I am on Television! • Flavia Mazzarino - An Anthropological Television Myth

In the organizer's words:

An Anthropological Television Myth (Un mito antropologico televisivo), 63’, 2011

a film conceived, discussed and edited by malastradafilm (Maria Helene Bertino, Dario Castelli, Alessandro Gagliardo)

A gesture in the presence of Alessandro Gagliardo for the Videothek at Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz.The event will be in English. 

Archives of local television stations within a relatively small stretch of land on the eastern side of Sicily. A people self-depict their own histories—imprinted on S-VHS tapes – negotiating reality through the television apparatus. Amidst misery, dignity, pain and insurrection, society manifests itself, through television, in a state of perpetual chronicle.

Intended as a real time narration of the present, and now suddenly a document of the past, the fragments – rushes often never broadcasted – of a local television, shot between 1991 and 1994, mark crucial events in Sicily, such as the struggle against the demolition of illegal houses, alongside the Mafia’s murders of Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino.

A representation of the everyday lives of people constantly striving to reorganize themselves autonomously from the State. A self-portrait, from within, of a people, of a community.

 

Letter in response to Annick Peigné-Giuly on the occasion of the screening at Forum des Images (Paris, 12 May 2015)

“We send a firm and clear response to the question posed by Annick Peigné-Giuly. From the rhetorical question of whether ours is ‘Un cinéma qui invente le peuple manquant?’ we infer a separation that does not belong to us and that we oppose. As far as we are concerned, we devote no energy to the invention of potential peoples, yet we are materially and culturally part of it. It is from there that we act, pushing, daily, toward revolt. The ramblings of thought of the Nomadic Philosophical Work proclaim: When the pain of the community we lack – and that lacks us – becomes stronger than any pleasure, that is revolutionary passion.”