Several titles in the Festival lineup offer the opportunity to explore the connections between technique and film history. Holofiction fully belongs to the so-called found footage approach: over eight years of work, director Michal Kosakowski reconstructed the history of the Holocaust by assembling sequences taken from 3,000 films and television series produced from 1938 to the present. This cinematic technique originates in Joseph Cornell’s Rose Hobart (1936–39) and involves the recovery of archival or discarded material to create a new film. A classic Italian example is La verifica incerta (1965), in which Alberto Grifi and Gianfranco Baruchello edited together CinemaScope reels destined for the trash– a work that later inspired the television program Blob in 1989. The duo Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi, the latter passing away in 2018, often worked with found footage as well, recovering material mostly related to colonial wars – with Pays Barbare (2013) and Frammenti elettrici n. 2-Vietnam (2002) – and the horrors of the First World War in Oh! Uomo (2004).
World War II and the Holocaust are among the most represented events in the history of cinema. With over three thousand fragments drawn from audiovisual works on the Shoah, produced from 1938 to today, Michal Kosakowski reconstructs how cinema has shaped – and at times disto...
The first feature film by Virgilio Villoresi, a director known for his experimental and visionary approach, is freely inspired by Dino Buzzati’s Poema a fumetti, published in 1969, which reinterprets the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice in a modern, pop key. Villoresi b...
A visual and sonic poem following the streets of Athens with the ghosts of two recently deceased young people: he, a queer Lebanese translator; she, a half-Irish photographer. They wander the city together, finding solace in the challenging beauty of life and its consequences,...
Another extraordinary example of this technique is Christian Marclay’s The Clock (2010), winner of the Golden Lion at the 54th Venice Art Biennale: a 24-hour film constructed from sequences spanning the entire history of cinema and television, united by the presence of clocks in each shot. The film, designed to start at midnight, shows the exact time throughout its entire daily progression. With the documentary Mata Hari, about David Carradine’s unfinished project of filming his fifteen-year-old daughter Calista every year to document her growth, we encounter the underground genre of home movies– cherished by Lithuanian filmmaker Jonas Mekas, who founded the magazine Film Culture in 1954, and by Stan Brakhage, both central figures in the New American Cinema movement, as well as by Gianikian/Lucchi themselves.
Director Virgilio Villoresi, on the other hand, works in the field of stop-motion animation and is present Out of Competition with his first feature-length film Orfeo, inspired by Buzzati’s Poema a fumetti. His archetypes include the works of Jan Švankmajer, Norman McLaren, and the Polish School, where artists like Jan Lenica and Walerian Borowczyk stood out. In the same section, Charlie Kaufman returns to the Festival, after presenting the animated film Anomalisa in 2015, with the short How to Shoot a Ghost. Kaufman has repeatedly experimented with the most diverse cinematic techniques, both in terms of writing and staging.
