Nespolo and Turin in art and movie
The 1960s saw the rise of Rome and Turin as the two most important hotbeds of the Italian neo avant-garde, a movement which enjoyed great international resonance. Just as the original avant-garde movement had generated cinematographic developments, the new Italian movement also stimulated, if not a real and proper subcategory, at least a considerable set of cinematographic experiences. However, although various neo avant-garde artists in Rome, including Schifano, Patella, Baruchello, Frascà, Angeli, Festa and Fioroni, embraced film in the second half of the 1960s, in Turin Ugo Nespolo was the only leading contemporary artist use the film medium in order to express his aesthetic imagery. Furthermore, of all the members of the underground film movement in Turin, a group which included filmmakers of the calibre of De Bernardi and the Ombre Elettriche collective (Ferrero, Centazzo, Dogliani and Sarri), Nespolo is the only figure – with the exception of Paolo Gioli – who still continues to make experimental works whose language and style are perfectly coherent with the rest of his artistic oeuvre.   
Paradoxically, Rome and Turin were also crucial to the development of the Italian narrative or commercial film industry, a form of expression far removed from the artistic experimentation with which we are concerned. However, with the establishment of one of Italy’s leading silent film studios, Ambrosio Film, in the early 20th century, the city of Turin became one of the most important centers of the film industry of the time, a status it has never relinquished but rather has actively endeavored to maintain by setting itself up as a centre of excellence vis-à-vis film and contemporary art via the founding of a fine film museum (Museo del Cinema) and a highly respected film festival (Torino Film Festival).
Nespolo’s film oeuvre is undoubtedly enrooted in the universe of experimentation and pervaded by an aesthetic which only a better understanding of the context within which he works can enable us to fully comprehend. 
Having trained under the auspices of leading exponents of the Arte Povera movement, Nespolo was more than able to make his way in the iconographic pop culture environment of the time, firstly setting up a relationship with the synaesthetic logic of the Futurists (and especially Depero) and then looking to developments in the United States in order to create his own new, very personal aesthetic. Indeed, the differences between the work of the artists of the Piazza del Popolo school in Rome and those of the New York pop art scene, enabled Nespolo to turn to the historic work of Man Ray and the Dadaist movement on one hand and the figure of Andy Warhol on the other. Inspired by Warhol, who not only set up dialogues between such varied media as painting, film, photography, advertising and mass communications, but also conceived the idea of The Factory as a community within which to create works of art, a  protective microcosm inhabited by friends, collaborators and divas (an essential link between his work and the firmament of the junk culture), with whom he made various experimental and non-narrative films whose aim was to refer to both the minimalist “actions” (sleeping, eating) of the films made at the dawn of the film medium and the imagery of Hollywood genre (especially horror) movies, Nespolo also set up a “factory”, a group of friends with whom he made his films in the 1960s, which is still the team with which he continues to work today, a group whose perfect organizational system superintends both his work and the formidable (extremely non-Italian) mega-atelier from which he operates. However, Nespolo’s frequent reference to the Italian cinematographic iconography, a feature of commissions such as Film-a-TO, Superglance and Italiana, clearly shows his need to mix the avant-garde and the traditional in an approach which bears no relation to his identity as an artist or independent filmmaker, but rather enables him to exploit his whirling pop-oriented energies in such a way as to filter and re-elaborate the visual culture of a city or even an entire nation.
Approximately 45 years have passed since Nesoplo’s first cinematographic experiment, Grazie Mamma Kodak (1966), a film whose very title testifies his love for celluloid film. And a 45-year career is undoubtedly something to be reckoned with.
