Ettore Siracusa Retrospective RetrOz!
Thursday 19 July @ 7:30PM, Arena Project Space, 2 Kerr St Fitzroy. $7.
Melbourne-based film and video artist Ettore Siracusa has worked in film for the last forty years, exploring film narrative around themes of place, memory and migration. Dense with allusions, associations and affect, his work wends its way through a panoply of extra-realist and inter-textual filmic modes, moving through narration and image, text and citation, recitation and recreation.
Our program provides a rich overview of work that charts Siracusa’s growing interest in essayistic and extra-cinematic forms, spanning early student shorts from the late 60s (SHORT STORY through to LOST) in a naturalist and contemplative narrative style to the exquisite NATURA MORTA (STILL LIFE), which Quentin Turnour aptly described as: "one of the most evocative yet concise statements - and powerfully inventive metaphors - of the migrant experience”.
The second half of our program introduces Siracusa's seminal encounter with the author Paul Carter and film-maker Giorgio Mangiamele, in the former instance yielding several works in the late 90s (most notably THE HOUSE OF DOCTOR DUENDE), which began a period where investigation into place, absence and memory became ever more central to Siracusa’s work.
Even more notably, the program affords a unique opportunity to glimpse excerpts from Siracusa's extraordinary project centred around Mangiamele’s “lost” neo-realist migrant drama “Il Contratto”, a work that exists in multiple iterations, for both single-screen theatrical and gallery spaces, and whose completion of which promises to be a valuable and long-overdue addition both to multiple fields of both scholarship and the essayist tradition.
PROGRAM
Short Story (1968, 8 min, digital)
Yours Faithfully (1969, 5 min, digital)
Spaces In Between (1969, 3 min, digital)
Lost (1970, 5 min, digital)
Natura Morta (Still Life) (1980, 13 min, digital)
The House of Doctor Duende (1997, 28 min, video)
Lecce: locations for an unmade film (1997, 28 min, video)
Excerpts from After 'Il Contratto’ (1953/2008-2018, 12 min, digital)
TOTAL: 102 min
