I 1982, D, SC Gabriella Rosaleva, C Renato Tafuri, E Anna Napoli, S Hubert Niyhius, Pippo Ghezzi, P Mariella Meucci, Emanuela Piovano for Cinema SAS, Cast Daniela Morelli, Massimo Sacilotto, Print colour, 16mm, 79 min, Italian OV with electronic German and English SUB, Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia – Cineteca Nazionale
Guest: Gabriella Rosaleva
Introduction by Claudia Honegger
Gabriella Rosaleva’s Processo a Caterina Ross restages a witch trial that originally took place in Poschiavo in the Italian part of Switzerland in 1667 in an empty factory close to Bovisa station in Milan. The visual compositions are minimalist, the devices employed kept restricted: a voiceover as the inquisitor, an actress as the woman accused of witchcraft, with a script that draws on the original court protocols. Remembering and forgetting, what is said and what remains unsaid all play an equal part in forming the witchcraft discourse. (Arsenal – Institut für Film und Videokunst e.V., Programme text Archive außer sich: Italy ’68, May 2018)
The film will be followed by a conversation between the director and Cecilia Valenti
| Acronyms | |
|---|---|
| amer. | American English |
| b/w | Black and white |
| OV | Original version |
| SUB | Subtitles |
| +SUB | electronic live subtitling (below the image) |
| INT | Intertitles |
| Countries | |
|---|---|
| AT | Austria |
| FRG | Federal Republic of Germany (historic) |
| BLR | Belarus |
| DE | Germany |
| CAN | Canada |
| GDR | German Democratic Republic (historic) |
| EGY | Egypt |
| FR | France |
| GB | Great Britain |
| URY | Uruguay |
| BRA | Brasil |
| SWE | Sweden |
| UKR | Ukraine |
| PL | Poland |
| IDN | Indonesia |
| PRT | Portugal |
| HRV | Croatia |
| ECU | Ecuador |
| HUN | Hungary |
| AUS | Australia |
| IT | Italy |
| MEX | Mexico |
| IND | India |
Gabriella Rosaleva began her career as a director in 1980, when she bought her first camera and shot several short films. This would be her first step in the world of cinema. In the following years she directed many films, among which Processo a Caterina Ross (1982), Spartaco (1985), Sonata a Kreutzer (1985), La Sposa di San Paolo (1989). She also directed TV movies, documentaries (such as La vocazione, released in 1984) and radio dramas. Rosaleva is an eclectic artist; during her life, she has explored many possibilities of fostering her passion for the construction of images. Rosaleva is also an eccentric auteur: her film style and production routines perfectly match those of the experimental cinema of the 1980s and 1990s. The use of electronic music, the presence of disorienting inserts and freeze-frame shots, the pictorial composition of the image are just some of the elements that characterize her cinema, distancing it from any conventional practice.
