Art & Experimental Film is a project carried out by the Home Movies Archive Foundation in close collaboration with authors, archives, cultural institutions, galleries, and independent curators. It was created with the aim of reinterpreting, through a contemporary lens, the work of some of the most significant Italian artists and filmmakers from the golden age of Super 8 (and other small-gauge formats), highlighting its performative nature, the materiality of film, and its aesthetic and perceptual dimensions.
La nott’e’l giorno – Gianni Castagnoli
(Super8, Italia, 1976, 45’)
Presentation of the restoration and the 16mm and video edition of the film (2024).
In memory of Adriano Aprà (1940-2024)
Gianni Castagnoli (1946-2007)’s La nott’e’l giorno (Super8, 1976) is a mythical, mysterious and maudit film.
‘Mythical’ because it represents both an exception and a summa of the Italian avant-garde cinema. Made out of time, when the experiences of the underground and cooperative distribution of independent cinema were fading away, it was pitched at festivals and screenings until the mid-1980s. Hailed by some as a masterpiece, it soon becomes invisible. La nott’e’l giorno, whose title takes inspiration from a canzonetta’s line by musician Claudio Monteverdi, continues to be quoted without ever being screened again. Also mythical is the “protagonist” and, as we shall see, co-author, Patrizia Vicinelli (1943-1991), an avant-garde poet and figure who has obliquely crossed – and always leaving an imprint on – literary, performative and cinematic experiences. Vicinelli is Castagnoli’s life partner. La nott’e’l giorno was born out of the couple’s shared experience: it is in its own way a political work being intimate and minimalist, but released just as Italian independent cinema veered towards explicit militancy at the service of political struggle and towards the use of videotape. So much so as to make La nott’e’l giorno seem out of date in the Italian context. And it is an out-of-format film: Super8, as soon as it was glorified as the film format of the future of independent cinema in the Dimensione Super8 (Filmstudio, Rome 1975) exhibition, it gave the way to the more versatile and revolutionary video. It is curious, noticing a sentence in the biographical note that accompanies the film, where it is written that Castagnoli “imposed himself through devotion to the aesthetic and productive definition of Super8.” And in fact, La nott’e’l giorno is an oxymoronic film, a small gauge blockbuster that came too late and had few admirers, especially in France. It remains a film that, at least in the author’s intentions, would unhinge the production canons of avant-garde cinema, with the ambition of charting a new course, making use of special contributions such as Alvin Curran’s original score, a perfect weaving over the images’ swirling rhythm.
‘Mysterious’ because we fundamentally know (still) too little about this fascinating film and its history. La nott’e’l giorno appears to us to be extremely fragmented and errant: in fact, it is the result of the recomposition of shots taken during travels in Europe, North America and Mediterranean Africa over the course of three years, and it does not rely on a classic narrative structure. According to Castagnoli, “this film is not a diary, as someone wrote… Let’s say it is a thriller/mystery story, quote-unquote, without violence, without murders, without guns” (statements to La Repubblica, December 11, 1981). There is an incipit with a couple and a little girl (Mimmi, Patrizia’s daughter), then as the couple moves from Bologna, the city of Castagnoli and Vicinelli, they meet friends with whom they share life experiences (and drugs) and, among the shadows, enigmatic presences emerge. One can (but not easily) recognize Annabella Miscuglio, Michele Avantario and Edouard de Laurot, the French-Polish man with a thousand names and pseudonyms, founder together with Jonas Mekas of Film Culture, a man with an adventurous past. The story of the very young Lada Laudański fighting against the Nazis in the Warsaw Resistance and later starring in the New York film and literary scene, would later be remembered by Mekas himself and a few others. But it is the Bologna-born Patrizia who with her mysterious presence transfigures the American and noir imagery on which the film feeds on. La nott’e’l giorno has left its mark in festival catalogs and programs, but we are unlikely to know exactly in what form and version the film was screened. A work that declares from the outset its provisional nature as a “work in progress,” presented, as “the result of the current editing,” in a ninety-minute version made from twenty hours of Super8 film shot between 1973 and 1976. Officially it made its debut at the Fourth International Festival of La Rochelle in 1976, and in the same year it won the first prize at the Festival International du Jeune Cinéma. But the film had already been screened-who knows what version in progress-right within the Dimensione Super8 exhibition at the Filmstudio in Rome (December 1975) and before that clandestinely, if we heed Castagnoli’s own recollections, at the legendary Festival international du cinéma expérimental de Knokke-le-Zoute in 1974. Years later it landed at the Internationales Forum des Jungen Films of the Berlin Film Festival (1981) and at the Midday-Midnight section of the Venice Film Festival (1982), curated by Enzo Ungari.
