Florence Film Festival: Paolo Parvis's "Schi(z)zo"

I watch him. His brow bone juts out creating a subtle shadow over his teal eyes. Eyes stern and contemplative beyond their years. He speaks passionately and exhaustively with a zealous energy that begs to be understood. Standing at the front of a theater full of journalists and fellow filmmakers, Paulo Parvis has just debuted his first film at the Florence’s Festival dei Pompoli.

A man in the audience a few rows behind me raises his hand and comments about the message of the film. I strain to understand, but can only pick up bits and pieces of his swift Italian sentences. The audience applauds and Paolo bows his head modestly in response.

I didn’t understand it the first time I saw Parvis’s short film, “Schi(z)zo” but I admired the rawness of its depiction. Admirably, from somewhere within himself, he’s been able to harness the courage to strip naked a life that could easily have been hidden by an unwarranted sense of shame.

The documentary begins with the camera set on a winding, darkened set of stairs. Paolo steps from behind the camera and climbs the stairs. The camera remains on the ground floor and the audience is able to overhear, but not see, a conversation he is having with his sister on the upper level of the house. She is apologizing to him for, at times, taking her frustrations out on him. Later I find out that his sister, older than him by 13 years, is a schizophrenic.

As the film proceeds we are toured through this apartment in which the family has lived for thirty years and discover that the home has been recently ravaged by a fire. We are given an intimate view of the bedroom where Paulo and his girlfriend were laying when the blaze began. Piles of old newspapers and close-ups of missing floor tiles give us an idea of the damage caused. ‘I’m laughing to keep from crying’, his sister chuckles from somewhere out of camera shot. ‘I’m ashamed to bring friends to this place’, she says, noticeably frustrated, ‘but I can’t stay alone all the time!’

Fire and smoke, the English subtitles read, is like a punch when inhaled. You just want to run even if you can put it out with water or sand. As Parvis relives the experience for us he shows us his bedroom where white shadows of a life once lived are now scorched onto blackened walls. As the fourteen minute film draws to an end, we watch a graffiti artist transform the walls of the room into artwork. The fire has created on the walls smoky imprints that have an uncanny resemblances to picture frames, as though even amidst its destruction the blaze was expectant of a masterpiece.

Slowly and patiently the artist embeds black and white murals into these silhouette frames. A message of optimism and recreation not to be overlooked: turning even tragedy into art. Frustrated he dwells on an image of Paolo’s late mother, determined to get it perfected. I want to make it bigger, he mutters, but I’m running out of white paint.

After my second viewing of Parvis’s film at Spazio Uno in Florence, I get the opportunity to speak with the 27 year old filmmaker. I ask him what life was like growing up with a sister with schizophrenia. It was difficult, he tells me. He was too young to be able to deal with the reality of his situation. She would wake in the night screaming, he says. Her symptoms progressively escalating, she would cut herself and often suffered from severe depression.

Paolo’s mother died from a rare form of cancer, he later shares with me as we sit on a staircase outside the theater and attempt to delve deeper into the message of his film. He can’t help but believe that stress contributed to her illness. Dealing with the stress of handling a child with schizophrenia in a country where the disease is stigmatized both by the health care system and by the ignorance of society was not easy. Until very recently, Italian laws have allowed for mental health facilities to offer subpar care to poorer patients. The young man stresses this to me several times during our talk. Whereas wealthy patients are able to, in a sense, buy normalcy, poorer patients struggle with finding a way to lead normal lives. There is no focus on helping these patients with the adjustments necessary into order to enter back into mainstream society after they are released from these facilities. And more, there is no understanding, by the public, of people with psychological illnesses.

Much of the inspiration behind the film, according to Parvis, comes from a need to fcreate awareness between the families of the mentally ill. It is an effort to form a supportive network and, at the very least, a message of a shared experience. The family, he adds, is the key to changing the way the patient is understood by clarifying the situation for a stronger starting point in the future. The family unit is the key to begin to form a basis for society’s understanding of mental illness and subsequently improving the overall quality of life for the mentally ill.

