RAGTAG is a found footage epic film composed of material gathered from 310 film noirs from the early 1940s to the late 1950s. The narrative is deconstructed and reconstructed into flickering images that vary in repetition.
Serge Daney understood the relationship between the director and the film critic as a tennis match, in which the ball was, in turn, the film and the critical text. Ragtag is, to some extent, an inversion of this, making the spectator-director-critic the ball, played back and forth between one film and another. Giuseppe Boccassini, who works primarily with found footage, makes his first feature films with this zigzagging journey through classic film noir, reducing narration to a minimum and concentrating on the power of gestures, close-ups, and compositional recurrences. The back-and-forth montage is somewhere between Martin Arnold’s film oeuvre and João Onofre’s looped video installations from films like Martha, L’Eclisse, and 2001. To a certain extent, this way of launching us, disoriented, into a wealth of more or less recognizable titles translates, metaphorically, the anguish of the spectator before choosing a film, in the times of maximum digital accessibility. Cinephilia as hypnosis. (Ricardo Vieira Lisboa)
Giuseppe Boccassini is an Italian filmmaker mainly working in Germany and Italy. He graduated in film theory at the University of Bologna and film direction at The New University of Cinema and Television, Cinecittà, Rome.
His work has been shown in several international film festivals and exhibitions, including the 79th Mostra Internazionale d'Arte Cinematografica, Venice, Italy FID Marseille, France, Edinburgh International Film Festival, Scotland, Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival, Czech Republic, Jerusalem IFF, Torino Film Festival, Italy, IndieLisboa, Portugal, FESTACURTAS BH, Brasil, Crossroads SF, USA, Avvistamenti, Italy, Punto de Vista, Spain, Trentino History Museum, Italy, Microscope Gallery, Brooklyn, NY, Pesaro Film Festival, Italy.
Light Cone Paris distributes his entire film production. By transforming and manipulating various sources of archival material, his work reflects upon the notion of proximity in contemporary media. He is in charge of programming at Fracto Experimental Film Encounter held yearly at Kunsthaus Acud, in the heart of Berlin.
https://giuseppeboccassini.com/about
RAGTAG
2022 / Germany, France, Italy / 84 min.
Director: Giuseppe Boccassini
Screening on Saturday, July 20 at 21:00.
Q&A : Tomonari Nishikawa and Giuseppe Boccassini