FOREVER JLG

“I play, You play, We play, At the movies. [...] To forget and to know, Early and slowly, The world, In oneself, To think and to talk, Life is such a strange game.” A self-portrait through other self-portraits; what Godard was and what he will always be.

regia e montaggio: Erik Negro

After his studies in Philosophy and Semiotics, Erik Negro (1990, Italy) has worked in documentary and experimental cinema. He is a contributor for FilmParlato.it and Cinelapsus.com as well as Il Manifesto, Cineteca Griffith (Genoa), and Garaje Lumiere (Madrid). He is a curator and nonconventional programmer of independent cinemas and an editor, at times co-writer, for avant-garde films, archival works, videos, and installations. He was a member of the Tff.Doc international jury. In 2019, the Pesaro Film Festival premiered his debut feature Non c’è nessuna Dark Side (atto uno), which went on to screen at the International Film Festival Rotterdam and the Rio Festival ECRÃ. His other works, including those with Barbara Elese, are selected in galleries, exhibitions, and the Rai 3 show Fuori Orario. He is currently pursuing his theoretical and existential research in the relationship between image, space, and time, in the use of several techniques, and the formal deconstruction of editing.

Fulvio Baglivi, Roberto Turigliatto

Between Erik Negro and ‘Fuori Orario cose (mai) viste’ there is a long-standing relationship, even though he was born after the launch of the show and belongs to a generation who hasn’t needed TV to watch films. Erik chose Fuori Orario as a point of reference since he was a teenager to build his own atlas of visions, which he has enhanced attending European film festivals for years. With the show conceived by Enrico Ghezzi, the young filmmaker shares not only a small group of favourite fundamental film directors who have lit up Rai 3’s nights since the beginning – including Godard and Michael Snow, for whom Erik made two tribute/films – but also the idea of endless continuity of cinema and life, appropriating an aesthetic worldview, in a unique, personal way, for which “playing” with images is crucial. Erik Negro’s approach to cinema is direct, unmediated; he prefers an amateur’s or lover’s approach to professionalism; he favours the notion of filmmaker over that of director or creator; he is convinced that ‘film critique’ is not bound to writing only, but includes programming or filming too, in line with the theories and practices that have found a congenial breeding ground of creation and experimentation in a few research or concept film festivals, such as Pesaro or Rotterdam. Even though it is filled with references, forerunners, and affinities, this solitary and often hidden voice hailing from remote provinces of Piedmont is uniquely original, in both existential and aesthetic terms. The cinema of Erik Negro is the outcome of the time of abundance and abandon: abundance of images available and of technical means to create, edit, alter them, and the choice of abandoning oneself, going with the flow, to this sea of light filled with heroes, myths, gods, lost paradises, and impossible enterprises. In the films of this singer of a permanent shipwreck, Brakhage and the boys of Acqui Terme, the Partisans and Pink Floyd, Ayrton Senna and Fenoglio meet and get lost, drifting in the fear and desire of an impossible dark side of the moon.