 
Action and parody: Dadaism revisited
Nespolo’s films have often proposed a kind of playful, irreverent parody. Indeed, his very first short, La Galante Avventura del Cavaliere dal Lieto Volto (1967) is a sort of film-collage of images of various types: seemingly home-made sequences, “stolen” footage (such as coverage of Allen Ginsberg during a visit to Turin) (1), sequences filmed in the grounds of Lucio Fontana’s villa in which Fontana and another of Nespolo’s artist friends, Enrico Baj, appear dressed as Savoy army officers waving a ragged Italian flag emblazoned with the coat of arms of the House of Savoy. Defined by Nespolo himself as a “scene from a play captured in a photograph” or a “photographical scene from a play”, the film describes a mad, improvised game after a barbecue picnic which makes fun of the patriotic rhetoric of De Amicis’ Piccola Vedetta Lombarda in a Dadaist re-evocation of the Risorgimento and concludes with a number of characters running naked before the camera. So quickly do the images (many enhanced by graphics painted directly onto the film) of La Galante Avventura del Cavaliere dal Lieto Volto move, and so pressingly repetitive is the sound track of the film (in which it is possible to recognize the rhythmic structure of Gimme Some Lovin’) that the frenetically moving figures take on the appearance of spring-mounted toys - perhaps referring to the Futurist imagery of Depero, of whom Nespolo is a passionate collector – participating in some kind of unstoppable race. As Bertetto observes, the “ritual, micro-theatre [approach] seems to dissolve any recognition or likeness, not replacing it with a fantastic world but rather creating a special space for nonsense” (2), an approach which, in his opinion, makes Nespolo’s film (together Baruchello-Grifi’s La Verifica Incerta, Schifano’s Umano Non Umano and De Bernardi’s Dei) one of the best works of the entire Italian avant-garde. To tell the truth, La Galante Avventura del Cavaliere dal Lieto Volto merely perfects the structure of Grazie Mamma Kodak, Nespolo’s “original” short, a film in which seemingly homemade footage is successfully mixed with repertoire images (black and white and faded colour documentary and B-movie footage) in a frenetic, rather random montage which freely exploits the concept of visual association, a tribute to film and kinetic art in which a woman is repeated hypnotized before a device which reminds us of Horner’s zootrope or Burroughs’ dream machine. 
Made in the same year as La Galante Avventura del Cavaliere dal Lieto Volto, Le Gote in Fiamme stars Daniela Chiaperotti as the sole protagonist of a series of costume changes. The texture of the film is given a decidedly ‘pop’ feel via the use of a halftone screen, a device which gives the film image a photographic or serigraphic appearance similar to that of the comic strip images of pop art iconography. Repeatedly stripping naked only to get dressed again in various ladies’ or men’s clothes, Daniela Chiaperotti alternately accessorizes each new ‘look’ with a revolver, an umbrella or a yo-yo. The costume changes become increasingly rapid thanks to an acceleration of the images during filming and editing yet also leave room for several erotic moments such as when Daniela Chiaperotti (who had already appeared in La Galante Avventura del Cavaliere dal Lieto Volto) offers her bosom to the spectator. Yet, far from being an erotic film, Le Gote in Fiamme – a film which Nespolo describes as his “first attempt at what I call magic-poetry” –is more of a slapstick comedy in which, as in his previous short, the artist is inspired not so much by his beloved Mekas, an artist he admired even before the retrospective organized in Turin in 1966, as by silent movies and Dadaist experimentalism.
Now unfortunately lost, Nespolo’s 1968 film Tucci-Ucci focuses on the culinary skills of gallery owner Tucci Russo as he completes the laborious ritual necessary to make the “perfect” pancake, a delicacy which, to the great astonishment of the chef, a woman dressed as an Arab (Daniela Chaperotti) will eat in just one mouthful. Thanks to Nespolo’s use of a series of clever expedients, effects and visual associations, the minimal event is pervaded by an atmosphere of almost magical realism. 
Nespolo’s desire to pay homage to the historic avant-garde (and especially René Clair’s Entr’acte and the performances of Picabia) is even more explicit in Con-certo Rituale (1972-73), a more mature work which abandons the fast pace of his early shorts, but nevertheless continues to fuse underground film and Dadaism. The repeated actions of the bizarre group of characters (all of whom have names, but whose identities are only revealed in the closing credits) assembled in the surreal domestic atmosphere of the sitting room of a villa give life to a kind of jam-session of puppet-like movements in which the various figures personify iconographic elements of society, some of which clearly refer to the social milieu (the syringe with which the man in the basket tries to inject the other onlookers with drugs), some of which relate to sexuality (the rubber penis used to enact a rape), some of which regard the political scenario (the cardboard hammer and sickle), and some of which refer to art (Andy Warhol - identified merely as ‘Andy’ in the closing credits - in a Russian hat taking Polaroid photos of a girl and then arranging them on the floor). However, offering far more than a mere collection of artistic actions, Con-certo Rituale is composed of a series of parodies whose intention is to make fun of the rituals of the world of contemporary art (a form of satire which will reach its height in Un Supermaschio). Indeed, in a montage of alternating scenes, we see the only character in the film, Entr’acte (a personification of the short after which he is named, interpreted by Enrico Baj) setting up a strange magic ritual in a wood before entering the sitting room and, as in the finale of Clair and Picabia’s original work, using his magic wand to make all the people in the room disappear one by one, himself included. Similarly, the game of chess between the motorcyclist (the artist Gianni Piacentino as “Kawasaki Kid”) and the girl (“the pre-Raphaelite”) refers to the famous rooftop game of chess between Man Ray and Duchamp with which Entr’acte opens, while the captions divide the film into chapters, present the characters and generate a sense of alienation in the same way as the captions of the films of Man Ray: “Ci sono pur sempre i gerani” refers to the poetry of Gozzano in the same way that “Il faut battre les morts quand ils sont froids” refers to Desnos-Man Ray’s Etoile de Mer, with bothphrases fulfilling a deliberately misleading, rather than explicative purpose, enhancing the enigmatic nature of the images and saturating their meaning. As Nespolo himself confirms, many of his films are pervaded by such a quantity of “additional information” as to enable “home-acculturation within the most flexible of limits”.