As the film closes the graffiti artist is putting finishing touches on a phrase that he has painted on the wall. In a sharply fluid style of lettering that, until then, I would never have imagined a spray-can could accomplish he has scrawled “Remember the light”. Now turn and show me the light of your eyes, Paolo directs…

Rabarama.

“Write to her” he said.

I don’t think he knew until that moment that I was capable of feeling intimidation. “I can’t! Yet…” I tell him.

It has to MEAN something. If I write her a letter, it must be substantial enough that I am able to connect with her.

I’m sitting on the floor of my friend’s living room gazing at a picture of Rabarama, the artist who has claimed the throne as the object of my admiration since I first experienced her sculptures while walking through Boboli Garden a few weeks ago. He insists with sincerity, “Pero, te senti veramente!….. She is an artist, if she knew how much you feel her work, I’m sure she would want to know.”

I look back at the picture on my laptop. There she stands. Chin-up, arms crossed, covered in all black up to her neck. Face framed in ebony hair, dancing across her eyelids, allowing only a glimpse of eyes that seem to possess all the emotion of the world. The broken tape on Pandora’s box.

There are those women whose strength humbles you. The ones with disobedient eyes and breathtaking ideas. The ones whose power is conveyed as much through their words as through their unspoken disposition. Through their posture and femininity and, yes, through their smiles. She is one of those women… and I’ve never even met her.

I think her message is too phenomenal to just write her a piece of fan mail. “She probably gets it all the time”, I think to myself. I mean… How could people NOT be touched by her message? Mesmerized by her. She speaks of truth. She speaks of freedom. Her eyes, dark and steadfast, are strength embodied. Her words are defiant of anything that does not allow for the true expression of human emotions.

“Il mio lavoro esprime la negazione del libero arbitrio, perché ritengo che il nostro destino sia gia stato scritto.” She says.

She maintains the idea of the negation of free-will throughout her work, believing that our destinies are already written. When we are brought into this world it is not of our own choosing. Nor is our socialization of our own choosing. In that sense, many of our views of the world are preceded. Fed to us from birth like breast milk. If our parents are liberals, more often than not we are brought up with liberal perspectives of the world. It takes a conscious action on behalf of our own commitment to self-discovery to reinvent and re-educate ourselves. It is an act against the natural current of society and takes a silent strength that many people will never know.

My understanding of Rabarama’s meaning when she speaks of a predetermined fate, is that although she acknowledges the effect of the literal pressures of society on shaping a person, she believes also in the influence of some celestial or metaphysical power in bringing to fruition a predetermined fate. However, in my favorite work of hers she redefines herself. She has up until this point insisted that our destinies as human beings are predetermined, but in her work “Ri-Nascita” (Italian for “rebirth”), she moves beyond this idea to the next stage of evolution. She now brings forth the notion of individuals having a choice in their own destiny.

The Ri-Nascita displays the bold image of a woman, left-breast exposed, tearing through a covering that has overtaken her body. This woman as the caption below the sculpture reads, is breaking through a cocoon that has enveloped her. The cloth like cocoon is representative of the expectations and superfluous values that society has throughout our lives engrained, at least somewhat, in us all. The sculpture depicts a figure that has reached a point of consciousness about the existence of space between the person they appear to be and the person they realize they truly are (the person they have been made into and the person they now must become). After grappling with this duality it has made a definitive decision to shed this skin, and reveal its true naked self.

As the woman tears through the shell, she is committing a definitive act. Ripping through metaphorical restraints like a shark through a net, she is shedding all of the expectations and values of a world that has defined her as she no longer chooses to define herself. It is a symbol of freedom. It is a birth of choice. It is a being, more specifically a woman, refusing to be bound. It is a determined statement of and demand for independence of thought and ideology. To the world and more importantly, I presume, to the self. It is, in short, the proactive self- realization that only our wildest dreams are made of.

