FICTA SciO was also about discussing animation with creatives and filmmakers. The dialogue with Sandro Del Rosario has been especially compelling and fruitful, and resulted in the chapter Sandro Del Rosario’s ‘Sguardo’, part of the edited collection Italian Experimental Cinema and Moving-Image Art. Again, many thanks to the artist, for his generous and friendly availability; and a big thank you to the editors, Rossella Catanese and Jennifer Malvezzi, for their painstaking and sensible work. The volume aims to be the first systematic English-language survey of Italian experimental and avant-garde cinema. The chapter has been freshly added to the list of the FICTA SciO publications.
Abstract: Lo sguardo italiano (The Italian Gaze, 2016) is the title of a short film by Sandro Del Rosario. The word “gaze” is very pertinent to his style: Del Rosario’s animated films thrive on the theme of gaze to evoke emotional explorations of places. Photography is at the core of Del Rosario’s animation style: pictures of landscapes are manipulated with traditional artistic techniques. Superimposed layers of color, paper cut-outs, and written words enhance the physical nature of printed photographs, to reveal them as objects that store traces of past moments. Their lyrical potential is brought forth also by the use of a composite soundtrack: words, effects, and music have equal importance and crossfade one into another, as in an inner recollection of distant memories. This chapter will analyze Del Rosario’s production, encompassing three short films and several installations, in light of his biography and career.
