THRESHOLD

A programme curated by Federico Rossin

This year's Lessons in Film History, dedicated as always to highlighting innovative film forms and rediscovering forgotten filmmakers in the history of cinema, will focus on the use of colour in experimental cinema, spanning the entire history of cinema from the 1930s to 2022. But these Lessons will also be an opportunity to remember and pay tribute to three giants of experimentation with images and sound who have left us in the last two years and no one has so far deigned to honour them in Italy: the Australian film-maker Corinne Cantrill (1928-2025), the Spanish-Basque artist José Antonio Sistiaga (1932-2023), and the British film-maker and theorist Malcolm Le Grice (1940-2024). Each program will be dedicated to a specific experimental technique, articulating different periods and uses. The first one will be about the three-colour separation technique, a process based on the early experiments in colour photography, that used the separation of the three primary colours, filming three strips of black and white film through coloured filters, which are then projected after being turned positive through those same colour filters, overlaying the three images. This usage of an old technique was caused by the dissatisfaction with the colours of the emulsions of reversible films manufactured in the ‘70s. The second program will be dedicated to the technique of direct painting on film: this technique is perhaps the purest and most radical that experimental cinema has proposed, a direct hand-to-hand encounter with the material support of cinema - the celluloid strip, the film - without the use of optics or a camera, very often without even the celluloid having a photochemical layer on it. The third program will be devoted to the use of colour through three performances created live for the occasion: two multi-screen projections and a cine-chrome experience that adds the colour and light of three projectors on a single screen. Through these three moments, mostly realised using analogue projection, we can cleanse our eyes of the false colours of our portable screens, to rediscover an original sumptuous palette, a feast for the eyes.

Federico Rossin