Reto Andrea Savoldelli
Reto Andrea Savoldelli (born December 20, 1949 ) is an Italian - Swiss film director , educator and writer .
Family life
Born in Solothurn as a child of Italian immigrants, just a few weeks after his birth he came into the care of the teachers of the Seraphische Liebeswerk Solothurn , a social organization affiliated to the Capuchin order. In 1972 he married the Norwegian Ellen Ribsskog. The marriage, which was dissolved in 1986, has a daughter. In 1989 Savoldelli entered into a second marriage with Magdalena Lorenz, from which two daughters were born.
Education and professional career
At the age of nine he joined the Catholic Boys' Choir, the Pueri Cantores . 1960 Savoldelli took part in an international congress of the Boys 'Choir in Rome in part, in a four-thousand-headed boys' choir during a Mass in St. Peter's Basilica culminated who by then-Pope John XXIII. was celebrated. Savoldelli later resigned from the Catholic Church.
Even as a high school student, Savoldelli became known for his short films, initially made in 8 mm and later in 16 mm, for which his classmate Jürg Naegeli was the camera. Stephan Portmann , co-founder and first long-time director of the Solothurn Film Festival , the annual performance exhibition of Swiss filmmaking since 1966, was an early promoter of his cinematic work . In addition to Naegeli, the later bassist and sound engineer in the hard rock group Krokus , Chris von Rohr and Tommy Kiefer, the founders of the successful Solothurn rockers, were among his school friends. In 1966 and 1967 (this year ex aequo with Clemens Klopfenstein ), his films Revenge in Italian and JJIPA (boy at puberty) each won first prize in the Swiss youth film competition held in Leysin , Vaud .
His film Lydia was shown at the Solothurn Film Festival in 1969 and received a positive response. Wim Wenders , Enno Patalas and Ulrich Gregor awarded the highest rating in the magazine Filmkritik . Lydia was invited to the Film Days in Hof and to the Mannheim Film Festival and was shown in Abaton Hamburg and other studio cinemas in Germany.
After several months of work in what was then the archive cellar of the Zurich headquarters of the UBS bank , at the end of 1970 he received an offer from German-speaking Swiss television to produce his film script Hieronymus . The federal film funding took over the remaining financing. The film, which was unnamed while filming in Stella da Falla , was broadcast on SFR television in July 1972. It is the first feature film to be produced by a European television station whose main character has been shown in two different ages in her life. The media attention of the Swiss press to the making of the film was great. Apart from a few exceptions, after the premiere in Solothurn in 1972, the majority of the reviews formed the tenor of rejection and occasionally furious criticism. Stella da Falla was the official Swiss entry to the competition at the Locarno Film Festival in 1972, where Savoldelli made the acquaintance of Andrej Tarkovski , the jury president at the time . His film Andrej Roubliov had its world premiere on the Piazza Grande in Locarno and made a great impression on Savoldelli. Savoldelli contacted Tarkovski again shortly before his death when Tarkovski was considering making a film about Rudolf Steiner .
The shooting for Stella da Falla was completed in India with the documentary film "The Lord of the Universe" produced by Savoldelli in November / December 1971 about a 14-year-old guru. The disappearance of the film material from the Zurich Kopierwerk and its reappearance as the first advertising film of the Divine Light Mission, as the organization of Prem Rawat aka Guru Maharaj-ji was called at the time, led to legal proceedings that lasted several years.
Savoldelli began a four-year course in eurythmy under Elena Zuccoli. In 1973 he joined the Anthroposophical Society , of which he was a member until 2010. Savoldelli made the acquaintance of Herbert Witzenmann in 1976 . In 1979 he was responsible for the editing of the seminar magazine of the "Seminar for Free Youth Work", which Savoldelli was to run until 1991. After completing his eurythmy studies, he joined the founding college of the Rudolf Steiner School in Solothurn. In 1980 Savoldelli took on Italian citizenship and in return completed Swiss military service within the unarmed medical department.
After four years as a eurythmist from kindergarten to seventh primary grade, he accepted Herbert Witzenmann's request to take over the management of the Gideon-Spicker publishing house , which was newly founded in Dornach , and to initiate the "Seminar for Free Youth Work, Art and Social Organics" ( as the extended title of the seminar read) to coordinate. Savoldelli's individual contribution on the occasion of the consultation of the cantonal model for education comes from the Solothurn time as a teacher, for which the head of the cantonal education department, government councilor Walter Bürgi, thanked him.
After the publishing house only had two Witzenmann titles in its program at the beginning of Savoldelli's activity, the years that followed until his death in September 1988 were determined by the publication of around two dozen new publications. Savoldelli also took over numerous reproductions of his friend, painter Beppe Assenza, in the publisher's offer and began in 1984 with the publication of the annual “Assenza Calendar”. After Assenza's death in 1985, Savoldelli conducted lengthy negotiations with the board of directors at the Goetheanum in Dornach, who wanted to close the internationally well-attended painting school run by Assenza. With appropriate legal support, he succeeded in convincing the Goetheanum, in whose area the painting school was previously embedded, to agree to its continued existence as an independent sponsor.
