Per una metamorfosi della storia: utopie e rivoluzioni nel contro-cinema di Franco Angeli

Franco Angeli’s films, made between late 1960s and early 1970s, are still unexplored. Their fragmented character and documentary gaps make reconstruction difficult. This study, which draws on unpublished works and documents, sheds light on the complexity of the artist’s film research and connects it with the widest picture of his creative path. The analysis thus traces a line that from the technique of veiling, which Angeli develops between 1950s and 1960s, comes to that of cinematic double exposure. If the former plunged symbols - swastikas, sickles and hammer, capitoline wolves, ‘half dollars’ - into the density of history, the latter activates the relationship between subject and world opening new possibilities of the real. The image thus makes the phantoms emerge to ripple the surface of the present: a continuous stratification process that is the place of the memory and the space of transformation and metamorphosis of the real.