«With the death of Adriano Aprà the pure breed of great critics risks becoming extinct.” The words of Marco Bellocchio perfectly summarize the dismay that accompanied this morning the news of the death of Adriano Aprà (born in Rome on 18 November 1940) who passed away in the night between 14 and 15 April in the Roman hospital where he had been hospitalized for pulmonary and cardiac problems: «I want to think – said his wife Stefania Parigi together with his son Agostino – that he passed away dreaming. Last night we left him in front of the computer to watch a Fleischer film.” And it is difficult to imagine otherwise for someone who has dedicated his whole life to love and make loved the cinema.
Always a cinephilehe began writing at the age of twenty Filmcritica with the essay «The Cahiers du Cinéma group 1951-1960» immediately making his choices of field clear: not the Italian school of New Cinematoo ideological and sectarian, but the new French school, the one that would give birth to the Nouvelle Vague. Then, when the passion for cinema seemed to demand more radical choices and the discovery of American experimental cinema at the Pesaro Film Festival had upset many critical certainties (not only Aprà’s), first there was the foundation of a magazine (Cinema & FilmThe first number is dated «winter 1966-67», the last, double, 11 and 12, «summer autumn 1970») then the need to move on to the making of films («Olimpia degli amici», 1970) and toopening a place where to show «invisible» films (the Filmstudio, whose program wanted to «reaffirm our joint interest in the “new” experimentalism and for the “old” classicism).
Despite his stances often radicals and the critical battles that saw him in the front row, for example when confronting the enemies/friends of the other trendy magazine of the late Sixties, Red shadowsArà has never been a sectarian critic. Indeed, his commitment has always been crossed by a decisiveness didactic spirit: he wanted to make people understand, he wanted to show, he wanted to compare himself with others (and I can personally testify to this, I who had grown up on the “barricade” of Red shadows). He did it magnificently when he directed the Salso Film & TV Festival (1977-1989) and the Pesaro International Film Festival (1990-1998), when he taught at the University of Rome Tor Vergata from 2002 to 2008, after directed for four years the National Film Library.
“Have ideas stuck in time It doesn’t seem like a good way to progress to me” Aprà wrote in one of the latest issues of Cabiria and the many articles he wrote, some fortunately collected (for example from Falsopiano on his beloved Rossellini), others still waiting to be re-proposed (his latest work, monumentalon Dreyer, still waiting on his computer) are yet another demonstration of his intelligence and of his “mission”, the one that in recent years had seen him become a champion of cinema “out of the norm”that is, the one who did not agree to respect the rules imposed by the market and wanted to try to experiment with new paths and new forms.
And that’s not all he analyzed and studied but he also made an effort to show. In the name of an idea of criticism that she was never proud of narcissistic but he first wanted to deal with the more attentive and curious audience.
