ZEUS MACHINE – L’INVINCIBILE

74’, 2019, Produced by Zapruder, co-produced by In Between Art Film

Supported by Gucci, Emilia-Romagna Film Commission, Soprintendenza Archeologia, Belle Arti e Paesaggio per le province di Ravenna, Forlì-Cesena e Rimini, Piano per l’Arte Contemporanea 2016, MAXXI Museo Nazionale delle Arti del XX Secolo Roma
. And with Xing Bologna, Lo Schermo dell’Arte Firenze, Università IUAV Venezia – Corso di laurea in Design della Moda e Arti Multimediali

ZAPRUDER

David Zamagni and Nadia Ranocchi, collectively referred to as ZAPRUDER, are Italian directors and visual artists. Together they are authors and producers of films, video installations, and live performances meant to become films. Their collective name refers to the amateur filmmaker Abraham Zapruder, author of the famous frames that captured the Kennedy assassination and narrator by chance in the century of the decline of all historical narratives. Their work is based on the research of new visual and linguistic codes that investigate the potential of non-linear narrative structures. Zapruder’s works are the result of a pioneering spirit and an ongoing research on language and media, on the border between figurative, performative and cinematographic arts, in the direction of a totalising visual experience.

The partnership between Zamagni and Ranocchi began in 1998, since then they write and direct jointly the projects of Zapruder filmmakersgroup, a collective based in Roncofreddo, founded in 2000 with Monaldo Moretti, and committed to exploring moving images.
From 2005 to 2011 Zapruder has been experimenting with 3D-stereoscopic filmic technique, giving rise to the Chamber Cinema, a form of embodied tactile cinema and incorporeal theatre. In 2011 their 3D filmic productions were awarded at the 68th Venice Film Festival.
In 2016, Zapruder received the MAXXI Prize for Contemporary Art.
In the same year Nadia, David and Cristina Zamagni founded the production company ZAPRUDER film.

Zapruder’s Zeus Machine. The Invincible (2019) tells the never-before-told story of Hercules in twelve vignettes. At petrol stations and roundabouts, in sports halls, sculpture storerooms and at music festivals, we encounter the Greek hero as a distant translation: performances by bodies and machines re-enact scenes from sword-and-sandal films linked to him as a playful analysis of legends and their structures.

In this film, we are confronted with Hercules and the idea of the myth in a manner that is both scattered and compressed: the stories have become unrecognisable and what remains is always the same motif of a fight – against bulldozers, training bags, time, or oneself — in a poignant re-examination of modern society through the absolute value of the Invincible.

Zeus Machine. L’invincible explores the very essence of cinema by bringing the viewers back to the mutable and circular nature of myth, a relentless machine that intertwines its existence with the infinite narration of its own deeds.