PROFIT MOTIVE AND THE WHISPERING WIND

John Gianvito | USA 2007 | 57 min.

Format: DigiBeta
Material: 16mm
Original language: English

Script: John Gianvito
Camera: John Gianvito
Editing: John Gianvito
Sound: John Gianvito 

Production: Travelling Light Production

German Premiere

For three years, John Gianvito travelled across the United States with his camera. He filmed public texts, aimed at passers-by or even pilgrims, in broad daylight. They included historical panels saturated with pithy information, epitaphs on tombstones and various monuments. He also filmed landscapes, the silent witnesses of past dramas. All these signs were recorded to trace, shot by shot, a certain history of the struggle for freedom of the country. No commentary accompanies the image, no-one adds their expertise to the obvious experience of the visible and the readable, the viewer is alone with the signatures of the periods that struggled for him. It is a meditation on geography and the capacity of the cinema for recording and memory. There is something insistent here, but what? It is the whispering wind mentioned in the title and which does not stop whistling. It even picks up and appears to us today, having gained strength from its intact power to which this calm project is dedicated. - Jean-Pierre Rehm, FID Marseille

John Gianvito is a filmmaker, curator, and teacher based in Boston, Massachusetts. As a film curator, he served for five years as the film programmer for the Harvard Film Archive and is currently film curator for the List Visual Arts Center at MIT. His writing has appeared in Film Quarterly, Cinemascope, Undercurrent, International Documentary, and elsewhere, and he is the editor of the book “Andrei Tarkovsky: Interviews”. He is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Visual and Media Arts at Emerson College. 

Films: The Flower of Pain 1983 | Address Unknown 1986 | What Nobody Saw 1990 
The Mad Songs of Fernanda Hussein 2001 | Puncture Wounds 2002 | Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind 2007

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