DUéL by Gino Lucente Closes the Piccolo Grande Cinema Festival: A Dream/Nightmare Between Buñuel and Spielberg

The final event of Piccolo Grande Cinema brings to the screen of Cinema Arlecchino a visual and sonic experience that pushes beyond the boundaries of traditional cinema. At the center of the evening is DUéL, the new video installation by experimental artist and musician Gino Lucente, created as part of the collaboration between Cineteca Milano and Casa degli Artisti, where Lucente is currently in residence.

DueL Flyer, elaborazione grafica di Gino Lucente

In DUéL, Lucente weaves together two films distant in time yet surprisingly close in psychological tension: Él by Luis Buñuel (1953) and Duel by Steven Spielberg (1971). In the thirteen-minute looped montage, fragments of the two films unfold in a tight, nervous, mirroring dialogue. Images chase each other, overlap, dissolve and intensify, while an original sound composition shapes the atmosphere of the entire installation.

The result is a “double cinematic dream/nightmare,” as described by Matteo Pavesi, director of Cineteca Milano, who accompanied Lucente throughout the creation of the project.

“DUéL’s montage,” Pavesi explains, “is an explosion of obsessions, jealousy, and death drives. Spielberg dreams Buñuel and vice versa, and the viewer becomes trapped in this hall of mirrors.” The title, merging the two films, is not merely a tribute but the spark that ignites an artwork capable of capturing the paranoia and loss of control at the heart of twentieth-century cinematic imagination.

Gino Lucente, Loro 3, 2022, light box in resina e polvere di marmo. 28x25x8cm. Courtesy Galleria Lorenzo Vatalaro.

DUéL is the latest chapter in the collaboration between Lucente, Cineteca Milano, and Casa degli Artisti, coordinated by Lorenzo Vatalaro. Over the past two years, this partnership has generated a rich body of shared research: from Sagra, the film-collage blending Lucente’s visual and musical vocabulary, to the live soundtracks for The Phantom Carriage by Sjöström and Hitchcock’s The Lodger, and finally the musical accompaniment for Protazanov’s Aelita.

Now, DUéL expands this dialogue into an autonomous, immersive audiovisual device.

The event will also feature a DJ set by Lucente himself, extending into sound the pulses, anxieties, and reverberations of the video installation. A vibrant finale that merges experimental cinema, electronic music, and visual research.

Cinema Arlecchino

Via San Pietro all’Orto 9, Milano

Date

15 novembre 2025