Alberto Grifi, born to a camera inventor in 1938, quickly becomes a man of all trades in the heart of Cinecittà, Rome: he is photographer, cameraman, screenwriter, sound engineer, author of various projects for the invention of particular cinematographic machines. An inventor by necessity, his desire for filming some version of reality and without the restrictions of the usual industry would lead him to invent a series of machines. The vidigrafo, conceived while filming Anna in order to convert from video, a format more adapted to his documentary practice of closely following his subject in any possible situation—a practice inspired by Zavattini’s theory of cinema of shadowing—to 16 mm, his preferred medium of production and projection. Another machine, born of the desire to save the degrading of magnetic tape films, would clean magnetic bands. Acting as much for independence in the cinema as in politics, he would investigate mental health and young revolutionary movements during the 1970s, and later in his life he would even lead several research projects about theories of vision, the biological evolution of the eye, and the invention of more machines.