Documenting the (neo)avant-garde
The relationship between Nespolo and the Italian neo avant-garde is also manifest in a trilogy of shorts dedicated to the work of Mario Merz, Alighiero Boetti and Michelangelo Pistoletto. Made between 1967 and 1969, these films go beyond the usual scope of the documentary genre to offer a real and proper “artist’s view” of the work of some of Nespolo’s most esteemed contemporaries (3). The first of the three homages, Neonmerzare (1967), is an abstract work in which Nespolo films (in colour) Merz’ neon light installations in the Sperone gallery. Lasting just over a couple of minutes, the film sees Nespolo’s camera pan over the luminous tubes in such a way as to create a symphony of forms which is further enhanced in a recent re-release of the work by a free jazz saxophone improvisation by Carlo Actis Dato. The second film of the trilogy, Boettinbiancoenero (1968) also features an exhibition of the work of the artist in question – this time in the Christian Stein gallery in Turin – although in this film, rather than focusing on each individual work, Nespolo explores the context, the reactions of the spectators and the behaviour of visitors to the show – the majority of whom are friends or art experts – as they contemplate each object or installation. In addition to Boetti, the film also cameos Pistoletto, Mario Ceroli, Giulio Paolini and Gian Enzo Sperone, a leading figure in contemporary art scene of the time, and even Nespolo himself walks in front of the lens for a few brief seconds. The atmosphere of the film is pervaded by a great sense of complicity and fun and the jokes exchanged between all those present at the exhibition clearly testify the closeness between the various artists. 
Very different from the other two films in the trilogy is Buongiorno Michelangelo (1968-69), a work in which Nespolo returns to the syncopated style of his earlier experiments. The film commences with footage of Pistoletto adding the final touches to one of his mirror paintings, only to rudely pick up the work in his hands and use it to shave. Leaving his atelier, Pistoletto then takes his famous ball of newspaper through the streets of Turin, on foot or in his open top car, on an excursion which takes us from morning through to night. After the ball episode, a papier-mâché rose is let down from the first floor of the Stein gallery on a string and also taken walkabout. Of the many members of the contemporary art world which appear in the film, it is easy to recognize such critics as Tommaso Trini, Daniela Palazzoli and Gianni Simonetti, the Arte Povera artist Gilberto Zorio and, once again, the gallery owner Sperone. Filmed on 16 mm film in order to exploit the immediacy and agility of this medium, the work aims to promote art as a daily gesture, an action which cadences our everyday existence (painting is liking shaving) rather than shut away in galleries, a phenomenon which can and must be taken out into the street and among the people. Indeed, Pistoletto’s ball was not designed to be admired in a museum, but is rather a pretext for having fun, an object to play with, an object which allows us to return to or childhood for a night. The importance of Nespolo’s trilogy lies in its dual purpose as a provider of documentation of the work of artists who have not yet achieved international success (documentation which, with the exception of a number of works conserved in the RAI film libraries, is extremely rare) and as proof of how Nespolo’s films are not only examples of contemporary avant-garde thought, but also affectionate reflections on the cultural context of the time. Indeed, all three films clearly promote the symbols and moods of the time of their making. Exactly forty years  after the making of the trilogy, Nespolo returned to the same “scene of crime” in order to make Gli Anni dell’Avanguardia 1960-1970 (2008), a work focusing on a retrospective dedicated to the avant-garde movement in Turin and featuring works from the Marcello Levi collection. Filmed at the Fondazione Sandretto art centre using video technology, Nespolo proposes the same underground style of filming as before, a style he has never really abandoned despite having embraced the digital medium, to create a sort of advertisement or trailer for the exhibition – of which he is also a protagonist – which offers a wide-angled overview of all the works included in the event, interspersed with captions and excepts from his 1967-1969 trilogy (which is now considered repertory material). Accompanied by a jazz score by Actis Dato, whose marching rhythm considerably increases the vertiginous nature of this synthesis of the “Uno sguardo su Torino tra gli anni Sessanta e Settanta” retrospective, the film features not only Merz, Boetti, Pistoletto and Nespolo but also other artists such as Gilardi, Anselmo, Zorio, Calzolari and Salvo. 

