Massimo Bacigalupo
Birth : 1947-04-20, Rapallo, Genoa, Italy
History
Massimo Bacigalupo (Rapallo, Genoa, Italy, 1947). His first works were produced for the local Amateur Film Club. For some years he helped organize the Rapallo International Amateur Film Festival. In 1966 his feature Quasi una tangente was awarded first prize in the Montecatini Film Festival. Bacigalupo, who was nineteen-year-old at the time, remembers that he was sitting in the audience with Lillian Gish and Anita Loos, who happened to be visiting Montecatini (Lillian was a friend of Massimo’s parents). Early on, through his personal acquaintance with poet Ezra Pound, Bacigalupo met film-makers and associates of the New American Cinema, among them Guy Davenport, Stan Brakhage, Gregory Markopoulos, Jonas Mekas, and Abbott Meader. In 1970 he prepared an Italian translation of Brakhage’s Metaphors on Vision. He brought to Rapallo in 1964 a selection of American films, among them works by Ron Rice and Maya Deren, which made a lasting impression. In 1966-71 he was a university student in Rome, where he was a founding member of the Italian Film-makers’ Cooperative, and was involved in producing and distributing independent films. In 1968 he shot 200 Feet for March 31, an uncut and silent 8mm film- happening. He went on in 1969-70 to create Eringio, a series of four films running over two hours. The title refers to Dürer’s self-portrait, and this film quartet amounts to a collective self-portrait of the student and art world in Italy at the time. The longest film of the series, Migration, a celebration of the Great Mother and her many incarnations, was premiered at the 1970 London Film Festival. Bacigalupo travelled with a showcase of Italian underground films to Denmark, Sweden, Germany (1970), and later Spain (1974) and England (Tate Gallery, 1983). He enrolled as a graduate student at Columbia University, receiving his Ph.D. in American literature in 1975. Warming Up, a color film shot in Italy and America, was premiered at the Anthology Film Archives, NYC, on Bacigalupo's 26th birthday, April 20, 1973. In 1975 he shot Postcards from America, a dream travelogue, and Into the House, an homage to his American mother’s family. Subsequently Bacigalupo has been chiefly active as a scholar, critic and educator. He is Professor of American Literature at the University of Genoa and has received numerous awards for his work as a translator, chiefly of English and American poetry. He lives in Rapallo.
Director
German dancer Angela Kirsten rehearses and dances (from memory) Balanchine's choreography of "Ricercar" by Bach-Webern, New York 1973. A short reflection on time, memory, beauty, art, and the film medium.
Director
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.
Director
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.
Director
Director
Italian film-maker Tonino De Bernardi meets in rural Liguria an old countrywoman, Agnese, and her chickens.
Director
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.
Director
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...
Director
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.
Director
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.
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.
Director
This is the third and most extensive part of the cycle Eryngium. The essential theme is the migrations that have populated our world, starting from ancient India and descending into Greece and Western Europe.The film’s conceit is that this movement is still in progress. The characters are shown in transit, as if they were part of an ancient caravan. While they move they make up myths and they worship the Great Goddess,impersonating her story. Thus she appears as young girl and mature woman, and is evoked in the stories and music given on the soundtrack: 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). A section is devoted to the idea of celebration, where the migrants get together to worship the life-principle. Later the film moves back to the individual and solitude.
Director
An anthology of short films directed by Massimo Bacigalupo around 1969 and 1970.
Unfinished feature film by Piero Bargellini
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Short by Massimo Bacigalupo.
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Short by Massimo Bacigalupo.
Director
According to the film-maker, this film, Part Two of the Eryngium series, provides the cycle’s dialogues
Director
First chapter of the four-part-cycle Eryngium, 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.
First chapter of the four-part-cycle Eryngium, 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.
Director
16mm collective manifesto by the members of C.C.I.
Editor
16mm collective manifesto by the members of C.C.I.
Director
"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
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.
Himself
Dedicated to Dieter Meier. voice-over by Gregory Markopoulos, reading an excerpt in English translation of Paul Valéry’s L’Homme et la nuit (Man and the Night).
Director
Experimental film in two parts, the first black and white, the second color.
Director
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.
Director
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.
Director
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).
Writer
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.
Director
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.
Director
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.
