Mandala Opus #7 - Poema dell'estasi1994

The film begins with the image of a whirlpool, a spiral of hypnotic, magmatic fire that dreams of enveloping the eye. The film plunges into the historical memory of avant-garde cinema (Duchamp's Anémic Cinéma, Germaine Dulac's Disque 957, Ruttmann's Berlin, Symphony of a Great City, Leger and Murphy's Ballet Mécanique, Hans Richter's Filmstudie, The Man with the Camera by Dziga Vertov, Un chien andalou by Bunuel) and is projected into the future: in a psycho-plastic space hit by waves of photonic energy. Mandala pursues an “epic of the gaze” with an endless struggle between forms: organic forms (the female body, stones, trees, leaves…) and geometric forms, like the sharp triangles that line the screen. The chromatic research based mainly on primary colors yearns for the incandescence of red, for strong tonal contrasts, with the gaze turned to an anti-naturalistic, subjective, internalized color, which looks to the Fauves, Munch and German Expressionists but also to Boccioni and Picasso for the metamorphosis of the human figure (here the female body) and his struggle against Euclidean geometry; to the Suprematists and Constructivists, cited in the geometric forms: sharp spiers of piercing light, flashes of lightning, triangles like blades that cut the screen and chase the evanescent bodies in the dark.

In Mandala there is a multiplicity of dynamic formal elements: movements of lines, of organic or geometric shapes; horizontal, diagonal, transversal movements ... But the dynamic development of the forms is organized above all according to a visual score of two opposing movements: a vertical one (represented by the rise or fall of the bodies; by the flow of the film taken in its materiality) and the another horizontal, with an endless optical tracking shot forward that follows the unfathomable virtual depth of the screen, trying to penetrate the organic essence of matter, the hidden "soul" of the visible world: leaves branches bodies faces grass stones clouds ... This continuous flow of images (a sort of Joycian stream of consciousness) is punctuated, like a metronome, by the rhythmic beating of the eyelid which, when lowered, veiling the iris, closes the outside world to the eye: it then erupts, from an original darkness, the river of interior images… And the human body - which we see in its continuous metamorphosis - would like to overcome its spatial boundaries and transform itself into a pure sign, a geometric abstraction placed in a vertigo of movement: a body in ecstasy in its glory of light.

The film therefore derives its construction from a complex score that has, at the base, a pictorial and photographic work, painted tables, graphic series and photographs ... Filming then becomes painting with light, cutting out ghostly apparitions, faces, fragments of bodies emerging from the night of the unconscious. Broken torsos, bodies wounded by the light, chipped, lapped and streaked by a watery light, as if they emerged from a mythical wash.

( Arcangelo Mazzoleni, Work Diaries )