Anna Pina Teresa

Director: Cynthia Madansky
CInematographer: Michele Paradisi
Dancer: Marta Ciappina
Music: Zeena Parkins
16 mm ◊ 15 min.

In the the most iconic sequence of Roberto Rossellini’s Roma Città Aperta(1945) Anna Magnani, in the role of Pina, runs desperately down the street after her resistance fighter fiancé as he is arrested by the fascist forces. She’s met with military gunfire, collapses, and dies. This scene is based on the life of Teresa Gullance, killed by the Nazis during the Second World War.

Teresa the inspiration, Anna the performer, Pina the heroine.

70 years later, Cynthia Madansky’s Anna Pina Teresa invokes these three figures, reimagining their gestures of defiance and their relationship to the architecture of fascism through the choreographed performance of dancer Marta Ciappina. Filmed in Rome in the same period as E42 (2015), highlighting the same modernist architecture, Anna Pina Teresa is contained to the Sala Scherma at Foro Italico, Mussolini’s former fencing studio designed by Luigi Moretti.

Madansky films Ciappina’s body in both medium but also in long shots—highlighting the shifting scale of the body in this architectural space—which is rendered equally elegant and imposing. This sense of graceful tension is further heightened by the seamless and yet electric use of jump cuts and a sonic score on an electric harp performed by Zeena Perkins.

A continuation of earlier dance films, Anna Pina Teresa also prefigures the use of textual citation that would ground the artist’s subsequent Feminist Writer series, here the act of gestural citation is at once abstract and explicit, poetic and political.