Pia Epremian

Short made for double parallel projections, for which Allen Ginsberg said that it's his favorite underground European film, debut from the director, cheeky hommage to B-movies.

This is the third and most extensive part of the cycle Eryngium. The essential theme is the migrations that have populated our world, starting from ancient India and descending into Greece and Western Europe.The film’s conceit is that this movement is still in progress. The characters are shown in transit, as if they were part of an ancient caravan. While they move they make up myths and they worship the Great Goddess,impersonating her story. Thus she appears as young girl and mature woman, and is evoked in the stories and music given on the soundtrack: the Virgin of Bach’s Magnificat, the Sulamite of Stockhausen’s Song of Solomon (“I am black but comely”), tales by Herodotus, Kafka, Villon (as set to music by Ezra Pound). A section is devoted to the idea of celebration, where the migrants get together to worship the life-principle. Later the film moves back to the individual and solitude.

Dissolvimento shows two women in domestic interiors who perform two different actions, edited one after the other. In the first, the painter Gigliola Carretti is engaged in an action with a series of sexually explicit props, making the activity resemble the brushing of teeth; in the second, the director herself is seen from behind, seated on a toilet. The film ends with the almost abstract view of cascades of the fountains of Turin.

The construction of the film is very simple. Most of the time we see faces in close-up. Three pairs of faces, usually, on three different levels of superimpositions. At first, the faces are very theatrical, made-up. It's not clear whether they are men or women. They move only slightly. They are, indeed, godlike. As the film progresses, very unnoticeably, these faces begin to gain more life and masculine and feminine qualities. At the end of the film, after three hours, the faces are very real, and very human, and sexes and ages are very clearly defined: men, women, children.

16mm collective manifesto by the members of C.C.I.

Experimental short about a male and a female figure.

Experimental short about a male and a female figure.

Dissolvimento shows two women in domestic interiors who perform two different actions, edited one after the other. In the first, the painter Gigliola Carretti is engaged in an action with a series of sexually explicit props, making the activity resemble the brushing of teeth; in the second, the director herself is seen from behind, seated on a toilet. The film ends with the almost abstract view of cascades of the fountains of Turin.

This film represents an encounter with several major icons of the history of western painting, "while attempting"–as the filmmaker says–"to always create a link between art and life, an impertinence with respect to those images that the production of works of documentation [books and magazines] brought to the attention of everyone for the first time." Reclaiming art history in a performative, playful way and evoking the tradition of tableau vivant, Pistoletto with his daughters Cristina and Maria Pioppi "act out" in a series of little scenes: Orpheus and Eurydice, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Raphael, Chaim Soutine, James Ensor, Edgar Degas, Vincent Van Gogh.

"Medea gathers all my important relatives and friends. Above all my daughter Alida as a child when they found out she had diabetes while she was hospitalised. It was my feeling of being a bad mother and a transmitter of hereditary that made me name the film Medea. All of the characters somehow transmit the inner pains of birth, body and life in a symbolic way" - Pia Epremian