between cinema and Poetronics (and beyond): the writings of Gianni Toti - Sandra Lischi In his memory of Gianni Toti on Cahiers du Cinéma "
(March 2007) Jean-Paul Fargier
begins with the recall of a sequence of SQUEEZANGEZAÙM (1988): the bow of the battleship Potemkin virtual
that splits the screen
white, as to head for viewers. RAI to
Turin, helped by its "montautori" and his "chimeramen"
Toti had experimented with instrumentation and electronic effects for
video made the idea of \u200b\u200bEisenstein,
he wanted at the end of his film, a real tear
screen by the image of the bow that
advances. LA CUIR POÈTEMKINE so
Toti had renamed the film in that its videopoema
which is a tribute to the artistic and political utopias of the twentieth century, the language of
transmental Khlebnikov, Mayakovsky's poetry.
Fragments of films one after another, intertwined with music
: Toti reworks them just as it did with
words, to create meanings ("sognificati," he said) new
new combinations of memory and imagination.
"It was something new with the old - writes Fargier. With frantic
associations, clutches,
overlapping layers, fragments of straw. " Moreover, "in his lyrics teem
suitcase-words thrown in Italian, French, English
, in Russian, in English, with the voice of post-Joycean
multilingual inspired by the trans-linguismo, rolling the syllables as
a declaimer on the scene,
detaching them from each other to better enjoy the source of each
is often taken from different languages. His model was the "Zaum" of Khlebnikov: The Futurist pot, the melting-pot of all the languages \u200b\u200bcombined to create an outrageous talk, the only one worthy to express the novelty of
revolutionary times. " That movie is a
track running through reflection and artistic creation
Toti. From the battle for the big screen
poetry in postwar cultural debate. "I
and some others - a minority, actually - we were
opposed to all the excitement, the rhetoric in
neorealist cinema and other fields ... We, with its rejection and
output field, we did other things ... Cinema
celebrated around the world for us was against reactionary
of the great cinema of poetry ... that for realistic cinema,
course, Eisenstein did not exist ...»,
I had said in a conversation (Rome, 1995).
Zavattini Friend - with whom he had worked for the newsreels
FREE, never ceased to argue with a movie theater
understood as "machine prose" (as said), unable to articulate
, process, transform the reality in poetic language
"other" or, worse still, bent
needs of political propaganda, attempted dall'infausto
recall "message." It is illuminating to read today
his contributions to the journal Film & Cinema ', such as that
Eisenstein and Vertov (1967) in which it interacts with the
issues of truth and cine-cine-eye. There is glimpsed between the lines
, statements similar to those that will then Toti,
in the eighties and nineties, the alleged super-electronic eye.
"not enough to be" masters of Sight "- wrote in
1967 -, create things to see and that there are
in the truth of the human eye and visual film
if the author is not involved in mythopoeic
you know what to tell you that he has built his life
watched by the most refined, agile and intelligent
handled and even artistically. " A Dziga Vertov
was dedicated in 1994 PLANETOPOLIS: to him, the "top
soaring, "cited in images with fragments de
THE MAN WITH THE CAMERA, the gigantic project of this
" video-poem-work "had started from a Symposium on
filmmaker in Moscow in 1992 . It is a video SQUEEZANGEZAÙM
interwoven with homages to cinema: the classic
(John Ford), one animated, one of the historical avant
. Act of love towards
a century of performances and utopias schemiche,
those that have made us all "spettratori, viewers of shadows,
ghosts and dreams. A film that becomes, in the sense of
"Zaum" Language transmental of Velimir Khlebnikov
. Go back, repeat, play with himself,
is screwed up other images, runs through other forms, recreates
captions and titles, as will happen next in the entire production
"Poetronics" Toti. I remember, during the post-production of
PLANETOPOLIS, the imaging of
Eisenstein's October, with the crowd flow backwards
flags in red on black and white sequences Pelescian,
of Medvedkine of Vertov, but also of Ruttmann
scientific documentaries, Lang, Pennebaker, Marker ...
Indeed, perhaps his most moving video, the one that won
electronic arts
various authors and several critics (as has been said recently at the festival in Clermont-Ferrand
, during a tribute to Toti) is Chained to
FILM 1982 (a Party to the trilogy MAJAKOVSKIANA
Experimentation RAI). That piece of film, two minutes, saved from destruction and given to Toti Lilja Brik by his friend, his companion for many years
of Mayakovsky, came from the film Nikandr Turkin
1919: I recited the two, by staging the story
a dancer who leaves the screen for the sake of young
"real." Thanks to the intuition of the possibility of metamorphosis
and time dilation and alterations
spatial and color of the video, thanks to the words recited to
poetic quotations, the magnification of details and gestures, repetition,
enchantments, melancholy interest ("malincosmie," said Toti
like), the fragment (re) becomes work accomplished, in one hour
interprets the hopes and disappointments of an entire generation of fans
revolutionaries
word and art, and brings out a new life
memory chips otherwise destined to disappear.
