Just two words on my cinema

I left with my16 mm Bell and Howell equipped with an Angenieux Zoom in search
of cinema, and I was lucky.

"My characters" worked with dexterity. Right off, Baj sprang rapidly in front of
the camera, and with consummate skill waved tricoloured flags on the fields in the company of the wise (and patient) Lucio Fontana, to attempt with the help of Volpini, an improbable, small, Lombard sentinel.

I was thinking then of a sort of "photo-graphed theatre", full of improvisation and bizarre materials. The idea was to land in a magical territory, in everlasting, untiring movement, in short, a game where rationality was banished to make room for a free associationistic creation, sounds and images, movement and color, sense and non sense.

La galante avventura del  cavaliere  dal lieto volto,  and earlier still, Grazie  mamma Kodak had no other roots if not this.

But deep down, I've always tried to follow a "critical" course.
With fatigue, I've searched for the grimace, the slap, acidity and sarcasm, all
barely tinted with humour and a good play, good workmanship and guaranteed amusement.

All the characters move like small toys, now docile, now strange, crazened
robots in actions without sense.
Their movements, in fact, are all mechanical, carefully accelerated to the excess,
frenetic and nervous, as untiring as they are useless.

Thus, the critical course I spoke about before stretched out ahead, obliquely,
readable with a smile on my lips.

I'm thinking of  Buongiorno, Michelangelo,  for example, which could be attributed
to an early Polanski-esque idea. This enormous paper ball that rolls along the streets of a cold Turin, all squared off and in grisaille, becomes a symbolic object of absurd provocation that may also be read as a vacuous, goliardic exhibition.

The fact is that the "foreign element" maliciously inserts itself in any Landscape of the city, and among the people that look on dismayed, without understanding. Pistoletto pushes the ball and the people follow him to see "how much" or "why".

And if the ball becomes an enormous rose at the end, then we are in unjustified folly... but they' re only hypotheses. No one lets himself be overwhelmed or provoked anymore. The hide is thick and serves as a defence. Surrealism has nothing to do with it, in no way; instead its a question of reading reality even in its paradoxical, internal, at times unexplainable aspects.

But the true reading is done with a critical eye". A small meanness is added without
pity to the interpretation of things: the Polaroid photos in  Con-certo Rituale,  Beuys head in  Un Supermaschio,  the electronic culture in  Andare  a  Roma.

My films are based on excess, on "more", on "supplementary information", a sort
of home-made acculturation with movable contours.
But theories are only theories, and leave things unchanged.
And then, they' re static like words, cold and false.
The images on the screen move on without tiring, they' re immodest, they don' t
fear the critics because they trust no one, they really and only try to make even the blind and deaf understand that every him maker is independent at heart. [1976]