Introducing Pirelli's Cinema

We are looking at a photograph of a three-dimensional structure (Figure 2.1). It is not quite a cube; geometrically, it would be defined as a rectangular cuboid, since its height is obviously shorter than its other two dimensions. It sits within an enclosed built space of which the walls are visible. The presence of a human figure makes it relatively easy to gauge a sense of the structure's scale. Its dimensions suggest something between an object – a sculptural object, perhaps, like the cubes of 1960s minimal art – and architecture. As an object, even as a sculptural cuboid of Minimalist inspiration, it is relatively large. However, as an architectural structure, even though its height would be able to accommodate comfortably the person who seems to be stepping inside it, it is fairly modest, nested within the larger enclosed space that hosts it. It is solid, material; yet it also has an ethereal and evanescent quality to it. Indeed, what is perhaps most striking is the fact that the structure appears, one wants to say, to be filled with light. So much so that light spills out from it onto the surrounding walls and bathes the body of the onlooker, making his clothes appear as if dyed by the work's coloured light. If the structure seems to be between – or, perhaps, both – sculpture and architecture, other kinds of in-between-ness come to one's lips in the attempt to describe it. Focussing on the light and the human silhouette visible inside it (an actual person, a cut-out or a shadow?), the structure appears somewhat between cinema and theatre; or perhaps, again, as a bit of both. Is the illuminated cuboid a stage within the larger architecture, or a giant unruly projector – throwing patterns of coloured light all around the space?

Film ambiente (Environmental Screen, 1969) is one of the most complex and richest intermedial achievements of the Italian artist-filmmaker Marinella Pirelli (1925–2009), whose practice is characterised by a pursuit of cinema which, as we will see, seeks to exceed and transcend the traditional experience of cinema. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, when it was first exhibited, Film ambiente was the main result of Pirelli's endeavour to ‘free’ the process of projection, to give it, as she put it, ‘real freedom’.