Anabasi1981

Anabasi in ancient Greek means "ascension", "expedition": from the coast to the interior of a region. The journey made by the Woman in Anabasi is towards the darkest depths of psychic life, where she goes in search of a possible liberation of the ego, in a cognitive itinerary marked by sudden dreamlike and animistic illuminations.

In Anabasi there is a fantastic projection of something strictly private, autobiographical: the author's relationship with his wife, which is poetically transfigured and goes through a series of metamorphoses: woman-fruit, woman-earth, praying mantis. (…) The recurring places inhabited or traveled by the Woman are the House and the Garden, a physical and mental place that becomes, from time to time, a primeval Eden and a Labyrinth full of dark presences. The Woman walks through the Garden-Labyrinth in search of a lost symbiosis with nature. Continuously enters and exits the Oedipal Womb-House. The vineyard and the cosmos in formation and perennial metamorphosis spring from his own body. At times they seem to incorporate it within themselves, in a panic relationship of total identification. The Garden, the Vineyard, the Sun allude to solar and telluric symbolism, to the great seasonal myths of fertility.

Other archetypal images: candles, daggers, combs (transparent male symbols), stairs, flowers and above all the water, stagnant in a bathtub, pervaded by blood flows, alluding to the myth of the return to the great primordial waters.

Daily reality, myth and inner experience are intertwined and fused in the composite structure of the film which uses the Jungian scheme of the "descent to the Mothers" to express the cognitive search of one's own Self. Like the poet Yves Bonnefoy's Douve, his wife Mariella becomes, in the incessant play of metamorphosis, a symbolic place, a crossroads of meanings, a semantic field, a dreamlike concretion, a metaphysical entity producing meaning, language, mystery. The more it reveals itself, the more it takes on new forms, the further it moves away: this is the dynamic, the rhythm of Desire, the matrix of eroticism.

( Arcangelo Mazzoleni )