Like the previous works, Beyond Madness has no real plot: everything unfolds through a series of visual scenes, each introduced by Zanuso himself while reading one of his book of aphorisms (in life he is also a writer); preceded by his own phrases or those of famous philosophers, impressive tableaux vivants follow one another, dreamlike glimpses which, as in dreams, proceed by accumulation and without a precise apparent meaning. Zanuso, who at the beginning appears in the role of Diogenes with the lantern while "looking for man", peppers them with psychoanalytic metaphors, but more than the meaning, what matters is the signifier, the visible, which here reaches the zenith of that "sublime and perverse” has always been sought after in his poetics.
May 2016
