Studio Azzurro launches online film series Narrativo stop!

During the coronavirus pandemic, the Italian art collective Studio Azzurro has made all its films publicly available through an online cinema series titled Narrativo stop!. The program runs until April 20, 2020, on the collective's website. The films are described by the group as cinematic experiments rather than conventional movies, as they explained in a conversation with Valentina Valentini, a professor of performing and electronic arts at Sapienza University of Rome and a contributor to Artribune, conducted between October 1993 and February 1994. The collective aimed to use the medium by connecting to their earlier experiences in visual arts without imitating the artist cinema of the 1960s and 1970s, instead building on the behavioral animations developed in their Laboratorio di Comunicazione Militante. These films have punctuated Studio Azzurro's trajectory and often anticipated ideas later expanded into theater, museums, video environments, and sensitive environments. The schedule includes La variabile Felsen (1988) on April 13, a film about a man observing a daily ritual and seeking to introduce a variable; Dov'è Yankel? (1994) on April 16, a surreal fantasy about the word "miracle" through Yiddish culture; and Il mnemonista (2000) on April 20, exploring a prodigious mind blurring reality and images.