Memoirs of an underground filmmaker. Massimo Bacigalupo

Massimo Bacigalupo, filmmaker, essayist, translator and literary critic, started filming as a child. In his family, since the 1930s, his father had been shooting in Pathé Baby. At the age of fifteen, he made his debut at film competitions with some amateur documentaries made with his 8mm camera. But as a teenager, thanks to family friend Ezra Pound he discovered Ron Rice, Stan Brakhage, Gregory Markopolous, Kenneth Anger. The overwhelming force of the Underground and New American Cinema will be the references that will inspire his artistic evolution. His films are short masterpieces of great sensitivity, of extreme fragility, invisible because relegated to underground circuits, never fully 'family', never totally 'amateur', not merely 'experimental'. The home and the bourgeois context of origin are elements at the centre of each of his investigations, autobiography and travel the recurring themes, the transcription of (almost) mystical visions is rendered using still and filmed images, photographs in negative, and in positive, multiple superimpositions, direct interventions on film. In Rome, for study purposes in 1967 he joined the group of independent filmmakers who in the autumn of that year merged into the Cooperativa Cinema Indipendente (CCI) based first in Naples, then in Rome. Bacigalupo traces his biographical path, from his relationship with his father to the success of Quasi una tangente (1966), considered the first Italian underground film, to cultural and film exchanges between Italy and the United States.