Gustavo Gamna was not a film man. He was a doctor, a psychiatry professor, director of the mental hospital of Collegno (when it was the largest in Italy with 3000 patients), director of psychiatric services of Turin, president of ADEG (Association for the prevention and study of youth problems), director of “Annali di freniatria e Scienze affini” and the author of numerous books and essays. Before his death, he gave the therapeutic community Fermata d’autobus in Turin a dozen Super8 reels and some 16mm reels dating back to the late 1960s and early 1970s. Discovering their contents was for us one of those surprises that rarely happens. Gamna used the camera not only as a means of documentation but also of creating complex visionary, wild, mortal and vital journeys as if he was trying to understand schizophrenia through a schizophrenic mise-en-scène of images, sound and their juxtaposition. We have selected three of his works. L’Eliogabalo ritrovato examines patients distorting their surroundings and is loaded with sounds that seem to stem from an alphabet too internal to be intelligible. Commento per decidere is a more peaceful investigation of an art therapy workshop and patients’ drawings and poems (“orange segments have the same curvature as the teeth”). Metaprogetto instead delves into a dismembered universe reassembled through fragments and refractions fluctuating between idyllic and infernal – far beyond the consolation of reason.

Andrea Meneghelli