Not Just a Film, But an Experience

Each time ORG was screened, Fernando Birri created a unique experience. At the 1979 Venice Film Festival, he said, “The presentation of the film was anything but conventional. To begin with, the main entrance to the theater was closed. Spectators had to enter from the back, where access was blocked by a screen: a large white sheet hung on the palace in Venice. At three o’clock in the afternoon, I climbed a ladder with a scimitar I had brought from my trip to India, cut the screen, and invited the audience to pass through it to see ORG (…) From then on, we held many screenings, always in an unusual, non-traditional manner, because the idea was to break free from conservative attitudes, from conditioned ways of seeing and hearing, from traditional ways of thinking.” ¹

Years later, in 1992, he presented ORG in Osnabrück, Germany, as an homage to Athanasius Kircher, the seventeenth-century inventor of the magic lantern. Titled Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae—after Kircher’s treatise on optics—the event was both a screening and spectacle. From these moments emerged a collection of drawings, designs and plans preserved by Birri in his archive, visual forms that became a way for ORG to survive as more than a film: it is a living, evolving experience.