Michelle Deignan

Il Cittadino
Single screen digital video, 8 mins 46 secs, 2007.

In 'Il Cittadino', an actor filmed in Friuli Venezia Giulia in the north east of Italy, performs a series of speeches to camera. Desolate locations, an atmospheric soundtrack and sporadic uncanny camera perspectives frame her self-conscious style of delivery. Speaking in English with an Italian accent, the story she weaves combines facts about this remote area of Europe with anecdotes about the film's director. The narrative meanders almost inappropriately from the humorously confessional to the directly political, including references to ski resorts, Irish themed pubs and the CIA.

click on images for low res. QuickTime movie of 'Il Cittadino'. file size: 20 mb.

"In 'Il Cittadino', 'Red Cheeks' and 'Our Land', angled jump cuts provide us side and back views of each presenter as they speak. In Il Cittadino , just after she has begun relating Deignan's opera vignette, we are given a shot-reverse-shot over her shoulder: she is speaking, gesturing as she has been, to no one. Suddenly, the agency and motives of the presenter are thrown in sharp light. The revelation of that simple sequence playfully tosses up the suggestion that they are not speaking to us in particular, but simply speaking out loud. The figure of the presenter transforms from the reliable, assured carrier of fact, to a wandering flâneur, a pedestrian collector of information and curiosities who inexplicably, obsessively recounts the things that they have learned. They share the autistic individual's "incapability of dishonesty," listing off details about the place they are, blurting out their employer's personal history, disclosing the occurrences and coincidences that make up the background of the work."

from the essay, 'What's New? - Televisions Mutual Contract', Chris Fite-Wassilak.