas, and Abbott Meader. In 1970 he prepared an Italian translation of Brakhage’s Metaphors on Vision. He brought to Rapallo in 1964 a selection of American films, among them works by Ron Rice and Maya Deren, which made a lasting impression. In 1966-71 he was a university student in Rome, where he was a founding member of the Italian Filmmakers’ Cooperative, and was involved in producing and distributing independent films. In 1968 he shot 200 Feet for March 31, an uncut and silent 8mm film-happening. He went on in 1969-70 to create Eringio, a series of four films running over two hours. The title refers to Dürer’s self-portrait, and this film quartet amounts to a collective self-portrait of the student and art world in Italy at the time. The longest film of the series, Migration, a celebration of the Great Mother and her many incarnations, was premiered at the 1970 London Film Festival. Bacigalupo travelled with a showcase of Italian underground films to Denmark, Sweden, Germany (1970), and later Spain (1974) and England (Tate Gallery, 1983). He enrolled as a graduate student at Columbia University, receiving his Ph.D. in American literature in 1975. Warming Up, a color film shot in Italy and America, was premiered at the Anthology Film Archives, NYC, on Bacigalupo’s 26th birthday, April 20, 1973. In 1975 he shot Postcards from America, a dream travelogue, and Into the House, an homage to his American mother’s family. Later Bacigalupo has been chiefly active as a scholar, critic and educator. He is Professor of American Literature at the University of Genoa and has received numerous awards for his work as a translator, chiefly of English and American poetry. He lives in Rapallo.
FILMOGRAFIA
filmografia/filmography
Lilan (cm, 1965), Quasi una tangente (mm, 1966), Ariel loquitur (mm, 1967), 60 metri per il 31 marzo (cm, 1968), Versus (cm, 1968), Her (cm, 1968), The Last Summer (cm, 1969), Né bosco (una conversazione) (cm 1970), Migrazione (mm, 1970), Paphos (cm, 1970), Coda (cm, 1970), Warming Up (mm, 1973), Into the House (cm, 1975), Cartoline dall’America (cm, 1975).
Cast
& Credits
regia/director
Massimo Bacigalupo
interpreti/cast
Fabrizio Buccarella, Silvano Fua, Costanzo Lemmi, Laura Onorati, Janet Velasquez
