Achille Castiglioni: Things made from nothing.

During a long interview, Achille Castiglioni speaks to us from simple shots taken with a digital movie camera in the year 2000. His amused dryness, people who knew him say, is a countenance he held all throughout his life. A large part of the interview is previously unseen footage taken in Castiglioni's studio on Piazza Castello in Milan, today the headquarters of the Fondazione run by his wife and two daughters. Castiglioni worked here for over 40 years. Everything has been preserved: 306 industrial-design objects, 191 architectural projects, 400 designs for temporary displays at trade shows and exhibitions, plus photographs, technical drawings and prototypes. Then there are objects of daily use that he collected from all around the world to study, use and transform into something else. He called them anonymous masterpieces. See the empty film reel he took as the base of the table lamp Lampadina.

Castiglioni’s dogged pursuit was reducing components to a minimum. He took away, never adding, in a creative process full of humour and joy. Indeed, toys were a great source of inspiration to him. He bought them for his children and then kept them for himself, even bringing them to the lessons he gave at the Milan Polytechnic. One of his students was Patricia Urquiola. She appears in the documentary, busily preparing the celebratory exhibition on Castiglioni at the Triennale di Milano (until 20.1.2019). She, like others in the film, speaks of a highly empathic man with a fun, spirited personality. He was a master at looking at the most elementary objects with a different eye. "You need to observe obvious and commonplace behaviour in order to discover if things can be done in another way," he said. But the portrait of this man's life and work would be incomplete without mentioning his profound seriousness, dedication and almost magical, demiurgic, maieutic capacities. These allowed Castiglioni to not only create new objects that would change the lives of all of us, but also lead clients to where he wanted them in order to realise his visions.

Several elements in the movie are inspired by his playfulness and wryness: the lively, circussy music and the young timbre of the narrator's voice. The voice belongs to Federica Fracassi, who connects the documentary's different sections in a straightforward, no-nonsense manner similar to the way Castiglioni's creations come across. Viewers are introduced to him as a protagonist of Italy's golden age of design, when manufacturers and architects collaborated on a virtuosic production process whose pieces responded to the practical requirement of use, the aesthetic requirement of beauty and the ethical requirement of accessibility. For 45 minutes, we all become students of a man who left many traces of his passing on this Earth – small ones like the Rompitratta light switch that are giant icons worthy of celebration.