In illo tempore (In that time): or how to escape the time that kills

What came first in the history of humankind: myths or films? Or rather: when we are alone in the dark, because before everything there is darkness, what stories do we tell about ourselves, about the places we come from? And what are these stories for? Are these mirrors in which we see ourselves? Or are these maps on which we want to find ourselves or get lost?

Let’s start with the first myths, those that show the world becoming a world: the forest and then the people of the forest. Insofar as they prove the origin and existence of a people, a group or a society, myths have the force of authority. They are the law that explains us and draws our boundaries: they are the rules for our survival. As Jean-Pierre Vernant has pointed out, when we talk about myth, we are not really talking about a chronology or a before and after, but about a genealogy. We are the children of our stories. Since the mythological and primitive traditions of archaic societies, gestures and stories have been repeated and exemplary supernatural and archetypal characters, good and bad, have been revealed. The sacred erupted. The house burst its walls and became a temple. The goddess entered the body.

Federico Campagna writes that mythology, which is closer to fiction and the fantastic and without seeking to be established as factual truth, incorporates the vagueness and excess of language. Myth is everything that doesn't fit in one's hands. In it, the narratives and aspirations of the characters, but also their flaws and contradictions, all share the same mystery. The translation is ours: "Myths transform our existential doubts into scepticism: a double investigation into the meaningless darkness that surrounds us and the imaginary light we need to shed around us. It is a form of existential wisdom combined with abstract knowledge. Mythology, in this sense, is the exemplary mother of philosophy and the legitimate descendant of science". It is not, therefore, a mere fabrication, but a real, practical, repeated wisdom that makes collective mythical representations a fundamental expression of life. And we, who live by experience and quotation, try, like the river rounding the stone, to tame the richness of myth, its inordinacy, through the rigour of our rituals. We carry this knowledge on our backs. In addition to giving the myth a concrete form, rites allow it to be lived, to be repeated cyclically, and allow us, through the rules we impose on our bodies, to access the mythical atmosphere: whether it's climbing a flight of stairs, wanting to shape the earth, or walking a line in the sand.

In this sense, these films are both myths and rites, because they are the myths and the form of the myths, and because they exist only through the mechanical process, always the same, of images following one another and light filtering through shadows: through the ceremonial repetition of this process. The sediment of this repetition becomes the only truth. That's why, when, in one of the films of this cycle, a diligence rips through a territory that does not belong to it, the people sitting in the cinema see in the photographed landscape and in the splendour of this endless continent a right to belong. The fact is that there is no abyss between life and thought. If, in the tradition of Western culture, the concept of myth was first opposed to that of logos, and later to that of history, and finally came to be used in the sense of fiction, sacred tradition or primordial revelation, what we propose to show with these films is that mythological thought functions in the same way as conceptual thought, and that mythology and history influence each other.

We have therefore tried to draw a very brief portrait of the world: its fears and its beliefs, its masks and its little escapes, whatever they may be. Some of the films in this cycle create and codify, while others interpret or update the mythical structures that give meaning to everyday life and to human, socio-economic, political, ecological and techno-scientific relations in different geographies and at different times. We wanted to show the complexity of myths and their circumstances: how they shape behaviour, institutions and ways of being, but also, and perhaps because of this, how they lead to war and destruction. Boats perish both at sea and in the desert. Between esoteric practices and the collective imaginary, between the history of thought and contemporary mythologies, all these films reaffirm the living power of myth and the meaning it gives to our existence.