ALFA'S BUILDING STOLEN TO CINEMA
2007 / 30’
- direction by Elisabetta Sgarbi
- photography by Elio Bisignani
- ripr Gianni Belloni
- music by Prodigy, Philip Glass, Brian Eno
On the12th September 2007, Milan municipality starts the demolition of the old Alfa Romeo's building, in Portello area, to make room to a tunnel supposed to accelerate the already accelerated Milanese life.
But the chronicle of a ruin committed to the industrial memory of a country (a country whose productive power arms have been given up long time ago), is, here, like a film.
A mechanical arm, intent on breaking up the building walls, hesitates, staggers, tries; it is clumsy as a human form, it misses the grip and, however failing, it destroys, showing all human frailty and poorness, who succeeds while failing and failes while succeeding, never adapting, anyway, purpose to facts.
But the obsession for the repeated gesture (and the obsession for the shooting) it is the evil hypsonis becoming habit of evil, until the complete oblivion of oneself. We suddenly wake up from it. And the human being becomes the injured one, he is not the offender any longer, but the victim, he is not the persecutor any longer, he is the dying building and not the murderous arm.
And the cinema, from obession for a repetition becomes, now, a complaint: against the power of ignorance and superficiality, and a cry for the theft of one of our memory place, to a future oblivion advantage.