PORTALUPPI
The biography of Piero Portaluppi
PIERO PORTALUPPI
l’Amatore (the Amateur)
collector, amateur, seducer
EXT – Garden – Day - archive 16 mm b/w. An elegantly dressed woman wearing a hat from the 1930s turns slowly towards the camera. The way she cautiously looks around discloses the secrecy of the encounter. She walks towards the lens, a little reluctantly, changes her pace, and takes two steps back, in line with the rules of seduction. She stops and poses, offering her profile so the camera gets a good shot of her.
L’Amatore (the Amateur) is the story of a seducer, a man with unusual obsessions, who buys a movie camera in 1929 and since then, does not stop shooting and editing the world around him. His name is Piero Portaluppi and he was one of the most famous and important architects during Fascism.
Eclectic and agnostic, Portaluppi fabricated a persona of a thousand faces for himself, bolstered by natural talent and true ambition. His personal style towards the world and himself portrays irony. He lives the enthusiastic and ambiguous years of the growing regime from a distance. And at the same time, he allows himself to reach his full professional growth. He too gains success thanks to the exceptional fortune that overwhelms a specific art design during Italy’s Fascist era, the one he is most committed to, Architecture. Portaluppi is first and foremost the architect to the upper middle-‐class. A man who accomplishes everything he desires, success, power, women, talent, but during the war, he loses what is most important to him in life. History mercilessly interrupts the existence of the man. His son dies in the sea off Algiers. His creative vein is irremediably spent. History follows the portaluppinian thread and its predisposition towards restrictions, and at the same time it reveals the dramatic side of events, devoid of a happy ending. The line between magnificence and poverty is blurred. Weakness and power.
The film arose from a fact. For more than thirty years since his death, Piero Portaluppi’s 16 mm reels, shot and edited throughout his life, had been locked up in a trunk. A tiny hidden treasure. This film is a reinterpretation of this film diary, much like a journal filled with notes that provides us with his view of the world. The architect’s attitude towards design adapts perfectly to the seventh art. Portaluppi obsessively splices and puts together edited footage in veritable catalogues created throughout the decades. The human and cinematic material is rich in mystery. The reinterpretation of the archives penetrates the mysteries of somebody full of light and shadows.
The fragmented portrait revealed by the edited footage finds its counterpoint in the present world, his work shot today; buildings of great beauty and enchantment. His architectural works become silent containers of our times, disclosing the role of an architect in the building of an identity.
In the film, Piero Portaluppi’s descendants live in the architecture he designed, leaving his habits and lifestyle intact. And they accompany us like presences and people in the reappropriation of memory.
