Short Movie Story: Born of Stone
There are a couple of images that I could always go back to as I grew up and thought of Pinuccio Sciola. I see myself as a child, maybe 8-9 years old. I am with my parents walking in a large garden, lit by fire, and surrounded by massive stones, which must have been absolutely overwhelming given how old I was, an image that still evokes a kind of weird out-of-this-world magic. Then, there is this mural:
Pinuccio Sciola’s Mural (used to be in Via Dante, Cagliari)
I used to walk in front of this building every day on my way to high school. The mural brought a sense of mystery and strength to a part of the city that, otherwise, was quite bland. It was erased about a decade ago for basically zero reasons, something about a condominium dispute about the maintenance of the facade. I am glad Google Maps history exists specifically for a chance to go back in time and see the way this was.
But Pinuccio Sciola is a name that most Sardinians know, and in my case, he was also a family friend, someone who I've met many times growing up. I visited his place in 2013 with my father, and an idea came to me. I was already making films, and visiting his garden was a far different experience than it used to be. Pinuccio was in his 70s and he survived a vicious cancer, yet he had more energy than most 20-something I know. He reminded me of seeing Bruce Springsteen live (in his mid-60s) just before seeing the Arctic Monkeys (in their early 20s) and noticing how much more energetic The Boss was than people a third his age. Pinuccio was just the same way. One could say he had a childlike energy, which is really a superpower for an artist.
Pinuccio lived in a house that doubled as a museum; and he turned San Sperate, his native village, into a museum with the help of is citizens and other artists. He was surrounded by art and constantly created. I went to visit him with a Panasonic GH3 (at the time, quite the powerful little camera) with the idea of shooting a small documentary about him. He showed me and my father his new project - a series of rocks cut to look like futuristic city skylines. And he made us listen to his sound stones - something I had experience before, but I forgot.
Almost as if to make a point about creativity, explaining how, when he and his brothers were little, they had to build their own toys, Pinuccio, over lunch, created these “cretures” out of potatoes and matchsticks. He was constantly creating, relentlessly playful.
The sound stones were Pinuccio's claim to fame; he started making them in the 90s and became his signature piece: gorgeous sculptures, often gigantic, that could be used to create musical sounds. He travelled the world with them, with a mission in mind: to make people realise that stones are a living thing.
What struck me the most that day was listening to one of the stones that he kept right in front of his front door. If you put your ear against it as he "played" it, you would hear a deep, cavernous sound that, somehow, also felt incredibly expansive. immediately after, he led us inside his house and played a CD with some space sounds recorded by NASA. One of them was a "recording" of the sound of Saturn. And it sounded exactly like the stone we just listened to.
That relationship between the stone and the galaxy, the small and the universal, made me realise that I wanted to use a larger palette to tell Pinuccio's story. I wanted to create a piece of work that would serve as an introduction to the artist, aimed especially at people outside of Sardinia and Italy.
In that spirit, I also had a very specific idea for the soundtrack that I wanted to create: many artists had created music with Pinuccio's stones, but since it's not quite possible to tune a stone, all of those recordings were quite abstract, I guess what I would call "experimental music". But I wanted to create something that could convey the emotions one gets when meeting PInuccio and visiting his garden, something immediate, direct, visceral. As such I thought it would have made sense to actually create melodies out of the stones.
So I thought the best approach would be to sample the stones and use those samples to compose music, to be able to control the tonality of the stones with greater accuracy. I had a hunch it would make for music that would still sound unique while also being able to create melodic pieces. (sometime later, I was told that Bjork had expressed interest in recording Pinuccio's stones; I have a feeling she might have gone in a similar direction, given how sample-heavy her recent recordings are. I do hope she considers using the stones in some of her future projects).
I came back to Prague and met with some of my closest friends and collaborators, the same people I had worked on ATM just a couple of years prior. Cédric Larvoire, Jindrich Kravařík and Tomas Patlich were pretty much immediately game. As usual, we had no budget, but we had a chance to stay at Pinuccio's place for the duration of the trip, plus the chance to stay in Sardinia for some time. The boys were actually willing to pay for their tickets to go to Sardinia, but then my uncle Luigi came in and gave a bit of money to help with that, and so did my mother. So we had travel expenses and some gear expenses covered. I was quite happy my collaborators did not have to pay to get there, but to this day I am very grateful that they considered doing that at all.
My main inspiration, style-wise, was a short documentary made by Henry Joost and Ariel Shulman, directors of Catfish, about John Baldessari. I really liked the way that the documentary used its style to fit its subject. In doing this for Pinuccio, of course, the style would be very different: given that the man could make stone signs, the idea was to find a balance between heaviness and expansivity; something solid that could expand its aura across the galaxy.
