Southern Italian Documentaries

Cristo si è fermato a Eboli and the Southern Question

In 1945, Carlo Levi's "Cristo si è fermato a Eboli" was published, a novel-memoir born from the author's years of confinement (1935-1936) in Lucania.
Levi's work, filled with amazement and bitterness, delineates the deepest South as entirely separate from the rest of Italy.
This radical otherness was simultaneously:
- Economic: subsistence agriculture and remittances from emigrants were the main sources of support.
- Cultural-religious: Christianity was grafted onto a very strong pagan religiosity, sustained by widespread illiteracy.
- Political: Fascist rhetoric had no hold in these places, except among the notables.
Levi's report, detaching itself from traditional studies of the South, automatically became an invitation to travel, not only literary.
Soon after, neorealism, as Alberto Farassino wrote, would attempt to explore Italy on a large scale.
Even without exhibiting the neorealist label, it is undeniable that post-war cinema, shifting its geographical axis in new directions, activated a long southern strand that Ennio Flaiano ironically called "southern."
Apart from Visconti's example (La terra trema [1948]) and, subsequently, much of Rosi's filmography – who also made a film adaptation of Levi's work in 1979 – most of the works referred either to literature (Verga, Capuana, Pirandello, Deledda) or to a consolidated genre tradition, which was reflected in comedy, melodrama, or historical-adventure films.
Within this container remain, perhaps out of context, traces of Levi's "separateness": for example, in Monicelli's Il medico e lo stregone (1957), Comencini's Pane, amore e fantasia (1953), Zampa's Anni ruggenti (1962).

Southern Documentary

In documentary filmmaking, which experienced significant growth in the post-war period due to protectionist laws, there was a wide gap between productive quantity and filmic quality, or simply informative incisiveness.
For example, it is almost impossible to find films that document the occupation of land, which had great journalistic echoes.
Simplifying the analysis, the southern documentary repertoire essentially includes two containers/models:
- The first groups together the propagandistic exaltation – linguistically a child of the fascist newsreel – of public works: dams, land reclamation, water consortia, anti-malarial campaigns.
- The second, folklore, landscape, artistic beauties.
Within this standardized universe:
- The duration of the films was not to exceed twelve minutes.
- There were almost never dialogues or direct recordings.
- The voice-over commentary was often redundant if not metonymic with respect to the images.
However, both some authorial personalities and an intentionally exploratory tendency – the Demartinian documentary – which involved intellectuals engaged in ethnographic field research can be found.

Fiorenzo Serra's Documentaries

Both "authorialism" and exploratory tendencies are also linked to the neorealist influence.
Fiorenzo Serra, from Sassari, author of over fifty documentaries on Sardinia in the years between 1947 and 1969, trained at the CineGuf in Florence and, as an aspiring filmmaker in contact with the cultural opposition, received the sense of the first pre-war realist theorizations, those that would lead Visconti to shoot Ossessione (1943):
- Drawing directly on the environmental, geographical, cultural, anthropological sources of a country; in this case, Sardinia.
In the post-war period, he would be the producer, director, photographer, and editor of his works, whose almost unique theme is economic and cultural separateness.
Determined to visually define – despite the limitations of the duration of the works – the boundaries of this world, the director spent several months "collecting" the filmic materials and shot mainly in sequence shots to try to respect the times of rural civilization, adapting to the seasonality of events.
Films about artisans working with plant fibers were linked to spring (collection of asphodel) and summer (drying of fibers and processing of baskets).
The small terracotta industry involved visualizing the summer excavation of wells.
Transhumance forced one to follow, on foot, the shepherds of Barbagia who, in winter, went down towards the sea.
It should be added that these activities were not at all folklore, but represented the economic base of the island.
With these anomalies, the director from Sassari managed to float excellently between art and industry, staying within the distribution standards that allowed the circulation of his short films in cinemas, but remaining, precisely because of his own production, a true author.
His poetics oscillated between the search for the "true everyday life" (perhaps spectacularized with color, as would later happen with De Seta) in the different island geographies, and awareness of the necessary and imminent social and economic change.
In the early sixties, after a long filmography that includes authentic masterpieces such as Pescatori di corallo (1952), Costa Nord (1955), Nei paesi dell’argilla (1955), Feste della Barbagia (1955), Artigiani della creta (1956), Desulo (1957), San Costantino (1957), Serra will shoot a feature film, L’ultimo pugno di terra (1965), recently restored by the Cineteca di Bologna and the Cineteca Sarda.
The film, which was awarded at the Festival dei Popoli in 1966, although representing a synthesis of the thematic and geographical journey conducted in the previous decade, is guided by a new bitter awareness: Sardinia remained a backward, closed island, with its unresolved problems and its archaic beauties, while the beginning of the industrial era was marked by the great emigration to Northern Europe.

