Carlo’s Vision

Carlo’s Vision is a 16mm film based on an episode in the unfinished novel Petrolio by the writer, poet, and legendary Italian film director Pier Paolo Pasolini. The episode that inspired Rosalind Nashashibi’s film describes the vision experienced by Carlo, the protagonist of Petrolio. Rather than filming the vision exactly as it is described in the novel, Nashashibi has taken the protagonists, the props, and the location, imported them into the present day and used them as the departure point for her film, thus using a template from the early 1970s and employing it in exactly the same location in 2011. The result is a mixture of observational documentary and fiction, in which Carlo is pulled along Rome’s Via Torpignattara on a director’s dolly, observing the long march of a young man, The Shit, and his fiancée Cinzia. Carlo is towed backwards by three gods, two speaking and one silent; with his back to them he can hear what they are thinking, their interior monologues. These prophetic figures provide an interpretation of what Carlo is witnessing, commenting on the past and present governance of Rome, and on class and sexuality as manipulated today by Italy’s power structures. Filmed on Rome’s Via Torpignattara in summer 2011, the vision experienced by Carlo is differentiated from reality by the use of color. The shift between reality and vision passes through Carlo’s gaze. When looking through his eyes, we see fragments of bodies, hairstyles, clothing, and sexual parts, which are first suffused in a bright red light, turning to orange, yellow, and finally vivid green as he proceeds along the blocks of the street. When the point of view goes back to the procession and to the reactions to it from the outside, we return to natural colors with a more steady and objective gaze. Through these techniques, simultaneous layers of reality are described, and the magical friction of the film lies in the borders where simultaneous realities meet.

Carlo’s Vision is presented as part of the program An Other Cinema: Apparatus and Histories, curated by Lukas Brasiskis and designed to precede the online symposium The State of the Moving Image (September 17–19).

For more information, contact program@e-flux.com.