‘Maudit’ because it was for a long time, and perhaps still is now, an extreme (family) film, dense with poetic images and strong aesthetic impact, almost always bordering between light and dark, the visible and the invisible, where life and death impulses are intertwined and where heroine reigns. Cursed in that it is a neither unfinished nor resolved film, and historically difficult to place, literally out of all time. And it does not exist as a finished work. What we present is a “crystallized” version that takes – presenting, however, differences in editing – the first part of about twenty-five minutes, already distributed by the Collectif Jeune Cinéma in Paris and the Centro Internazionale di Brera in Milan (in Super8 and 16mm prints, respectively) and adds the second part, in a forty-seven-minute edition edited by Castagnoli a few years later, to ideally condense the hour and a half of the first official screening.
This edition of La nott’e’l giorno, restored and edited for Home Movies’ Art & Experimental Film Collection in 16mm film and for RE:VOIR’s video distribution, is the result of a long work that begins with the discovery and identification of the original Super8 edits and the magnetic tape containing the soundtrack. Following the analysis, the comparison of these materials – scanned on several takes – with the copies and versions of the film tracked down during the course of the research, the consultation of the available written and printed sources, we have tried to obtain the best possible compromise in order to restore and return the film in the version that was presented to us by its author, Gianni Castagnoli, in the meetings we had with him before his death in 2007.
The result of our reconstruction is in fact a version that retraces the one Castagnoli left as the last of an unspecified number of versions, after various rehashes on the original films. This is the edition of La nott’e’l giorno circulated on video support (U-Matic and VHS) within festivals, independent and art film exhibitions, and television broadcasts, of which we do not have a certain date of production but testimonies from 1984 onward (Milano Poesia. III International Festival of Poetry, Music, Video, Performances, Dance and Theater, May 26-June 1).
The original elements underlying the restoration are two reversible Super8 color films, without sound, and the music score master on a quarter-inch magnetic tape, belonging to the Gianni Castagnoli Fund deposited at Fondazione Home Movies – Archivio Nazionale del Film di Famiglia , Bologna. The two films contain the first and second parts of the final version of the film, that is, the last edit left by the author. The other films in the Fund that refer to La nott’e’l giorno present assemblages, thematic and chronological montages, outtakes-though it makes little sense to call them as such-and in general diaristic shots that make up the larger filmic corpus of La nott’e’l giorno. On an archival level, as well as as a curatorial project, the original footage and assemblages underlying the artistic project of La nott’e’l giorno still remain a reservoir of images to be screened, exhibited, viewed and reviewed.
The image was scanned at a resolution of 2.5K by attenuating, without erasing, the numerous scratches present in some parts of the film through pre-imbibition. The pose sought to restore the extent and richness of extreme situations of brightness and colorimetry linked to the use of different invertible color emulsions, Kodachrome, Ektachrome and Agfacolor, alternating, while for the sound, the master of the musical soundtrack starting from a recording on a high quality medium.
This edition of La nott’e’l giorno is the result of projects carried out by the Fondazione Home Movies between 2018 and 2024, which included restoration, digital preservation of elements, archival research and presentation of the film at various stages. An earlier version of this was presented in a 16mm reissue in the Art & Experimental Film programming, curated by Jennifer Malvezzi, Mirco Santi, and Paolo Simoni, on Italian experimental and artist cinema of the 1960s and 1970s, as part of the Archivifo Aperto Festival in 2018. Subsequently, thanks to the 2019 Italian Ministero della Cultura Extraordinary Digitization Plan, all elements of the Gianni Castagnoli Fund were scanned. Starting from these digital elements, thanks also to the contribution of the Regione Emilia Romagna, it was possible to complete the research and create this edition (Archivi Vivi/Live Archives Project 2024).