Gennariello due volte

What about «Gennariello», the neapolitan teenager invented by Pasolini in 1975 in his small educational treaty «Lutheran Letters»? Gennariello would be today 50 years old, the same age of Pasolini when he wrote this text, he would have the same generational gap with current 15-year-old young people. While remembering in neapolitan what Pasolini had said to him 35 years earlier (the address is then inverted : You is Pasolini, I is Gennariello); the «ghost» of Gennariello watches the current neapolitan young people, playing, laughter and occupying their high schools. They practise in diverse levels the self-management, analyzing the berlusconiʼs dictatorship in the light of Fahrenheit 451 or transforming the high school into big discotheque while trying to escape the Mafia. Some sequences hint at Accatone and Oedipus king while others are shot on places where Pasolini filmed in Naples (Decameron, Comizi dʼamore). The movie starts out as a documentary and evolves into a more poetic and lyrical «essai». ELise Florenty

Élise Florentyʼs project originates in a text by Pier Paolo Pasolini. As we all know, Pasolini was very much in tune with the world around him; in 1975, he published in the daily Corriere della Sera a series of letters to some imaginary reader, a 15 year-old Neapolitan teenager he called Gennariello, as an address to the future. Put together under the title Lutheran Letters – Educational Pamphlet, these often scathing texts are an introductory course to rebellion that tackles in turn family, school, the media, religion or politics.Todayʼs film deals with todayʼs Naples: young boys are playing in a waste ground, a high school is occupied, fragments of the city are shown alternatively. Gestures, bodies, places, and a voice to connect them all: Gennarielloʼs voice, here and now, like a living echo to the voice that remained silent through the fake correspondence.
This actual voice is to be heard, but set back off screen. Today, Gennariello
would be as old as Pasolini was when he wrote the texts. Roles are reversed, and Gennariello, due volte provides the opportunity of a retrospective exchange. This response is often critical and invites us to decipher the present through the lens of these past letters, like a reversed process: what do they tell us about the present, about the commitments to honour, about the pitfalls, failures, utopias? How is this Naples that Pasolini imagined? How can one depict todayʼs adolescence, this in-between time? How can one film it?By coming back to some places filmed by Pasolini, or by evoking some sequences,
as a tribute or an updating, Gennariello, due volte chooses to uphold this suspension, this dual time. The film is punctuated with sequences that go the other way around, creating ghostly mutant bodies and placing us in a time span at once paradoxical and dialectic, retrospective and introspective.Nicolas Féodoroff

This short film formed part of the program for the Hors Piste at the Centre Pompidou, Paris.