ESERCIZIO DI MEDITAZIONE

Alfredo Leonardi (Voghera, Italy, 1938) studied literature in Milan, initially becoming involved in theatre and later in cinema. After moving to Rome in the early 1960s, he worked as an assistant director to Ugo Gregoretti. He worked as a director on cultural programmes for RAI and made several experimental short films for the producer Enzo Nasso, as well as the feature film Amore amore (1966). From 1967 to 1970, he self-produced a number of experimental films and was a member of the Cooperativa Cinema Indipendente. In 1969, he spent time in the United States writing a book on the New American Cinema, entitled Occhio mio dio (Feltrinelli, 1971). In 1971, together with Guido Lombardi and Anna Lajolo, he formed the group Videobase, with which he produced several videos documenting social struggles ignored by the mainstream media up to 1975. In 1996, he settled first in Milan, and finally in Turin.

a programme curated by Orazio Leogrande

If you want to engage with the experimental films of Alfredo Leonardi, then you should approach them with the same willingness and open-mindedness as you would poetry. Leonardi himself has stated that the cinema he believes in and pursues intends “to give film form to his visions and stimuli, just as writers and painters have always been capable of.” Leonardi’s camera, in fact, seems to dispense with the cinematic conventions that have ruled for over half a century, thus becoming a powerful tool for conveying emotions, opinions, and revelations. Comparing him to other experimental filmmakers of his generation, one could say that Leonardi stands out as a real lyrist who can make sensations, stimuli, and ideas reverberate through an extremely personal lens. Leonardi did involve himself, his family, and friends, but the individual gaze should not be confused with autobiography. Resorting to personal information to capture the portrait of this filmmaker could be even more ineffectual. Speaking of Derek Walcott, Joseph Brodsky would say, “Poets' real biographies are like those of birds, almost identical – their real data are in the way they sound.” What are these sounds like anyway? Primarily, there is impatience with psychologism. Next come the elimination of narrative; the rejection of theatrical dialogue; the abolition of the protagonist, making room for associations derived from visuality rather than logic. In his early experimental films, multiple exposure seems to question perspective while lightening the plane into a spatial interpenetration. In the structural trilogy – of which Esercizio di meditazione is a part – he seems to aspire to recreate a virgin gaze through of a series of static shots. His research played out over a short period of time. The self-produced experimental films, ranging from Cinegiornale to Vampiro romano, were made between 1967 and 1970, i.e., the same years as the Cooperativa Cinema Indipendente, which saw Leonardi in a very active role. After that, a solid break – precisely in 1969, the year when Leonardi travelled to the US to write his book on the New American Cinema. This trip was an eye-opener, because it challenged the autonomy of art that had been fiercely advocated by so many American filmmakers with whom he identified. The underlying reason was that history broke into the scene, the turbulent years of the Vietnam War, the persecution of the Black Panthers, the fight for civil rights… The film that Leonardi made upon this journey, Occhio privato sul nuovo mondo, is like an x-ray of this personal crisis, or an elegy to a cinema in which he had deeply believed and lived. Through a series of portraits, his book Occhio mio dio provides a lucid and passionate overview of US experimental cinema that is remarkably timely, even anticipating P. Adams Sitney’s popular essay Visionary Film by three years. Some of the thoughts found in Leonardi’s introduction could apply to a whole generation of independent filmmakers, and not just in the US. They provide the best key to understanding his farewell to experimental cinema: “having swum in the deepest waters of my ‘I’ for years, I now understand both the genuineness and initial necessity of many filmmakers’ work and choices, including the growing isolation and the perils of vainness, as well as – in the long run – the unconscious opportunism that plague several good, sincere artists. Fixated on watching themselves in a mirror, they forget that the wider world is moving on without them. […] The best contemporary artists are languishing in the grip of an increasing neurosis and trying to resist by isolating themselves further, like (often consenting) victims of a malaise that is slowly becoming their only creative source.” Upon returning to Italy, he made one more film before collaborating with Guido Lombardi and Anna Lajolo to make videos that gave a voice to the weaker and the outcast. Vampiro romano looks like a posthumous film. This feeling stems not only from the fact that it reconnects to two works made before travelling to America, i.e., Se l’inconscio si ribella and Libro di santi di Roma eterna. The film features a vampire who is far removed from the traditional image, save for his two sharp canines. He seems like a dazed dandy, who feeds in the company of friends; he devours pictures, browsing metres upon metres of film stock; he cannibalises the characters during theatre rehearsals. At one point, the vampire has a fainting spell and sucks his own blood. It doesn’t feel like he's doing so out of kindness or a desire to preserve those around him. It seems more like he is complying with a fate of self-destruction through endogamy. In the end, it’s at once a tragic and ironic gesture, akin to those who revolve incessantly around their egos and realise they can get by without their selves, preferring to immerse themselves in reality.

