Coreografie d’archivio

The programme offers a significant and unusual comparison between two artistic and disciplinary fields that are usually kept separate: found footage film and dance. Viewed from an interdisciplinary perspective, these artistic realms reveal a shared compositional and structural model, based on the practice of editing and visual collage. The idea is to transform and reposition filmed movement – of a body or an object, in a specific space and time – into a new formal and figurative choreography.
Following a chronological trajectory from the 1930s to the present day, the selection demonstrates how the most experimental practices of reusing archive film have found in dance imagery a vast repertoire of figurative and rhythmic forms and motifs to be reworked: from ballet to opera, from contemporary dance to video-music, from sports choreography to military parades, from video scratches to social ballets, right up to split-screen web videos.
The programme is situated within a Western geographical context, featuring films predominantly from European and North American production, and is divided into two programmes, each centred on a specific formal motif. The first, Movements, is dedicated to the creative reuse of dance archives and highlights both the principles of perception and representation of movement in cinema – from pre-cinematic devices to animated forms – and the styles, techniques and choreographic figures steeped in history, ranging from jazz dance to butō, from Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers to Pina Bausch. The second, *Metronomi*, is instead based on a musical and choreographic reinterpretation of various archival repertoires, in which a rhythmic and choreographic organising tension emerges: from phantom rides to the urban landscape, from sporting to musical performances, right through to TikTok reels.
The breadth of the field of inquiry and the transdisciplinary approach allow experimental and underground filmmakers to coexist with artists of experimental animation, just as visual artists and video artists engage in dialogue with musicians, dancers and performers. The aim is to foster an active dialogue between diverse fields, such as archival cinema and the performing arts, in order to outline novel interpretative perspectives and highlight transitions, genealogies, and formal and conceptual continuities inherent within the practices themselves.

I would like to extend my special thanks to Federica Foglia, Eve Heller and Peter Tscherkassky for their film recommendations.

Giacomo Ravesi