Film - Gianluca Colitta

About L'Inverno

In the beginning it was a short film. The story of a man and a woman who meet by chance, they like each other, they get to know each other, they make love and they fall asleep. Until he wakes up and, maybe because he is bored or maybe a sudden inspiration, he starts painting his car in red dots. Once finished, he stays there watching his work from a short distance. After some little time he jumps in the car and runs fast to a pier. The screen turns black for a few seconds. When the image appears again, there is nothing: not the car nor the man nor the woman. All is lifeless. Only the sea is alive. And the wind. Everything has disappeared or maybe it never existed.

From L'Inverno to Fragments

About Fragments

When I have shot L'Inverno, I had a film in mind. When I have finished L'Inverno, I have found the film.
I think I can sum it all up like this, in the end.

What are the Fragments of Winter?
A film in fieri and a film testimony of production difficulties that have “broken” the original film and have split it, uncompleted.

Why the Fragments of Winter?
At the end of a “failed” film why not showing it? Opening the film, giving it to the spectator, even if wounded; multiplying the framings and the screens, in order to even renew the concept of movie theatre.

How?
With a museum space big as an hangar, with five big screens scattered (more or less perpendicular to each other) in the empty and dark space, each one of them showing a fragment of the film in loop sequences.
Few spectators per visit, free to move, to wonder, attracted by the sounds and lights that come out from the different screens.

For this reason this is an “open film”...
I have thought that just as all of us – the actor, the crew and myself – we got lost in the making this film, I would like the same to happen for the spectator, that he looses himself inbetween the five big Fragments. Thus giving the impression of a film that is once again “suspended”, not only in its story or in the style, but also in its modality of vision.

How, technically?
With five screens, five blu-ray players, five projectors, ten speakers and a lot of darkness. More specifically, with two versions, one different from the other, for various situations. The low budget version, designed for smaller spaces, with five digital televisions and five blu-ray players. The high budget version, designed for much bigger spaces as abandoned churches or hangars, with cinema screens and excellent digital projector. Sound is stereo in both versions. Therefore, sound diffusion will be the same: two good speakers for each screen will be enough.

experimental / art film
IT 2014 | 18' | col. | SHD - 4K

produced by Associazione Culturale Azteca | associate productions Azteca Produzioni Cinematografiche, Media Land and Sharoncinema Production | executive producer Rita Surdo (Sharoncinema Production) | written and directed by Gianluca Colitta | script collaboration by Cesare Landricina | camera (col. SHD) Giuseppe Truppi | art directors Marcella Mosca, Egle Calò and Corrado Pizzi | costume designer Marcella Mosca and Allegra Mori Ubaldini | music and sound design Luigi Porto | editing Tiziana Settembrini | additional editing Paola D'Andrea | 1st assistant director Esmeralda "Dada" Da Ru | director's assistant Gabriella Barbati and Viviana Dominici | continuity Francesca D'Antoni | floor sound engineer Andrea Mazzotta | production manager Leonardo Peluso (Sharoncinema) | production assistants Roberta Stifini, Luigi Nico, Giovanni Castelluccio | camera operator Giuseppe Truppi | 1st camera assistant Gennaro Visciano | camera assistant Pier Paolo Battocchio | key grip / best boy Simone Petrelli / make-up and hair stylist Roberta Stifini | cast Andrea Onori and Marie Marlard

The short film is an abstraction, a symbolic representation of the story. The main female character – like a gold digger – is a pilgrim in a surreal place, with a royal attitude, solemn, almost distant.
She is both controller and prisoner of a space that “it is neither a forest or a park: it is nothing more or less than an enchanted garden” (Mann); it is a place that is a labyrinthine projection of her unconscious. What surrounds her is a “tangible reality which turned into a vision”. However this majestic and sacred attitude of the character disappears by the ending, the only moment in which we clearly see her face. We see a gaze that looks at us and asks for mercy and compassion. What this gold digger finds is actually her fragility and friability.
Reading Paolo Cognetti's short story Pelleossa I was spontaneously attracted by three, four elements. The wedding (“Qui ci sposiamo per andare via” - “Here we get married in order to escape”, p. 35), the menstrual cycle ("Qui abbiamo una bambina che scopre l'esistenza del sesso e smette di mangiare. Senza saperlo fa la cosa giusta, visto che l'anoressia interrompe il ciclo mestruale" - “Here we have a young girl discovering the existence of sex and stops eating. Without knowing it she makes the right choice, as anorexia causes the interruption of the menstrual cycle”, p.30), the body as a house hunted by ghosts ("Non credere anche tu a quello che vedi, per favore, non tu. Il corpo che hai davanti è una casa abitata dai fantasmi: un posto pieno di ragnatele, scale storte e pavimenti marci" - “Don't you believe what you see, please, not you. The body you are looking at is a house hunted by ghosts: a place full of spider webs, twisted staircases and rotten flooring”, p. 28), “anoressia come forma di misticismo” (“anorexia as a way of mysticism”, p. 29).
I was attracted by these phrases and I wrote them down while reading. It was easy to me to imagine a woman whose thinness does not get revealed until the end. A red-haired woman. Red as what she is shrinking from: blood and life. A woman locked in a sort of labyrinth which is mental and not, that is her body and outside her body, just like the clinic and the bodies in which Cognetti's characters are locked in. Finally, a woman that sews a wedding dress, because, like the author writes, often a wedding is the only way out, an object-wedding, desired only for the purpose of the escape and not for love.
The first place/non-place that came up to my mind was the Scarzuola, the big scenographic construction by Tomaso Buzzi, the ideal city, neo-Platonic, dreamlike and labyrinthine, in which everything is to be found and to be lost. The city of tuff stone, friable, that rises and dies every day. A city that is mystic, sacred, where there is no time, where time is suspended. Where all is suspended. Both light and history. Where even life is suspended. And death. Like anorexia.

drama / art film
IT 2014 | 4' | col. | HD