Massimo Bacigalupo

Massimo Bacigalupo (Rapallo, Genoa, Italy, 1947). His first works were produced for the local Amateur Film Club. For some years he helped organize the Rapallo International Amateur Film Festival. In 1966 his feature Quasi una tangente was awarded first prize in the Montecatini Film Festival. Bacigalupo, who was nineteen-year-old at the time, remembers that he was sitting in the audience with Lillian Gish and Anita Loos, who happened to be visiting Montecatini (Lillian was a friend of Massimo’s parents).

Early on, through his personal acquaintance with poet Ezra Pound, Bacigalupo met film-makers and associates of the New American Cinema, among them Guy Davenport, Stan Brakhage, Gregory Markopoulos, Jonas Mekas, and Abbott Meader. In 1970 he prepared an Italian translation of Brakhage’s Metaphors on Vision. He brought to Rapallo in 1964 a selection of American films, among them works by Ron Rice and Maya Deren, which made a lasting impression.

In 1966-71 he was a university student in Rome, where he was a founding member of the Italian Film-makers’ Cooperative, and was involved in producing and distributing independent films. In 1968 he shot 200 Feet for March 31, an uncut and silent 8mm film- happening. He went on in 1969-70 to create Eringio, a series of four films running over two hours.

The title refers to Dürer’s self-portrait, and this film quartet amounts to a collective self-portrait of the student and art world in Italy at the time. The longest film of the series, Migration, a celebration of the Great Mother and her many incarnations, was premiered at the 1970 London Film Festival. Bacigalupo travelled with a showcase of Italian underground films to Denmark, Sweden, Germany (1970), and later Spain (1974) and England (Tate Gallery, 1983).

He enrolled as a graduate student at Columbia University, receiving his Ph.D. in American literature in 1975. Warming Up, a color film shot in Italy and America, was premiered at the Anthology Film Archives, NYC, on Bacigalupo's 26th birthday, April 20, 1973. In 1975 he shot Postcards from America, a dream travelogue, and Into the House, an homage to his American mother’s family.

Subsequently Bacigalupo has been chiefly active as a scholar, critic and educator. He is Professor of American Literature at the University of Genoa and has received numerous awards for his work as a translator, chiefly of English and American poetry. He lives in Rapallo.