AN(N)A/GRAM is an essay film partly based on a re-vision and a re-working of unedited rushes belonging to another film: Anna, by Alberto Grifi and Massimo Sarchielli. The film retraces the experience of this iconic film from the Italian under- ground cinema of the 1970s and from there develops another fictional story which deals with the social and political reality of the “years of lead” (anni di piombo) and also with the history of the Autonomist feminist movement in Italy at that time. Alongside the work with different archives, the story also portrays the discourse of a woman, an imaginary character difficult to identify (a specter, an actress being cast for a role, a metaphoric reincarnation of Anna), and who bears a number of different names. In the streets of Rome, a voice recites a layered constellation of multiform texts, a contemporary version of Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
By referencing the history of cinema and by employing strategies of reappropriation, AN(N)A/GRAM investigates the disappearance of Anna, dark star and central charac- ter in Grifi’s film, and the symbolic death of its heroine. AN(N)A/GRAM becomes a tenuous, unstable portrait, of Anna, a character who is both real and fantasmatic, and of the complex times she was living in.
OUT 1 Emilien Awada Constanze Ruhm
