ROMBORAMA : THE VIDEOCLIP

….In the beginning was the line

A hypothetical visual cosmogony of Bennet Pimpinella could perhaps be guessed at by observing his works and his singular approach to film, making him one of the most rebellious personalities in the undervalued world of art.  Pimpinella doesn’t define himself as “avantgarde” so much as a “craftsman”, because of the exhausting physical and optical effort to experiment and penetrate the every day that characterizes his work.

Retrolit glass, stop motion, screenfuls of pins, time lapses, scratches and paint on film are some ot the techniques in the vast, yet young filmography of Pimpinella: a series of compositions that touch upon cinema, art, photography, exploring unreal, almost forgotten spaces. It wouldn’t be incorrect to define Bennet’s work as obsolete, if only for the abundant references in his videos: the historic avantgardes of the Twenties and Thirties of the last century, Abstractism, Alexander Alexeieff, Hans Richter, the great tradition of Prague, the iconoclastic iconography of Pop Art. It is as if Bennet’s art lives in an undefined limbo, where time isn’t affected by the weight of space and viceversa: an example of this is the video of Romborama, by The Bloody Beetroots, the electronic alter ego of Sir Bob Cornelius Rifo.

This collaboration between the filmmaker and the composer Sir Bob has produced an audiovisual experiment narrating a nightmare, a monstrous and mysterious vision of the subconscious, the desperate, conscious howl of a man-made hallucination. Touching and retouching the film is a natural act. Using 35mm, the filmmaker creates a unique re-write. In motion.

On one side, the overlaps, the dense colours and the anguished forms of drawings, scratches and handmade actions, on the other a series of action sequences in which two hooded men (symbolizing “The Bloody Beetroots Dj Set”) chase each other in a warehouse, like the protagonists of a surreal children’s game: here too, the artist puts his experience into play, working on the lines of the figures, on the contrast between full and empty, in almost comic-book sequences.

The slowly gains momentum in a crescendo with the music, evolving without ever giving the sensation of being artificially constructed like so many of the videoclips that invade music channels on TV and youtube. On the contrary, Bennet manages to trasmit his moods, passion, anxieties, hates and fears; through months of hard work on every single frame. The result is something purely instinctive that releases a story bereft of any kind of reflection.

Raffaele Meale & Giuliana Liberatore