Sirio Luginbühl: Experimental Films

“Sirio Luginbühl: film sperimentali”, an exhibition curated by Guido Bartorelli and Lisa Parolo, was held at Palazzo Pretorio, Cittadella, Italy (April- September 2018). Promoted by the Fondazione Palazzo Pretorio Onlus in collaboration with the Department of Cultural Heritage at the University of Padua and the Department of Humanities and Cultural Heritage Studies at the University of Udine, it was the first critical reassessment of one of the leading figures of Italian avant-garde and experimental cinema of the 1970s and 1980s.

Sirio Luginbühl (Verona, 1937–Padua, 2014) was an informed witness of his age. From politics to sexual liberation, from class struggle to feminism, from consumerism to ecological issues, he translated some of these topical themes into an innovative, modern, and controversial language. In line with this trend of the time, Luginbühl wanted his films to disturb and go beyond the
boundaries. Moreover, he was author of many important texts such as Cinema underground oggi (1974) and Lo Schermo negato (1976), with Raffaele Perrotta.

The exhibition was intended as the end event in a preservation and digitisation project held by the lab La Camera Ottica of the University of Udine and the National Film Library (CSC-CN) in Rome. On one side, Luginbühl’s cinematic masterpieces and historical documents have been presented in order to contribute to the reconstruction of the history of experimental cinema. On the other side the public – and above all the new generation of digital natives – was offered the possibility to deepen the
material apparatus of cinema: film camera, projector, and celluloid. In fact, even though it is necessary in order to give a wider access, the digitisation of film implies the loss of particular and specific aspects of experimental cinema, such as the noise of the projector. If museums and institutions that hold audiovisual works do not also show or declare the original supports and
apparatus, it is easy to forget that the film image in motion made use of mechanical technology and an optical medium that requires chemical processing.

For this reason, the first floor was dedicated to the technology of cinema, where visitors could watch a projection of Il bacio (Amarsi a Marghera) (1970, 8mm), reprinted for the occasion. Thanks to the installation that made use of a period projector, it was possible to reproduce the sounds of the apparatus as well as the peculiarities and defects of a non-digitised film image.

Under the care of Home Movies: Archivio Nazionale del Film di Famiglia, another room of Palazzo Pretorio was assigned as a laboratory space in which the public could get close to the cinematographic apparatus. Here visitors were able to touch, color, scratch, and cut the film to learn the difference between formats and standards. New (digital) technologies permit on the other side the spectator to ‘enter’ into the work, placing the film under the magnifying glass the defects, the errors, and the signs of deterioration of the original material, but also those signatures of the work of the film-maker expressed through scratches, cuts, paint applied directly to the celluloid, and inserts made, often in an amateur way, with unsuitable materials.