L'ARIA IN TESTA

A private TV station has seta 180,000,000 lire prize for someone to film the story The Morning Girl by a famous writer. Luce, a young filmmaker wins the prize with the support of film critics. She goes to Rome for this reason. Gerri, the film's producer tries to get the operation off the ground economically. In the meantime, the shortsighted and visionary director looks about for a person to play the key character of the story. The producer is hounded by creditors and can't manage to increase the budget. The director can't manage to break with her visions and the shadow of her mother. In this way the object of desire is constantly postponed. Things don't get off paper. In fact, the screenplay is not even finished. It's a problem to make the plot more realistic. It's even a problem to justify the 180,000,000 lire award. The situation disintegrates. Luce is forced to give up the film, even though she finally identified the person to play the key character who had been there among them under everybody's noses all along. Nevertheless, her mother's legacy remains. There is a new and paradoxical hope for Gerri. And for Luce there is a recognition of her own growth and a warning to persist.

"Air in the Head is the overreaching of a certain way of being, but it is also a flash of the imagination: imagination, not fantasy, as Gramsci would put it.
Air in the Head is a singing of tales, and a singing out of tune of the happiness of the shipwrecked. It is a jam session. For I've made many people act nuns, the homeless, and woman convicts who do not hold a degree from the academy of fine arts. And they blame me for not having the same courage myself. It was the bill I had to pay at the cost of losing it. And it was also because I believe in slip ups, in the needed raw material rather than the unneeded polished product. And in as far as possible, everyone should play the part of herself. You're better as your own stuntwoman.
There is criticism of the people in the 'creative' underbrush, but also irony. There is a cleverness in the effort to make every experience into a story, even an experience that seems to come about purely by chance.
There is a poet in the form of a mother who does not make poetry here but tells her daughter how she could decipher existence, naturally according to an enciphered code. The videos that periodically interrupt the story like commercials are there as a salute to everything amorphous and latent, to all dreamers of automatic writings, to all that which cannot be said or is still in note form. There are spaces for sighted shortsightedness and for the maternal (Cassandra all over again?). It is an 'opera semibuffa', because the scheme is that of the sitcom, the screwball comedy crisscrossed with craziness, as if all this were enough.
This is dedicated to Rome, where I lived through exactly that which I told about along with Dirce Bezzi, naturally playing around with symbols, but not that much at all.
This is dedicated to Adriano Belli. He created some publicity for me by putting me up next to Tanner and De Oliveira and then he thought I would be the ideal director to shoot The Morning Girl. It didn't cross his mind that I would never have been able to and now he's happy that his subject has become one of the characters anyway.
This is dedicated to all emigrants, to all displacements (including rhetorical displacements, the socalled 'detournements'), and to all initiations.
Air in the Head is initiatory viaticum." (Emanuela Piovano)

Director: Emanuela Piovano.
Screenplay: Emanuela Piovano, Dirce Bezzi.
Director of photography: Roberto Romei.
Art director: Caterina Faina.
Music: Guido Cenciarelli.
Sound: Cinzia Rossi.
Editor: Anita Cacciolati.
Cast and characters: Emanuela Piovano (Luce Stravirata), Dirce Bezzi (Chiara Primavera), Ennio Pontis (Gerri Panzanò), Mariella Tortora (Maritornes Panzanò), Nazzareno Neri (Vito Lo Yucca).
Director of Production: Fulvio Pontis.
Production company: A.I.P. S.r.l., via Properzio 4, Roma, tel. 6874677, fax 6874677.
Italian distribution: Airone Cinematografica S.r.l., largo Olgiata 15, Roma, tel. 3789550, fax 3788200.