Alberto Grifi

1938 - 2007

Alberto Grifi (Rome, 1938–2007), a painter, director, cameraman and photographer, is a fundamental figure of Italian experimental and activist cinema. In the first half of the 1960s he worked on the production of documentaries, and in 1964, together with Gianfranco Baruchello, he made La verifica incerta, followed by many other experimental films. With the cult film Anna 1975 he was one of the first to experiment with the use of videotape in an independent film. In 1976 – together with a group of ‘video hoodlums’ – he produced documentaries rarely screened today on youth protests in Milan, Bologna and Rome. Throughout the 1980s he shot industrial documentaries in the United States, Latin America, Africa, Australia and Southeast Asia. Grifi has also produced many radio programmes, published his writings on penitentiaries, contributed to various film magazines and held seminars in many squats, and universities, becoming a reference for future militant filmmakers.

Фильмы

Anna

Massimo Sarchielli, Alberto Grifi

Anna, Raoul Calabro

A documentary ostensibly about Anna, a young drug addict taken off the streets by one of the filmmakers. Through her they attempt to explore the social issues from their hippie perspective, instead they create a revealing, uncomfortable self-portrait and inadvertently raise questions about documentary film-making.

Anna

7.3 ⚠️ 1975

Италия, документальный

Il grande freddo

Alberto Grifi

Giordano Falzoni, Caterina

A film about painting and its denial concerning Giordano struggling with the Sleeping Beauty, this is the challenge. Will art, free of museums and academies be able to give back to the child raped and abandoned on the snow, the desire to go on living? Giordano, Prince Charming bearing butterfly catchers and rotating optical games, plods along sinking into the snow and… but revolutionary creativity is not the one that makes the bird in the cage sink: is it the reason why the imprisoned bird breaks the cage.

The Big Chill

7.3 ⚠️ 1971

Италия

Il preteso corpo

Alberto Grifi

Hospital documentary on the testing of a medicine produced by a known pharmaceutical company on people considered psychiatrically calibrated that caused a "vascular storm" with horrible convulsions. Patients were discharged when they could make the fascist salute. Found at the market of the Fiera di Senigallia in Milan, signed by Grifi as ready-made.

Il preteso corpo

7.0 ⚠️ 1977

документальный

Lia

Alberto Grifi

The intervention of a student at the "counter convention" at the Fabbrica della Comunicazione di Brera, against the convention on anti-psychiatry by A. Vermiglione.

Lia

6.8 ⚠️ 1977

Италия

L'occhio è per così dire l'evoluzione biologica di una lacrima e autoritratto Auschwitz

Alberto Grifi

Alberto Grifi, Monica Vitti

In the film we find some scrap of slow motion they see a Monica Vitti trying to cry, a meeting between Antonioni and Grifi, a film shot in the concentration camp of Auschwitz with a survivor who recounts those awful moments, a glimpse of Palestine today, Grifi's reflections on the prison.

L'occhio è per così dire l'evoluzione biologica di una lacrima e autoritratto Auschwitz

6.8 ⚠️ 2007

Италия, документальный

Orgonauti, evviva!

Alberto Grifi

Giordano Falzoni, Sophie Marland

In the distant future, a spaceship inhabited by a group of young descendants of a "subversive" minority who escaped the destruction of the Earth, recovers a capsule in which the hibernating body of a reactionary warmonger has been preserved, who after having caused war and death, it has abandoned the now unlivable Earth. The visual experimentation aimed at the liberation of the gaze is intertwined with psychedelic visions on the one hand and with the orgone theory of Reichian memory on the other.

Long Live The Orgonauts!

6.7 ⚠️ 1970