I recently worked alongside Italian director Simo Manfredi in what turned out to be a wonderful acting experience. Her short film Last Minute (Fino All’Ultimo Minuto) is set to premiere at festivals around the world in the fall. Here are some photos taken during production.
Noise Matters Premiere! We are pleased to announce that Noise Matters will have its world premiere in London on September 29th at the 20th annual Raindance Film Festival.
For further details and to purchase tickets please visit the official Raindance Film Festival page by clicking the link below:
Noise Matters at the 20th annual Raindance Film Festival
Further updates can be found directly at the Noise Matters website at noisematters.org
To view the trailer click here: Noise Matters – Official Trailer
Here is what the festival had to say about our film:
“The whole essence of noise is that there are no instruments. We’re not musicians, we make noise.” Noise Matters is a two hour lesson in noise and a journey into the minds of some rather eccentric characters. While it is intimately touching it’s also outrageously funny in its satire on music, noise and the arts.
While it takes the disguise of a simple documentary, it soon becomes clear that this is something out of the ordinary. In Noise Matters we get to follow the fictional noise making band Shame on You. The band consists of Stan, the traumatised abstract painter; Philip; the sound engineer genius; Ryan, the political activist with an anger management issue and the professional noise maker and self proclaimed band leader Dagobert. The band is managed by their completely inappropriate and somewhat delusional manager, Captain Monroe, who wants the band to record an album in order to reach the bigger market. This becomes a question of artistic integrity which splits the band in two camps and threatens to ruin it all.
Matias Masucci’s feature length debut is without a doubt in a class of its own and it’s sure to divide audiences. It’s splendidly bonkers and leaves you wanting just a little bit more.
by Mirjam Genetay
Noise Matters Deleted Scenes is a collection of shots and clips that was not used for the film but I’ve put it together because it conveys the feel that ultimately I like about Noise Matters. The song was specifically written for the film by Cody Marks and is titled I Found it All.
Noise Matters, starring Matias Masucci, Ugo Bianchi, Bret Roberts. Joey Capone, Dean Delray, Brian McGuire, Kevin Dorian, Circus-Szalewski and Frank Payne.
This is a matter of noise, its culture and its effects on the lives of a group of off-beat characters devoted to the simplest of all “arts”, making noise. “…memories are connected to sounds” says Dagobert, leader of the noise band “Shame On You”, as he explains the painstaking process of finding the right objects to generate unique and inimitable sounds capable of evoking emotions in the listener.
Noise Matters is a glance into the life of a professional noise maker, an abstract painter, a sound engineer and a social agitator brought together by their passion for creating sounds using everyday objects.
Trouble starts when their manager Captain Monroe, a womanizing conspiracy theorist and con man, insists on having them record an album that Dagobert just cannot bring himself to do. The story explores the implications of creative undertakings within a group and its impact on artistic integrity.
Chapter One: Piece & Quiet
Introducing Marcello and Sofia
Finding a quiet place where Marcello (Matias Masucci) can meet Sofia (Angela Sarafyan) proves to be problematic. Kevin Dorian and Ugo Bianchi also star in this first chapter written and directed by Matias Masucci and shot by Sebastien Hameline.
The writer of two of my favorite books, Animal Farm and Ninety Eighty-four, explains why he writes.
From a very early age, perhaps the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer. Between the ages of about seventeen and twenty-four I tried to abandon this idea, but I did so with the consciousness that I was outraging my true nature and that sooner or later I should have to settle down and write books.
Intervista a Matias Masucci – The Italian newspaper La Voce D’Italia (The Voice of Italy) ran an article yesterday on myself and the film Noise Matters. It tells a bit of my story and gives a very nice review of the film.
Currently the text is available only in Italian but should you happen to understand the language feel free to go visit their site.
The original article can be found here: La Voce D’Italia: Noise Matters
The interview was conducted by journalist Davide Clemente.
The completion of Noise Matters has been due for the past few months. Today I can finally sit down to announce it properly right here on the site.
We went into production on March 20th 2009, my calendar tells me it was a Friday, why I started production on a Friday at this moment escapes me but we must have had our reasons. My mother considers Friday a lucky day but I doubt superstition had anything to do with it. For whatever reason we started on “lucky” Friday and it worked because after only 921 days I have a finished film. Irony? Yes.
It was an unusually long post-production but a journey which afforded me the opportunity to learn invaluable lessons as a person and filmmaker.
It is not certain at this stage at what festival Noise Matters will premiere, as soon as I know I’ll be sure to post it right here on the site.
I am pleased with the results and hope the film will find its audience.
Thanks to everyone involved.
