28° TORINO FILM FESTIVAL
ONDE - MASSIMO BACIGALUPO

QUASI UNA TANGENTE

by Massimo Bacigalupo
Country: Italy
Year: 1966
Duration: 37'


almost a tangent

A day in the life of a young student, Paul, who commits suicide with his girl friend. We follow him in the schoolroom, where he fantasizes about space travel while the instructor goes over the dates of WW2 and his companions read “Playboy”. He walks in a city covered with postcards for coming elections. Discusses life and death with a friend, Harald, meets a pretty acquaintance, Mara, with whom he makes love, and finally turns on the gas in his study.

 

“The title means more or less ‘a kind of escape’. I made it up in cold blood one afternoon, thinking what would be a good and unusual word with which to begin a title. Quasi seemed just right. Tangente, from my knowledge of basic trig, happily followed. An essay by Maya Deren about filming without a tripod and getting from one place to another just with one continuous movement had been a revelation, as had Ron Rice’s The Flower Thief and Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising. To my surprise, the film won first prize in the 1966 Montecatini Amateur Film Festival.” 

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 e personaggi/cast and characters

Mara Fazio (Mara), Harald Nieuwland (Harald), Peter Van Dijk


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