Splinters of Utopia

Alberto Grifi, the protagonist around whom the whole Italian underground movement revolved, confesses himself in front of Paolo Brunatto's cameras. Grifi tells poet Valentino Zeichen the reasons behind “The Uncertain Verification” (recently restored for the Venice Film Festival), the most famous film of the Italian underground.

During the underground season Tonino De Bernardi set out to tell “what he saw” and-if possible-save himself and his world by means of his own work. De Bernardi tells the poet Valentino Zeichen and a young cinephile friend - Fulvio Baglivi - that in those distant 1960s he wanted to make a cinema that would “accompany him in living.”... A simple and direct way to see the very special way of working of this unusual and brilliant director.

Muse and Goddess of the Italian underground, she always rejected the opposition between art cinema and popular cinema and helped create the new critical taste that broke the mould and crossed schools, tastes and trends. He founded in 1967 with Americo Sbardella - who in the film traces his memory and remembrance - the legendary Filmstudio in Rome, a temple of independent and underground cinema of yesterday and today.

In a 1974 letter to Massimo Bacigalupo, which later appeared in Black and White magazine, I wrote, “It is dangerous to talk about oneself, because the thing lends itself to a thousand misunderstandings. But I will do it anyway, because my Ego as an author, cannot resist the temptation.” (Paul Brunatto)

Piero Bargellini's overwhelming journey into technique and aesthetics.

Scavolini together with Paolo Brunatto and his friend Valentino Zeichen, traces the vicissitudes of his early steps in experimental cinema, the basis of which was the development of an attempt to describe in real time the gestures and events of reality. The documentary presents never-before-seen images and evocative backstage moments from Scavolini's latest film, “The Apocalypse of the Apes” (2004), a very recent production that was completely self-managed and an example of a new poor cinema.

Paolo Brunatto and Valentino Zeichen meet Alfredo Leonardi, a passionate standard-bearer of Italian underground cinema, who now lives “in retreat” on Lake Como and has now distanced himself from that season and from cinema in general.

A journey in the company of two explorers of our time - Anna Lajolo and Guido Lombardi - who through video and written text went from the more experimental and poetic underground in the 1960s, to the Videobase collective in the 1970s and, in the 1980s, to documenting the life of communities living on mythical islands lost in the oceans, such as Tristan da Cunha or Pitcairn, the island of the Bounty mutineers.

For Gianfranco Baruchello, as for his master Duchamp, the poetic is found first and foremost in subconscious processes, in a liberating and, once said, anti-bourgeois function. Paolo Brunatto and Valentino Zeichen unveil the playful vein and irony that bring to light the biting ideas, latent in the artistic gesture, of Baruchello, co-author with Grifi of “La verifica incerta” and maker of a series of experimental shorts, epochal performances and indelible signs of time.

In his country hermitage in the Veneto region of Italy, amidst films laid out to dry, projectors, old 16mm. cameras and antediluvian moviolas, Paolo Gioli describes his procedures of “alchemical cinema.”

For Brunatto and Zeichen, attempting a portrait of Brocani meant inevitably referring to the latter's friendship and creative, human and professional complicity with Mario Schifano, a lifelong traveling companion.

Now a distinguished scholar of Anglo-Saxon literature (he won the Opera Prima Viareggio Prize with an essay on Pound), Bacigalupo talks about himself and his idea of cinema. With the complicity of Brunatto and Zeichen after at least 20 years of inactivity as a filmmaker, he picks up a camera again and indulges in a nostalgic and amusing remake of one of his 8 mm. films shot in Portofino when he was 14.