by Orazio Leogrande

How did you approach film, particularly experimental film?
I have been passionate about theatre since high school. At that time, I would have liked to do theatre. I was a regular at theatre shows in Milan. There used to be a wide selection at that time; it was a golden age for Giorgio Strehler’s Piccolo Teatro. At university, I focused on this passion for theatre. I enrolled in an acting course at a private school while studying literature at Milan’s Università Statale, where I graduated with a dissertation on Gordon Craig. I was also a contributor for Il Paradosso, a sociology and economics magazine, with two columns on theatre and film. At one point, Ugo Gregoretti arrived in Milan to make a film called New Angels, with young factory workers as the main characters. Gregoretti addressed this magazine to obtain information about these industrial situations, therefore the magazine delegated the role of intermediary with Gregoretti to me, who was to become his assistant of sorts. After wrapping up the film, Gregoretti returned to Rome, but he wrote to me proposing that I collaborate on a script about Rai and its world. Having already worked at Rai for years, Gregoretti wanted to carve out an ironic portrait of the popular TV station. Therefore, I moved to Rome to collaborate on the script, but the film was not made. But I hung around, and became familiar with the Rai editorial staff who worked on one-hour TV shows comprising ten- to fifteen-minute segments about culture or lifestyle news. The editorial staff would choose a theme, and I would be in charge of directing, working alongside a crew. At the same time, I started filming shorts to be screened in movie theatres along with feature films. These short films were eligible for quality awards, which the producers almost entirely cashed in on. I made almost a dozen of them with the producer Enzo Nasso. My shorts were quite experimental from the outset, a language which was to become integral to my works. The strongest inspiration came from Godard’s Breathless. In the 1960s, France saw the birth of cinéma vérité, as did the United States with direct cinema; Marker versus Leacock. There we discovered the importance of handheld camera, of filming people while following them, of not leaving the camera on the tripod… The freer the camera’s mobility, the greater the dynamism, but also the stronger the expressivity. So I departed not from historical experimental film, which I didn’t know yet, but from the latest trends in documentary filmmaking, which became used in fiction film as well, for example by Godard.
I believe that Amore amore, your only experimental feature, is also your first film to use this language with great conviction.
Amore amore was produced by Nasso. He gave me a few metres of 16mm film stock which he was to blow up to 35mm to run for a quality award where that format was required. I shot most of it with my 16mm Bolex; Mario Masini shot some scenes with a 16mm Arriflex. I only had two months for the entire project – shoot, edit, print, sound track… it was a real tour de force! I am convinced that it would have been a much better film if I had had more time. But mine was not just intolerance of working on a tight schedule: the sole owner of the completed movie became the producer. Thus, I made up my mind and left Nasso for good, throwing myself into self-producing. That film was the tipping point.
The use of the camera seems to go much further than cinéma vérité and direct cinema, namely with your elaborate use of multiple exposure, which is reminiscent of some American experimental films of the same period. When did you first become acquainted with the ‘New American Cinema’?
In Fall 1967, Jonas Mekas arrived in Rome and introduced this type of cinema, having done the same in Turin that Spring. Mekas would travel with a suitcase full of these reels. In Rome, he had them screened at Filmstudio, an arthouse cinema directed by Amerigo Sbardella and Annabella Miscuglio. Antonioni, Bertolucci, and the Taviani brothers also came to Filmstudio, as established or famous directors too were strongly interested in those works.
You also co-founded the Cooperativa Cinema Indipendente in 1967. What was the purpose of this organisation?
The main point of reference was the painter Gianfranco Baruchello, his home was the Cooperative’s headquarters. We would basically meet for screenings. Together, we designed film programmes featuring our own works – each of us contributing one piece, trying to achieve a total duration of one and a half hours. These miscellanies were distributed to art galleries, film clubs, and other types of venues. All of the Cooperative’s activities took place on a private level, so to say; everything happened on the basis of goodwill, friendship, and contacts.
Can we say that Cinegiornale was your first self-produced experimental film?
