Introduction

In first-person filmmaking, authorial subjectivity is essential. The personal camera of the diary, notebook or self-portrait film echoes subjective reflections on the world unfolding across a proliferation of fragmentary temporalities. As this chapter will attempt to demonstrate, some of the experimental films made by the Italian independent filmmaker Massimo Bacigalupo can be placed at the crossroads of a strand of artistic and experimental cinema defined by Laura Rascaroli as ‘first-person filmmaking’, which foregrounds autobiography and authorial subjectivity, ‘the personal cinema of the avant-garde, that of auteur and art cinema; and that of the first-person documentary’. Distinguished by a hybrid sensibility toward the arts, Bacigalupo's approach to filmmaking entailed a profound dedication to cinema as a life-long dream imbued with a quietly intense poetic towards both the old and new worlds.

This chapter aims to map the filmmaker's transformative journey of the self through his films made between 1968 and 1977. It draws on his years spent travelling whilst gleaning impressions of his experiences as an artist and a young man. His journeys range from the metaphorical to the otherworldly imaginary and the actuality of travelling. Bacigalupo's introspective and meditative style builds on the essay form, which is essentially speculative and lyrical. His films are based on an idiosyncratic formal combination of the autobiographical, documentary and experimental techniques, such as the collage of intertextual cultural references, ranging from poetry to myth and popular culture. I argue that through his personal camera Bacigalupo may have found a different mode of addressing his social, historical and cultural contexts. As Paul Arthur also notes, ‘the essay film is galvanised by the intersection of personal, subjective and social history’, and its definition ‘rests somewhere in between fiction and nonfiction cinema… . One way to think about the essay film is that of a meeting ground for documentary, avant-garde and art film impulses’.

Arguably, Bacigalupo's subjectivity lies in his peculiar use of different media, which give his films a polyphonic voice. In most of his essay films, he did not use the voice-over technique, which has often been considered as predominant, and provided instead either a verbal metacritical commentary or an omniscient narrative voice for his nonfictional films.