Narrative developments
By the mid 1970s the popularity of Italian auteur film was on the wane: the Roman underground movement had concluded in 1970 with the closure of the Cooperativa del Cinema Indipendente, while the shift to videotape, a medium which was, at least initially, essentially documentary-oriented, had generated a general need for aesthetic change, although several artists - among whom Ugo Nespolo - continued to prefer celluloid film. Although still clearly experimental works, Nespolo’s films of the 1970s are more narrative in structure that his work of the previous decade, albeit, as Fagone (4) proposes, a rather “eccentric” form of narration as from the making of Buongiorno Michelangelo. Even though each of his films is very different from the next, Un Supermaschio (1975-76), Andare a Roma (1976) and Le Porte Girevoli (1982) are all finely structured, compact and well defined works which pursue what Bertetto describes as the “more detailed, less subversive discursive path” (5) he considers Nespolo to have started upon with Con-certo Rituale.
Common to all three films is the figure of the artist (Nespolo’s alter-ego) and the setting of the action in the bedroom.  
Inspired by Alfred Jarry’s Le Surmâle, Un Supermaschio – a work originally intended as a full length feature film – commences with an erotic charge which is soon, however, contaminated to such an extent that it becomes little more than a grotesque parody. This opening is already clearly indicative of the ambiguity which pervades the entire film: while the hillside villa in which the story takes place brings the thriller genre to mind, the successive scene, in which a woman comes out of a trunk accompanied by a man playing the flute, reminds us of Nespolo’s earlier Dadaist experiments. The atmosphere of the film becomes increasingly decadent when we are shown the protagonist of the film (Galeno) lying in his bed surrounded by a number of naked young women with whom he has obviously spent the night. Linear in structure but offering very few dialogues, Un Supermaschio is ostensibly a narrative film, although the actual result is a curious mélange of scripted action and improvised performance art, a work which lies halfway between the auteur and the soft-core B-movie (a genre which was very much in vogue at the time of its making and even entered the mainstream Italian film industry). However, when Galeno buys the papier-mâché bust of Joseph Beuys, the film takes a decidedly Surrealist turn, reserving its message to those art lovers who are able to appreciate the rarified satire with which Nespolo – he who, in the mid-1970s, had created several “proto-conceptual” works - makes fun of conceptual art.
Galeno’s journey across the city of Turin with the Bueys bust in his lap makes clear reference to Buongiorno Michelangelo as he takes the object of his desire (his “dream”) to the children’s playground, as if it were his girlfriend, only to return home and make “passionate love” to the imposing simulacrum, to the strains of rhythmically insistent waltz and the great astonishment of his house guests. The atmosphere is similar to that of the orgy sequence in Eyes Wide Shut (6). His next action is to marry the bust – which Nespolo still exhibits as a sculpture entitled Simulacro – after asking for and receiving the blessing of a priest. However, the reaction of the perverse community which populates the film – once again a sort of Factory – is extremely harsh and, indeed, on watching Galeno make love to the Beuys bust on three closed circuit TV screens, one mysterious character (interpreted by Marcello Levi, one of Italy’s most important art collectors) exclaims “I would never have expected such a thing from him. He was one of the best. This is terrible. It is not natural. He has broken all the rules. He must be suppressed!”. As Galeno is obviously an alter-ego of Nespolo himself, that fact that he falls in love with Beuys clearly betrays the Italian artist’s passion for pop art, although Nespolo also uses this auto-ironic film allegory to set up a contest between theory and practice, between the promoters of philosophical thought (or philosophical art) and the supporters of a predominantly aesthetic genre which requires a far greater emotional involvement.
According to an analysis by Liborio Termine (7), Galeno’s falling in love with the bust enables him to free his unconscious fantasies and accept his homosexuality, although Nespolo’s apologue suggests – without resorting to excessive intellectualism but rather adopting the desecrating, anti-artistic, anti-dogmatic language (8) of Dadaism – that the purpose of the film is more probably to stimulate a comparison between heterosexuality, the vitality of art and the pop aesthetic on one hand and homosexuality, sterility and conceptual art on the other. The tragic epilogue – a rapid montage of images depicting all the events of the film so far – is faithfully based on the conclusion of Jarry’s novel and sees the supermale, now wired to a series of electrodes, dying of electrocution during a last fatal moment of intimacy with his beloved bust.  
