Ciné-boucle #1: Tu saresti capace? is the first short piece I managed to squeeze out of my Octatrack sampler that I got last year. It is a loop of a dialogue snippet from 8 1/2 (Federico Fellini, Italy/France, 1962) by Marcello Mastroianni’s character Guido Anselmi asking Claudia (Claudia Cardinale): “Tu saresti capace di piantare tutto e ricomminciare la vita da capo?” (“Could you leave everything behind and start from zero again?”). As such the quote captures one of the many instances of existential musing that define the Guido-character in 8 1/2.
Form-wise, the piece is an attempt to capture a key moment or a glimpse of a film through the form of a short loop (or a ciné-boucle/ciné-loop as I call it), using various effects for processing it and approaching it analytically through repetition. In working with a form that is shorter than the pieces I regularly make, I was inspired by one particular piece by film scholar and video essayist Catherine Grant – Film Tweets from 2013 – that links and juxtaposes two moments from respectively Blackmail (Alfred Hitchcock, UK, 1929) and Carnival of Souls (Herk Harvey, US, 1962) through birdsong. Grant’s piece can be viewed here. The loop I have posted here does not suggest a comparative approach as in Grant’s piece however. That is something I will try out with other loops. In this sense this piece mostly reflects an experiment.
Itineraries of Sonic Cinephilia 