Sirio Luginbühl

Piero Tortolina has been a point of reference for a whole generation of film lovers. Pioneer of cinema-clubs and great film collector, he has been an invisible protagonist in the history of italian cinema.

Experimental short by Sirio Luginbühl.

I dreamt of finding myself naked sitting in a café. On the table was a cactus. I was watching it. The cactus also looked at me - and the more it looked at me, the more it was blushing.

The film is dedicated to Vittorio and Silvio Loffredo who, in the second half of the 1930s in Paris, using film excerpts found at flea markets, created a memorable collage film

A particular shot, made with a lens that breaks up the image field into fragments and reproduces the optics of a fly, explores a room where there is a girl with a guitar. The shot, back to normal, shows a container with the fly and a jar of honey. The girl than performs various actions: she plays the guitar, collects honey from the jar with a finger, reads a book while the buzzing becomes insistent. In this way, an ambiguous and unusual relationship with the insect arises.

The film aims to show the fall of revolutionary ideals and broken ideologies.

A young woman comes home and discovers that she has her period. She is forced to change her sanitary napkins continuously, while her husband eats eggs in the kitchen. Towels invade the room, then the apartment, then fall into the streets of the city. The chosen places are the headquarters of financial, political, police and religious power. They are centers of oppression.

Contrast between different portraits of women, between the public and the intimate.

A young woman dedicates to a solitary pleasure surrounded by precious cushions. Larvae of flies appear in superimposition moving briskly and multiplying until they conquer the entire frame. Numerous signs, scratches and holes deliberately made on the film follow. On this images a tricolor ribbon is again superimposed, which start to burn together with the worms. "Common people’ succumbs to the massacres of the state and to the terrorist attacks that infect Italy.

Experimental interpretation of the Narcissus myth.

1971 / 8mm / color / sound

The film is set in an industrial landfill in the Petrochemical area of Porto Marghera (Venice). Here, among the toxic residues, a happening takes place: a boy and a girl without knowing each other before are invited to undress and kiss in front of ‘fake’ journalists, photographers and operators. The soundtrack is composed by different environmental noises. The director denounces in this way the pollution and the landscape changing, focusing on the vision of two beautiful bodies kissing.

The film begins with a shot on the countryside near Padua. A young man goes slowly towards the camera carrying a big red flag, referring to the student revolts of 1968. The camera follows the protagonist ..

This « comic strip » of alienation takes place within the walls of a bourgeois house, in a valley created by the toxic red-violet waste of a large chemical industry. In the background, popular songs from the '60s.

The film took place at Villa Pisani (Stra-Venezia), near Venice’s lagoon in Porto Marghera (VE) and in a car cemetery. A beautiful girl covered with a semi-transparent gauze and with a gas mask.