In a poetic, evocative, sometimes enigmatic,
these works are a path to political reflection, offer
matter of doubt and thought
on the rise and decline (or the temporary silence) of communism, which was renamed
Toti "coSmunismo" to emphasize the
worldwide vocation, to come, beyond this or that
hasty and misguided application.
Cinema Gianni Toti had not only loved, commented,
studied, used in the video. At one point the
had also made, both as an actor (for Faccini, the
Straub, Gutierrez Alea and others) and as an author and screenwriter
of many texts that were at the stage of
project, both with two films : E Shaul AND
SICARI ON WAY DAMASCUS (1973) and ALICE IN
CARTAVIGLIE (1980, an operation which is also related
a book and a 45 music).
is interesting to read today's debates (especially on
Shaul, edited by and starring Roberto Perpignani
GeorgeWilson) magazines of the period, by 'Cineforum "
the' Review of the Cinema" to "New Cinema" and
"Cinemasessanta '. This is a film that reverses the
idea of \u200b\u200b"cinema history" and that it builds with time shifts,
provocations (the headlines in the middle of the film), effects such as
to call the video, more versatile and malleable Film,
more willing for its vibrant nature and point
to "bending" of the language. "I think the film (he says Toti
in one of these items) as a" picture books and audio visual
"which may then need to prefaces,
of post-factions, to work on the texture, useful to the reader
-spectator because it manufactures its own "key
Reading" or "slettura" or "illettura "...».
writer of all the scriptures, Toti shows us here as in his creative journey
it is not "jump" from one medium to another
, by writing to another (perhaps more technically advanced
). The Page -
literally and metaphorically - is one, white sheet and brightness of the screen,
projection surface film and
under the monitor. In the eighties Gianni Toti becomes unmaestro
of experimentation in electronic
internationally known, award-winning, celebrated (more abroad than in Italy,
must be said) among the pioneers of the more educated and more radical views
video. Back in the "Poetronics" the subversion of language,
back film (medium now "fully born" Toti
seconds) as a form of speech in video, but also born
figures never seen before, the adventures of forms, layouts
and creations - in digital -
extraordinary impact of sensory, intellectual and emotional.
If we read the critical analysis of his literary and poetic work (such as, piercing, Joseph Zagarrio) recognize the "rhetorical devices" totiane, his inventions, his twists of language, its deconstruction,
also in video images: as well as planetary and cosmic
his breath, his "irony antroposociologica"
his views on the possible future and "poesibile. As a young scholar
well established, Silvia Moretti
(how many young people around the work of Gianni Toti, how much attention
collecting his work and passion in students
that they approach or who met him in person), you
is a screen-video-page to go with the
write, browse, through, "a continuity of mutual
nourishment between writers and visual art. " Moreover, the video-
his poems are full of letters and words and lives
dancing, entertainment (futuristically)
containers become images or of images and the film itself, taken for
"sentences", it becomes an element of the speech:
moved a little muffled Gramsci, filmed in Moscow (in GRAMSCIATEGUI)
Lilja moves the dancer who has nostalgia for
white canvas screen, soldiers on horseback returning
back, advancing to the masses who do not progress more ... Page,
film, video? Word, writing, music? Perhaps the lesson
higher Gianni Toti, inseparable from
rigor and freshness that was taking him
detailed examination of the various arts that has spanned (and which was also a theorist
, formulating concepts and terminology coined) ,
lies precisely in this poetic and artistic co-
this practice of recruitment and "total" of
languages. Which is inseparable from the rest of the fruitful coexistence
passionate - in his art and his experience
of life - of many modern languages \u200b\u200band "death" of many
literary masterpieces of all time, of many different musical influences
, knowledge theater, films, scientific, philosophical.
But many countries visited, people
known and unknown, met and never forget, extraordinary adventures, extraordinary battles
: human, poetic, political, intellectual
. The partisan Vania, a militant of the "proletariat,"
willingly sang the verses of the poet and musician
Argentine Atuahalpa Yupanqui, singer of the Indians and
Wretched of the Earth, which had included in PLANETOPOLIS:
"be a man first, then poet ".
Even in this direction will be revisited and rethought and
"rewritten" his work. And re-lived. In different ways and new
but always thinking and writing and producing, filming and creating and inventing
never surrender to
easy, obvious, the known. And still writing and creating and
thinking and filming and producing and ...