Love, Me... Free

Ri-Nascita

l'arte is art is l'arte... and I love it all.

From street art to innovative decor to politically charged graffiti...around every corner there's a unique image to be seen. Here are a few that've caught my eye.


















Love, Me... Free

The Portrait: Me through her eyes (Me attraverso i suoi occhi)

I look at the canvas and wonder to myself “Do I really look that mean?!”. The sad part: I already know the answer…

Her hands are flying wildly across the paper. She’s broken three pencil points so far and snapped a crayon in half. Casualties of war, she discards them and continues, unwavered. She jumps up, frantically and shuffles to the living room to find a marker that is just the right color. I try (and fail) to quiet my neurotic side, which is currently glaring at the discarded pencil shavings on the floor secretly itching to sweep them up. She comes back into the room and gazes at my hair with pleased curiosity. She wants to get the bleached and hennaed color just right but can’t seem to find the tools for the job. She settles on a yellow crayon which she first drags violently over the paper, then scribbles over it with a brown marker.

Guya Versari, a teacher and trained painter, is a graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts of Florence under the guidance of the art critic Capocchini with a thesis on “Futurism: Boccioni and Marinetti”. But to me, she’s the mother of a good friend. A peculiar and artsy woman in appearance, I find out later from a mutual friend, that she is nearly blind but paints more of what she senses spiritually in a person than what she sees visually. I’m told I should be flattered that she wants to draw me. And I am.

I’m wearing no makeup, my hair is a mess and her hands are moving so feverishly that this spur of the moment portrait could turn out any which way. She reminds me to straighten my head, and I attempt to fix my posture. I‘ll admit that I’m a little nervous as I sneak peeks down at the unfinished work. I want to tell her that my eyes look crooked, or that my forehead couldn’t possibly be that big, or that my lack of eyebrows is my mom’s fault, and probably my dad’s too and that my brother’s eyebrows are perfect and he must’ve been switched at birth and…… but I refrain. Half because she doesn’t speak any English and half because I’m not quite sure who invited my vanity to the party. So I sit. And I wait.

Guya is known for more abstract depictions of reality. Her paintings reflect her own inner world, and whether that world is mysterious, joyous or painful, she’s always careful to be very truthful about her current sense of the world. My understanding of her is that she has a sixth sense so to speak. She understands a sublayer of life that can easily be ignored had she not this form of spiritual literacy. She reads into the invisible watermark that exists in the space between her eyes and your existence as though confirming it as reality. She portrays life through the colors and movement of her paintings so that they are to be experienced rather than simply looked upon. Even flowers, she says, are not only a symbol of life and happiness, but a tapestry of colors, of light, a vitality, a movement of lava.

I stare at the final product. This sketched portrait of me. There is something about it. This depiction of me. Sure it looks like me, but more, it feels like me. The eyes and the mouth. They tell my story. A story I never translated for this woman who sat in front of me and read me like a book, with words that neither of our languages would allow us to efficiently convey. I’m learning something herein Italy. Something that you have to learn when you don’t speak the same language. It’s that communication is so much more complex than I could’ve imagined. And that the most beautiful things don’t have to be said...

Love, Me.... Free

A Day at the Museum... turns into a post- mortem therapy session waiting to happen

Recently I visited a museum that was recommended by a friend of a friend. The Marino Marini Museum. Being in Florence and not having the same enthusiasm for classic Italian art as most tourists, I was elated to have a recommendation for a modern art museum. The building, tucked away in a sunlit opening of one of Florence’s many side streets, is dedicated to the paintings and sculptures of the late artist donated by his wife shortly before his death.

