- Artist's statement
- Cast
- Credits
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Shot on two consecutive nights, the film takes place on two parallel planes. On one there is a reading of A. Rimbaud’s text “A Season in Hell”, the other is where the real action takes place, which is exhausted in a few essential gestures.
The text, read by the actor Paolo Bessegato, accompanies the images for the duration of the film, which coincides with the reading of the romantic poem.
The initial shot shows a petrol station, with a close-up of a cabin and a petrol pump. It is dark and the place is unknown.
The petrol-pump attendant who plays Arthur Rimbaud in our days, but also Aldo Runfola, reads “A Season in Hell” while sitting in the cabin.
On a few occasions he stops reading, to fill up a car and a jeep, to replace an empty tank given to him by a man on foot with one that is presumably full and was placed near the cabin, travel with his mind back to when he used to concern himself with poetry.
The only female character is an explicit reference to the person who was close to the poet during his time in Africa, when poetry was only a memory.
The reading stops as dawn breaks and the film ends with a wide shot taken from above that reveals the point in space in which the filming took place.
With the exception of this last image of a faraway horizon, open and irradiated with light, the film takes place in the narrow perimeter of the petrol station and particularly the cabin, which emphasises the nocturnal atmosphere.
Through reading the text and the correlated images, the petrol-pump attendant Rimbaud/Runfola or anyone else (There is no one here and there is someone”) asks himself during the course of the night about the essence of art and reality and the relationship these have with an ideal of perfection. Poetry and action are compared with absolute purity of the incarnation of the poet (Myself I’m intact).
In fact, what is art if not the visions and dreams of an adolescent mind under the influence of obscure forces? And what is left of the pragmatic reality in front of the death of ideals first and then the definitive death of the body?
ARSI is therefore about waiting, a never-kept promise (“So much for my fame as an artist and story-teller”), tacked onto more waiting, for a long or short time, depending on the spectators’ capacity to let themselves be absorbed by their own sensations, for the reading to come to an end.
The time of the story, thanks to some shots that look like freeze frames, recall literary time, the absence of time or a condition of suspended time, and for another reason, through an unorthodox approach to editing, a perception of altered time.
The characters, male and female and the objects, ranging from the
cabin, to the cars, to the petrol pump, benefit from the quality of
being of pure presence and reflect the amazement in the spectators’ virgin
gaze.
There are no professional actors among the cast, except for the narrator.
