Giannalberto Bendazzi - A Moving Subject

T HE BROTHERS A RNALDO G INANNI Corradini (18901982) and Bruno Ginanni Corradini (18921976) were born in Ravenna, Italy, into an aristocratic (they were earls) and educated family. At a very early age, they started cultivating poetry, writing, and painting. They also took an active role in the debate between Tradition and Modernism that agitated the realms of literature, art, and music in Italy, from the turn of the century until the outbreak of World War I. Arnaldo mainly involved himself with painting, while Bruno focused more on literature.

Originally published in Animation Journal , Tustin, California, Spring 1996. Updated version.

After 1914, the brothers joined the Futurist movement, where they used pseudonyms, Arnaldo Ginna and Bruno Corra, to distinguish their separate identities. For convenience we will refer to them by their pseudonyms in this chapter, even though some statements were actually published under their true names.

Fascinated by the possible correspondence between sound and colour, in about 1909 the brothers created a chromatic piano whose keys corresponded to a parallel number of coloured light bulbs. Subsequently they carried out several experiments with what we now call direct painting on film, abstract cinema, or coloured abstract animation.

At first, they made a number of tests, including removing the projection shutter and projecting alternating frames of different colours to get an optical mixture of another colour. They then composed four films by painting directly on the surface of clear film strips to explore four different aspects of synaesthesia or correspondences between the arts. Lacking exact titles, the films can be called a Thematic Development of a Harmony of Colours based on a divisionist painting by Segantini (it was eighty metres long, or ten minutes running time); a Study of Effects between Four Colours, Two Complementary Pairs; a Translation and Adaptation of Mendelssohns Spring Song Intertwined with a Theme from a Chopin Waltz; and a Translation of Mallarms Poem Flowers into Colours. The longest of these films was more than 200 metres around twelve minutes in projection. They subsequently sketched three more experiments on film strips (it is not clear whether they fully completed the films in a rough form or just made sample frames like a storyboard).

These three works explored abstract visual phenomena. One begins with a pure green screen, then a tiny red star appears in the middle, grows until the screen is all red, and then green spots burst out and reclaim the whole screen, making it all green again for a whole minute. The second work develops a white and a yellow line moving over a solid blue background. The third shows seven cubes, each a colour of the rainbow, moving, layering, and warping against a black background. The last two films, again about eleven minutes in length, bear formal titles. The Rainbow is a symphony in which the spectrum of colours throb, bubble, drown, and explode against a grey background. In The Dance, the dominant colours crimson, violet, and yellow continuously separate, unite, and whirl upwards as the most agile pirouettes of spinning tops.