All the movies from the film festival are on Vimeo

“More than movies in the common sense, ours are cinematic experiments. At the beginning, we wanted to use this medium by linking it to the particular experiences we had had in the field of visual arts, without following the path of the so-called “artist’s cinema” from the Sixties and Seventies. We wanted to start from that small heritage of behavioural animations we had developed in the Militant Communication Workshop”*.

In the first movies “there is a progressive personalisation of the camera, without it representing the point of view of any of the actors, until we get to certain moments in which it freely departs from the narrative and seems to become curious about something else; as if it were to detach itself from the director’s will, and seek its own path. We were experimenting the mismatch between the given story and the possibility of enticing viewers to create other possible ones. After all, it was the same tension you could find in our video environments from that time, 1984-1985. Whoever wants to look for connections between our video experience and our cinematographic process must look this way, and not to the formal aspect of the use of effects or other very common electronic repertoire from that time”*.

Movies have punctuated the experience of Studio Azzurro, often anticipating insights that then expanded into space and time with other projects, from theatre to museums, passing through video environments to sensitive environments. With this complete review, we propose a walk through these “cinematic experiments” as we wait to be really back walking together – you and us – perhaps to reach a cinema.

* From the conversation between Studio Azzurro and Valentina Valentini, Topics and figures in Studio Azzurro’s aesthetic universe, made between October 1993 and February 1994, published in Studio Azzurro, Percorsi tra video, cinema e teatro, edited by Valentina Valentini, Electa, Milan 1995.

The complete conversation in Italian is available online on Sciami

The streaming movies

FACCE DI FESTA / PARTY FACES (1980) – movie fact sheet

LATO D / D SIDE (1983) – movie fact sheet

L’OSSERVATORIO NUCLEARE DEL SIGNOR NANOF / MR. NANOF’S NUCLEAR OBSERVATORY (1985) – movie fact sheet

LA VARIABILE FELSEN / THE FELSEN VARIABLE (1988) – movie fact sheet

DOV’È YANKEL? / WHERE’S YANKEL? (1994) – movie fact sheet

IL MNEMONISTA / THE MNEMONIST (2000) – movie fact sheet