Massimo Bacigalupo

The construction of the film is very simple. Most of the time we see faces in close-up. Three pairs of faces, usually, on three different levels of superimpositions. At first, the faces are very theatrical, made-up. It's not clear whether they are men or women. They move only slightly. They are, indeed, godlike. As the film progresses, very unnoticeably, these faces begin to gain more life and masculine and feminine qualities. At the end of the film, after three hours, the faces are very real, and very human, and sexes and ages are very clearly defined: men, women, children.

On November 26, 1976, Massimo Bacigalupo was in Catania with his 16mm camera, filming the streets of the city at the foot of Mount Etna and the people lingering and strolling about. The movement and the pauses in everyday life —seemingly boring and not particularly appealing— captured the filmmaker’s attention. Bacigalupo recalls those diary-style film shots, edited years later into a film:

This exhibition focuses on Jonas Mekas’ 365 Day Project, a succession of films and videos in calendar form. Every day as of January 1st, 2007 and for an entire year, as indicated in the title, a large public (the artist's friends, as well as unknowns) were invited to view a diary of short films of various lengths (from one to twenty minutes) on the Internet. A movie was posted each day, adding to the previously posted pieces, resulting altogether in nearly thirty-eight hours of moving images.

German dancer Angela Kirsten rehearses and dances (from memory) Balanchine's choreography of "Ricercar" by Bach-Webern, in New York 1973 where Massimo Bacigalupo met her before she would become his wife and mother of his two children.

A series of migrants who at times narrate and impersonate shards of myths, among them the Great Goddess, the Virgin of Bach’s Magnificat, the Sulamite of Stockhausen’s Song of Solomon (“I am black but comely”), tales by Herodotus, Kafka, Villon (as set to music by Ezra Pound). Third part of the Flower of Eryngium cycle.

Shot between Italy and New York City, Warming Up is the journal of a season of creativity. The film-maker and his characters improvise scenes and sequences, and wonder how to make up a story as they go along. The recurring theme is how to make the world (or read it as) an imaginative place...

On November 26, 1976, Massimo Bacigalupo was in Catania with his 16mm camera, filming the streets of the city at the foot of Mount Etna and the people lingering and strolling about. The movement and the pauses in everyday life —seemingly boring and not particularly appealing— captured the filmmaker’s attention. Bacigalupo recalls those diary-style film shots, edited years later into a film:

German dancer Angela Kirsten rehearses and dances (from memory) Balanchine's choreography of "Ricercar" by Bach-Webern, in New York 1973 where Massimo Bacigalupo met her before she would become his wife and mother of his two children.

A series of migrants who at times narrate and impersonate shards of myths, among them the Great Goddess, the Virgin of Bach’s Magnificat, the Sulamite of Stockhausen’s Song of Solomon (“I am black but comely”), tales by Herodotus, Kafka, Villon (as set to music by Ezra Pound). Third part of the Flower of Eryngium cycle.

Shot between Italy and New York City, Warming Up is the journal of a season of creativity. The film-maker and his characters improvise scenes and sequences, and wonder how to make up a story as they go along. The recurring theme is how to make the world (or read it as) an imaginative place...

Collective manifesto by the members of C.C.I. It is a collective film, the result of an operation devoid of any aesthetic purpose: to verify the existence of any harmony between a fairly large group (twelve people) of members of the independent Cooperative. Someone, who had the idea, turned 60 meters of Ektachrome according to the moods –or discontent – of the moment and gave them to others to see. The others reacted, each with their own piece. It was then thought to call the film “circular letter”. It was not so simple and so quick: the operation, which started in June of ’68, ended in March of ’69.

Material shot between 1961 and 1967 ,including bad takes for Quasi una tangente, is reorganized following the five acts of Shakespeare's The Tempest. Thus Ariel loquitur ("Ariel speaks") has five numbered sections, and a Prospero-like figure of old philosopher appears repeatedly. The wedding ceremony of Miranda and Ferdinand in Act IV of the play is performed in section IV, an unedited night-film in which one catches glimpses of a match being lit. The last section introduces color and sound, the latter through the Beatles' A Day in the Life (from Sgt.Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band).

