Mario Schifano
Umano non umano

THE REVIEW

"The people who come to me, well, they're not much for the avant-garde. They buy mostly very figurative stuff, often ugly as well"... Sandro Penna in the film.

Here we are, finally we're here with the cinema, the heart "beats". It had to be a hardened heroin addict, an absentee, an incorruptible faulty one, someone for whom night and day were the same thing, there was always light. Someone who, if you asked them the time, would answer "pardon?", someone who had other "calculations" in mind, a fool, someone with such compassion that he would smile with his childhood smile at the question of trying to rationalize a little for others the meaning of what he was doing. "But what do you see, Mario?" That modest, shy, reserved expression that said it all: "explain what? It's all right there in front, emulsified, it's all clear. Don't you see the stars too?"

An immediate flow to disintegrate present securities that if you already think of them as present are part of the past. Trying to deflect death, where memories and thoughts kill the revelation of our soul, staging "the undiscipline" of diversification from the little theater set up by vanities, a sense of existing through the impalpability of disappearances. Filming silence.

And the fallacious external conduct, the earthly weaknesses that enchant our judgments here find no foothold in condemnation, and there we, doubly enraptured, witness the Satori of an impersonal love proposed with an impaired medium of what cinema can be.

Slices of souls, glimpses of oblique perspectives that glimmer "randomly", dialogues with eternity excluding chronologies, purging considerations. Friends of eternity, ancient brothers, millennial strangers follow one another in a psychic randomness "with no rhyme nor reason", a beautiful gift. Each one moves their story with external silence, with the inner verb. The quantum spectroscope captures in the protagonists the nothingness we need.

To remain in the seventh art (?), all those situations that tell stories are automatically nullified, practically all cinema, peddled for the deceit of consolation. Here, one has the possibility to withdraw freely, the wickedness of human misery to influence, to indoctrinate, to cheat, is not here: free falling, without a net... The justification of experimental cinema serves to give a function to things, there you go... giving a function to everything, that is the problem.

In the "screenplay", Mario Schifano and Franco Brocani bring the instinct, the speed, the objectivity of a transcendental detached painting where the turpentine of its essence peels off old varnishes unaware of their inquisition.

The camera is then left by Schifano freed in its astral journey of capturing moments that connect us to unimaginable human scenarios, at times catching invisible pillars that support the maya shack. "That's life" says at a certain point Sandro Penna, recalling Elsa Morante's impression at the listening of his poem, Elsa gets it right.

There are no poses, conveniences are left to the fabricated market of legal attributions. "What's the use of poets?" Don't ask this question, you'll go to hell, never ask it...

We are blessed by the awareness of the instability of the journey, we surrender by participating in the infinite. Nothing is asked in return, you will suffer for this...