Turin, Italy
Mission Title: The Italian Job
Mission Author: Iain Borden
Mission By: Alessandro Fontanesi, Massimiliano Todisco
Mission Finished on Date: 22-05-2008
SCRIPT
- Find out what kind of driving can be captured on film. Tape the car from the inside while driving, and from the outside while it’s moving.
- Try and recreate
- legally and safely – some of the journeys made by the Mini Coopers along the back streets and alleys of Turin, and to capture these journeys on film.
- Explore how this route changes the way you experience the city and architecture.
- Tell the story of your adventures and experience. Frame your footage thinking about a narrative arc.
TRAVEL BAG
How does driving change the way we encounter urban space?
In Peter Collinson's 1969 film The Italian Job, starring Michael Caine, a gang of British crooks steal a bundle of gold bullion from Turin using three Mini Coopers. They sabotage the city's traffic lights, creating total chaos, and then escape the city in one of the best car chases in the movie history, tearing through Turin’s landmarks at breakneck speed.
As an experience, driving explores a way of encountering, conceiving and remaking urban space. It does so by investigating how different kinds of driving, at different speeds and on different roads, produce distinct encounters with cities and architecture and, hence, also produce similarly distinct political and cultural experiences.
In particular, different intersections of speeds, roads, automobiles and histories produce 5 different kinds of political and cultural productions of space: 0 mph, and social display; 30 mph, and the cognitive mapping of city streets; 55 mph, and the tourist and existential experience of the countryside; 70 mph, and the contemplative experience of motorways; and 100 mph, and the risk-danger of accelerated real and virtual speeds.
Mission Report
My mission start at 6.30 am, when the alarm clock makes me pitch on my bed… wow, it's finally morning!!!
I get in my Mini and drove toward Turin, dispersing myself into the morning traffic to reach my fellow passenger, the camera operator who's going to help me in th is mission: Massimiliano.
We get a little acquainted while driving from his place to the BMW dealer where we pick up our Mini Clubman Cooper S, our third partner.
Our mission is to retrace Turin's street as the old-fashioned Mini did in the legendary movie "The Italian Job."
Ready, steady, go: we spent all day taping the historic rides in the main streets and between city's monuments.
No interviews, only images.
The amazing shootings of the city don't need any comments… crossroads, traffic, people, chaos, cars,…
Unfortunately, we were compelled to drive slowly, which made me regret the '69 movie.
Such a great day, especially for someone like me who never had the chance to play around Turin, through its highways and byways.
At the end of the day, I bring Massimiliano back to his place, and I drive all by myself to the dealer to hnd over our beloved companion…
I'll leave to your imagination to figure out what happened next, with the cameras off ;P
Alessandro Fontanesi, aka Phonz
