Those Dreams That On the Silent Night Intrude; The Secret Cinema of Jerzy Treblinka: A Film by Luca Gennari

This is a Super 8 film made on a single cartridge without post-production effects by Italian filmmaker Luca Gennari for the Straight Eight Festival at Cannes 2010. There’s a great reference to the brilliant Super 8 filmmaker Derek Jarman buried in here. This film glories in the history of abstract, surreal and neorealist cinema. But it fuses those things with a documentary realism. It ties the artistic workings and ramblings of a mysterious filmmaker to the darkness, horror and murder of the Twentieth Century.  I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again… Italy is involved in a cinema movement that is just as profound as the movements there in the 1940s, 50s, and sixties. The filmmakers in Italy who are today using the Web for their expression are the equals of Fellini and Rossellini.

It’s Gonna Rain: A Short Film by Luca Gennari

Italian filmmaker, Luca Gennari made this beautiful and gently moving piece about her grandmother. The rural setting is a classic part of Italy. The slaughter and skinning of the rabbit is something that I have seen several times in the northern villages of Italy. Italian filmmakers seem to me to be developing a magnificent new cinema of memory with the new accessible tools of film and video making. But it is the Italian filmmakers that I see most delicately capturing the operations of memory today.