Un Supermaschio is undoubtedly an atypical example of Italian experimental film. Indeed, not even an artist such as Schifano (whose trilogy of experimental films - Satellite, Umano Non Umano and Trapianto, Consunzione e Morte di Franco Brocani – is considered emblematic of the Italian underground movement) had dared to present such an explicit narrative and the storyboard of the film, exhibited by Nespolo on various occasions as graphic proof of the film’s narrative origins,  is a real and proper work of art per se.Yet, despite his status, in the opinion of Alberto Barbera (9) as “one of the Italian contemporary artists most compromised by film”, Nespolo has never made a full length feature film, remaining stubbornly loyal to the “independent” film genre, despite an attempt in 1978 to make a parody of Robert Rossen’s The Hustler, which he soon reduced to a short in which he was the sole protagonist. Indeed, all that remains of the original Hollywood film in Il Faticoso Tempo della Sicurezza is the game of pool, albeit now played by the artist alone in his home immediately after having completed his morning ablutions, accompanied by the incomprehensible words of a German documentary played backwards in the background.        

In the artist’s bedroom
In line with the unfinished puzzle model of which Nespolo is particularly fond, so totally fragmented and utterly deconstructed is the structure of Andare a Roma that even though the events follow a linear development, the plot remains enigmatically vague. All the events are presented on two levels: as they happen in reality (albeit, at times, only an imaginary reality); and as they are represented on two television screens in the centre of the protagonist’s bedroom (the protagonist of the film being once again Nespolo’s alter-ego, Galeno, although this time he is accompanied  by a pregnant woman whose belly is constantly bared as a result of the terrible heat). The film commences with a montage of alternating scenes - images of various aircraft on the runway of an airport and images from the bedroom - broadcast on the television screens but disturbed by persistent interference, a phenomenon which highlights the incompatibility of the real and the recorded images and the differences between the two temporal dimensions (not to mention the utopian ambition of the ubiquity of the artist), as well as reminding us of the struggle for supremacy in which film and video engaged as contemporary artists began to embrace the new digital medium. Although Nespolo had already used closed circuit TV in Un Supermaschio, it was only used at the narrative level as a voyeuristic device, albeit perhaps conceptually an allusion to the fact that body art performances were generally documented on video rather than film. In Andare a Roma, bluish, rather ‘lunatic’ electronic images cadence the entire film, confounding reality and narration in an imploding, misleading rather noir-like plot which essentially revolves around the departure of the protagonist for Rome.
Although, on one hand, the television images of Andare a Roma remind us of the spreading use of video in contemporary art (in the same way that Nespolo makes rails against concept art in Un Supermaschio), on the other, they confirm Baudrillard’s theory that television has actually replaced reality, the ‘live’ broadcast of the monitors being more real than reality itself, while the action which takes place in the artist’s room – which is purposely furnished with state-of-the art designer furniture, pop art paintings (including an imposing work by Frank Stella) and contemporary art magazines – is ritualistic and timeless as if the protagonist is monitoring exterior events in such a way as to be able to dominate them. Naturally when Galeno leaves his home in order to wander through the streets of Turin towards Balôn fruit and vegetable market, to receive a mysterious telephone call from a public call box and to collect a package containing a disassembled rifle, the film takes on a deceptively thriller-like approach which, despite the genre-film aspects with which it is contaminated, sabotages it and destroys it from within.
Andare a Roma concludes with the artist’s failure with keep his appointment. Indeed, despite having planned his enigmatic project in exquisite detail, he wakes up late and misses his plane, whose departure for the Italian capital is confirmed on the two television screens. We never discover the real purpose of his trip, although his objective was probably to shoot the pope (an event which actually occurred on 14th May of the previous year), as Galeno leafs though a book of prints and engravings relative to the pontiff on several occasions during the film. Furthermore, after several sequences set in a rifle range, the artist takes aim and shoots the pregnant woman, albeit in an imaginary uxoricide as opposed to the real, ritual wife-killing perpetrated by the engineer in Ferreri’s Dillinger è Morto. Rome is one of the most symbolic places – or rather, in this case, non-places - in Italy, a leading centre of contemporary art which enjoys a mirror-like relationship with Turin, and thus a place which Galeno disdainfully dismisses, as if justifying his failed departure, by complaining that “it is always so hot in that goddamned city”.     
Andare a Roma presents the story of a (deliberately) failed act of rebellion, political or aesthetical as it may be, a story which Fagone describes as “an act of gratuitousness in the sense of André Gide, resolved by an act of non-accomplishmentin the sense of Freud” (10). Among the magazines in the artist’s bedroom, there is also a catalogue on conceptual art, while, in another scene, as the artist and his girlfriend discuss the concept of comprehension, Galeno notes the irrationality of everything and, thus, even of the film in which he is appearing. The self-referencing nature of his speech and the relative impossibility of his being able to conclude with a sensational or liberating gesture is symbolized by the image of an Arriflex camera on a tripod with which the film opens and closes as if sealing the work within its own narrative and conceptual circularity: the artist is unable to leave his ivory tower - the world of visual arts – as he is afraid to face reality.  