Francesco Alliata's Sicilian Cinema

Sicilian Francesco Alliata is known above all for his activities as a producer (Stromboli [1950], La carrozza d’oro [1952]) but recently his direction has also been highlighted, almost always signed together with colleagues and friends Quintino di Napoli, Renzo Avanzo, Renzo Rossellini, Pietro Moncada and Fosco Maraini, names that marked the short season of post-war Sicilian cinema.
Passionate about photography, Alliata became an operator of war newsreels and, in 1946, experimented, together with the aforementioned collaborators, with the first underwater cinematographic shots (Cacciatori sottomarini [1946]), where, alongside the innocent trip of the three protagonists with fins, masks and rifles, Stromboli majestically rises in full eruption, a constant and menacing presence of the entire Aeolian archipelago.
Tonnara, Tra Scilla e Cariddi in 1947 and Bianche Eolie and Isole di Cenere in 1948 will follow, which make use of a refined photography by Fosco Maraini.
These four films – together with Opera dei Pupi (1947) – have also recently been restored by the Cineteca di Bologna.
Common to the entire South facing the sea are Tonnara and Tra Scilla e Cariddi:
- The first dedicated to the practice, still used today, of constructing large cages of nets, surrounded by boats, to trap tuna that, in spring, go towards the shore to lay their eggs.
- The second instead follows the hunt for swordfish with a harpoon, aboard small rowing boats, where, on a long pole, an observer is hoisted, a fundamental figure of a now disappeared tradition.
The themes will then appear in Vittorio De Seta's documentaries and, as regards tuna fishing and subsequent processing of the catch on site, also in Serra (Il giorno della mattanza and La tonnara, both in 1962) who has in common with Alliata a descriptive didacticism: voice "off", maps of the area, history of fishing.
Similar in the three authors mentioned is also the meticulous attention to the choreutics of the fishermen, which ends up becoming a true ritual.
In Alliata there is then the constant use of a sound in which the cries and songs of the fishermen are mixed, an important element of realistic construction that will appear above all in Tra Scilla e Cariddi.
Here the director opens the didactic framework to show the small community of the Strait of Messina which, ashore, waits trustingly for the coveted capture of the swordfish, on which the survival of the town depends.
Furthermore, the dead times of fishing favor a sort of exploration/stalking of the bodies and faces of the fishermen that seems to anticipate the classical plasticity of certain shots of La terra trema.
And even the ending, with the wholesaler approaching the boat to buy the fish, is already a Verghian/Viscontian theme: the fishermen are cataloged among the "losers" of the South.
The most interesting short films, however, are dedicated to the Aeolian Islands (Bianche Eolie and Isole di cenere, both from 1948), also by virtue of the object itself of the documentation: a distant world, not touched in any way by metropolitan civilization.
There is also a sort of contrast between a socio-anthropological diagram permeated with tragedy, and the beauty of the places and human figures.
In the three large scenic-narrative sequences in which the film is divided:
- The fishing boat with three women.
- The baker who, weekly, announces the sale of bread with the sound of the horn.
- The blinding pumice mine.
There is in fact, alongside the synthetic description of the isolation of Panarea, a great figurative refinement of the bodies, almost derived from Greek vase painting.
Not very different is the setting of Isole di cenere, shot in Vulcano, and also divided, this one, into three different scenes:
- Rabbit hunting with ferret.
- The shepherd who loads the sheep into a boat to take them to graze on another island.
- The return of the fishing boats while the alarm is given for the eruption of Stromboli.
Whose meticulous realism ends up symbolizing everyday life.
Alliata will shoot other documentaries in Sicily: Sagre dell’Isola, Inverno in fiore, Culla dei miti, Mondo di pietra, Itinerario dei Mille, Opera dei Pupi.
The latter is certainly the most interesting, both for the didactic aspect once again (the description of the techniques of the puppeteers, as well as the typicality of the stories dedicated to the Trojan War and the cycle of Orlando, reconstructed in exteriors), and for a scenic language that puts the spectators at the center of the representation, especially children, enthusiastic participants in the myth.

