“A Companion for Amateur Cinematographers: Vol. I”
SAFF 2022 Award Winner
Set against the backdrop of Italy in the years of the fascist dictatorship, a man of means, yet unknown to history, scrutinises the world through his small cine camera. Guiding him and teaching him is a manual; the buds of ideology are detectable beneath the seemingly impartial tone it uses to describe technique. But in his films, the ineffable signs of resistance still rise to the surface.
Director Biography
Born in Andria in 1991, he lives in Milan. He graduated from NABA - Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti, where he now teaches film editing. He is one of the founding partners of the Re-framing Home Movies association, which works to safeguard and promote amateur film heritage. His short films "The Shack" and "(s)words" both explore the theme of private memory, through the aesthetic of video tape devices; both were presented in competition at the Locarno Film Festival. "A Companion for Amateur Cinematographers: Vol. I" is the result of his research into Fascist-era manuals for amateur cine enthusiasts, and was made using footage from the Augusto Gandini Collection (Archivio Cinescatti - Lab 80 film); the film was developed with the support of Re-framing Home Movies and the French association, Vidéadoc.
Director’s Statement
When I came across the work of Augusto Gandini, an amateur filmmaker who was active between 1927 and 1942, what surprised me was the staged perfection of his images. His sequences are underpinned by a profound dramatic composition; to me, they seemed to portray a microcosm that reproduced, at family scale, the huge, national performance of Fascism. I therefore decided to do some research and seek out whatever it was that had influenced this man's gaze, stripping it of artlessness.
Discovering the amateur cinematography manuals owned by Gandini offered a clue to this. By comparing his films with the technical manuals of the time, I was able to interpret amateur filmmaking as a cultural phenomenon that was strictly 'conditioned', and see how technique became the vehicle for ideology. But my satisfaction at finding proof of a correspondence between rule and example soon gave way to a question: what irrepressible elements endure in these images?