Michelangelo Pistoletto and Turin’s young film directors of the 1960s at the Philadelphia Museum of Art

In the next few days, three of the films made in the artist Michelangelo Pistoletto’s Turin studio in early 1968, recently preserved and digitalised by the National Cinema Museum of Turin, will be shown at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, as part of a wide retrospective exhibition which this prestigious American museum has devoted to Pistoletto entitled Michelangelo Pistoletto:  From One to Many, 1956-1974, which will run from the 2nd of November to the 16th of January 2011.

The three films are Plinio Martelli’s Maria Fotografia, made in 16 mm film, Pia De Silvestris’s Pistoletto and Sotheby’s and Tonino De Bernardi’s La vestizione, both in 8mm film. The actors in the thee films are Pistoletto himself, his partner Maria Pioppi and a few of these film directors, key players in Turin’s more experimental film scene at the time. Among others, viewers will recognise Ugo Nespolo, also the author of Buongiorno Michelangelo, a film made on that same occasion and which will also be shown at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, as well as Gabriele Oriani, Gioachino Nichot, Renato Dogliani, Mario Ferrero and Paolo Menzio, all of whom also made films produced in Turin with Pistoletto at that time and who we hope will one day re-emerge and take their places alongside these precious rediscovered films, now being shown once more in Philadelphia and in Rome, more than 40 years on.

The original copies of these films, now preserved by the National Cinema Museum of Turin, have been donated by the Archive of the Fondazione Pistoletto. The restoration work was carried out at the Zenit laboratory in Turin in 2010.