Andare a Roma is almost exclusively set in a bedroom in which a man and a woman are waiting for two different events to unfold: she is waiting to give birth; he is waiting to depart. A bedroom, a man and a woman are also the central focus of Le Porte Girevoli. Based on a story written on a scrap of paper by Man Ray between the end of the 1950s and the beginning of the 1960s which the American artist never made into a film, Le Porte Girevoli was turned into a screenplay by Nespolo and Janus, a friend of the Dadaist master and editor of his catalogue, although little remains of the original story apart from the idea of using Man Ray’s collages and other objects. Entirely rewritten by Nespolo, the new screenplay parodies the story of Eve and the forbidden fruit and sees a naked young woman eating a tomato in her bedroom as she leafs through the pages of a catalogue illustrating the ten drawings of Man Ray’s Revolving Doors series, a set of collages, drawings and paintings conceived in 1916-17 whose name, according to Janus “derives from the idea that a work of art is like a revolving door, a changeable opening in space which, like all openings, can never be located, motionless, within definitive confines” (11). Interpreted, once again, by Galeno, the artist makes love to the young woman before smearing the pulp of a tomato he finds among the pages of the catalogue over her face. As the white sheets on the bed turn red, the woman is enveloped in flames. Brief, but extremely rarified, the dreamlike atmosphere of Le Porte Girevoli is cadenced by the ticking of the iconic metronome with a photograph of an eye (in this case the eye of the artist) attached to its swinging arm, created by Man Ray in 1923 and revisited in 1932. This objet à detruire is iconic of the historic avant-garde movement, as is the surrealist music of Eric Satie which accompanies the ticking of the metronome and cadences the narrative ritual of the film, which is nevertheless pervaded by a subtle eroticism: the red juice of the tomato alluding to the menstrual cycle and the defloration of the woman and the man’s movements and kiss being symbolic of passion and murder.
While the rifle used to shoot the pregnant woman in Andare a Roma was a test necessary to verify the effectiveness of a violent act to be perpetrated elsewhere, the symbolic crime hypothesized in Le Porte Girevoli is the result of a mechanism of movement and condensation: immediately after the sheets turn red and the woman is enveloped in flames, she is reborn in the same way that a new phoenix rises from the ashes of its predecessor’s nest. The photography of the film is directed by one of Nespolo’s regular collaborators, Bruno Dreossi, who makes wide use of chiaroscuro effects (i.e. the shoulder view of the woman which is similar to the girl looking in the mirror in Velasquez’ Rokeby Venus) to contrast the starkness of the predominantly black and white set. As Bertetto carefully observes, Le Porte Girevoli offers “a universe of quotations in which every element refers to something else, a simulacrum which basks in reflected glory.” (12).

A journey about Cinema
An inveterate cinephile, Nespolo often refers to iconic moments of Italian film in his works.  Film-a-To (2001) and Superglance (2005), both based on texts by Edoardo Sanguineti, are respectively a homage to the film history (from silent movies to modern day productions) of Turin and the surrounding area and an illustrated tour of the Museo del Cinema in Turin, while Italiana (2005), starring Giancarlo Giannini, widens the field of enquiry with a tribute to Italian film in general.
