CARTE BLANCHE – Lo schermo dell’arte for FIFA Montréal (40th edition)
15–27 March 2022
On the occasion of the 40th edition of the Festival International du Film sur l’Art (FIFA), Silvia Lucchesi, director and founder of Lo schermo dell’arte, was invited to present a Carte blanche dedicated to recent Italian production at the intersection of cinema and contemporary art.
“The five works presented in this Carte blanche are films made by internationally renowned Italian visual artists and performers who have taken part in the programming of Lo schermo dell’arte. I selected these examples because they represent different linguistic and stylistic approaches within recent Italian production positioned between cinema and art: from the rapid montage of internet-downloaded materials created during lockdown (Found Choreographies), to slow, contemplative filming (Sudan, produced by Lo schermo dell’arte); from the exploration of cinema’s potential as a tool to create estranging situations (Poor Poor Jerry), to a reflection on the now widely debated issue of image objectivity (What Time Is Love?), and finally to the original narrative approach of documentary filmmaking (Welcome Palermo).”
by Luca Trevisani
(Italy, 2016, 15’)
For years, white rhinoceroses have been killed by poachers for their valuable horn, believed to possess aphrodisiac properties. Sudan is the last of these specimens and takes his name from his place of birth. He lived for a long time at the Dvůr Králové Zoo in the Czech Republic, where the cold climate caused him to lose the ability to reproduce and continue his species. He is now 43 years old and lives in a nature reserve in Nanyuki, Kenya. There, protected by armed guards, he moves slowly across one of the world’s vastest horizons.
Trevisani films him in close-up shots, highlighting his rough skin as if it were a sculptural work of art with an unusual, almost plastic fascination. The camera also captures blurred and barely outlined portraits of the soldiers tasked with monitoring his movements day and night, while it lingers on his body, sketching the image of a dying work of art slowly moving towards extinction.
by Rä Di Martino
(Italy, 2017, 7’)
An elderly Jerry (the famous mouse from the animated series Tom and Jerry) walks alone across a wind-swept desert, an alien landscape that could belong to an imaginary planet: images shot by the artist near a volcano on the island of Lanzarote. The character speaks in different voices, endlessly repeating a long sequence of lines taken from romantic films and television series from different eras.
It is a surreal journey through the collective emotional imagination, carried out by a symbol of American pop culture that traverses and reactivates, in the present, a shared heritage of images, words, and emotions conveyed by cinema, music, and television.
by Anna Franceschini
(Italy, Germany, Netherlands, 2017, 11’)
T.U.V. is a company specialized in issuing European conformity certifications for goods and products. Its headquarters in Nuremberg, where the video was shot, is particularly dedicated to the testing of toys and childcare products.
The video, positioned between documentary and fiction, follows a procedural path linked to the completion of tests that becomes, in itself, the making of the film. It investigates the concept of “fitness” and questions how high the price of being accepted by a community can be.
by Masbedo
(Italy, 2019, 62’)
In 2018, for Manifesta 12 in Palermo, MASBEDO transformed an old van into Videomobile, a travelling laboratory on wheels. This unusual vehicle, equipped with a stage for performances and interviews, became a multi-channel interactive installation. Welcome Palermo, dedicated to the relationship between the city and cinema, traces the evolution of the project.
Interviews with Palermo’s mayor Leoluca Orlando, Princess Vittoria Alliata di Villafranca e Valguarnera (daughter of Francesco Alliata, founder of Alliata Films), the musicologist Gioacchino Lanza Tomasi (grandson of writer Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa), and Sister Cornelia of San Paolo Film, who selected films for distribution in parish cinema circuits, are interwoven with archival materials and performances by artists and ordinary citizens of Palermo.
The latter perform the questions about sexuality posed by Pier Paolo Pasolini in Comizi d’amore.
