UnArchive // Expanded
Mani Materia Memoria
Leonardo Carrano / Italy / 2023 / Cinepoetic in VR 360° / 10′
Mani Materia Memoria Mani Materia Memoria is a 360° linear virtual reality project. A non-filmed film, where Leonardo Carrano’s experimental animation cinema meets the innovation of new immersive audiovisual technologies. A prototypical artistic experience of far future cinema.
A plastic magma of images, voices and abstract sounds surprise the viewer in an unusual dreamlike and poetic universe, as protagonist of one’s own personal trance.
Word and voice Antonio Rezza
Music Massimo Carrano, Gino Fedeli
Editing Riccardo Canini
Sound design and mix Toni Armetta
Animation Mixed techiniques su pellicola 35mm
Notes
By Leonardo Carrano
When man, in the course of the evolution of the species, conquered the erect position, the hand left its motor function becoming a faithful collaborator of the brain. Having discovered its versatility, the hand transcended its role as an organ of touch and becomes an instrument of communication: it caresses, kills, can be friend or foe; through the palm we can affirm that our uniqueness traces the subtle and unrepeatable texture of our identity. The artist-researcher shows himself through the work of his own hands that become a diary of his inner journey.
The manual work of the film was to photograph the moments when the film loses its opacity: through scratches and thanks to the encaustic technique (brush strokes of diluted nitric acid heated with a pyrograph) materials previously glued to the film – hair, glass, metals and plastics – are revealed. The technique, taken to its extreme consequences, dissolves the materials and tears the film itself.
The viewer will witness the evolution of the entire microscopic process magnified around him.
The creative trance in which I developed the frames follows a procedure that is used in Psychonology: a method of character self-inquiry in which scribbling allows us to trace back events that occurred in childhood and prenatal age.
Everyone is the result of their childhood and for this reason, absorbing the energy that the signs imprint on themselves, they cannot help but unconsciously reopen unresolved issues and be accompanied towards their understanding and resolution.
This approach helps to make the film suitable for all kinds of viewers. An abstract film for everyone.
The collective experience in a movie theatre is not enough to transport the viewer into their own personal dream environment: the choice of virtual reality means that the viewer, in this amniotic and solipsistic environment, is faced with his own self and finds in the shapes that surround him his own life experiences. A journey of atemporal discovery, through new perceptions and consequent emotional novelties that the VR vision can offer, accompanied by a Virgil, that is, Antonio Rezza’s recorded voice improvising on images and by Massimo Carrano’s music.
The three combined signs, images, voice and music, as well as giving an abstract and lysergic experience to the viewer, will renew his understanding of himself making him feel, after removing the visor, regenerated and conscious.
Il sonoro arruffone
by Antonio Rezza
It turns and turns, the vision on the notes of a silence that clings to melodies. The words I wrote on Leonardo Carrano’s images, is my word, separated from the Most High excuse provided by the virtual immersion. After seeing what was inside, I took my visor off and didn’t think about it for several days. Until time raised the synchronism, which then coupled with appearances made the text simulated. A poem that touches the surrounding colour, circled by the hue that goes beyond the ceiling and becomes evening. Evening is where darkness still gets roused up, while on its sides, infinite perceptual flashes give the subject the illusion of a meaning. Which it’s not, if it isn’t, serves him right if it isn’t. The word gets into the colour and then into a big trouble, to gladden the ear of onlookers and the eye of those not listening. What I say doesn’t leave traces because I say it well, nothing will be remembered if it does without opportunism, it comes back, but never before then. It’s not the word that revolves around the sound, but it’s the sound that wastes time with itself. Because it has so much of it and doesn’t hold back.
Who would have thought?
Notes
by Massimo Carrano
As always, composing and playing for Leo’s “visions” pushed me into the most delicate and affective dimension that unites us.
I reflected on how to improvise on what, in my eyes, is itself an improvisation, since the free flow of consciousness that generates the images of the film appeared so clear to me.
I chose to play my percussions together with one, extremely trusted musician; had we been more, we would have run the risk of creating a “structure”, where the request seemed to be for a “whisper”.
So I didn’t want to see the film before the recording session: We went in, Gino Fedeli and I, into Toni Armetta’s studio, an excellent producer, and we played, our eyes glued to the images, without sharing anything beforehand if not a coffee.
We hadn’t even heard Antonio’s voice mounted ontothe images. We realized, only after playing our “only” take, that we had treated it as if it were another music, another instrument.
Leonardo Carrano
Leonardo Carrano (Rome, 1958). After studying at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome, he began his career as a painter and graphic designer, and obtained his first prestigious recognition in 1980 with the Lubiam prize awarded by Renato Guttuso. From 1992 he has been working on experimental animated films; his work combines different techniques and languages, halfway between abstract and referential, and was soon noticed by critics and selected in important festivals in Italy and abroad (Venice Film Festival, Rome, Locarno, Montreal, Paris, Berlin, Zagreb, Casablanca, Shanghai, Beijing, Milan, Naples, Palermo). His animations have been aired several times in some RAI programs, “Blob”, “Blob cose mai viste”. In 1994 he created for Fininvest the virtual sets of the show L’ Angelo. L’Angelo. For his creations, Carrano has made use of the collaboration of well-known and appreciated composers such as Sylvano Bussotti, Giorgio Battistelli, Ennio and Andrea Morricone, Marco Colonna, Massimo Carrano.