BISFF2025｜ASTRO: Giuseppe Boccassini 星辰：朱塞佩·博卡西尼

The 9th edition of Beijing International Short Film Festival (BISFF 2025) presents the first Asian retrospective of Italian experimental filmmaker Giuseppe Boccassini. Active between Germany and Italy, Boccassini has served as Artistic Director of the FRACTO Experimental Film Encounter in Berlin since its foundation in 2017. His practice is research-driven, focusing on the re-assembly and re-create of found footage, archival materials, and experimental cinema. Moving along the liminal zones between the ruins of film history and the thresholds of perception, Boccassini uses found footage and archival images as a medium to probe the tensions between memory, the body, and vision. In his films, the image is not merely a tool for representation, but also a means of interrogating its own mode of existence — how it is picked up, fragmented, and re-ignited. This retrospective is presented in three parts, tracing his major works from 2013 to the present.

第9届北京国际短片联展将呈现意大利实验电影人朱塞佩·博卡西尼（Giuseppe Boccassini）在亚洲的首个作品回顾展。博卡西尼活跃于德国与意大利之间，同时自柏林 FRACTO 实验电影节 2017年创办之初就担任影展艺术总监，其创作以研究为基础，专注于拾得影像、档案素材与实验影像的再组装与再书写。博卡西尼的影像创作长年游走于电影史的废墟与感知的临界点之间，他以现成影像与档案材料为媒介，探索记忆、身体与观看之间持续震荡的张力。在他的电影中，影像不仅被用来再现世界，更被用来审视影像自身的存在方式——它如何被拾起、被切割、被重新点燃。本次回顾展由三个部分构成，涵盖其自 2013 年迄今的主要创作路径。

Photo by Denis Laner

Giuseppe Boccassini 朱塞佩·博卡西尼

Giuseppe Boccassini is a filmmaker based between Berlin and Italy. After graduating in Film Theory at DAMS, University of Bologna, and completing a diploma in Film Directing at NUCT Cinecittà in Rome, he developed a research-based practice focused on found footage, archival materials, and experimental cinema.

His recent works explore the historical and formal dimensions of film noir and melodrama — noir in Ragtag (2022) and melodrama in Desire (2025). Since 2017, he has been the director of FRACTO – Experimental Film Encounter, a Berlin-based festival dedicated to experimental cinema. His research extends to industrial cinema, explored in Blast Furnace (2024), where archival imagery emerges as an immediate presence — closer to living nature than to a technological device. He is currently developing Phantom Ride, a film-based project combining early Antarctic expedition footage with the aesthetics of early cinema.

His films have screened at Venice International Film Festival, FID Marseille, Ji.hlava IDFF, Jerusalem IFF, Torino Film Festival, IndieLisboa, Image Forum Tokyo, and the Museum of the Moving Image, New York, where Ragtag was presented in conversation with film theorist Tom Gunning. His work is distributed by Light Cone (Paris) and the Film-Makers’ Cooperative (New York).

朱塞佩·博卡西尼（Giuseppe Boccassini）是一位活跃于柏林与意大利之间的电影导演。他毕业于博洛尼亚大学（DAMS，艺术、音乐与表演学系）电影理论专业，并于罗马奇内奇塔电影学院（NUCT Cinecittà）获得导演文凭。他的创作以研究为基础，聚焦于拾得影像、档案素材与实验电影。博卡西尼近期的作品聚焦于黑色电影与通俗剧的历史与形式维度。2022年的《黑色电影与电影黑色》（Ragtag）探讨“黑色电影”，2025年的《欲望》（Desire）延伸“通俗剧”（melodrama）的影像语言。自2017年起，他担任柏林 FRACTO 实验电影节（FRACTO – Experimental Film Encounter）的艺术总监。他的研究亦延伸至工业电影领域，在《高炉》（Blast Furnace, 2024）中，档案影像以一种“即时的存在”出现，仿佛更接近有机生命，而非技术装置。他目前正开发基于胶片的项目《幻影之旅》（Phantom Ride），结合早期南极探险影像与早期电影的美学特征。其作品曾在多个国际影展及机构放映，包括威尼斯国际电影节、马赛国际电影节（FIDMarseille）、伊赫拉瓦（Ji.hlava）纪录片电影节、耶路撒冷国际电影节、都灵电影节、里斯本独立电影节（IndieLisboa）、东京映像论坛电影节（Image Forum）。《黑色电影与电影黑色》于纽约动态影像博物馆放映，并与电影理论家汤姆·冈宁（Tom Gunning）展开对谈。博卡西尼的作品由巴黎 Light Cone 与纽约 Film-Makers’ Cooperative 发行。

