La nott’e’l giorno

Masterfully edited, Gianni Castagnoli’s La nott’e’l giorno is a rhythmic portrait of Patrizia Vicinelli, star of Gruppo 63 – a 1960s avant-garde Italian literary movement – between 1973 and 1976, when the two companions began in Bologna and travelled continents together.

Patrizia Vicinelli was among the most radiant stars of the Gruppo 63, a loose gathering of poets who together defined Italian letters’ post-war modernism. Vicinelli was barely twenty when she was invited to join the circle – her first work had been published only the year before. Soon, cinema would be included in her sphere of exploration, collaborating with luminaries like IFFR legend Tonino de Bernardi or Italian avant-garde axiom Alberto Grifi.

For a time Vicinelli lived with the artist Gianni Castagnoli who captured her radiant presence (and not so glorious moments) as part of his diaristic filmmaking practice. His sole major work, La nott’e’l giorno, was finished in 1976 and is seen here at IFFR for the first time in its  digitally restored entirety – instead of its half-hour digest. It is an intimate impression of a certain 70s lifestyle poised painfully between the rejection of bourgeois securities, and the prison made of needs and desires that an artist’s existence too often turns into. A time capsule, a masterclass in editing, a howl.

– Olaf Möller

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