AMOR | International Competition | UNARCHIVE --- 2 Found Footage Fest 2024 | 28.05 > 2.06.2024 | Cinema Intrastevere | Rome | Italy

with the director Alina Marazzi

 

"The direction of the Festival, now in its second edition (although it was preceded in 2022 by a bold number 0), wrote the delightful introductory notes that follow. For that matter, the creator on behalf of the Audiovisu-al Archive Luca Ricciardi and the artistic direction booth formed by the tried-and-true couple Alina Marazzi and Marco Bertozzi have carefully described the nature of the days that renew the activities of the appointment.

UnArchive has become a permanent institutional deadline. It is fully added to the traditional programming of the Aamod Agenda: the Prize named after Cesare Zavatti-ni, the Aperossa, The Project and Forms of a Political Cinema, the Palestinian Cineforum, and the residency for artists Suoni e Visioni. To mention the best-known chapters of the annual schedule.

Over time, that is, in the preparatory stages of the two editions, UnArchive’s cultural thread of absolute and swaggering contemporaneity grew. The thread has developed, following trajectories in the early days that were perhaps unimaginable.

The reuse of archived and thus unarchived materials has nothing to do, now, with the albeit very noble en-terprise of the re-reading of history told in pictures. . Certainly, it is also about that. But the peculiarity has gradually been refined: footage is the premise for the construction of reality rendered – thanks to the running backward and forward in time – much truer and deeper than mere naturalistic explora-tion."

By Vincenzo Vita - AAMOD President

"In those days, it was said in the press that, if films were mathematical objects, UnArchive would be a festival squared. (F. Ferzetti, L’Espresso, April 30 2023). Of course, films are not geometric constructs, and certainly “ours” are not, so full of humanity, research, attempts and crossovers as they are. But the metaphor of a cinema squared captures the deep meaning of the creative reuse of images and highlights the reasons that leads an archival institution of cinema and audiovisual such as ours to support this practice decisively.

The intuition of considering reuse practices as processes that multiply meanings recalls the situationist idea of Détournement and of the specific strength that the “diverted” elements possess because of the “coexistence in them of their ancient and immediate meaning: their false bottom”.

Cinema squared is an inspired and fitting definition that binds together the different artistic practices that UnArchive wants to promote and make known. A cinema – and not only – that feeds on the images of the past, recontextualizing them and giving them new life, new meanings, without cancelling the original one. Images that are new and at the same time ancient. Signs and lines that generate complex and free geometries, false bottoms, augmented visions. Layered readings, capable of reworking the traces left by time in aesthetic and political processes that are absolutely contemporary. Perspectives, therefore, rather than retrospectives."

By Luca Ricciardi - Concept and managing directior

Burning cinema sets fire to the borders between the poetic and the political

Making a film using archive footage does not mean seizing the life that sleeps in the forts of the film libraries, but stripping reality of its appearance, restoring its raw aspect that is enough in itself while at the same time looking for the aspect it will end with.

Apparently complex, this statement by Jean-Luc Godard published in 1963 in the «Cahiers du Cinéma», upon a second reading strikes us for its crystalline “truth”. An invitation, almost a prophecy, that we make our own in launching the second edition of UnArchive, the Festival dedicated to the cinema that scrutinizes, questions, rekindles, sometimes overturns its own sources. It is the vast and multifaceted landscape of found footage, an iconic horizon that is constantly changing because it houses a multitude of materials, imaginaries, media and technologies. During the preparation for the 2024 program, we were surprised to see films that differ greatly, not only for the themes and time period of the repertoires, but also for the different practices adopted and the aesthetics embraced. The authors fatefully become involved, sometimes in person, other times taking on the point of view of third parties, be they collective or anonymous; other times they strive towards invisibility, touching on cinema-eye perspectives or using images from surveillance cameras. Here the sweetly imperfect gaze of private images gives way to the alienating panoptic eye of closed-circuit images or videos from the media, just as the first-person narration of the narrating voice alternates with soundscapes composed of found and machine-generated sounds.

By Marco Bertozzi and Alina Marazzi - Artistic directors

MORE INFO 

www.unarchivefest.it