BEST REGARDS
Year: 1974
Lenght: 23 min
Copyright: Alberto Cima
Direction, screenplay, cinematography, editing: Alberto Cima
Assistant director: Paola Ratti
with the collaboration of Vincenzo Maniscalco
Music of Arnold Schonberg selected by Camillo Togni
Cast:
Franco Bonfiglio, Aldo Engheben, Ermes Scaramelli, Edy Gambara, Paola Mazza, Mariuccia Pola, Eros Venturini, Fabio Beccalossi, Renata Bugatti, Claudio Sampaoli, Mario Soloni, Angelo Zampedri, Serenella Bazzoni, Franco Botticini, Rosanna Cima, Roberto Colombo, Tatiana colombo, Luciano Mereghetti, Francesco Mirigliani, Andreina Morandi, Ernesto Pernigo, Gabriella Poli.
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Subject:
A young clerk in a large industry, the OM in Brescia, sees his own humanity crumbling into an alienating mechanism. His frustration overflows beyond the working environment, where his colleagues have readily accepted the climb towards consumer well-being. His identity clashes against the toughness of a system determined by power and hypocrisy and struggles in the quicksand of daily banality.
Review:
Alberto Pesce
A metaphor-film, of clear autobiographical influence, but of incisive socio-moral content. A protagonist, anonymous, any young man, compulsorily set inside a productive mechanism, in a factory, as an employee, at first curiously suspended, oscillating between inside and outside, between an office reality which astonishes him, torments him, gradually grasps and bites at him with pitiless everyday reality, and an evasive dream, faraway mists blended with fog and sunshine, trembling waters underneath the light, coveted and frustrated loving affections, and then, isolated, emarginated, against his will, ready to go off at a tangent skimming a gallery of dummy-employees, integral parts of their working tools, grown numb, astonished and mutilated in their own talks, but nonetheless satisfied and puffed up in a slowness of puppets commanded in other places, by other strings, under the direction of a puppeteer called office supervisor... Distinti saluti is a bitter, nearly desperate, without alternatives film. The main character lives in a semi hallucinated state; he experiences neuroses, suicidal nightmares, abysmal contemplations, gushes of eroticism, love impotence, retches of sterile revolt, but in the end, he makes up his mind to something; on the verge of being absolutely conditioned, of completely identifying his self with his behaviour, he departs from the norms, attempts escape, a confused, frantic escape, where to he does not know… By accumulation, in a crescendo between the grotesque and the dramatic, Cima describes the world of clerks in their cocooned impotence and pours his polemic ideological opposition into it. Biting, with a realism which always tends to evoke metaphor with a richness of figurative language in his refined selectivity; with a discerning use of the repetitive refrain of a state of mind, or of metonymy, i.e. the ability to transform a concept into an incisive and hammering image; with an especially masterly editing construction, in a research for rhythm which eliminates the superfluous but which gives an immediate sense of time in every shot, maybe a bunch of seconds later because, beyond the representation which describes and tells, the image itself suggests other things, and he insinuates them with splinters in the soul of the viewer.
A young clerk in a large industry, the OM in Brescia, sees his own humanity crumbling into an alienating mechanism. His frustration overflows beyond the working environment, where his colleagues have readily accepted the climb towards consumer well-being. His identity clashes against the toughness of a system determined by power and hypocrisy and struggles in the quicksand of daily banality.
Review:
Alberto Pesce
A metaphor-film, of clear autobiographical influence, but of incisive socio-moral content. A protagonist, anonymous, any young man, compulsorily set inside a productive mechanism, in a factory, as an employee, at first curiously suspended, oscillating between inside and outside, between an office reality which astonishes him, torments him, gradually grasps and bites at him with pitiless everyday reality, and an evasive dream, faraway mists blended with fog and sunshine, trembling waters underneath the light, coveted and frustrated loving affections, and then, isolated, emarginated, against his will, ready to go off at a tangent skimming a gallery of dummy-employees, integral parts of their working tools, grown numb, astonished and mutilated in their own talks, but nonetheless satisfied and puffed up in a slowness of puppets commanded in other places, by other strings, under the direction of a puppeteer called office supervisor... Distinti saluti is a bitter, nearly desperate, without alternatives film. The main character lives in a semi hallucinated state; he experiences neuroses, suicidal nightmares, abysmal contemplations, gushes of eroticism, love impotence, retches of sterile revolt, but in the end, he makes up his mind to something; on the verge of being absolutely conditioned, of completely identifying his self with his behaviour, he departs from the norms, attempts escape, a confused, frantic escape, where to he does not know… By accumulation, in a crescendo between the grotesque and the dramatic, Cima describes the world of clerks in their cocooned impotence and pours his polemic ideological opposition into it. Biting, with a realism which always tends to evoke metaphor with a richness of figurative language in his refined selectivity; with a discerning use of the repetitive refrain of a state of mind, or of metonymy, i.e. the ability to transform a concept into an incisive and hammering image; with an especially masterly editing construction, in a research for rhythm which eliminates the superfluous but which gives an immediate sense of time in every shot, maybe a bunch of seconds later because, beyond the representation which describes and tells, the image itself suggests other things, and he insinuates them with splinters in the soul of the viewer.