In addition to recounting the history of film in Turin in the form of a long poem, Film-a-To mixes excerpts of locally-set films with nocturnal views of Turin and extracts from Nespolo’s shorts to create a dense weave of images, all of which are pervaded, thanks to the use of chroma keycompositing,bythe silhouette of Sanguineti. Yet, the image and the spoken word are also accompanied by the written word, a third linguistic level which sees a French translation of Sanguineti’s text (the video was made for a retrospective entitled Turin, berceau du cinéma italien organized by Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris) scroll down the visual texture of the film, highlighting the mosaic-like structure of the plot of the film (which once again follows the logic of the unfinished puzzle) and satisfying Nespolo’s fascination with Futurist lettering, an expedient used in the 1920s in films such as Ballet Mécanique, in which we experience the animated decomposition of a newspaper headline. As Wanda Strauven notes, the concept of ‘words in freedom’ theorized by Marinetti in his Distruzione della Sintassi. Immaginazione senza Fili. Parole in Libertà manifesto of 1913 can be easily adapted to the cinematographic medium, as Marinetti’s aim is merely to  “reach the immediacy of film using verbal language, manipulating words as if they were objects (or images) rather than linguistic symbols.” (13). In other words, a ‘words of freedom’ texts requires movement. A similar procedure was also contemplated in the 1916 Manifesto della Cinematografia Futurista which refers not only to ‘words in freedom’ but also synoptic tables and designated analogies. Naturally Nespolo’s reference to animated lettering also relates to the concept of visual or concrete poetry proposed in the 1960s. Sanguineti’s presence also dominates Nespolo’s second homage to the city of Turin, Superglance, a film in which the voice of the poet and literary critic acts as a guide in an exploration of the magic of film. Commencing with images of the machinery from the pre-cinema era exhibited in the halls of the Museo del Cinema in Turin and video installations recounting the history and evolution of the feature film, Nespolo’s film becomes a kind of kinetic arena in which wide-angled images are speeded up and fragmented in such a way as to echo the poet’s verses with a continuous movement of “construction and deconstruction”. Superglance embraces the entire length, breadth, height and depth of the Mole Antonelliana in Turin, capturing its uncontainable energy in such a way as to collect and conserve the very essence of the medium (and Nespolo is an avid collector of cinematographic paraphernalia).
More complex in structure is Italiana, a film which offers a real and proper grand tour of the Italian film industry. Produced by Cinecittà Holding, Italiana sees Nespolo use vast quantities of found-footageto transform the cities of Turin, Venice, Genoa and Rome and the regions of Tuscany and Sicily into huge cinematographic sets, the sequences being joined with an elegant use of lettering, images of Giancarlo Giannini and an uninterrupted flow of full or split-screen sequences from dozens and dozens of Italian films. 

Cinema/Painting
Although there is no direct relationship between Nespolo’s film and painted works, probably because his painted compositions are, necessarily, far more static in their construction than his moving images, his film images (and especially those of his more experimental works) have often become the subject or source of inspiration of serigraphies, acrylics and soft-painted puzzle images (collages of hand-painted, hand-made paper), either acquiring new life within his painted compositions or becoming the background for graphic and chromatic elaboration. As Luciano Caprile confirms, for Nespolo “a film is never a mere pretext for a painting, but rather a means of stimulating ideas which are then used to invent new landscapes, chromatic games and allusions of timbre.” (14).
Nespolo’s homage to the story of experimental film is inspired by a series of key avant-garde works: Eggeling’s Diagonal Symphonie, Snow’s Wavelength, Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou, Lye’s Rainbow Dance, Connor’s A Movie and Morrissey’s Flesh. Yet Nespolo also echoes the pop art practice of quoting stills and posters from famous films  by selecting, re-appropriating and re-elaborating frames from silent (Murnau’s Nosferatu and Lang’s Metropolis) and spoken (Hitchcock’s North by Northwest and Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey) films in such a way as to embrace that which Barthes calls the “third sense” of the frame, a sense which is revealed by the choice of a certain instant of a temporal sequence, a certain movement or a certain expression rather than the one before or the one after. Indeed, according to Barthes, it is only by examining a certain frame that we are able to see “inside the fragment” and thus appreciate “a second text enclosed within the fragment” according to a relationship in which “the film [sequence] and frame are equals, it being impossible to say that either one is more important or that one is extracted from the other.” (15).
Another occasion upon which Nespolo’s art was used within the realm of the moving image was during the making of a short television signature clip for Raidue and the newly established Raisat in the early 1990s. Directed by Massimo Fichera, this real and proper audio visual experiment saw Nespolo using both electronic animation and the most sophisticated (Paintbox) technology of the time to create a series of animated collages of figures, objects and other stylized elements in which he translates compositions already pervaded by a rhythm of their own into an audiovisual texture which is real and proper ‘music for the eyes’, an accomplishment which would have undoubtedly delighted Depero. In the brief hiatus which followed the conclusion of his work in the arena of underground film and preceded his first attempts at video art, Nespolo’s experiments with computer graphics and animation enabled him to find a direct relationship between painting and film which, although it was to have no real and proper follow up, undoubtedly confirmed his desire to break down the boundaries separating the static and the moving image. Nespolo returned to the art of computerized animation in 2010 with the making of Campari 150 (2010), an advertisement celebrating the 150th anniversary of the world famous drink in which he composites iconic examples of the historic advertising imagery of Campari in a collage which offers the pretext for an iconographic meeting between Depero and Nespolo (who even quotes himself in the film by including an advertisement he created for Campari in the early 1990s). Marking the apex of Nespolo’s esprit joyeuse, the short experiment offers an almost pyrotechnical explosion of forms, logos, colours, lettering and painting in movement. (16).
