Film

On Piazza del Popolo in the early 1960s, Schifano comes into close contact with the film scene. He makes the acquaintance of directors such as Pier Paolo Pasolini, Federico Fellini, and Marco Ferreri and becomes friends with the film critic and writer Alberto Moravia.

“In New York, cinema is the most modern art form,” Schifano writes from the United States to his artist friend Franco Angeli in 1964. There, he discovers underground cinema, including Andy Warhol’s avant-garde films. He soon begins making his own experimental films, which become the focus of his artistic work for several years.

In addition to several short films, he also produces a trilogy of feature films during this phase, including Umano non Umano (1969), Schifano’s most complex cinematic project. The ninety-five-minute film deliberately dispenses with a linear plot. Instead, it unfolds as an episodic collage of various visual materials, including staged sequences, interviews, “found footage” recorded from flickering television screens, and documentary moments—all linked together by the steady beat of a human heart. The structure of the film thrives on the contrast and crossfading of images, thus revealing the contradictions and complexity of the (then) present.

With Finale muto da ex film (1975), Schifano transfers the visual language of cinema into painting. The four large-format works are based on film stills from the historical drama Mutiny on the Bounty (1962), which are transferred as screen prints onto special plastic foils and then painterly reworked by the artist. The size and elongated format of the works reference the widescreen format of cinematic films, and their presentation in a darkened room reinforces the impression of a cinematic experience. Schifano transforms the moving image into a painted memory—a silent echo of the film, frozen between screen and projection.