Il Trasloco (Moving out of the future) [1] is a 1991 independent documentary directed by Renato de Maria, was screened for the first time in the UK with English subtitles as part of a project by Auto Italia South East, London. The film is set in Bologna and retrospectively depicts the history of one of the key places where Autonomia took place during the 1970s. It was translated and subtitled through a collaboration between Auto Italia [2] and Through Europe [3].
“Every film is a foreign film, foreign to some audience somewhere – and not simply in terms of language… Subtitles are only the most visible and charged markers of the way in which films engage, in direct and oblique fashion, pressing matters of difference, otherness, and translation”. (Atom Egoyan and Ian Balfour, Subtitles; On the foreignness of film, 2004)
Film is never static, the idea of movement – moving out, moving in, moving on – coexists with film becoming more than image or signification, but time itself. It is time that is situated within specific contexts: physical, economic, political and territorial. Film alludes to the immaterial experience of time yet there is an undeniable infrastructure behind the production, distribution and reproduction of the moving image. There is the physicality of tape, film reels, projectors, there are specific atmospheric requirements around storage and location. When film is stored, moved, translated and subtitled and ultimately reproduced it crosses borders. The moving image and the thing it signifies transgresses its meaning; Its images depicting otherness, its foreignness emerging from its dislocation from time.
The first time I saw Il Trasloco, was on my laptop, watching a poor quality compressed digital copy that had been downloaded from a file sharing website. It was against this I started programming the subtitles while I anticipated the arrival of a better quality version from Renato De Maria. I had already finished the subtitles and exported a copy for viewing when this better file arrived. Yet it was by no means the original I was expecting. It was a video copy of the specific broadcast of Il Trasloco on RaiTre on December 25th, 1991. It has the RaiTre logo embedded into the image and the titles were different from the version I had seen before.
Digital images are distributed throughout the world over the internet, they are all reproductions, all have an element of foreignness as they appear disconnected from any specific original. Yet beyond the realm of interpretation, the conditions in which film is made also impact its actual visibility. The progression of neo-liberal policies in the production of moving image has marginalised experimental or essayistic film – the commercialisation of culture requiring the foreignness to appear as universal as possible, or conversely, eroticised as an orientalist fantasy. As Hito Steyerl observes “resistant or non-conformist visual matter disappeared from the surface into an underground of alternative archives and collections, kept alive only by a network of committed organisations and individuals” (In defence of the poor image, e-flux journal 10, 2009).
So what of Il Trasloco (Moving out of the future)? This particular reproduction, which appears for the first time with English subtitles is not the original. It is a digital reproduction of a recording of the first broadcast of this film on Italian Television - a re-creation of this first performance, 20 years later accessible in a new language. Yet it’s reference to the gulf war, to social struggle, to oppression and the illustration of an alternative world resonates today especially as now is the new, mediated age of real-time revolution - documented, distributed, translated and de-contextualised instantly in grainy videos and images of revolutionary postures and poses. In this climate, Il Trasloco (Moving out of the future) is perhaps not actually a reproduction but a re-enactment, potentially even a second original.
Auto Italia, a small arts organisation based in London, in collaboration with Through Europe, has produced this translation of Il Trasloco. It has appeared in a public exhibition programme – its screening accompanied by presentation, by contemporary discussion, dialogue and exchange. It has been translated in collaboration with Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi who now appears in a new introduction to the film and in the ‘original reproduction’ of the film itself. There is a specificity in the original screening at Auto Italia, the organisational structure and non-institutional context complimenting the politics of self-organisation and autonomy. The very presentation and initial screening event at Auto Italia has been essentially reproduced in entirety and replayed live at the ICA, London and at the Arnolfini, Bristol. 2011 will see this project developed in realtion to other documentation and artistic practices in collaboration with Auto Italia. It is necessary for these documents to be reproduced and redistributed and it is possible through an art organisation like Auto Italia to do this, and for artists to engage in the re-enactment of this material.
Indeed, the impact of digital reproduction and distribution of film has its highly developed equivalent in art. In the art-world’s orgy of ripped images and signs redistributed through a global art market facilitated by the constant deterritorialisation of capital, the immaterial has been fully exploited. If we are to follow Felix Guattari’s description of the semiotic turn of capital we understand that dematerialised art, which first emerged as a resistance towards the fetish value of things, was actually the perfect reflection of the conceptual turn of capitalism. Yet it is against this background that we can find new meanings within Il Trasloco, both as the representation of otherness in time and culture but also as an inverted document of our present time. It is only through the physicality of viewing bodies present inadvertently performing a re-enactment of this film that can create the possibility that it would emerge truly as a second original.