ragtag, Giuseppe Boccassini, 2022

The Tension to the Invisible

Giuseppe Boccassini’s cinema inhabits an unstable zone where memory and vision converge — where forgotten gestures and fractured desires are reactivated through the montage of found footage. His films do not unfold along a temporal line but breathe through layers and flickers, forming an organic rhythm. They do not seek to tell stories but to map the emotional landscape that remains after narration has collapsed, embodying what Aby Warburg called the Pathosformel — those residual emotions that persist across epochs. Bodies appear in tension and dissolve in flashes; the image becomes both pure and perilous: revealing and withdrawing, summoning memory while producing forgetting. When frames are layered, repeated, and abstracted until the body disappears, what remains is a pulse of energy and form. This dematerialized mode of seeing leads him away from the violence of spectacle toward a darker ethics of perception. Running through his work is a persistent question: how does the image survive within its own history? His films revolve around the fragility of perception and the shadows of history — when narrative disappears, in what form can human emotion endure? Time and again, we are invited into the ruins of representation, to witness the ceaseless entanglement between the visible and the invisible. 

From Lezuo (2013) to Debris (2017), Boccassini redefines the mythic journey and the destiny of matter: from departure to drift, from shipwreck to rebirth. The image becomes the flesh of memory, while the grain, erosion, and folds of film stock form the material traces of time. In Orbit (2016) and Temple of Truth (2018), this perception of time expands toward a cosmic dimension — passing through scientific fantasy and optical hallucination, where the cries of history intersect with dreams, and our vision enters a collapsing space-time: a monument of technology, yet also a tomb of vision. From The Saved Night (2019) to Blast Furnace (2024), his cinema gradually condenses into a silent energetics. If the earlier works engage with the physical life of the image, this phase turns toward the ontology of existence itself — the image as a vibration between life and death, light and darkness, drifting like dust along the threshold of visibility. In his recent films, Ragtag (2022) and Desire (2025), his archival aesthetics reach a height of cultural archaeology. The former weaves together hundreds of postwar film-noir fragments into a visual portrait of fear, desire, and spiritual crisis; the latter returns to the ruins of melodrama to ask how emotion is performed, inherited, and forgotten. He does not reconstruct genre, but allows images to fold back upon themselves — letting the forms of the past ignite once again in the present.

Boccassini’s practice maintains a latent intertextuality with painting and literature. Its darkness and tension owe something to German Expressionism, while its fractured rhythms recall the cut-up experiments of William Burroughs, a gesture of resistance against the control of time and narrative. Yet these external aesthetics ultimately dissolve into a purely cinematic language in which the act of re-viewing becomes a form of writing. The screen, in his hands, is both microscope and mirror, revealing how collective memory is continuously rewritten through the image.

To watch Boccassini’s films is to trace that invisible line between image and time — to feel how repetition and difference slowly slide toward revelation. His cinema does not rebuild the past but interrogates the very mechanisms of remembrance. Between light and darkness, between noise and silence, he resists nostalgia through nostalgic means: making everything old new again, turning the fragments of the past into the substance of present perception. He transforms our history of looking into an unstable organism whose parts interpenetrate, mutate, and cling together in a state of suspended motion. The deepest gesture of the archive may not be to display, but to return — to see again, and to reaffirm the act of seeing itself. (DING Dawei)

通向无形之力

朱塞佩·博卡西尼的电影存在于记忆与视觉的不稳定的汇聚地带——在那里，被遗忘的姿态、破碎的欲望在拾得影像的拼装中重新被激活。博卡西尼的影片并非从时间的线索中叙述，而是让影像在层叠与闪烁中构成一种有机的呼吸。他的作品往往不进行故事讲述，而是试图描述在故事坍缩之后的情感地貌，呈现出瓦尔堡所谓的“情感公式”（Pathosformel）——那些跨越时代仍存留的情绪残痕，身体在紧绷中显形，又在闪烁中消散。影像因此变得纯粹而危险：它既在展示，又在撤回；既在召唤记忆，又在制造遗忘。当画面被层层叠化、重复、抽象，直至身体不再被看见，而成为能量与形态的波动。这种观看的去物化，使他从视觉暴力的边缘，抵达一种更幽暗的“感知伦理”。贯穿他作品的，是一种持续的哲学追问：影像如何在自身的历史中存活？他的作品始终关乎感知的脆弱与历史的阴影，当故事消失，人类情感还以何种形式延续？我们一次次被邀请进入表征的废墟，目睹可见与不可见的持续纠缠。