Vittorio De Seta's Documentaries

The second name of Sicilian documentary cinematography, Vittorio De Seta, is also the best known: his films enjoy a fairly imposing bibliography
For production methods and cultural approach, De Seta's cinema moves in the same areas as Serra and Alliata.
The director produces his works, shoots with a very small crew – his wife, Vera Gherarducci is the sound technician – photographs and edits alone.
Many themes, starting from fishing (Lu tempu de lu pisci spata [1954], Contadini del mare [1955], Pescherecci [1958]), to arrive at the traditional peasant world (Parabola d’oro [1955]) are found, as has already been written, throughout southern cinematography.
The peculiarity of De Seta's films lies instead in what Alberto Farassino defines as the author's "operatic" mode, that is, the construction of "great melodramas of work, land and sea".
Totally devoid of the didactic "off" voice, the entire "corpus" of Seta's documentaries is, in contrast, very rich in real sounds, skillfully mixed as a sort of spectacular construction of the "veristic" type:
- Songs of the fishermen.
- Shouts of the swordfish and tuna spotters.
- Musical rhythms of popular dances.
- Deafening noises of mechanical excavators in the sulfur mine and of fishing boat engines.
- Band sounds and drum rolls that accompany the mysteries of Easter.
- Branches moved by the wind.
- Cut branches.
- Crackling fires of the shepherds.
- Cowbells of the sheep.
A real soundtrack.
The narrative reconstruction of the events is also absent.
It is rather, as in the theater – or in the opera – the scenic scan, arbitrarily constructed in editing, with plenty of dead times functional to the slowness and repetitiveness of those existences, to dictate the construction of meaning.
Typical of this theatricality is the extraordinary and mysterious scenographic apparatus that dominates Pasqua in Sicilia (1955), with the various ceremonies that from San Fratello to Caltanisetta and then to Enna, celebrate the passion and resurrection of Christ.
From the cruel masks of the Jews who play the horn and announce the condemnation of Jesus, we move on to the ascent to Calvary, a sort of sacred representation that is almost carnivalesque, but theatrically bloody, in which the spectators themselves become "actors".
Finally, in the Resurrection, the initial scene seems to recover the masks of the Opera dei Pupi, identifying the actors who run through the village in the apostles in search of the risen Jesus.
Equally mysterious is the beginning of I dimenticati (1959), in the mountains of Pollino.
The caravan that, on foot or with mules, supplies a mountain village with basic necessities, which is accessed through a single path, seems to announce adventurous suspense.
The long sequence remains without explanation until you arrive in the village.
Here begins another story, the annual rite of Spring, that is, the cutting of a large fir tree that is then brought into the village to become the tree of plenty.
In some way, with this film, we are already in the field of Demartinian documentary, even if there is no trace of a conscious adherence of De Seta to the studies of the ethnologist.
As for Alliata, a Viscontian influence has also been evoked for De Seta, that is, the classic mixture of La terra trema, between verismo and melodrama.
But on a more properly documentary level, De Seta's form is, however, at least in Italy, the most direct – and perhaps also conscious – filiation of two parallel theorizations and two practices, that of John Grierson and Robert Flaherty.
From the first, with all social reformism removed, we learned by assonance with the famous introduction to Drifters (1929).
«[…] if you can tell me a story more compelling than the departure of the ships for the herring season, the outing at sea, the nets cast in the evening, the long wait adrift, the recovery of the nets during a storm with enormous exertion of muscles, the return home with contrary sea […] I promise you that I will use it for my next film» $(5)$ .
To the second, a sort of scenic artifice that, starting from real shots, arrives at a reconstruction of a world, a community with emblematic traits.
This synthesis is present in all the titles, with the simple temporality dawn/sunset – that is, symbolic repetition of an eternal existential cycle – to frame in Surfarara (1955) and Parabola d’oro.
In the first the lights of the evening, and the horizons that stand out along the path that brings the miners home, represent the exit from the hell of the sulfur galleries; in the second, the peasants who return home on mules loaded with sacks of grain, come across modern machines that will soon replace them.
But it is above all in the diptych shot in Barbagia, Pastori di Orgosolo and Un giorno in Barbagia, both from 1958, that the Grierson/Flaherty unification is fully shown.
In the first title there is the London "struggle for life" of the shepherds surprised by the storm in the mountains; in the second the arbitrary unification of different countries (Orgosolo, Oliena, Mamoiada) in which, daily, the same almost ritual existence is lived:
- Absent adult males.
- Women working in the fields.
- Children cheerfully leaving school.
- Elderly women who care for newborns and infants, and prepare the fire for cooking bread.
- Old men sitting on the threshold of doors.
And finally, the evening arrival of the bus, the only contact between those closed worlds and the life of the cities.