As the majority of Nespolo’s films regard art and the artist, he has inevitably generated a sort of ideal or imaginary link between the historic and the neo avant-garde, a link which is also propagated in Time After Time (1994), a brief work in which he films a miniscule rubber doll with suckers moving across a number of his paintings and collages as well as, in the first and last sequences of the work, over an image of himself reflected in a mirror. As we follow this tiny animated character - filmed on a frame by frame basis - on its journey across Nespolo’s artistic oeuvre, all we see are the surface details and textures of his  richly coloured paintings, which thus become the setting for another micro-narrative: are we merely observing the animated gymnastics of a tiny doll or are we participating in a circular fugue which will inevitably conclude at the point in which it started?
On closer inspection, Time After Time is a really a self-portrait of the artist in which Nespolo (as the rubber doll) reviews the work he has produced over the last few decades and the media and techniques he has used to create it (inevitably assigning film a place of honour) through a sort of filter which enables him to observe the entire world with profound enthusiasm, curiosity, lightness and irony. Film thus becomes the most suitable medium for communicating a story which has always been post modernist in its approach. As the philosopher Gianni Vattimo rightly observes, one of Nespolo’s most important abilities has always been his faculty to “claim a postmodernist sensitivity in times in which modernist avant-gardism predominated.” (17).
The career which Nespolo commenced at Bell & Howell over 45 years ago has still to conclude and, unlike almost all other (especially Italian) artists and painters who have used film as a medium to be exploited in order to stay abreast of the fashions of a time or to create a more incisive, more immediate effect than that which can be generated in real  life, Nespolo has never relegated film to a corner. On the contrary, he has both revised and promoted use of the moving image – more so even than his artistic works, which must nevertheless be assessed according to the rules of the market and the system – as a means of achieving absolute liberty. Indeed, as Nespolo, himself wrote, now over thirty years ago, “on screen, images follow one another untiringly, shamelessly and without fear of criticism. They trust no-one as all they want to do is make even the blind and the deaf understand that [in the words of Stan Brakhage] every filmmaker is independent at heart.”(18).     

NOTES
(1) In 1968 Nespolo made a film, A.G., dedicated to the American poet, although it never reached the editing stage.
(2) Paolo Bertetto, La tradizione del nuovo nel cinema di Ugo Nespolo, in Cinenespolo, catalogue of an exhibition curated by Ugo Nespolo and Luciano Caprile, held in Locarno, Casorella from 3 - 31 August 2003. Edizioni Art’è, page 22.
(3) Luca Patella’s  SKMP2, an episodic film commissioned by Fabio Sargentini, owner of L’Attico gallery in Via del Paradiso, and made in Rome in 1968, focused on four leading exponents of the Arte Povera movement: Kounellis, Pascali, Mattiacci and Patella himself (even through, unlike the others, Patella has never been truly considered part of the movement originally theorized by Germano Celant).   
(4) Vittorio Fagone (ed), La fugace vita dei fotogrammi. I films di Ugo Nespolo, Mastrogiacomo Editore, Padua 1978. Fagone’s introduction is also published in Nespolo Cinema. Time After Time, Il Castoro, Milan 2008.
(5) Bertetto, ibid., page 25.
(6) Nespolo is a great lover of Schnitzler’s Dream Story, the novel which inspired Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, and even considered making his own film of the story.
(7) Liborio Termine, Cinema Nuovo, N° 242, July –August 1976.
(8) It is no mere chance that Nespolo’s film company operates under the name Antidogma Film.
(9) Alberto Barbera, Introduzione a Nespolo Cinema. Time After Time, ibid., page 6. 
(10) Fagone, ibid., page 48
(11) Man Ray, Tutti gli scritti, (ed. Janus), Feltrinelli, Milan 1981, page 40.
(12) Bertetto, ibid., page 24.
(13) Wanda Strauven, Marinetti e il cinema – tra attrazione e sperimentazione, Campanotto Editore, Pasian di Prato (Udine) 2006, page 140.
(14) Luciano Caprile, Ugo Nespolo e il cinema, in Cinenespolo, ibid., page 13.
(15) Roland Barthes, The Third Meaning in The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Music, Art, and Representation,University of California Press, Berkeley 1985.
(16) Another work created by Nespolo for Campari was E’ l’ora del Campari in Centrale (2009), an experimental documentary focusing on an installation created by Nespolo in one of the arches of Milano Centrale railway station.
(17) Published in Cinenespolo, ibid, page 93.
(18) Ugo Nespolo, Due parole appena sul mio cinema, published in Nespolo Cinema. Time After Time, ibid, page 55.