Well... It didn’t take long for me to form a very strong opinion of the artist. This opinion, let me say, was not the most pleasant.…

Let me take this opportunity to insert a sidebar: I realize that a person’s view of the art they are viewing is sometimes, if not always, a reflection of their own understandings of the world, society, humanity and so forth. I attempted to view the work objectively but sometimes feel overcome with very strong feelings. This is one of those times. After leaving the museum, upon further internet research of the artist, discovered that there is very little in the realm of negative critiques of his work. Of the reviews of both the man and his work that I have found, most exude a quieted, neutral tone. It is as though there has been a unanimous decision made in the art world that the controversial implications of his work are better off left alone than delved into publicly. Aside from the year that they were created, the works in the museum have no other descriptions posted and are, therefore, open for interpretation.

A Man About a Horse

Much of Marini's work is loosely based on an equestrian theme. Specifically, the image of a man atop a horse. As his work progresses in time the sculptures and painting become more abstract and the figures less true to life, anatomically speaking. His later work gives an uncanny feeling of conflict between the horse and its rider. Often the horse appears in painful poses at the mercy of a sadistically overjoyed rider. The horses head is often turned in a way that would imply some sort of merciless and humiliating subjugation of the animal. In many of the oversized sculptures the bodies of the two are melded together as though becoming one as though in some sort of centaurian fantasy. The pieces that manage to maintain the dignity of the animal’s natural disposition to remain standing, often depict some other act being performed that confirms the theme of conflict that is present throughout his work. One piece in particular, displayed proudly on the ground floor of building, depicts the animal’s head tilted backward, chin pointing straight up, with the rider roughly tugging on the horse’s mane.

I found it quite interesting, that the painter’s basis in reality seems to deplete over time. His later paintings and drawings, mostly oil paintings and pencil sketches with water color, depict horses sitting upright many times with geometrical shapes replacing the joints in their legs. Whereas in his earlier works, the detailing and intricacies of the human body were so well depicted, his later work comes to resemble more and more that of a small child releasing his fantasies on paper. The human figures bend at the neck as though broken, faces turned sideways in a way that mimics the eerie feel of a classic horror movie. The horses, still at the mercy of these sadistic riders, become objects of ridicule, placed in highly sexualized positions that highlight their rears.

The Women

The sculptures and paintings of women are the most troubling images of all to me (note: I will admit that I am writing from a very feminist perspective). The similarities in the body shapes of his models to that of the horses in his work are uncanny, signaling to me a troubling link in the psyche of the artist. With large thighs and generous rumps (yes I just used the word “rump” in a sentence) variation in the sizes of his models is nonexistent. Very few of his pieces that depict a female subject display the subject with a smiling expression. In fact, more often than not, the face is expressionless and borderline traumatized (much like I was after leaving the museum). Especially, in contrast to the elated expressions of the male riders atop the aforementioned demeaned horses, these womens’ faces are too disturbing to be ignored. Whereas, many of the earlier drawings depict detailed faces, though often a saddened, sometimes confused expression, his later sketches feature figures with faces and eyes darkened and/or scratched out. While the bodies are very often nude and true to life, the feet are often not of definable shapes or human origin whatsoever.

In one of the more troubling sculptures, a woman’s naked body is featured in a seated position. Welts are raised across her shoulders and just below her knees. It is hard to determine if the artist is depicting a woman tied by ropes, or if the sculpture was somehow destroyed and put back together, though the latter possibility is doubtful considering the exactness of the placement of the marks. In another distressing piece, a woman is depicted in a seated fetal position, head lowered as though ashamed or cowering. It is worth mentioning that this particular piece is one of the firsts I see as I enter the museum, and upon first seeing it, I did not interpret it as negatively as after I had seen the rest of the pieces and collected a general misogynistic impression of the artist.

Just before I reach the doors to exit the museum, there is a large photograph Marino Marini himself. Wild hair, deep eyes and gaping mouth. After taking a look into his world, one is prone to want to ask out loud “What goes on in that head?”… But then again, I’m afraid he’d ask me the same thing.