Demartinian Documentary

The term "Demartinian documentary" was born in the ethnographic field no earlier than the seventies, when an attempt was made to retrospectively unify a varied filmography that had Ernesto de Martino's research in the southern world and in particular in Lucania and Salento as its cultural horizon.
The field of observation, described by the scholar as "non-folkloristic" and not dependent on classical meridionalism, of a political-economic type, was programmatically oriented towards the complexity of cultural and religious life, linked to a true historical and anthropological differential, compared to the rest of Italy, and in particular to metropolitan cultures $(6)$ .
This declaration seems to underline a criticism both towards those documentaries, even by authors, in which a sort of romantic amazement for the "still time" prevails, and for those, such as Cristo non si è fermato a Eboli (1952) by Michele Gandin, who hoped for the modernist transformation of the South.
Curiously, Gandin will be the director with whom Ernesto De Martino will collaborate, in 1953, for Lamento funebre, a short film in which Lucania is still that of Levi, in the landscape devastated by earthquakes and floods, and in the funeral rites, characterized by the lament of the women of the town.
To find other examples of this influence/collaboration we must arrive in 1958 with Magia Lucana by Luigi di Gianni, which still boasts in the opening credits, the name of the scholar, and is shot between Potenza and Matera.
The following year, the same Di Gianni, without the direct contribution of De Martino, will shoot Nascita e morte nel Meridione and then Cecilia Mangini's Stendalì, certainly the most famous film in this series, especially for the participation in the project of Pier Paolo Pasolini, translator/reconstructor of the funeral laments in Greek, read in voice "off" by Lilla Brignone.
Again, in 1960, Lino Del Fra, again with the text by Ernesto De Martino, directs La passione del grano, a long and complex rite linked to Demeter/Ceres, that is, to the rebirth of life (the wheat) after the harvest, which is however grafted onto the Christian tradition, with the passion and death of Christ, a vehicle of rebirth for the whole world.
In 1961, with La Taranta by Gianfranco Mingozzi, in whose titles De Martino still appears, a new cycle begins, dedicated to magical practices, in particular to tarantism, that is, to the obsessive music that should cure the convulsions caused by the bite of an insect.
I maciari by Giuseppe Ferrara (the last title in which the name of the scholar appears, flanked by that of one of his students, Clara Gallini) will follow, that is, the "magicians", healers that the director and his prestigious consultants, identify in three geographical locations: again Basilicata, then Salento, and finally Calabria.
A theme similar to tarantism is also that of Il male di San Donato (1965), again signed by Luigi di Gianni, with the consultancy of another student of De Martino (who died in 1965): Annabella Rossi.
In Montesano, in Salento, epileptics and mentally ill people are accompanied to the Basilica of San Donato, protector of these infirm.
A geographical variation of these themes is also Il ballo delle vedove (1963) by Giuseppe Ferrara, which makes use of the consultancy of Gallini, and theatricalizes the healing rites practiced, in Barbagia and Oristano, in Sardinia, on those who have been stung by the argia, a poisonous spider.
Finally, with I fujenti (1966), by the same Di Gianni, the theme of southern "separateness" rejoins traditional folklore, taking up the great summer festival at the sanctuary of the Madonna dell’Arco, in the municipality of Sant’Anastasia, on the slopes of Vesuvius.
To this meager list, we can add, for commonality of themes and geographical contiguity, the following films by Di Gianni:
- La madonna di Pierno (1965), shot in Basilicata in the homonymous sanctuary where a religious rite with a pagan base takes place annually.
- Il Messia (1965), dedicated to the Sephardic Jewish community that lives in the Gargano.
- Viaggio in Lucania (1966).
- Il culto delle pietre (1967), with another story of healing through magical stones placed near a Christian sanctuary.
- La potenza degli spiriti (1968), again dedicated to healing rites halfway between paganism and Christianity.
