Paracinema by Laurent Grasso

Laurent Grasso is an artist who produces “few” works, and this is likely due to their complexity. His video work consists of extracting potentially cinematic phenomena from reality by scripting—or rather, one might say, virtualizing—what the camera’s mechanical eye captures. His work inhabits the border, the edge of reality, by having the camera adopt a viewpoint that is generally unexpected in relation to the filmed scene. The main character in Laurent Grasso’s films is never directly present, since it is the camera itself. He conceives of it as an autonomous object, not governed by the reflexes of the human gaze. “It scrutinizes reality like a foreign territory,” as he himself puts it.

His videos take the form of installations—devices in which sound plays a central role, both as a material in its own right and as a vehicle for “unreality.” The artist presents *Paracinema*, a video shot at the famous Italian film studio complex created by Mussolini in 1936. Cinecittà, the “city of cinema,” was originally intended to compete with the Americans on their own cultural turf. This massive film complex was later nicknamed “Hollywood on the Tiber.” Initially reserved mainly for the production of fascist propaganda films, Cinecittà would experience its golden age in the 1950s thanks to American cinema (what an irony of history!), which developed the famous peplum films there.

For several years now, Cinecittà has regained a great deal of vitality. Laurent Grasso was naturally drawn to this location as he sought to make a film that would draw inspiration from other films. The artist therefore spent a day filming in these still-standing movie sets, “weaving” minimalist fictional stories into the streets of fake Westerns and other papier-mâché cityscapes, giving these sets a second life. The impression is that of an existence within fiction, as if each set had a life of its own, one that had escaped the history of the various film shoots. The sound of the wind helps render the scenes surreal. The camera moves very slightly, and—perhaps even more so than in the artist’s other videos—it tends to fade into the background, allowing us to be drawn into the heart of the artist’s central concern: is what we see and perceive truly reality?