从《莱祖奥》（Lezuo, 2013）到《残骸》（Debris, 2017），他以一种近乎神话重述的方式重新定义物质的命运和旅途：从出航、漂流到坠落与重生，影像成为了记忆的肉体，而胶片的颗粒、损耗与褶皱，则构成了时间的物质痕迹。在《轨道》（Orbit, 2016）与《真理之殿》（Temple of Truth, 2018）中，影片创造的时间感知转向了某种宇宙维度——影片穿行于科学幻想与视觉幻觉之间，历史的呼喊与梦呓交错，让我们的观看进入一种塌缩时刻在发生的时空：技术的碑石，亦是视觉的坟墓。从 2019 年的《拯救之夜》（The Saved Night）至 2024 年的《高炉》（blast furnace），他的影像逐渐收敛为一种静默的能量学。如果说前期作品关注影像的物理生命，那么此阶段则转向对“存在状态”的思辨——影像成为一种介于生与死、光与暗之间的振动，仿佛尘埃般漂浮于可见与不可见的边界。而在近年作品《黑色电影与电影黑色》（ragtag, 2022）与《欲望》（desire, 2025）中，他的档案美学抵达了一种文化考古学的高峰。前者以数百部战后黑色电影的片段，描绘了一幅关于恐惧、欲望与信仰危机的视觉肖像；后者则在通俗剧的废墟中追问情感如何被表演、被继承、又被遗忘。他并非重建类型，而是让影像在历史的回声中自我折叠——让过去的形式在当下重新燃烧。

博卡西尼的实践又与绘画、文学等其他艺术媒介保持着潜在的互文性：其晦暗与张力继承自德国表现主义；影像的断裂节奏则让人联想起威廉·巴勒斯（William Burroughs）的文字剪切（cut-up）游戏，尝试跳脱时间与叙事的控制；然而所有外在美学线索最终都在他的影像语言中消融——变化为一种纯粹的电影语言，其中“重新观看”的行为本身即是书写。屏幕在他手中既是显微镜，也是镜面，揭示集体记忆如何在影像中被不断重写。

观看博卡西尼的作品，意味着追踪影像与时间之间那条不可见的线——感受重复和差异如何缓缓滑向启示。他的电影并非意在重建过去，而是不断询问记忆机制自身。在光与暗、喧哗与宁静之间，他以怀旧的方式坚定地反对怀旧——一切旧的都必须是新的，过去的残片必须成为当下感知的经验。他将我们的观看史转化为不稳定的、各个部分彼此渗透的、持续形变并呈现胶着状态的有机体。档案最深的姿态，或许不在于“展示”，而在于“返回”——在于再一次看见，其本身以及其决心。（丁大卫）

check here to see the full list for Astro: Giuseppe Boccassini

With special thanks to Giuseppe Boccassini and Istituto Italiano di Cultura for their generous support.

本策划特别感谢朱塞佩·博卡西尼先生和意大利驻华大使馆文化处—文化中心的支持。

 As in a Land, a Vagary, Giuseppe Boccassini, 2021

ASTRO-1

Lezuo｜莱祖奥

Giuseppe Boccassini 朱塞佩·博卡西尼

2013｜0:17:00｜Germany, Italy, France｜No Dialogue｜Asian Premiere

The Tin Hat｜锡制军帽

Giuseppe Boccassini 朱塞佩·博卡西尼

2014｜0:15:00｜Germany, Italy, France｜No Dialogue｜Asian Premiere

Orbit｜轨道

Giuseppe Boccassini 朱塞佩·博卡西尼

2016｜0:15:00｜Germany, Italy, France｜No Dialogue｜Asian Premiere

Debris｜残骸

Giuseppe Boccassini 朱塞佩·博卡西尼

2017｜0:11:00｜Germany, Italy, France｜No Dialogue｜Asian Premiere

BeComeBeCalm｜成境·成静

Giuseppe Boccassini 朱塞佩·博卡西尼

2018｜0:01:45｜UK, Germany｜English｜World Premiere

Temple of Truth｜真理之殿

Giuseppe Boccassini 朱塞佩·博卡西尼

2018｜0:15:00｜US, Italy, Germany｜ No Dialogue｜Asian Premiere

ASTRO-2

The Saved Night｜La Notte Salva｜拯救之夜

Giuseppe Boccassini 朱塞佩·博卡西尼

2019｜0:12:00｜Germany, Italy, France｜No Dialogue｜Asian Premiere

Lunar Studies｜月光学

Giuseppe Boccassini 朱塞佩·博卡西尼

2020｜0:38:00｜Germany, Italy｜No Dialogue｜Asian Premiere

As in a Land, a Vagary｜如置幻境

Giuseppe Boccassini 朱塞佩·博卡西尼

2021｜0:15:00｜Germany, Italy, France｜No Dialogue｜Asian Premiere

blast furnace｜高炉

Giuseppe Boccassini 朱塞佩·博卡西尼

2024｜0:06:00｜Germany, Italy, France｜No Dialogue｜World Premiere

ASTRO-3

ragtag｜黑色电影与电影黑色

Giuseppe Boccassini 朱塞佩·博卡西尼

2022｜1:24:00｜Germany, Italy, France｜English