- L’attaccatura (1971), story of a sorceress from Foggia who lives in Naples.
- Morte e Grazia (1971), and finally the famous La Madonna del Pollino (1971), shot during the country festival.
This last film is quite in line with other "folkloric" documentaries by De Seta (for example I dimenticati) or by Serra (San Costantino, Feste della Barbagia).
It should also be emphasized that the latest titles appear at a time when the cinematographic documentary has already hybridized with the television investigation.
The voices and sounds of reality are used more, as in De Seta, and the interviews with the protagonists become a true text parallel to the visual one.
Exemplary of this mutation is, in 1977, the program of the Second Rai network, Sud e magia, signed by Gianfranco Mingozzi and Annabella Rossi, in which not only is the film La Taranta recovered, but it is reread with the help of the witnesses of a time (for example the barber-musician who performed the healing rites) and of observers, more inclined to scientific truth, such as the medical officer who has cataloged the "tarantati" according to real psychiatric pathologies common to the poorest social classes.
In the contrast between myth and reality, that is, between a factual description not always marked by Demartinian historicism, and the sociological investigation on the transformation of the South due to the economic "boom", there is a good part of the unitary fabric of the Demartinian documentary, which at the time was not much loved neither by scholars of ethnography, nor by film critics.
The former, suspicious of the uninhibited use of audiovisual techniques as a parallel, if not substitutive, "documentary proof" to the traditional oral field investigations, argued that mode of production and filmic form (voice "off", little attention to spoken word and testimonies, arbitrary editing of sequences, generic temporality, episodicity of descriptions) did not guarantee any scientificity.
The latter lamented a lack of authorship $(7)$ .
In fact, if it is easy to reread southern documentarism through the eyes of De Seta, Serra or Alliata, the Demartinian series has only one name that can be associated with the first three, Luigi di Gianni.
His didactic-descriptive style in Magia Lucana, which explores various forms of exorcism, or in I fujenti, with the explanation of the gestures of the participants in the procession and its historical origins, is distinguished without difficulty; and even the expressionistic and symbolic accentuation of Nascita e morte nel Meridione does not undermine the ultimate sense, à la Levi, of the film: birth and death as the only events in the life of southern peasants.
On the contrary, the open theatricalization of other titles, even famous ones, such as La Taranta, Stendalì, or La passione del grano, confirm the doubts of the observers of the time.
Of the first title, the final sequences dedicated to the festival of San Pietro e Paolo in Galatina di Puglia remain unforgettable, with the arrival of the "tarantati" who, like medieval plebs, await healing in front of the church, while around them, the musicians continue with their exorcisms.
But the beginning, with the description of the home ritual, smacks too much of an artificial reconstruction.
Stendalì, despite the fame due to the name of Pasolini, is practically a film ruined by the "off" sound.
Mangini's direction captures the sense of "trance" transmitted by the funeral litanies.
But the Italian translation and above all the emphatic recitation of Lilla Brignone, create a bothersome redundancy that normalizes the mystery.
Finally, in La passione del grano, it seems that the ethnographic description is a sort of script for a reconstruction/recitation imposed on the peasants.
A final consideration must finally be made on the current legacies of the documentarism that we have defined as southern.
The films of Serra, Alliata, De Seta, have re-emerged from the obscurity of the archives thanks to their indisputable authorship.
The Demartinian documentaries have been saved by ethnographic museums as a filmic specialization for scientific use.
But paradoxically, their charm, despite the scholar's warnings, has been permanently pigeonholed in the folkloric dimension, as a repertoire of images, also coming from a lost world, but without the eyes of an artist who redeems their simple documentation.