words by Leda Balzarotti
Bruno Munari and Marcello Piccardo met immediately after the war. Since then their friendship and work relationship will always continue, with the elastic modalities given by the unpredictability of life and by the very personal way of dealing with it of each of them.
Marcello Piccardo & Bruno Munari. Photo © Gin Angri
The Research Cinema Laboratory was founded in 1962, in the locality of the same name, near Como, and for about ten years it worked out, gradually doing so, what Piccardo and Munari have defined as "research cinema". During this period, the Studio will produce and make about fifty films, which can be divided into two different groups: research films and advertising information films.
The first film by the Studio was in fact a "documentary", with anticipations of that research attitude that will gradually emerge, on the works of kinetic art exhibited at the Olivetti headquarters in the gallery in Milan. "Programmed art".
A strongly characterized cinema, the result of a completely disenchanted approach to the medium, free from any authorial impulse, clean in the look at the possible doing that both had as a dowry and which allowed to keep the whole range of observer positions open in every realization of the reality in question using fully the available technique.
I Fratelli Castiglioni foti Allmark Gallery, New York 16 mm. B/W 9’, 1967