Given the budget situation, we could not spend a giant amount of time on the project, so we aimed to stay in Sardinia for about a week, to spend as much time as possible with Pinuccio, and document his process.
The shoot went very well. We managed to cover everything we needed, even in a short time, with only one day of bad luck with the weather, which made it impossible to shoot a scene where Pinuccio, at night, would have held a "shamanic ritual" with fire and stones in front of a small crowd. But we covered his workflow, we interviewed him, we explored the village, his garden, his incredible house. We also dedicated one day to travelling around the island to get some solid shoots of a nuraghe - ancient structures built millennia ago with stones, one of the most recognisable Sardinian landmarks, a way to connect Pinuccio's work with the heritage of the island, its history. Thanks to the hospitality of Mario Brasu, that turned out to be one of the most memorable days of the whole trip: the man, a shepherd and a poet, hosted us for a lunch prepared by him and his friends in the middle of the Sardinian countryside. They proceeded to treat us to an incredible feast of fresh food while, at the same time, profoundly apologising for the lack of food - a contrast that I've witnessed before, but that my friends were pretty much flabbergasted by.
During the fantastic lunch, there was only one moment of tension: the foreigners were asked if they had ever been to Sardinia before, and Cédric answered "Well, I've been to Corsica", a statement that, luckily, was only ignored, instead of being met with extreme, justifiable violence.
After a week of meeting interesting people and eating great food and shooting beautiful things, we came back in Prague. Editing did not start immediately, because my goal was to end the documentary with Pinuccio's main project at the time, which was his set design for a production of the Turandot that was taking place in Cagliari's Teatro Lirico; giant reproductions of his stone designs were being used as backdrops for the opera, and it looked incredible. Turns out, after waiting for some time, I had been told that I could not really use much from that production, because of issues with actor's rights. I was disappointed by having wasted time on waiting, but I think this "loss" has made the film fundamentally better. Turning it into something more universal, more representative of Pinuccio's philosophy as a whole rather than being a document of a specific time in his career.
Post-production was aided by the mighty people at Bunker 4k, a post studio in Prague that is literally hidden in a bunker. They handled animations and graphics to give some punch to the video, and to help my vision to make Pinuccio's stones connected with all the rocks in space - that suggestion still inspired me greatly.
Pinuccio kept working: his Turandot sets were a great success, and he had a million plans brewing at any moment, both for his art, for San Sperate, and for Sardinia as a whole. When we showed Born of Stone publicly for the first time, in March 2016 at the Cineteca Sarda, with a public event moderated by Giacomo Mameli, one of my mentors as a journalist, he attended with a great spirit and full of insights, and, coincidentally, it was his birthday.
We went for dinner after the screening, and Pinuccio was supposed to join us, but his daughter Maria called me to say that he was not feeling great; his health had been deteriorating in the past few months. That would be the last time I saw him. It's a sad and beautiful memory at the same time; I was very grateful he got to see the film, and that he liked it as well.
I started sending Born of Stone to festivals soon after and got lucky very soon when it was selected for the Raindance Film Festival, one of the biggest festivals in Europe. That selection piqued the interest of a short film distribution company that from that point on handled the submissions of the movie - a great thing, since submitting shorts is real, exhausting work. Thanks to their help, the short went to over 30 film festivals worldwide, with some highlights like the Hot Springs Film Festival, and winning the Premio di Cinema D'Arte, one of the most prestigious festivals dealing with films about art.
Born of Stone is one of the best things I've done for sure, and I'm very much proud of it. It's a cinematic portrait, something I would like to do more often.
Of course, it's just a portrait of a part of what he did. What is missing is the way he created a world of culture around him. His house was basically a museum in its own right, and it was open to people who would come in to check out the stones. If those people were coming around mealtime, Pinuccio was very likely to invite them in; and they would find themselves at a table with other great artists, journalists, actors, writers... Pinuccio was a one man hub, a living testament to an artist who took his mission seriously, and as something that needs to cover a lot of ground. He was a curator, a connector, a builder, and a creator. Born of Stone is meant to be the way it is, it was not meant to be a "teaser" for a bigger project, but there is plenty of material to explore Pinuccio’s art further. His poetry, and the way he embodied what David Lynch calls The Art Life.
The life of Born of Stone is not quite over yet. The plan is to release the film more publicly, For some time, it was available on ItsArt, a streaming service funded by the Italian Government as a hub to showcase Italy’s artistic scene, but that service shut down last year, so right now the film is offline. It constantly shows as an introduction to any visit to the Stone Garden, a fantastic place to visit.
The film is as much mine as it is Pinuccio's, and his family, and the foundation they now run; it's a tool for the family and the foundation that has been created under his name to present the man to the world.
Born of Stone poster - Image by Ivan Bravi
