-
With a career spanning more than 50 years, Marinella PIRELLI's artistic efforts and unquestionable talent are still surprisingly under-recognised. A leading experimental filmmaker in the 1960s and 1970s, Pirelli’s 16mm film explorations have only recently been rediscovered thanks to the retrospective that Museo del Novecento in Milan dedicated to her in 2019.
This selection of works cover ideas relating to intimacy, the body and the relation of self with other. By experiencing Pirelli’s work from the comfort of the home, rather than a setting usually reserved for museums and institutions, one can develop a more intimate and deeper understanding of the artist.
-
Starting with the short 16mm film Narciso, in which Pirelli takes close-up details of her body in a diary-like format, she explores her identity as a woman, mother and artist. In the second week we will show the short documentary film Indumenti [Garments] that records Arte Povera artist Luciano Fabro making a cast in tissue paper from Carla Lonzi’s breast. The virtual screening concludes with Pirelli’s last film, Doppio Autoritratto [Double Self-Portrait], where she filmed herself acting simultaneously as a director and actress.
-
Doppio Autoritratto
22 - 28 February -
Marinella Pirelli
Doppio Autoritratto [Double Self-Portrait], 1973-74
Film, 16mm, digital transfer, colour, sound,
14'
-
Produced in January 1974, just after the death of her husband Giovanni Pirelli, the last film by Marinella Pirelli, austere and moving, appeared as an attempt to exorcise this event and the elaboration of grief. In the double role of actress and director, the artist records herself in movement without controlling the image. Érik Bullot
In this work, Marinella Pirelli invertes the traditional relationship between the author and the spectator as stated in the the film's opening credits: "the camera is now my partner, each of you is now my partner".
The work is dedicated to conceptual artist Vincenzo Agnetti, here presented with his painting ‘When I Saw Myself I Wasn't There’ (1971). In the film, the camera records the artist's face and gazes uncontrollably, restoring intimate surfaces and pauses burdened by the weight of emotion. Offering herself as an integral tool to the filmic process, the author frees the movement of the camera by acting on the distance between seeing and acting. In Doppio Autoritratto it is precisely what goes beyond the classic vision, that is, abstract surfaces, out of focus and shapeless shadows, that seduces us. – Lucia Aspesi
-
The music is interrupted when the frontal portraits are shown: it’s the Vivaldi’s Juditha triumphant and Monteverdi’s Lamento di Arianna (Ariadne’s Complaint). If Judith triumphs thanks to the behaving of the general Oloferne, the Ariadne’s Complaint is the desperate song of an abandoned woman in love waiting for death as liberation.
The film is an indirect reply to Narciso. It is not the artist who films her own body anymore, but a hand-controlled camera which enacts a similar operation, moving around her. It is difficult not to link this film to the contemporary artistic scene, that sees the rise of video art, of which Rosalind Krauss analyses the psychological dimension in her seminal 1976 text ‘The aesthetic of narcissism’.
Doppio autoritratto ends with a last apparition of the artist in front of the camera with shut eyes. Is she trying to disappear from her own eyes, and interrupt any contact? The end of the film acquires without a doubt an allegorical meaning with respect to the silence of the years to come. - Érik Bullot
-
-
Published on the occasion of Light Movement. The Experimental Cinema of Marinella Pirelli at the Museo del Novecento, Milan (22 March - 25 August 2019), this catalogue is the artist's first extensive monograph, including a complete filmography, written by the critic and filmmaker Érik Bullot.
Get your copy here.
-
-
Marinella PIRELLI
Indumenti [Garments], 1966-67
Film, 16mm, digital transfer, colour, silent
2’15’’
-
"This very short film portraits Luciano Fabro recording the breast of the Florentine art critic Carla Lonzi on a piece of paper, drawing a circle with a pencil, cutting it, producing a cone, wrapping it with a needle.
Once again the film proves Marinella’s closeness to the Italian artistic scene and, in particular, her relationship with Carla Lonzi, who had a deep influence on her personal and artistic path. Moreover, the film highlights Marinella Pirelli’s early intuition with reference to the importance of the documentation of artistic actions and gestures. Produced without a post-production and filmed with a Bolex camera, after a dinner among friends, the film has a duration of a 16mm strip that is about 30 meters long . After producing films characterized by music, like Il Lago or La piccola noia, such document represents for the artist a breath of fresh air, allowing her to experiment freely."
– Érik Bullot, Luce Movimento. Il cinema sperimentale di Marinella Pirelli, exhibition catalogue, Mondadori Eelecta, 2019
-
Marinella Pirelli, Carla Lonzi and Pietro Consagra. Photo of the automatic machine at Varese station, c 1965. Courtesy of Archivio Marinella Pirelli
"As in Narciso, also Indumenti focuses on the necessary reflection on the relationship between action and experience, in which the film is used both as a generative process and as a documentation, adopting a language that constantly revolves around the suggestion of an image or a thought."
– Lucia Aspesi, Luce Movimento. Il cinema sperimentale di Marinella Pirelli, exhibition catalogue, Mondadori Eelecta, 2019
-
Marinella PIRELLI
Narciso, film esperienza [Narcissus, film experience], 1966-67
Film, 16mm, digital transfer, colour, sound
11 minutes
-
Sat in her studio, partially undressed, the artist films at close-range her own feet, knees, tights, a hand, while drawing arabesques on her body.
This experience happens at the same period as the interviews carried out by Carla Lonzi for her book Autoritratto [Self-portrait], published in 1969, which explores the orality as a subjective discourse.
After Pirelli’s early animated films, that follow a more traditional wayof production, Narciso can be appreciated as a leap forward, artistically and personally. Made in the same year as Fuses by Carolee Schneemann, the film is contemporary to the feminist mouvements at the end of the 60s, overlapping films, words and performances. It is no coincidence that the first public presentation of Narciso was held only in 1974, during ‘Art 5 ‘74’ in Basel. – Érik Bullot
---
The use of the term "film-experience" in the opening credits of Narciso (1966-67) is significant. It is emphasizes the immediacy of the scene and at the same time reminds the viewer of the "in progress" experience of a film screening, anticipating her subsequent reflections on Expanded Cinema which will take place at the end of the 1960s.
The body, which is also at the center of the contemporary reflections of the feminist movement, is intended as the privileged place for the dialogue between being a woman and the world, in an investigation that relates one's self to "the other". Fundamental for many reasons is the meeting in the first half of the sixties with Carla Lonzi, future animator of "Female Revolt" (Rivolta Femminile), which marks the gradual abandonment of painting for a more focuses attention to themes related to subjective perception and experiences. In this work, the naked artist's body appears for the first time, portrayed and turned to the viewer in an act of becoming aware of its own gestures. In the film, made in a single take and without editing, the artist resumes herself in a sort of intimate discourse, which reflects on her identity as a woman, mother and artist. – Lucia Aspesi
Marinella PIRELLI: Three Films: “The camera was my partner; each of you is now my partner.”
Past viewing_room