The Boom: After Marco Ferreri

Eleonora Roaro, “The Boom: After Marco Ferreri”
Single-channel video | 11’37’’
3840 × 2160 UHD 16:9
Sound: Emiliano Bagnato
Edition 3 + PA | 2024
Special thanks to: Marco Brianza, Edoardo De Cobelli, Raffaella Nobili, Katy Richardson.

Eleonora Roaro, “Catherine Spaak”
Ambient audio in stereo | 7’22’’
2024

“The Boom: After Marco Ferreri” is a video essay divided into three chapters that explores the themes and complex genesis of a film by Marco Ferreri, known by various titles including “L’uomo dei cinque palloni” or “Break Up” (1963–1967). Conceived as a critique of the economic boom, the film stars Marcello Mastroianni as an entrepreneur and is set in the centre of Milano, in an apartment on Corso Europa 9, with views of the Duomo and the Santuario di San Bernardino alle Ossa.
The first chapter, “Views,” reflects on the changes in the city centre, now characterised by inaccessibility and urban transformations. Through a montage that combines live footage, Google Earth images, and hotel booking sites, the artist explores the transformation of the film’s apartment into a hotel, and the concept of ‘views’. The second chapter “Automation” addresses the themes of automation and measurement, distinctive elements of capitalist society in the 1960s as well as today. In the final chapter, “Metaphors,” the artist reenacts some actions from the film in a room of the hotel on Corso Europa 9, and stages the protagonist’s question: what is the maximum point to which balloons can be inflated before they burst?
The audio of the project mirrors the heterogeneity of the chapters and the original film (comprising serigraphs, photographs, black-and-white and colour scenes). The first chapter alternates field recordings from the centre of Milano with recordings of a computer’s electromagnetic field. The second and third chapters feature a montage of extracts from the film: in “Automation,” one of the main themes of the soundtrack introduces excerpts related to the protagonist’s obsession with quantification; in “Metaphors,” diegetic sounds and a persistent bass line, which in the film underscores moments of greatest tension, provide the backdrop to a free and obsessive composition of significant fragments from the movie and a statement by Marco Ferreri about his relationship with tangerines.

The installation is enriched by the remains of the balloons used in the performance and various ephemera from Marco Ferreri’s film, including three posters from different countries (France, Belgium, Australia) that highlight its complex production and reception history. The ambient audio consists of the co-star Catherine Spaak’s manipulated laughter, used in the film not to express joy, but to soften the tension and obsession of her partner, Mastroianni. The fragmented and distorted laughter reflects a dynamic where the desires and needs of women are subordinated to the psychological necessities of men, as depicted in Ferreri’s film, rather than being valued as autonomous and legitimate expressions. In an echo of her subjugated role in the film, in which she is primarily a body, here she is reduced even further to a mere voice.