The “Metapolis” project is the start of a path leading into a-temporal town. We are far from the noisy metropolis convulse, impetuous, disorderly, violent in their contrasts.
Here we are on the border between metaphysics and realism. And from this threshold that the author moves to bring us to an invisible film with an extremely articulated storyline, punctuated by sixteen still image.
The country seems drowned in opaque veils; all colors are subjected to a burning sun, which sucks them in silence. Donato frames the almost geometric perfection of the small town, the ideal symbol of “Italian beauty”. A town situated at the limits of reality, an icon of poverty and sincerity. The lens of the camera moves, one senses some human presence. But residents seem to be gone, in a kind of “day after”. In fleeing, they left, behind, skinny memories.
Nothing is normal. The buildings and squares lie in a fragile lagoon light. We are in a strongly characterized in ideological space. Tracking shots of color and segments that leave dumbfounded. This place is arranged on a ridge between metaphysics and realism. Recalls the painted scenes from de Chirico in his paintings, while indicating a dimension “on a human scale” where the men are gone.
It is carved with the color of a territory profile abandoned in an email dimension beyond history. The only emblems of contemporary civilization are constitute of silhouettes of television antennas.
But they are only echoes. There is no movement. Precise lines, sharp edges and flat surfaces suggest a clarity, which is immediately broken by an opaque veil. Nothing is as it appears. The sunny meets a Nordic coldness; the city has moved into the territories of an imaginary acid and rough, full of humanistic piety towards metropolitan anonymity, accepted as inevitable condition of modernity.
This is the place of the virtual erasure of the individual from the surrounding context; The nameless is the privileged place insulation of consciousness, which is returned, with part disillusionment, through mute scenes made of porches and walls, roads and houses.
