TOTO SEQUENCE 05

One other excellent "in-between" film on view at BAFICI, Totó, directed by Austrian Peter Schreiner, and shown in the "Careers" section of the Panorama is very hard to classify. The title character is a real person, Antonio Cotroneo, who was born in Tropea, Calabria, Italy and who returns home after a long sojourn in Vienna. We learn this information from the press kit, and can gradually understand who he really is through watching and listening to the film. But Schreiner's digital, black and white film is more concerned with looking—at and past Totó—and listening—to Totó talking in Italian to his friends in Tropea, and talking to the filmmakers in German—than documenting a person's life. Totó is a work of ostranye, where what is familiar is shown in a strange way, so that the viewer sees things from a different perspective. Often, the eyes of the protagonist are shown in extreme close-up, and his face is invariably viewed only partially, very close to the camera, and often in oblique angle. We are encouraged to look past him into the depth of the frame, and sometimes he is not in the frame at all, and we wonder what is generating, let's say, an extreme high angle view of the beach. Surely Cotroneo is not seeing what the camera sees here, but we imagine him being close by. Indeed, on the evidence of this film, Peter Schreiner is surely a major filmmaker worthy of greater study (...) (Peter Rist, offscreen, 2010) TOTÓ / Austria 2007-2009 / 35 mm / black and white / 1:1,85 / Dolby Digital / original version Ger. - It. with English or Italian subtitles / running time: 128 min. (25f/s) / cast: Antonio Cotroneo, Angela Simonelli, Gaetano Dimarzo, Melo De Benedetto and many others / collaboration: Maria Schreiner / concept, realisation, camera, editing: Peter Schreiner / production: echt.zeit.film / supported by: Bundesministerium für Unterricht, Kunst und Kultur, Wien-Kultur / world distribution: sixpackfilm