L 'Association Power International Film Festival in collaboration with the Film Studio Noeltan and City Power have banned - as part of ' Atelier Film power - the first international workshop for filmmakers with master Artur Aristakisyan .
day 2 February 2008, the workshop will be presented in a meeting / public dialogue to be held at the Teatro Stabile of power at 19:30, with the participation of the director and the film critic Enrico Ghezzi.
Artur Aristakisyan
Born in Kishinev, Moldova, studied at the Film School Moskow ( VGIK ) in which he slept and cooked while hiding behind the curtains during the course of his companions. For four years he has worked hard to complete his first feature Palms , who won the Nika , issued by ' Academy Film Festival for best documentary of 1994, along with many other awards. A Place On Earth 2001. Cinema Artur Aristakisyan is a cinematic exploration of the border. It, in transit between documentary and fiction, the flow of image and narrative, is not mentioned in any kind. Off the aesthetic canons of "good cinema" Aristakisyan is an author of rupture which refers to the idea of \u200b\u200bearly cinema and the picture of simplicity, now lives on the edge of large-scale production and despite its apparent size distribution of expression.
Aristakisyan The film is unusual: rather, you experience not common, if we want to experience a journey in life and in meditation.
Palms is a journey into the human condition with an eye to those who, apparently, is excluded from the human assembly. For years the director has "shadowed" with his camera marginalized Russia: lame, amputee, epileptic, blind, insane, desperate, living and sharing with them the time, day and life. The film tells ten stories of love between beggars in Kishinev, it is Return poetic and meditative at the same time through the accounts of players caught in their condition and narrate the film that will appeal to a child who has yet to be born.
A. does not produce a documentary to show who they are and why they are so these beings. The film makes a gift of life for life. The characters caught in its own universe, made in its candid look show themselves naked in their pure existence. The film returns archetypal figures, faces, bodies that express a deep humanity atropologia that captures a "primitive" look with no clear patterns and filters intellectuals. The "product" film A. In the cinema of the early fifties and is the filmography of other European countries, when the film is not yet tainted by too much technique and its language is still "direct" made with the power of images.
An extreme travel between the places of suffering and hope, no satisfaction and morale among a humanity without guilt and victim of the cruelty of man and destiny. There is compassion in the purest sense of the term, a common feeling in a mutual exchange of love.
Reflecting the other humanity (the system) appears in the cold dehumanizing machine which destroys vital form of self-sustaining existence, depriving it of the spirit and body. The aliens, the marginalized, as crazy fragments, in their otherness become icons of freedom, in any "deficiency" acquired or intended for the possibility of redemption.
The film is deeply spiritual, not in the sense of religiosity. Humanity is the one who wanted it closer to the Gospel, Jesus, who emptied his own divinity chooses to be all the way man, humble with the meek, and in representing their deep anthropology makes them "figures" eternal.
The narrator in the film turns to the child to be born, saying that he hopes will become a beggar who appears naked and poor life in order to receive the spirit, the spirit that is moving away from the earth.
If we want to isolate only a few elements that seem to give us a better sense of the movie then we must think of the silence, blindness, in the light. The first two such deprivation that lead to the third. The silence of the dumb and who has no language contrasts with the artificial and mechanical attributes of writers who repeat nonsense words, made indifferent by the system. The blind man can look himself in and feel the world around him with maternal affection. Light as a transfiguration of the body in spirit.
a place on earth is a feature film that tells of the attempt to build a utopian community based on love, self-giving and the fusion of individuals in a single Community body. The director has lived for a time in a real town and through the stories of the protagonists of the events really happened has built a script - plot making the film with them.
Gathered in a disused building go there desperate, marginalized and socially excluded young people who want to make a journey more radical in altruism. The model is the apparent shape of the hippie community, which follows a religious experience, a sort of imitatio Cristi , even with the resumption of some symbolic elements: the birth, communion, poverty, betrayal. Like all such experiments fail for the community background of artificiality and the radical and deep contradictions that emerge within it.
