Exeunte

Exeunte is a video composed of eleven film clips that show the interpretation of actors who never made the limelight.

Only the final sentences reveal the common element linking the actors who make up its strange cast: all of them were killed.

About Exeunte

The idea for Exeunte arose from reading a book that recounted atrocious crime stories that occurred in Rome. I was struck by the fact that the stories of the Marchesa Casati Stampa and the dwarf Domenico Semeraro had in common an appearance in the world of cinema, and I wondered if others like them might have ended up being murdered after briefly appearing on the big screen. I therefore began my special casting, looking in the Italian co-productions or production of feature old films: adventure films, comedies, crime, erotic, dramatic, historical.

Exeunte proposes a conflation between cinematic extracts, cinema title (and soundtrack) conventions and real-life murder details.

© Cristiano Berti

2024

I can only encourage people to go through the whole 11 minutes [sic] of Cristiano Berti’s Exeunte, not only in order to get the “raison d’être” of this obviously conceptual piece with a reading key, but mainly for enjoying a splendid anthology of images and sounds that sum up the melancholy of Italian cinema. Its secret of metaphysical longings, perversely hidden under layers of comical trash share shallow ambitions of transient glory.

© Calin Dan

excerpt from «Long Time. Short Distance. Or the Other Way Round», in Overlapping Biennial, ed. by Maria Manolescu, 5th Biennial of Young Artists exhibition catalogue, Bucharest: Meta foundation, p. 74

With Exeunte Cristiano Berti presents a gallery of short scenes taken from Italian films shot between the fifties and the eighties, that can be identified as minor or forgotten films. During the first half, the lack of specific information makes the series of events unclear, keeping the spectator in check as with a narration that requires a key, where the events can only be understood by going back in time, applying a precise interpretative code to make the nature and message emerge. After the final scene, in fact, the work goes back in time, re-presenting close-ups of actors that appeared in the clips in the form of stills, accompanied by a number of brief explanatory texts. Through the laconic and lapidary tone of a forensic medical report, this is where Exeunte expresses its intentions, certifying the death of each of the actors in brief detail.

As in a book of records for post mortem identification, Berti records the year of birth and death of each actor, provides the name of each individual as it appears in their official identification documents, along with a short description of the circumstances of their death. All of the cases in question involve circumstances of murder and violent death, often brutal in their cruelty, as expressed by the telegraphic yet unequivocal account. The effect catches you off guard, wavering between reality and fiction, accentuated by the often unknown personality of the actors that are the subjects of the work, and by the choice of keeping their memory alive by presenting them in the roles they played in films, in the midst of their acting profession. This is exactly where one of the crucial moments of the work develops, on the blurry border between cinematographic role and real life, between characters and actors.

At the bottom of the screen Berti also provides the identity of the actors as they are known in the film world and recorded in the credits of the films analysed for this work. In many cases an inconsistency opens up between personal and professional information and the names do not match. In numerous cases, in fact, their stage name is often used in the film credits – and often in English as was the fashion in Cinecittà at the time, in the unrealistic hopes of resembling the world of Hollywood legends. This division between real and stage name accentuates the phantasmic nature of the characters/actors, for whom this work certifies a suspended and undefined identity, halfway between cinematographic fiction and life, between the ambition of a public figure (as an actor in Cinecittà) and the reality of obscure and forgotten roles.

Therefore, are the protagonists of Exeunte characters or actors? Berti focuses on a thin edge, faded on the circular border between three identities: their personal identity, their artistic one and the one of the character they are playing. In two cases in Exeunte, the roles played by the actors were so secondary that they not even included in the official closing credits of the films: the paradox is that the personal and artistic identities of the actors disappear completely, while only the trace of the ephemeral part played in the script remains. In these circumstances Berti’s archival investigation worked in paradoxical terms, and it is precisely the reporting of their deaths that bestows a reality and identity to faces that were otherwise lost in the limbo of a minor cinematographic galaxy, deprived of every definite and verifiable identity.

In classic Latin works the personae were the masks worn by actors in tragedies – the narrative incarnations of dramatic roles distinguished by strong identities -, in Exeunte the role of an actor identifies an ontological loss, the gradual disappearance of the identity and personality of the individual that is acting, accompanied to the same extent by an artistic role which is also minor and destined to oblivion.

© Luigi Fassi

excerpt from «The Vertigo of Reality », in Cristiano Berti. Vertigine del Reale/Vertigo of Reality, exhibition catalogue, Turin: Allemandi (ISBN 978-88-422-2104-3), 2012, pp. 149-151