Savoldelli taught for several years in the Assenza painting school and in the "Seminar for Free Youth Work, Art and Social Organics" and was also involved in the development of the "Social Aesthetic Study Year" carried out in its framework. In addition, he was responsible for organizing Witzenmann's lectures and conferences in Basel, Arlesheim, Dortmund, Ottersberg, Colmar, Berlin, Copenhagen and Oslo. In doing so, he himself led seminars or contributed lectures from his own area of research, which was gradually emerging, which he would later call eurythmology (the exploration of the interrelationship between thought movements and eurythmy gestures) or orthology (the exploration of the threshold between spiritual observation and spiritual observation). After the death of the seminar leader, he continued the seminar founded by Witzenmann with a few people and became chairman of his sponsoring association. In 1991 the first volume of his “Documentation of Herbert Witzenmann's Activities on the Board of Directors at the Goetheanum” appeared, followed by two more volumes in 2017.
In 1991 he began teaching again at the state school of the city of Basel, this time for children with a migration background, which he taught for 21 years until summer 2012. In this context, four school videos were created based on the ideas of the young people, in which parents and teachers also participated.
In 2003 Savoldelli presented the film project Hieronymus - about cinema and love in times of reincarnation to a group of interested actors and film workers for the first time in Berlin . He took up the material from his script, which was rejected in 1973.
The Hieronymus novel was published in 2013 with financial support for printing costs from the Canton of Solothurn. Savoldelli conducts audiovisual readings (readings combined with excerpts from the production of the film project). In 2011, Savoldelli started the series of orthology workshops in Berlin with Rahel Savoldelli in the Theaterhaus Mitte.
In 2018 his media studies paper Rudolf Steiner on cinema - on the genealogy of film - was published in 2020 by TempleLodge Publishing under the title The Future Art of Cinema - Rudolf Steiner's Vision . - In May 2018 he was invited by the Moscow School of New Cinema (supported by the Swiss Embassy in Moscow) to present his films at the KaroArt film studio in the former Cinema Oktobr, New Arbat, and to give three lectures on the cinema of the future at the university hold. (1. On the mediumistic nature of cinema / 2. Film art as the penetration of appearance and reality / 3. The warming of the mirror).
Selected films
- 1969: Lydia (script, acting, directing)
- 1971: Stella da Falla, production: SRF-Fernsehen (script, acting, co-director with Jacques Sandoz and production)
- 2006: West-East video lounge No. 1 to 3 (Greece, Turkey)
- 2011: When Mr. Spielmann comes (school film, Basel-Stadt)
selected Writings
- Conditions of eurythmy culture - moving thinking and animated gestures. Free Spiritual Life Publishing House, Stuttgart 1989.
- Documentation of Herbert Witzenmann's activities on the board of directors at the Goetheanum . SeminarVerlag, Basel 1991 and 2017.
- Swirls of color and pillar mystery. An art-historical study of Rudolf Steiner's last lecture before the outbreak of the First World War and its significance for painting. SeminarVerlag, Basel 2002.
- Hieronymus - about cinema and love in times of reincarnation . SeminarVerlag, Basel 2013.
- Rudolf Steiner on cinema - on the genealogy of the film SeminarVerlag, Basel 2018
Awards
- 1969: Federal quality award for the film Lydia
- 1970: Support bonus from the Canton of Solothurn for the film Lydia
- 1972: Award of the Montreal Film Festival, Canada, for Stella da Falla
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Chris von Rohr: You want to rock dogs forever. Steinblatt Verlag, p. 82.
- ↑ An excerpt from Lydia was broadcast on SFR TV's Tagesschau, and the tabloid Blick described Lydia as the “most promising film of the fourth Solothurn Film Festival”.
- ↑ movie review, Munich, Sept.1969.
- ↑ This is how the later film editor of "Spiegel", Urs Jäggi, wrote in his book Film in der Schweiz: "Stella da Falla is about the narcissistic self-reflection of a hitherto greatly overrated pseudo-genius"
- ↑ prem-rawat-bio.org
- ↑ More details in Klaus Hartmann: Herbert Witzenmann's biography. Volume 2. Gideon Spicker Verlag, 2013.
- ^ RA Savoldelli: Conditions of eurythmy culture - moving thinking and animated gestures. Free Spiritual Life Publishing House, 1989, ISBN 3-7725-0057-9 . Several orthology trailers on youtube.com
- ↑ http://www.das-seminar.ch
- ↑ Created by: Hieronymus Video Lounge. Accessed February 4, 2018 .
- ↑ das-seminar.ch ( Memento of the original from October 20, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ amazon.de
- ↑ das-seminar.ch ( Memento of the original from October 20, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ From the decision of the government council (N ° 2012/2158): “The narrative climax of the book is a serious and very convincing look back of the main character Hieronymus Halbeisen in an earlier embodiment, which takes place in the time of the Occitan singers and heretic wars . "
- ↑ youtube.com
- ↑ das-seminar.ch ( Memento of the original from January 11, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ Hieronymus - on cinema and love in times of reincarnation. (No longer available online.) Archived from the original on February 5, 2018 ; accessed on February 4, 2018 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ HieronymusFilm | Switzerland | Moscow. Retrieved February 10, 2020 .
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Savoldelli, Reto Andrea |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Italo-Swiss film director, educator and writer |
| DATE OF BIRTH | December 20, 1949 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Solothurn |