Ciribiribì, Kodak

#television #memories 

Young people today cannot understand the emotion we felt when, upon returning from vacation, maybe fifteen days later if you had something to do, you finally collected the envelope that contained the photographs of the holidays. And you magically leapt back to the places and moments you left behind.
You took out twenty-four prints if you were in hardship, or thirty-six when you wanted to abound and the destination of the journey deserved. Of course you weren't wasting the shots to take idiotic selfies or to immortalize the brioche in the bar or the spaghetti in the restaurant. Each frame was a discovery and forever fixed an unrepeatable moment.
In the seventies, I remember, Polaroid came into fashion, which immediately printed what you photographed on self-developing film. We felt modern to own it.
My father was one who loved to keep up with the times and with the news. At a certain point a small viewer appeared in the house, the View-Master. You put strange double discs in them and the photos seemed three-dimensional.
And the film to print on was always Kodak.
Until the nineties a commercial was shot with a nice alien with telekinesis who took souvenir photos and wanted them printed strictly on Kodak paper, speaking a language all his own.
Ciribirbi Kodak, he said.
He was played by Davide Marotta, a Neapolitan actor suffering from dwarfism, famous for having worked with Fellini and Dario Argento.
Those were years in which science fiction was still on the rage and the commercials were shot with the same air of legendary films such as Act of Force (by Paul Verhoeven), without many special effects but equally evocative. All you needed was a briefcase, a computer screen, a few models of a spaceship and you dreamed.