A film that takes images from hundreds of film noirs, mostly but not only American, to create a chronological collage of intriguing and captivating moments that, dislocated from their context, build new visual landscapes. An iconoclastic zig-zag through the material of cinema, which becomes an essay on the tropes and recurrences of one of the most striking genres in the history of cinema.
Serge Daney understood the relationship between the director and the film critic as a tennis match, in which the ball was, in turn, the film and the critical text. ragtag is, to some extent, an inversion of this, making the spectator-director-critic the ball, played back and forth between one film and another. Giuseppe Boccassini, who works primarily with found footage, makes his first feature films with this zigzagging journey through classic film noir, reducing narration to a minimum and concentrating on the power of gestures, close-ups and compositional recurrences. The back-and-forth montage is somewhere between Martin Arnold’s filmic ouevre and João Onofre’s looped video-installations from films like Martha, L’Eclisse and 2001. To a certain extent, this way of launching us, disoriented, into a wealth of more or less recognizable titles translates, metaphorically, the anguish of the spectator before choosing a film, in the times of maximum digital accessibility. Cinephilia as hypnosis. (Ricardo Vieira Lisboa)
