Scusate il disturbo
Apologies for the Interruption

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"His film used montage and kinescope clips from broadcast television channels, de-contextualising the messages and, in the opinion of Donatella Valente: "Such agressive interruption aesthetic was not only one militant voice of countercultural cinema, but also Turi's powerful means of politicising media technology in order to rupture televisual hypnosis and subvert the power of information communication. In 1971, British video artist David Hall adopted a similar critical aesthetic in his Television Interventions [sic], which aimed at separating image from reality, apparatus from illusion. While in Turi's film the audience may be engrossed in watching impactful events, such as a documentary newsreel on the effects of the napalm bombs, the film abruptly ends with the TV female presenter announcing: 'Scusate il disturbo, grazie.' [Apologies for the interruption. Thank you for watching'.]. Thus, the film is an overt critiscm of the populare medium of television and aims at depicting the desensitisation it causes consumer society when confronted with death and war imagery, while invoking an indirect criticism of the Vietnam War. The TV presenter's sudden interruption voices Turi's cynical commentary on the audience's manipulated experience of their daily reality, leading them to perceive such harrowing stories and pictures as the real intrusion into their lives." (Source : Donatella Valente, "The Unconscious of archival film footage in the Italian experimental cinema of the Sixties", Cinema and Art as Archive. Form Medium Memory, Francesco Federici & Cosetta G. Saba (eds.), Mimesis International, Milano, 2014, p. 186-187).

Publications and Periodicals which reference the work

- Francesco Federici & Cosetta G. Saba (eds.), Cinema and Art as Archive. Form Medium Memory, Mimesis International, Milano, 2014.

- Laura Leuzzi & Stephen Partridge (eds.), Rewind Italia: Early Video Art in Italy, John Libbey, New Barnet, 2016.

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