|
|
| Fredo Viola, the alien in the family |
View Video >>
An American of Italian origin, a professional boy soprano and a film director with a degree from the prestigious NYU Tisch School, Fredo Viola is certainly the most unusual guest at this year’s festival, the one most on the edge of recognized cinematic parameters. But these edges and parameters are unstable, questioned every day by human creativity, constantly redefined by technical advances and how they are used.
Fredo Viola condenses this confusion and the possibilities that it brings within himself, expressing them through a closely intermingled mix of music, visual art, film and performance, a synthesis found by confronting needs and limits, as often happens with the best ideas. After working as an editor and animation designer, Viola decided to dedicate himself primarily to music, and began producing songs by himself made from many superimposed vocal parts: “As my compositions started to get more complex I started to aim some of the filmic ideas I had into the music. When figuring out how to structure the more complex pieces, I would visualize the structure as if it were a filmic journey, or a dream," he says. But how can they be performed live?
Through film, by creating an ensemble of many synchronized Fredo Violas, filmed singing the different parts of the same song and each one given his own piece of screen, each one singing his own part. Quite simple, really, but did anyone else think of it first? Says Viola: "I figure this is the purest kind of live performance. Although it isn't experienced live, it's an uncorrected performance, so about as close as I can get without having a family of singing clones." But the different expressive planes are interwoven afterwards, rather than at the source. Delicious watercolors somewhere between pop and folk, religious hymns and avant-garde songs, his melodies become truly extraordinary when seen live. Seeing them becomes the best way to enjoy them – it’s not by chance that his debut album The Turn comes with a DVD. In turn, his short films are much more than just music videos for songs.
Like Viola’s music, they bring together ancient magic and modern solutions, romantic tension and peace, the ordinary and the spiritual, all with exceptional technique and style. Between the lines, they even talk about cinema, declaring their fiction in an explicit way, or with small details – a microphone coming into the shot, the uncut sound of a clapper board – without affecting the naturalness of it all, but instead enhancing it. So cinema can be a film made of 15-second fragments filmed on a small digital still camera, viewed 175,000 times in one day on YouTube. Cinema can be films made at home or in the street, with simple tools and clear ideas, accessible outside traditional channels.
For this reason – and it is the gift of the great – Fredo Viola is both an alien who has descended into our midst, and one of the family who we’ve known forever. This is why it makes perfect sense for Fredo Viola to feature in the program of a film festival as lively and curious as Corto in Bra.
Andrea Pomini
|
|
