NEW PARALYTIC CINEMA by Davide Ferrario, out of competition at the 38th edition of the Turin Film Festival, is a mosaic of hundreds of small short films around Italy, avoiding the big centers and favoring instead the villages, the common world on the edge of great events.
And all this in the name of poetry.
Sometimes, in fact, the protagonist and Virgil of these little one-and-a-half minute microfilms is the poet Franco Arminio who recites unsolicited poems in the most unlikely places, not least in a barber shop.
The formal rule of this original work by Ferrario, which also explains its title, is the 'paralysis' of the camera that moves only on its axis.
In short, the lens is aimed at a square and expects what happens "a bit like going hunting", explains the director himself at a remote press conference.
"The idea came to me at the Mantua Literature Festival. I said to myself: what a bummer the action film! What if we did a job where nothing happens except simply to observe what happens? The bench on where a pensioner sits or a football match seen from the goalkeeper's side. A match you see nothing of, but which you can still imagine and follow anyway ".
And so in the documentary by Ferrario, director, screenwriter, writer and film critic, born in 1956, the images of a four-star hotel in Caserta, behind the scenes of a concert in the square, images of a village market.
In the belief that "large dimensions distract", NUOVO CINEMA PARALITICO moves in the small, works on the margins.
"Where nothing happens, in reality many things happen, we make the cinema of those who are at the last bench and as for Serendipity, things then happen when they have to happen. In the basic idea of this work - continues Ferrario - there is no nothing intellectual, but on the contrary something that everyone can see.On the other hand we grew up with the cinema that was in our hands, with people who went to a room and watched a story of two and a half hours while paying the ticket. Today, with technology, the narration is in the hands of the public and you can perceive this in many ways. Instead, we have chosen to give our shots the sense of a suspension which is the key necessary to tell the doubts and anxieties of the time we live in. ".
The cult phrase of the film and its true manifesto, the one that Franco Arminio reads in front of the ruins: "God is not dead, he just fired us. Poetry serves to make us summarize, poetry is our union".