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A COMPANION FOR AMATEUR CINEMATOGRAPHERS: VOL. I

MANUALE DI CINEMATOGRAFIA PER DILETTANTI – VOL. I

By Federico DI CORATO

ENECE FILM - as PROD

Experimental - Completed 2022

Training the amateur gaze in Fascist-era manuals: a film essay.

Festivals
& Awards

Mar Del Plata IFF 2022
Competencia Estados Alterados
Venice 2022
Orizzonti, competition
Mar Del Plata FF 2022
Altered States, competition
Visioni Italiane 2022
Visioni Doc, competition
Festival del Cinema Europeo di Lecce 2022
Puglia Show, competition
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    • Year of production
    • 2022
    • Genres
    • Experimental, Documentary
    • Countries
    • ITALY
    • Languages
    • ITALIAN
    • Duration
    • 20 mn
    • Director(s)
    • Federico DI CORATO
    • Writer(s)
    • Federico DI CORATO
    • Producer(s)
    • Tommaso PERFETTI (ENECE FILM)
    • Synopsis
    • SHORT

      Set against the backdrop of Italy in the years of the fascist dictatorship, a man of means, yet unknown to history, scrutinises the world through his small cine camera. Guiding him and teaching him is a manual; the buds of ideology are detectable beneath the seemingly impartial tone it uses to describe technique. But in his films, the ineffable signs of resistance still rise to the surface.


      LONG

      Augusto Gandini was a chemical engineer and plant director for Italcementi, a prestigious position that meant he spent his life travelling between Italy and Ethiopia. He was already a photographer and inventor, and in 1927 he purchased a substandard (small gauge) cine camera: he would continue making movies and developing the films himself until a few months before his death in 1943.

      The smiling faces of his wife and children, captured in Gandini’s rudimentary domestic experiments, soon gave way to more ambitious undertakings: from propaganda- inspired documentaries to comical sketches, from receptions in luxurious mansions to military cadets doing drills, the spectre of an initially unfathomable contradiction hovers throughout Gandini’s footage.

      But the Gandini collection consists of more than just the films. His belongings include several amateur cinematography manuals. In simple prose, complete with ample illustrations, these handbooks set out the essential rules for attaining full technical and expressive control of the camerawork, to create a film that adheres to a political ideal of beauty.

      Today, in the silence of a studio, is an editing station. Film sequences, illustrations and texts blend into each other in a process of mutual revelation. While the cultural norms of the era seem to fully explain the meaning of these images, they bear the residues of unplanned glances and moments; the traces of that which refused to bow down to technique.
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