Il Ricordo is a journey into "memory," a theme that artist and curator Caroline Lepinay constantly enjoys confronting and renewing with her sensitivity and intense passion. She offers logical and rational interpretations while choosing, as usual, the path of emotion, symbols, metaphors, and multi-artistic creation.
On the occasion of the 2019 Venice Film Festival, Caroline Lepinay sets up on the terrace of The Bauer Palace Hotel on the Grand Canal, facing the Church of La Salute. Invited by manager Vincenzo Finizzola to create a "tribute" event for actor Al Pacino, the artist and curator chooses to stage, through a short film titledIl Ricordo, a universal love story between a son and his mother, a theme dear to the actor.
In the proposed script, Al Pacino plays a man who has gone blind and refuses to accept the idea of no longer being the person he once was. As he contemplates ending his life, images come back to him. From memory to memory, he ends up opening the door to his childhood and recalls that his mother sacrificed her life for him. This truth brings him back to the essential: life is a precious gift, and a mother's love for her son is the strength and courage to face the impossible. He then chooses to live.
The short film is projected every evening on a giant face-shaped screen, imagined and created by the artist, with a structure realized by architect Antonio Sarto. The face consists of five elements: a giant screen on which four original sculptural works are fixed (two eyes, a nose, and a mouth).
The projection of the short film on this face symbolizes, for the artist, the expression of two worlds: that of the visible (the physical world) and that of the invisible (the world of intimate thoughts, emotions, and memories, represented by moving images).
Through her creation, the artist evokes the complexity of feelings, the insoluble ambivalence of impulses when faced with tragic events. Man is naturally torn between two forces: to remember or to forget. Forgetting means committing to the definitive and irreversible erasure of the mnemonic trace. But it is paradoxically from this desire to forget that truth emerges, as memory is a vital force capable of retrieving a memory among many others from the vigilance of consciousness that concealed it, allowing it to resurface at the right time. Stronger than forgetfulness, memory is triumphant.
For the artist, memory is the only jewel that remains when we believe we have lost everything. Without memory, there are no recollections, and no future.
In cinema, the mechanism of memory is always presented in the same way (whether in German expressionism, Hitchcock, Fellini, Lelouch, Truffaut, Godard, Antonioni, or even the Coen brothers and beyond): it is a montage of flashbacks interspersed with present-day sequences and future projections. The flashback method (mechanism of jumping back in time) allows the story to be told and emotions to be created without the need for explanation. But while the images speak for themselves, Caroline Lepinay chooses to represent the "present time" through black-and-white images to show a character physically and psychologically trapped in a dark, hopeless everyday life, while giving memories color and light as a way out. This directorial choice is based on the idea that blind people see in shades of gray (a black-and-white palette), that they remember and dream in color, but most importantly, that from darkness (from gloom, from chaos), light and its nuances of color emerge.
The screenplay, music, and artistic direction of the short film, as well as the visual artworks, are all by Caroline Lepinay.
The images of the short film are taken from various sequences of ontological scenes from Al Pacino's filmography, giving the work its unique originality. The editing is done by the artist Timur Barzarov. The soundtrack is created by musician-arranger Matteo Boischio in collaboration with his father, Alberto Boischio, pianist at the Teatro La Fenice
