I do not consider my AI films demonstrations of technology. Artificial intelligence enters the process as painting, photography, sound and editing do: it helps construct images capable of lying just enough to say something true. Since 2023 I have used this cinema to move through surveillance, identity, memory, violence and human fragility.
Three works define the directions of this research with particular clarity: American Musical, a political film about the collapse of the American dream; Three Films After Midnight, an experimental triptych about Paris and the end of romantic love; and My Memorial of the Madhouse Circus, a social work about madness seen from within. A general introduction to the project is also published by Acquistare Arte, while the complete AI filmography brings together thirteen titles made between 2023 and 2026.
American Musical: an autopsy of the American dream
American Musical is a deeply political film. It does not celebrate the United States; it studies the body left behind after the party. Quiet suburbs, illuminated houses, motionless streets and family rituals become the stage for a community suspended between longing and fear. Everyday space still carries the visual order of the American promise, but that order no longer protects anyone.
A figure in jeans and a faded camouflage parka appears on rooftops like a spectral witness: not quite a soldier, a hero or a killer. He is an ambiguous presence, half myth and half threat, making the pressure of violence visible above apparently ordinary lives. The images may recall Gregory Crewdson’s uneasy precision and Norman Rockwell’s narrative America, but this world has been emptied of the confidence that once held those scenes together.
At the centre of the film is the allegory of regicide: the symbolic killing of authority, tradition and the nation’s founding myths. In America, this gesture does not remain merely metaphorical. It can become lived reality through the blind violence of a world unable to choose between transformation and stagnation. The musical of the title is therefore an anti-musical: the choreography continues, but the collective promise has ended.
Three Films After Midnight: three dreams in one night
Three Films After Midnight is the most openly experimental work. The three shorts do not form a collection but a single journey through three temperatures: the black and white of lost love, the rain of desire and the hallucinatory colour of a cinema contemplating its own ending.
In Paris with Love
Paris appears grainy, almost imprinted on 16mm film. Two figures cross streets, rooms, cafés and corridors in search of a love that had already ended before it began. The narrative breaks into details — a glance, a cigarette, a sentence, a door leading nowhere — and love stops being a feeling to become a visual ghost.
Dancing in the Paris Rain
The city opens to rain, wet boulevards and reflected light. A dance begins almost accidentally, then becomes an obsession and finally a ritual. Movement is the characters’ only way not to disappear. Rain seems to wash everything, yet erases nothing: it holds the traces of desire and sends them back into circulation.
La nouvelle nouvelle vague est finie
In the third episode the dream explodes into the colour of a fake 1950s summer: pop, absurd and sunburnt. The Nouvelle Vague is not simply quoted or celebrated; it is loved, betrayed and sabotaged. There is no longer such a thing as pure cinema, pure love or pure Paris. Each frame is simultaneously memory, artifice, nostalgia, artificial intelligence and future.
This is what the trilogy tells us: after midnight every image is still looking for someone to love. AI makes it possible to hold incompatible eras, lost images and images that never existed within the same space. It does not reconstruct the past; it produces its unstable memory.
My Memorial of the Madhouse Circus: madness, irony and testimony
My Memorial of the Madhouse Circus is a social and political film about human fragility. In a few minutes it crosses the suffering of existence, moves from pain to irony and arrives at an ending that breaks through fiction. The cinematic image becomes photographic and painterly reportage, seen from an insider’s perspective.
I did not want to use madness as spectacle or decorative metaphor. The madhouse-circus is a system of gazes: who watches, who is watched and who decides what is normal. Irony does not soften pain; it prevents tragedy from becoming a fixed, reassuring image. The film was officially selected by Punkfilmfest Berlin, scheduled for 20 October 2025.
The other AI films: a practice, not a parenthesis
These three shorts belong to a wider body of work. The early films — The Beginning of AI: The Elephant in the Room, 100 Kisses, Under Observation and The Little Girl and the Wolves — establish the relationship between synthetic image, control and narrative from 2023 onward. In 2025 the practice expands through Under the Lawn, The Lost Tape, The Dying, Coreography of Random Ideas and Anatomy of My Dreams: Tribute to Jean Cocteau. In 2026 it continues with The F**ing Midwest and Three Films After Midnight.
The complete sequence is available on the AI video and experimental cinema page and on my FilmFreeway profile. Seen together, the films reveal their continuity with my earlier work: the body as a field of tension, the room as a mental space, photography as evidence and cinema as a montage of incompatible memories.
The image after the image
For me, the question is not whether an image was produced by a machine. It is what that image can see of our present. American Musical looks at political myth after its rupture; Three Films After Midnight looks at love after romantic cinema; My Memorial of the Madhouse Circus looks at fragility beyond the boundary between reality and hallucination. AI does not erase direction: it makes it even more responsible.
Film stills and use
© Massimo Scognamiglio. The film stills and images are published as documentation of the works. Publication does not grant a reuse licence. For editorial or screening enquiries, contact the studio.
