Wedding in San Fruttuoso
16mm
Music by Guglielmo Pagnozzi
At San Fruttuoso di Camogli, newlyweds and guests arrive by boat. Before them come others, for the preparations, including the filmmaker who films the splendid abbey and the picturesque bay from the sea. A beautiful place for a wedding. Rapallo's Giuseppe Bacigalupo, a former young tennis player and now a brilliant young doctor on the verge of a fine career, and Frieda Natali, an American national who also works as a doctor, got married. A proper wedding, in a 'world of yesterday', where gentlemen celebrate and toast on high, and where fishermen on the beach also drink from kindly offered flasks and salute. Witnessing the bride and groom is the blond Lorenzo Lanza, of noble and decadent lineage, author of the poem Sanctity of Wine, awarded a prize in a poetry competition by Marinetti: "Rough vine stump / naked knot of winter anguish / that autumn melts in the barrels". Today, however, is the first of June 1939, and only his friend Ezra Pound is missing, who is also in Rapallo, but just this year he has returned to the United States on a peace mission to convince the Americans of the goodness of Fascism. Shortly afterwards came the war and Giuseppe Bacigalupo's 'world of yesterday' soon dissolved ('Yesterday in Rapallo', recalling Stefan Zweig, was to be the title of his memoir). With much nostalgia for the cosmopolitanism experienced on the Riviera of which this marriage is also a sign. Giuseppe wrote of his love for Frieda, which remained the same until her death: "It was born as a love affair, and a love affair it always remained."
Almanac
A year-long online programming, the 365 days of 2023. From January 1st to December 31st, every day we will publish on this site a film or an archive excerpt shot on that same day during the short century of small gauge formats cinema. A new and different way of telling the collective story and reconnecting it to today, through private and daily micro situations of individuals and families, public events filmed by amateur filmmakers, surprising shots of special moments, gestures, rituals. We will thus compose the mosaic of a portrait in progress, jumping from one date to another, from one place to yet another, following the 2023 calendar to tell the story of a century, made up of thousands of glances. The selected film materials are the result of a collective work of archival research and historical recontextualization, as well as sounding of mostly silent images which we re-appropriate also through the original sound and music. The Home Movies 100 Almanacco (almanac) is dedicated, on the centenary of his birth, to Jonas Mekas, the master of the avant-garde who was the first cantor of home movies and more directly a precursor of this project, with his 365 day project in 2007, the year in which every day he posted on the net a video shot that same day.
Partner: Kiné società cooperativa. With the contribution of MiC - Direzione Generale Cinema e Audiovisivo and Regione Emilia Romagna - Emilia Romagna Film Commission. With the support of Coopfond, fondo mutualistico di Legacoop.