You can flip through a film.
It’s not a mistake, and I’m not getting confused. I discovered that films, besides being watched at the cinema, on television and — I say this with a heavy heart — on PCs and smartphones, can also be flipped through, held in your hands and have their pages gently stroked.
I discovered this by reading (in preview) He Read Deep Into The Night, a book that is not just a book — it is a world, in fact a hundred worlds.
He Read Deep Into The Night is an editorial project born from a fortunate encounter. On one side, Peter Greenaway, a filmmaker, writer and artist known worldwide; on the other, Stefano Bessoni, a filmmaker in love with stop-motion and a designer of unsettling creatures.
It is Stefano himself, at the end of the book, who recounts their meeting and the beginning of a collaboration that can be defined as not only professional, but also philosophical. Questioning how much freedom a text can have — capable of stimulating the reader’s imagination — and how little freedom an image might have, which once fixed in the mind risks confining it, this collection of stories was built, page after page.
From one-line texts to longer stories, from essential discomforts to paradoxical dreams, from films never made to paintings never painted, He Read Deep Into The Night contains it all: irony, mystery, social critique, humor. One hundred stories that encapsulate humanity and represent only the first chapter of the five publications through which this collaboration will unfold.
The interplay between words and images is crafted to perfection, and Stefano Bessoni’s illustrations are not meant to do all the work, but rather present themselves as an additional invitation to let the mind wander, the only way to make a book somewhat our own.
If you think Stefano created an illustration for each story, you are greatly mistaken. It is not negligence or forgetfulness, but a matter of weighing things in the right way, as he himself states: «I did not want to fall into mere illustrated narration, but to transform text, images and graphic elements into a game for the reader, so that they can fantasize with the pieces at their disposal, developing a personal idea. And precisely to avoid that risk, I believe that many stories should remain without images, preserving all the evocative mystery that only the written word can suggest».
He Read Deep Into The Night, with texts by Peter Greenaway and illustrations by Stefano Bessoni, is available for pre-order on the website of Bakemono Lab publishing house and will be available starting March 23.
