An evening performance at Bologna to remember the father of the Italian Underground Cinema, in collaboration with the Associazione culturale Alberto Grifi of Rome.

AT 7.30 P.M. - POPCORN HOUR - UNPUBLISHED WORDS BY ALBERTO - FRIENDS of RECENT YEARS

An hour on Blob, a Verifica Incerta on/with/for Alberto Grifi: unpublished images, tokens and suggestions collected over the years by his friends/ followers to be projected in the foyer of the Sala.

AT 9 P.M. SHOWING OF FIVE OF ALBERTO GRIFI's FILMS

The works will be introduced by Monica Dall'Asta (DAMS Cinema di Bologna lecturer).

Six years after his death, Kinodromo pays a heartfelt homage to the greatest representative of the Italian Experimental Cinema: Alberto Grifi, a unique, eclectic, forceful and anti-conventional personality. He was in fact a painter, film director, cameraman, sound engineer, actor, airplane advertisement photographer and a creator of video/ cinematography equipment.

Apart from a plentiful video production, Grifi has left us machinery, photographs, interviews and correspondence which, over the years, had been collected by a group of his students, supporters and followers who do not wish to (and cannot) forget him. The Associazione culturale Alberto Grifi (among which Ivan, the son of the film director and the President Sandro Costa are part of its promoting partners) represents today the official reference point for all the major initiatives linked to the name and works of the Roman artist.

A list of the films to be shown accompanied by Grifi's autographical notes, follows:

LA VERIFICA INCERTA BY ALBERTO GRIFI AND GIANFRANCO BARUCHELLO (ITALY, 1964, 30 MIN)

"The destruction and desecrating re-editing of 150 thousand meters of film, that is 47 box-office films of the fifties and sixties (mostly American commercial cinemascope) purchased in the form of waste material - destination debris. The original film comprised pieces of film stuck together with scotch tape according to unknown assembly methods (the script was the destination and not the starting point of the film) and the result of an initial selection carried out through the use of a table of random numbers. the stories, surrounded by fires, shipwrecks, natural catastrophes and wars of all kinds and periods flowed into each other in the following way: Audrey Hepburn from a tourist airplane bombs the u-boat of the Nazi Curd Jurgens; Her Royal Highness the Queen of England interferes in a loveaffair between the Pharaoh Victor Mature and a Palestinian dancer,a friend of Jesus Christ, while Victor Mature, in the guise of a gangster, bursts into the Katacomben Restaurant, which he entered to set his wife free when she was a prisoner of the Vikings, to the Santè in Paris.The film was shown for the first time in Paris in May 1965, presented by Marcel Duchamp, to whom it was dedicated, to an extraordinary public (Man Ray, Max Ernst, John Cage, the latter enthusiastic about the sound track)".

TRANSFERT PER KAMERA VERSO VIRULENTIA BY ALBERTO GRIFI (ITALY, 1966-67, 22 MIN)

"Virulentia was first and foremost a "place" for theatrical experiments and at the same time a proposal for exiting from the theatre, set up by Aldo Braibanti, a "place" where, through single real experiences that actors brought with themselves onto the stage, where living, searching, poetry and love flowed into each other. The camera approached this psycho-dramatic collective ritual in an attempt to "re-invent" the history of seeing, the biological evolution of the eye that, from the primordial waters such as the amniotic ones, appears on the land; again experiencing together with the actors the evolution that the species have passed through and attempting to show how during the past our animal ancestors appeared during our dreams and during our daily behaviour.

THE GREAT CHILL THAT IS: WILL GIORDANO FALZONI IN THE ROLE OF PRINCE CHARMING BEARING ROTATING OPTICAL GAMES BE ABLE TO GIVE BACK THE DESIRE TO LIVE TO SLEEPING BEAUTY? BY ALBERTO GRIFI (ITALY, 1970, 20 MIN)

"Film dedicated to (and created together with) Giordano Falzoni, one of the most eccentric and fascinating protagonists of Gruppo '63. This film is about painting and its negation that shows Giordano struggling with Sleeping Beauty. This is the challenge! Will art, free of museums and academies, be able to give back to the child, raped and then abandoned on the snow, the desire to go on living? Giordano, the Prince Charming bearing butterfly catchers and rotating optical games, plods along sinking into the snow and …. but isrevolutionary creativity is not the one that makes the bird in the cage sing: it is the reason why the imprisoned bird breaks the cage!".

MICHELE ALLA RICERCA DELLA FELICITÀ BY ALBERTO GRIFI (ITALY, 1978, 23 MIN)

"Michele, a political prisoner was transferred to a small prison. Raffaele, a thief, stated to be a habitual delinquent,who was in the same cell, managed to receive a program from a private TV channel showing a debate about the prison. A third inmate Giulio arrived there who was drug addict suffering from lack of heroin. The whole night through Michele asks for a guard in vain to call for a doctor. The next day, as a result of this disturbance, he was dragged to a punishment cell beaten by three guards and a sergeant with his face covered by a handkerchief. In a quarrel between Michele, still bleeding and a "higher rank democrat" relives the increasing irreconcilable dispute between the PCI (Communist Party) and the independent Communists. Giulio, the drug addict, hangs himself on the cell bars. The last scene shows the sergeant urinating on a newspaper showing the text "young drug addict dies in prison". It should have been broadcast just on the same evening when Moro was kidnapped and was definitely suppressed with this excuse (though Portobello that evening went on just the same) and it later disappeared in the cellars of Viale Mazzini.

DINNI E LA NORMALINA BY ALBERTO GRIFI (ITALY, 1978, 27 MIN)

"It was made from two different materials: an activist videotape in black and white in 1976-77, during the protests against anti-psychiatry at the conference organized in Milan by Armando Vermiglione, a futuristic political story. In the plot it is assumed that the State transformed all its citizens into perfect employees and workers who were willing to partake in this treatment through the use of one of its drugs, normaline (whose stabilizing effects lasted for 8 months followed by painful withdrawal crises). Certain normaline drugs had deteriorated consequently creating illegal groups of dissidents and terrorists. The video police used the videotapes to overcome them and they were on the verge of getting their hands on their leader. Dinni then woke up - it al only a dream but reality was nevertheless hard enough ….. "!

WHERE: Kinodromo @ Cinema Europa, via Pietralata 55, Bologna

WHEN: Monday April 15 2013 from 7.30 p.m. POPCORN HOUR / 9 p.m. projection

PRICE: From 9 p.m. the showings will cost 4 euros and for possessors of the Kinodomo card it will cost 3 euros. Tickets can be obtained directlly at the cinema.