The film seeks to question how a certain image is perceived. The point of departure is a photograph of a street in Palestine. Later the camera moves to show that the photo includes (in a rear mirror) the image of the photographer with a camera. Finally, the image is reversed as in a mirror. The film is constituted of four unedited rolls of 100-feet 16mm reels, one of which was previously exposed in an 8mm camera.

A conclusion and recapitulation of the Eryngium cycle, Coda deals directly with the theme of self-portraiture. The first shot alludes to the end of Erichvon Stroheim's Foolish Wives, where the corpse of the hero-director is dispatched in a man-hole. Other dramatic self-portraits follow: Caravaggio's Goliath, Dante's Sestina (read by the film-maker), and Dürer's Self-portrait with Eryngium. The abandoned villa of Migrazione is revisited. But the finale is hopeful.

Italian film-maker Tonino De Bernardi meets in rural Liguria an old countrywoman, Agnese, and her chickens.

After the author’s period of experimentation, these American notes are extremely straightforward. As in Migration, however, this America could be a more remote country, and the inspiration is avowedly Japanese (Basho’s Narrow Road to the Deep North). Implicitly, the film-maker compares himself to an old peddler of drawings, Sam, hawking his wares at the entrance of Columbia’s Butler Library.

Bagni di Lucca, June 1988.

Short film shot in Rapallo, 1987.

A previously unreleased film that documents the relationship between Bacigalupo and the American poet who introduced him to the underground scene. “Filmed in Venice during the production of a documentary by Bayerischer Rundfunk, in which I participated as a consultant.” - M. Bacigalupo

8mm film of Rapallo in 1985

Short film shot in Uscio, Genoa, May 7, 1989.

Lilan, the heroine, reconciles herself with the breakup of an affair.

No synopsis available yet.

Most of this silent film was shot in Rome within one day, March 31, 1968, and edited in the camera (a 100-feet double8 BW film roll). It is divided in six episodes following an ancient Indian text, Katha Upanishad, in which a youth, Nakiketa, converses with Death. Every section presents an event of that day and refers to a writer and a painter. The film captures some of the excitement of Spring 1968 in Europe and elsewhere.

Pontremoli, July 1988.

A close and affectionate look at an Italian-American family engaged in a wedding party, accompanied by a voice-over of childhood reminiscences in the same location, the industrial region of Pittsburgh (Pennsylvania), by one of the older participants.

A sketch of materials (and texts) that were to be used in Nor Wood and Migration, this short film has the freshness of an improvisation.

A short film featuring shot in 1987 at Chiavari.

14Reels is a collective film in Super 8, where 14 directors in 14 cities around the world have filmed and edited in camera one reel each on the theme of the city.

A tale in two (silent) voices. The forest, the vineyards En Geddi, are there and are not there. The two voices speak on the border between recognition and estrangement, distance and contact. Sometimes, like certain angels in paintings, they turn their eyes away from the representation and look at the observer. Part Two of the Eryngium Flowers series.

Rapallo, Italy, summer 1998.

Rapallo, 1990.

"Her was shot as my contribution to a collective film of the Italian Film-makers' Cooperative, "Tutto, tutto nello stesso istante", which started out as a Dadaist protest against police brutality. I used a "Newsweek" cutting about the Chicago Convention riots, about a woman being beaten up, and isolated in every line a symbolic word, which returns in the second part with an extension of its original meaning. I remember showing it with an 8mm projector at the USIS Rome Library in winter 1970 as part of a concert of American music." Massimo Bacigalupo

A day in the life of a young student, Paul, who commits suicide with his girl friend. We follow him in theschoolroom, 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.

A day in the life of a young student, Paul, who commits suicide with his girl friend. We follow him in theschoolroom, 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.

Observations of a space and (last) time, of a landscape and the people who inhabit it. The first chapter of the Flowers of Eringyum cycle, the film portrays the family background where the individual journey begins, the rituals of middle-class life, their representations (also in home movies), and what they may conceal.

An anthology of short films directed by Massimo Bacigalupo around 1969 and 1970.

Short film shot in Forte dei Marmi, August 1989.

Experimental film in two parts, the first black and white, the second color.