Sincerely,
Matias Masucci
I came across this speech given by Ayn Rand at the United States Military Academy on March 6, 1974. It argues that philosophy plays a central role in all human activities, that every action or thought has at its root certain assumptions, and that humans need to examine those assumptions to live a full, meaningful life. Below is the full text.
Since I am a fiction writer, let us start with a short short story. Suppose that you are an astronaut whose spaceship gets out of control and crashes on an unknown planet. When you regain consciousness and find that you are not hurt badly, the first three questions in or mind would be: Where am I? How can I discover it? What should I do?
You see unfamiliar vegetation outside, and there is air to breathe; the sunlight seems paler than you remember it and colder. You turn to look at the sky, but stop. You are struck by a sudden feeling: if you don’t look, you won’t have to know that you are, perhaps, too far from the earth and no return is possible; so long as you don’t know it, you are free to believe what you wish–and you experience a foggy, pleasant, but somehow guilty, kind of hope.
You turn to your instruments: they may be damaged, you don’t know how seriously. But you stop, struck by a sudden fear: how can you trust these instruments? How can you be sure that they won’t mislead you? How can you know whether they will work in a different world? You turn away from the instruments.
Now you begin to wonder why you have no desire to do anything. It seems so much safer just to wait for something to turn up somehow; it is better, you tell yourself, not to rock the spaceship. Far in the distance, you see some sort of living creatures approaching; you don’t know whether they are human, but they walk on two feet. They, you decide, will tell you what to do.
You are never heard from again.
This is fantasy, you say? You would not act like that and no astronaut ever would? Perhaps not. But this is the way most men live their lives, here, on earth.
Most men spend their days struggling to evade three questions, the answers to which underlie man’s every thought, feeling and action, whether he is consciously aware of it or not: Where am I? How do I know it? What should I do?
On Thinking For Oneself by Arthur Schopenhauer (1851)
A library may be very large; but if it is in disorder, it is not so useful as one that is small but well arranged. In the same way, a man may have a great mass of knowledge, but if he has not worked it up by thinking it over for himself, it has much less value than a far smaller amount which he has thoroughly pondered. For it is only when a man looks at his knowledge from all sides, and combines the things he knows by comparing truth with truth, that he obtains a complete hold over it and gets it into his power. A man cannot turn over anything in his mind unless he knows it; he should, therefore, learn something; but it is only when he has turned it over that he can be said to know it.
Continue reading Thinking For Oneself by Arthur Schopenhauer
I read this book for the first time as I was traveling through Mexico and it made a lot of sense. I was at a strange place in my life reexamining faith and superstition and reading Jiddu Krishnamurti’s book Freedom From The Known was liberating. A lot of these excerpts still ring true.
What follows is a collection of Jiddu Krishnamurti quotes taken from the book Freedom From The Known (you can purchase it by clicking here).
Faith invariably breeds violence. (p.9)
The primary cause of disorder is the seeking of reality promised by another. (p.11)
Immaturity lies only in total ignorance of self. (p.12)
The whole history of man is written in ourselves. (p.13)
We are each one of us responsible for every war because of the aggressiveness of our own lives. (p.14)
Truth has no path, and that is the beauty of truth, it is living. (p.15)
It seems to me that all ideologies are utterly idiotic. (p.16)
If I were foolish enough to give you a system and if you were foolish enough to follow it, you would merely be copying, imitating, conforming, accepting, and when you do that you have set up in yourself the authority of another and hence the conflict between you and that authority. (p.17)
If you try to study yourself according to another you will always be a secondhand human being. (p.17)
Order imposed from without must always breed disorder. (p.17)
If you reject all authority it means you are no longer afraid. (p.18)
When you reject something false which you have been carrying about with you for generations, …you have more energy, you have more capacity, you have more drive. …if you do not feel this, then you have not thrown off the burden, you have not discarded the dead weight of authority. But when you have thrown it off you have ….no fear of making a mistake, no fear of doing right or wrong. (p.18)
We need tremendous amount of energy and we dissipate it through fear but when there is this energy which comes from throwing off every form of fear, that energy itself produces the radical inward revolution. You don’t have to do a thing about it. (p.18)
Freedom is entirely different from revolt. (p.19)
All authority of any kind, especially in the field of thought and understanding, is the most destructive, evil thing. Leaders destroy the followers and followers destroy the leaders. (p.21)
If you do not follow somebody you feel very lonely. Be lonely then. Why are you frightened of being alone? Because you are faced with yourself as you are. (p.21)
I have to study myself in actuality – as I am, not as I wish to be. (p.22)
Learning is a constant movement without the past. (p.23)
We may be sensitive about certain things that touch us personally but to be completely sensitive to all the implications of life demands that there be no separation between the organism and the psyche. It is a total movement. (p.23)
