Postcard from America
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.
Massimo Bacigalupo
Also Directed by Massimo Bacigalupo
Experimental film in two parts, the first black and white, the second color.
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.
This short film was timed to Midsömmer, a lyrical track in the Atlantic album The Modern Jazz Quartet at Music Inn/Volume 2. The heroine reconciles herself with the breakup of an affair.
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.
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.
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...
"Her was shot as my contributionto a collective film of the Italian Film-makers' Cooperative, Tutto,tutto nello stesso istante, whichstarted out as a Dadaist protestagainst 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 anextension of its original meaning. I remember showing it with an 8mm projector at the USIS Rome Library in winter 1970 as part of a concertof American music." Massimo Bacigalupo
Recovered silent 16mm footage from New York, 1973, edited, with a soundtrack, in memory of my wife, the dancer Angela Kirsten. A reflection on art, time, loss, and permanence through the foregrounded medium of film. Elsewhere on YouTube you can see the unedited overexposed reel of Angela dancing Balanchine's "Ricercar", the reel which is here corrected and placed in the larger context of winter and spring, life and the seasons.The original footage was scanned by Home Movies, Bologna, and Aleksandr Balagura assisted with editiing and suggestions. When in 1975 I shot in New York my film "Postcards from America", Angela asked me if I was going to use this material (which she had not seen). "But", she added, "I would not like to be a postcard". --M.B., 2020.
A close and affectionate look at an Italian-American family engaged in a wedding party, accompanied by a soundtrack of childhood reminiscences by one of the older participants.
Short by Massimo Bacigalupo.