NECRO NOT(TO B)E / IL VENTO DEL CINEMA. LIPARI 2001

As was the case with the solo retrospective dedicated to Mario Martone, that focused on the footage and other works made before his debut feature film, spazio bianco gallery suspends its exploration of the most contemporary practices and emerging visual artists leaving room to two early works made by Franco Maresco for TV (one with Ciprì, the other on his own) which allow for a different vision from the Teatro Sperimentale features programme.

The two video installations expand the festival’s tribute to two key areas of Franco Maresco’s work. They are also a sign of the human and aesthetic comradeship of enrico ghezzi and the TV show Fuori Orario with Ciprì and Maresco first and then with Maresco alone, after the duo split.

One installation is NECRO NOT(TO B)E, broadcast on August 15, 2003, a lengthy montage edited by Ciprì / Maresco on purpose for Fuori Orario with shorts, unreleased fragments, and film clips from the Cinico TV period – more or less from the 1988-98 decade. That was the moment in which the Palermitan duo gained national traction thanks to their ‘film chips’ broadcast on State Rai3, helmed by Angelo Guglielmi, within the shows “Avanzi” and mostly “Blob.” Before this, they were shown on Italia1 within “Isole comprese,” a programme on local TV stations’ shows. Ciprì / Maresco were featured in Palermo-based Tvm, where the duo had debuted in the late eighties.

Francesco Tirone “the cyclist,” Marcello Miranda, Pietro and Carlo Giordano, the huge Paviglianiti and other characters from a unique world recur in the long compilation film, with that post-apocalyptic landscape, the high-contrast black and white, and the black skies. It includes excerpts from A memoria, the silent medium-length film accompanied by Steve Lacy’s music, and some early shorts including Così and A Silvio. 

The second installation, Il vento del cinema. Lipari 2001, is a long video directed solo by Maresco, with a small crew, on the first run of the film festival conceived and directed by enrico ghezzi that took place in the Aeolian island in June 2001. Franco Maresco interviewed film directors, philosophers, film critics who took part in the event including Béla Tarr, Julio Bressane, Otar Ioseliani, Giorgio Agamben, Edoardo Bruno, Dusan Makavjevev, Emanuele Severino, Massimo Donà, and Sergio Grmek Germani. The festival revolved around two films with digits in the title, i.e., Stanley Kubrick 2001: A Space Odyssey and Roberto Rossellini’s Europe ‘51, clearly related to the current date which was to prove a fateful one (the Genoa G8 Summit and 9/11). In the editing, the interviews were left intact, without Maresco’s off-screen voice. The footage remained unreleased for years until “Fuori Orario cose (mai) viste” broadcast it in 2020.

Fulvio Baglivi, Mauro Santini