Rä di Martino’s NOT360 is set on green hill in the countryside. It begins with an argument between two women, which is interrupted by an elderly gentleman on a bicycle. The camera moves slowly to the left, bringing a table with microphones and three more actors into view. One starts reciting lines from Shakespeare and another breaks into the song Que sera, sera. They are told to stop by the director, who is clearly under pressure and appears to have little understanding of the temperament of his actors. The scene is repeated from the top three times, with the director always calling “cut”. The last scene shows the band playing the background music but the filming is again interrupted, this time by the cell phone of the director, who definitively loses control of himself and the troupe. The filming comes to a halt. Nothing makes sense, neither the setting in the countryside nor the actors and their unexpected comments. Every attempt at filming falls through and it all ends up in chaos.
In NOT360 Rä di Martino makes a film within a film and peeps behind the scenes of a film set, a space normally off-limits to the spectator. The director makes three attempts to organize his troupe for filming but runs up against the stubborn refusal of his actors to stick to the script every time. The director himself constantly appears in the shots, getting in front of the camera and interrupting the scene. The music, another essential element of a film setting, also appears on camera. The very elements that must remain concealed in order to maintain the scenic illusion are thus shown to the public. The failure of the project is even implicit in the title of the film, NOT360: the camera never completes its movement of 360 degrees and the scene never arrives at its conclusion. Cinema, its history and its historical significance are some of the major themes addressed in various settings by Rä di Martino, who shows us its importance for our everyday perception of things and the collective memory of society.
Rä di Martino (Rome, 1975) has been awarded numerous prizes and taken part in group exhibitions at venues such as the Venice Biennial (Slovenian Pavilion), Manifesta (Trentino, Italy), the Tate Modern in London, the MACRO in Rome, the Busan Biennial (Korea), P.S. 1 and the MoMA in New York, the Deutsche Bank Collection in Milan and the Adriano Olivetti Foundation in Rome. He lives and works in New York. |