The preaching of the new Christ (the charismatic leader of the community) is based on the donation of their bodies and sex to offer not only desperate but also the lame, who is humanly and physically scarred soul and appearance.
a position of clear opposition to a system that breaks with its violence and brutality shaking the apparent peace achieved and inculcating hatred and falsehood.
As the community flake. The leader lost his charisma, show its profound selfishness, and others will return to normal or go crazy, or just come back on the road.
Aristakisyan always turns her gaze "to the damned of the earth", but this time inverts the logic. In Palms the world of exclusion is chased and stalked. The outcasts of the earth can see a possibility to help each other and are evidence of the contradictions of an unjust world, a humanity which may indicate a hidden alternative. This film, however, shows that it is impossible to follow that path and how the dream of every material and spiritual revolution is impossible before they go into a deep deprivation and dispossession of oneself. One limitation difficult to overcome.
body in film A. is presented in its extreme physicality and becomes the most important aesthetic element of the director. In what refers to an aesthetic deeply Christian represented the body of Christ on the cross. The naked body of suffering and passion that reverses the ideals of beauty, deformity found in the wound, the amount of human suffering hardly disguised by false iconography of ideal beauty. Truth and Beauty of the proposed further deep and irreconcilable contradiction. The first if it is proclaimed aloud without inflection and failure is reversed into its opposite when challenged by the existence, if the second form becomes idealized in the form of appearances and tinsel, a veil instead of a reality marked by suffering and despair.
There are traces of him primarily as Pasolini and Rossellini ability to draw from life and from the margins seen as losers / losers
Consider the first Rossellini, siding the side of civil war and desperately helpless spectators to the projected need to make do creative, invent and build in their own identity, tipping decidedly cinematic point of view (Germany Year Zero even before Bicycle Thief). Pasolini draws realistically other losers / losers exploring the identity of a people through sexuality and the body. 
... I'd give the film that answers the need for the community to show how people are united together, sometimes in a paradoxical way ( Artur Aristakisyan )
Three types of communities are explored: what looks like the system (as a totalitarian society and alienated), the second one of the excluded, the third utopian experiment.
The first is presented as a counterpoint to the other, as the closed system in itself, in the form of rigid, preconceived accompanied by all the mechanisms of exclusion. Streamlined and functional, violence and prejudice and exclusion operate effectively annihilation Diversity: asylums, hospitals, physical violence used to repress and exclude all forms of diversity that may endanger the normal operation. A cold and inhuman society where every being is part of a gear which is subject to its own existence.
The second, however, is the spontaneity of a free gift from those in the loss or lack of free trade itself is in the encounter with otherness.
The third promises to be the establishment of a utopia. It is organized around the symbol Eucharist, as the food-body, self-giving body only to find themselves cast in the community. The female figure is prominent, his body as a source of happiness and life, is in the foreground. Mother and child, breastfeeding and child expresses an intimate fusion. But like any desperate dream is doomed to fail for lack of authenticity of the foundations upon which it is based since the giving does not take the extreme form of gratuity.
Aristikisyan from his point of view can be assimilated to those directors who have ventured in the exploration of the community of non-visa or excluded. Can be counted to the ranks of the brave movie Herzog to (The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser , The Ballad of Strozek especially Even Dwarves begin by Small ), Todd Browning (Freaks of 1932) and with the queen of the Nouvelle Vague Iranian poet Forough Farrokhzad with his The House is Black 1962. The documentary F. takes place within the leper colony in Tabriz where the outcasts of humanity living, eroded by the disease in the body, aspiring as they are forced to light in the darkness of life.
Forough dived with great emotional involvement in daily lives of the lepers of the institution, trying to establish with them a relationship of trust and respect. While
F. constructs, with a rhythmic editing a good movie, on a material by itself already highly expressive, A. proceeds with a reverse logic. His film is a journey "mystic, ecstatic (ex - stasis), as a form of dispossession, to a void in itself because the 'other' can be, and in this case, appear, appear impressed on the film.
A director, an artist whose art is life, and it is more extreme than life itself. In the face of his films there is amazing. The wonder is not the wonder. It makes astonished, leaves us speechless, suspended on the brink of the abyss, silent in the face of pure existence, which demands a more original language: poetry.
Ulrich
