Rondò final

SINOPSI
One hundred years of searched and founded images, film fragments, family tapes, pixels. A holy martyr, a warrior, Sant’Efisio, an icon that moves the people. A party, a rite that is repeated out of time and that brings with it the masks of past and present dominations, of an island; Sardinia.
What escapes? What remains?
It is question and answer that founds editing, and renews the past into another past. In this delayed meeting of glances, the party is renewed again in memory and in dreams, far away from known places.

PRIZES
1° CO-Festival – Festival du cinema cooperatiu – Barcelona 2023 – Best film

OFFICIAL SELECTION
52° Visions du réel – International medium and short competition – World Premiere
62° festival dei Popoli – International competition – Italian Premiere
46° Laceno d’oro – Doc Competition – Avellino
1° Unarchive festival – Roma
15° Semaine Asimetrique – Marseille
1° Lo sguardo e la memoria – Cagliari
1° Made in Sardegna – un’isola di film – Firenze
1° Cinemarmilla – Ales – OR
18° Rencontres du nuveau cinema Paris/Berlin
14° L’iSola del Cinema – Fuorinorma / la via neosperimentale del cinema italiano – Roma
10° Ultracinema MX- Cine Experimental y Found Footage – Città del Messico
2° Docusfera – Roma
27° Les rencontres du Cinema Documentaire – Peripherie – Montreuil – Parigi
7° ISREAL Festival – Nuoro
1° IAC – il teatro che cresce – Matera
1° The memories film festival – Bocchigliero / CS
1° Pula – OP – Pula / CA
1° Cinema atemporal – Lima / Perù
5° Visioni Parallele – Sassari / SS

CREDITS
A film conceived started and coordinated by Gaetano Crivaro e Margherita Pisano
Disassembled and reassembled by Editing Assembly compose by Luca Carboni, Gaetano Crivaro, Felice D’Agostino, Alberto Diana, Arturo Lavorato, Margherita Pisano, Margherita Riva, Vittoria Soddu and coordinated by Arturo Lavorato e Felice D’Agostino
Reassembled and finished by Gaetano Crivaro, Margherita Pisano, Felice D’Agostino
Sound and sound archives Margherita Pisano
Sound Recording 2019 Luca Carboni, Alberto Diana, Felice D’Agostino, Margherita Pisano, Margherita Riva, Vittoria Soddu
Sound recording 2018 Massimo Carozzi, Jonhatan Parker
Sound mix Stefano Grosso
Color grading Felice D’Agostino
Voices Pierluisa Castiglione, Sacko Souleiman
Texts Rondò Final – in I Sogni della città bianca, Sergio Atzeni / I Dannati della terra, Frantz Fanon
Translations Caterina Gueli, Tom Rodgers
Archive footage research Gaetano Crivaro Margherita Pisano with the support of the archivists of the Cineteca Sarda Natalino Virdis, Luca Portas, Martina Mulas, with the collaboration of Alberto Diana and Margherita Riva
Footage from Cineteca Sarda – Cagliari
Antonio Vodret (‘20/’30), Francesco Muntoni (‘30/’40), Elena Cossu (‘50), Natalino Ridolfini (‘50), Rundini(‘50), Elio Del Piano (1954), Fausto Lai (1954), Salvatore Bruno (8mm – 1959, 1960, 1963), Girolamo Sotgiu (8mm – ’50/’60), Paolo Bucarelli (S8mm – ‘60), Mariarosa Pineider (’60), Romano Widmar (’60), Raffaele Angius (1965), Gerolamo Anziani (1963-1965), Enrico Angioni (8mm, ’60), Felice Tiragallo (‘80), Nino Solinas (1960-1980).
Shooting in vhs Felice Tiragallo – 1991
Shooting in 9,5 mm Marino Cao – 1943
Shooting from smartphone Salvatore Carboni – 2007/2018
Shooting in Super8 Gaetano Crivaro – 2018
Digital shooting 2014-2020 Gaetano Crivaro / 2015 Margherita Pisano / 2019 Gaetano Crivaro Felice D’Agostino
Produced by RUGA Film/ L’Ambulante
With the support of Società Umanitaria – Cineteca Sarda and Fondazione Sardegna Film Commission
With the partecipation of Virages
With the contribution of Regione Autonoma della Sardegna
Film realized within the projects
Cinema di Seconda Mano and Smontare e rimontare immaginari
Curated by L’Ambulante

