Mariella De Bernardi

Percorrendo la spirale

With his film "Il quadrato. Definizione di spazio", Tonino De Bernardi represents an exception in the Italian underground scene: the author retired to private life and continued an experimental production, in a reduced format and in a private cinema context, even after the end of the experience of the Cooperativa del cinema indipendente.

A film commissioned by the Centre Pompidou, where the director captures moments of his daily life and of his relatives.

This is the third and most extensive part of the cycle Eryngium. The essential theme is the migrations that have populated our world, starting from ancient India and descending into Greece and Western Europe.The film’s conceit is that this movement is still in progress. The characters are shown in transit, as if they were part of an ancient caravan. While they move they make up myths and they worship the Great Goddess,impersonating her story. Thus she appears as young girl and mature woman, and is evoked in the stories and music given on the soundtrack: the Virgin of Bach’s Magnificat, the Sulamite of Stockhausen’s Song of Solomon (“I am black but comely”), tales by Herodotus, Kafka, Villon (as set to music by Ezra Pound). A section is devoted to the idea of celebration, where the migrants get together to worship the life-principle. Later the film moves back to the individual and solitude.

Shot between Italy and New York City, Warming Up is the journal of a season of creativity. The film-maker and his characters improvise scenes and sequences, and wonder how to make up a story as they go along. The recurring theme is how to make the world (or read it as) an imaginative place...

A conclusion and recapitulation of the Eryngium cycle, Coda deals directly with the theme of self-portraiture. The first shot alludes to the end of Erichvon Stroheim's Foolish Wives, where the corpse of the hero-director is dispatched in a man-hole. Other dramatic self-portraits follow: Caravaggio's Goliath, Dante's Sestina (read by the film-maker), and Dürer's Self-portrait with Eryngium. The abandoned villa of Migrazione is revisited. But the finale is hopeful.