Cinema Volta

Cinema Volta is a memoir, a quirky performance piece, an ear-popping and eye-grabbing reverie about electricity and its transforming power. In twelve stories that pulsate and migrate across the screen, narrator Jim Petrillo considers the strange lives of great inventors of the nineteenth century: Alessandro Volta, Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, Samuel Morse, and Nicola Tesla. But don't expect a dry treatise on the history of science. Petrillo's idiosyncratic perspective takes in the history of Sicily; Shelley and Byron's shenanigans during the summer of 1816 (Byron's daughter, Ada, wrote the first computer program); Joyce's X-rated love letters to Nora (the program takes its name from a movie theater opened by Joyce in Trieste in 1909); the cave paintings of Lascaux; Frankenstein; naked people; vampires; big noise; and the artist's own childhood memories. Often ironic (electricity was first used, he notes, to make dead frogs twitch), Petrillo's commentary weaves together an arresting collage of images and text. The subtitle promises "Weird Science and Childhood Memories." Weird it is, and not for everyone. But like any cult favorite, it has its fans.