DIRECTOR’S NOTE
It all begins with an image, a picture; one of those pictures that can hold at the same time past, present and future. A lost image, an obsessive pursuit, which becomes ritual and seeks to escape its own consumption. It all begins with a sound, gleaned among the city streets and then pursued, at first a distant echo then searched for in a thousand corners, in an effort to bring it closer, to make the body tremble as in ecstasy.
And out of the ritual begins a process of accumulation, of images and sounds, lasting for years, which is repeated over the years and becomes an archive. And, unsatisfied, one searches in that which was, in others’ gazes, or in one’s own gaze projected onto the images of others. One arranges and dismantles, searches for meaning, a composition. One gets bogged down in the reels of images and signs, amongst the films of the Cineteca Sarda in Cagliari where often there spool in front of us, squeezed between a baptism and a birthday, a birth and a holiday, snippets of migrations of human masses following the procession of Sant’Efisio. Images filmed by amateur cinematographers, some silent, some with sound, which hinted at conversations hidden among the sounds of bells, bulls’ hooves, prayers drowned out by reed pipes, deafened by the din of a cathedral of modernity.
Images, sounds, pieces of paper, literary texts, film rolls, VHS, pixels, whispering voices, megaphone announcements, chanting, phone conversations, jingles, sirens, footsteps, shadows of glances and of other times.
Everything becomes “archive” to draw on in order to divert, deviate, subtract or compose. Materials for appropriation, which become actual territories to be explored and reinterpreted. Nothing therefore is archive, because everything becomes live material.
Rondò Final is the fruit of a very singular path, arrived at by various steps. It is grounded in a seven-year process, within certain cinematographic research and experimentation projects (“Second-hand Cinema” and “Assembling and Disassembling Imaginaries”), dedicated to making films taking the “re-use of archive films” as a starting point, and further developed by the “L’Ambulante Lab”.

It is a film of obsessive research which could be defined as “of montage”: begun by two authors, continued in a workshop on so-called “archive” films, edited by “relay” under the aegis of an “Assembly of Montage” and given the shape of a film by the interventions of three directors.

It is nourished by collective experimentation, giving structure and outlining the game of montage. The “Assembly of Montage”, composed of eight editors/filmmakers, is a space where projects are watched and re-watched, put aside, imprinted, cut, woven, slowed down, juxtaposed.
Conversations begun, interrupted by one and taken up by another. The partial result, the arrangement, structure, incipit, slowly conglomerates into a final edit in which three directors, like tightrope-walkers, weave these fragments with new threads of meaning, trying to create a dialectical tension between the individual elements and the total structure, through the periodic return of a central idea, different with each reintroduction. Undoubtedly what comes out of this is a multiple re-appropriation. A second-… third-… fourth-hand film.

The play of juxtaposition and composition which we have undertaken through the archives has been guided by a desire to explore the that which can be sensed, to make open arrangements, which interrogate the gaze at every turn, the position from which one observes, one listens, the mechanism by which one generates an image. We have tried to produce new invisible images, we have tried to build a continual conflict between saturation and rarefaction, between inside and outside, between sense and signified. We have played with shifting the relations between sounds and images, sometimes multiplying and amplifying the sounds belonging to the images that manifest them, at other times provoking a rupture between the visible and the audible in order to dilate the field of what can be imagined, and sometimes leaving the space for distant echoes capable of provoking new images.

The film is composed in the main of clips made by amateur cinematographers, often without sound. The film’s device is structured around this constraint, and around the relationship between image and sound, whereby sound, constructed for the most part from the sounds of the festivities gathered over several years, could seem diegetic, but constantly reveals its own non-belonging, playing continually with a tension between adhesion and distance, similarity and conflict, visible and imaginable. A self-confessed lie, which opens a void of meaning, which opens onto multiple courses, among the multitude of gazes, inside, outside, huddled on the edges or far from the crowd, the festivities, the spectacle. The viewer can choose. She can choose whether to believe the lie of montage, knowing it to be a lie… and so it is the viewer who makes the film, thanks to her choices, to her desires, to her beliefs (just as the spectator of the rite of Sant’Efisio makes the festival with her gaze).