New York suburbs, mid 60s. Rob Niosi and his friends are not even teenagers when they start filming as a game with the home cameras stolen from the family, experimenting hand over fist cinema genres – horror, splatter, science fiction – and animation techniques, tricks, low-angle shots and visual effects. The Shapes of things to come is an archive selection of amateur films made by the italian archive Home Movies. It includes excerpts of unfinished films made by this group of young experimenters, recovered almost by chance during a trip to New York, as well as two integral gems: The History of the American Negro, the story of blacks from slavery to Malcolm X, and Empire, an irreverent and rebellious short film toward a symbol of the American power. Later on, some of the young men become artists: Niosi will work in animated filmmaking, in advertising and in video clip making. Niosi’s obsession for H. G. Wells remained intact since he was a kid and it culminated in a lifelong project: the building of a Time Machine which accurately traces that seen in the 1960 science fiction movie. The Shape of Things to Come is curated by Michele Manzolini and Paolo Simoni (Home Movies - Archivio Nazionale del Film di Famiglia of Bologna).

biografia

Home Movies - Archivio Nazionale del Film di Famiglia of Bologna (homemovies.it) was founded in 2002 with the aim of saving and transmitting a hidden and inaccessible audiovisual heritage through restoration, digitalization, preservation, research and valorisation activities. The archive currently has more than 30,000 small gauge films - 9.5mm, 16mm, 8mm, Super8 - including private, public and artists' films made between the 1920s and 1980s, most of them accessible on Memoryscapes, the first online platform dedicated to the discovery of the heritage of Italian private cinema (memoryscapes.it). The live sound performance is one of the methods of valorisation experimented by Home Movies. The archive lately has produced different works soundtracked live by different italian artists like Memoryscapes. Live sound Liberazione (2020), Primo maggio a colori (2020), Il gesto delle donne (2020), La città rossa (2021).

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