In terms of language, Living and Glorious or Musica in Corso, both produced by Nasso, can already be called experimental, as besides acting as director I also was the cameraman there. I would shoot myself, in 16mm, with a Bolex. Creating cultural contents for Rai I would film original footage, but at other times I would browse their archives, retrieving discarded footage. There was a lot of discarded footage, especially from current events. I brought some of this footage home with me, and this is how Cinegiornale came into being. I worked with a hand crank editing machine, then I thought of coupling it with Satie’s music. Beginning with Cinegiornale, I stopped making shorts for other producers. After that, I made Organum multiplum on the wake of my desire to film an electronic music band, Musica Elettronica Viva, directed by Frederic Rzewski and Alvin Curran. I have always enjoyed working with other artists as well as documenting their creative processes. Se l’inconscio si ribella was conceived in the same context: I consider this film to be an emotional synthesis of what I was back then. As though bursts of heat came out of a cauldron of emotions and experiences… Even though it was less intimate, Libro di santi di Roma eterna is closely connected to Se l’inconscio si ribella: they share the same cultural and social milieu and the same dose of raw emotions. Esercizio di meditazione, instead, could be considered the first panel of a Zen triptych, followed by Le N ragazze più belle di piazza Navona and an unmade film about swifts’ flight patterns. I consider Può la forza di un sorriso, an improvised film about the protests against the Pesaro Film Festival in 1968, as the third chapter of the trilogy, which eerily foreshadowed my future evolution.
In the same period, you wrote a book about the New American Cinema.
The programme that Mekas circulated, which went to the Pesaro Film Festival after Turin and Rome, aroused a lot of interest in that type of filmmaking. Nanni Balestrini, who at that time was a lead editor at Feltrinelli, proposed that I write a book on the New American Cinema for the series Materiali. Balestrini managed to obtain a grant from the Ford Foundation for me to spend a year in the United States and write the book, which was to be titled Occhio mio dio. I agreed and stayed for the whole of 1969. My accommodation was a slum room in the Lower East Side, which was the Puerto Rican neighbourhood of Manhattan at that time. I would go every day to the Film-Makers’ Cooperative, then directed by Mekas. There, I browsed synopses, publications, books… I even travelled to San Francisco to visit the headquarters of a smaller cooperative called Canyon Cinema, which had been founded by Bruce Baillie. The directors of the West Coast would mostly gather there. After spending several months in New York, I realised that, on a large scale, no one cared for the New American Cinema, which had no impact on reality whatsoever; on the other hand, the city was constantly torn by protests about the Vietnam War. There was great turmoil and powerful unrest. On top of this, there were the Black Panthers. Bobby Hutton, who had already been in prison, was killed by the police in an ambush. There was Angela Davis, who is also featured in Occhio privato sul nuovo mondo. I was so invested in and overwhelmed by these very real social struggles that, by the time I moved to San Francisco, my interest in the New American Cinema had waned. I am still sorry for not accepting Stan Brakhage’s invite to stay with him, in Colorado, before going to San Francisco. I felt a strong affinity with Brakhage, he was so kind as to offer to meet me at his mountain home, but I was already turning in a different direction. It was as if I was being swept away by a huge wave.
After that strange American journey, I returned to Rome and made Vampiro romano, which is above all a tribute to Romano Amidei, Sylvano Bussotti’s beloved partner, whom he called Rara. I see it as being closely related to Se l’inconscio si ribella and Libro di santi di Roma eterna, with which it forms a sort of triptych. That was the last experimental film I made. We were living in an extremely dynamic era: there were neighbourhood committees, squats, and a frenetic social scene. When I met up again with Guido Lombardi and Anna Lajolo after my time in America, we decided to set up a social documentary group called Videobase. We bought some portable video equipment, which was a huge novelty at the time. We needed those cameras to make feature-length films for the experimental programmes on the Rai third channel. However, we also used them to document various situations in neighbourhoods, factories and so on. Videobase lasted through the first half of the 1970s, right up to Lottando la vita.
Many of your films could be described as cinema of poetry. Has poetry been a direct source of inspiration for you?
No, not directly. I would describe myself as a poet of cinema, but not in the sense of drawing from literary poetry, rather as a cinematic equivalent of poetry, without any derivation involved. One of my points of reference is Antonioni, a director who gave absolute priority to the visual over the literary. Although I have a degree in literature and greatly appreciate written poetry, I am so much more sensitive to the visual element, encapsulated in light, than to words (and let’s not talk about fiction here).
I’d say that in all my films I’ve sought a genuine harmony with the people I’ve worked with: that’s the breeding ground for my films. According to Chinese astrology, I’m a tiger. I’m reckless. I’d say I’m an extremist. If I set my mind on something, I throw myself into it with everything I’ve got. I throw myself into it wholeheartedly. I’m a sort of phoenix that burns and rises from its ashes somewhere else.