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Introduction by Manuela Gieri
No full textIn the introduction to the volume, the author outlines the development of Italian cinema from its early days to the present
Introduction: For a New ecology of the Gaze in Contemporary Italian Cinema
No full textOver the past few decades, as we have entered the new millennium, Italian
cinema has undergone a fairly apparent transformation, and yet one that
was somewhat announced in the early 1990s. If we were to try and give a
panoramic picture of such national cinema in this new stage of its development,
we would have to observe a frequent tendency to rewrite space,
both the one we inhabit in a difficult daily relationship between inside and
outside, city and country, culture and nature, and the one we conceive as
a generally termed Southern space of the world in its diverse articulations,
as landscape and as environment in both natural and cultural terms
Basilicata and Southern Italy Between Film and Ecology
No full textThe authors have decided to gather within this volume a collection of essays on Southern Italy, cinema, and ecology, which with different approaches and diverse viewpoints return to ponder on the Southern question and the meridian thought from a specific ecocritical perspective.
The volume is divided into four parts, each of which contains three essays preceded by a brief exordium. The first section, “Travels, Paths, Narratives” (Chaps. 2, 3, 4, and 5), collects the images of a journey toward the South and through the South. It is a journey that unravels through different stories and narratives, at the slow pace of walking (or riding a mule), in which we are projected as strangers moving toward a mysterious and unknown otherness or engaged as natives in the obstinate, attentive defense of our historical-cultural heritage. At the same time, it is a journey that offers an encounter with the past, an ideal and fairy-tale imaginary, and the experience of an interior and initiatory journey toward the future. Lastly, in the face of the complexity of the South, this journey must inevitably find its end in the beginning of another.
The second section, “Places, Landscapes, Relations” (Chaps. 6, 7, 8, and 9), conveys the emotions and moods of the encounter with the South. It is an encounter that embraces different places and landscapes, between fascinating and suggestive scenarios and deserted and hostile ones, with the mysterious sounds of uninhabited places and the silence of abandoned villages, through the lively voices of peasant communities and the deafening noises of cities. It is an encounter that establishes relations between landscapes and environments, centrality and marginality, places of the past and present places. It is an encounter with the archaic purity of peasant civilizations, magical and ritualistic symbolisms, and new ecocritical placeologies, in the comparison between poetics of the landscape and philosophies of the environment. In it is found the emotion of a gaze that suggests other possible gazes.
The third section, “History, Memories, Identities” (Chaps. 10, 11, 12, and 13), weaves the fabric of the South through stories and remembrances, offering a comparison between real and imaginary, myth and reality. It is a plot that develops through the expressions of oppressed and uprooted characters and through lost, claimed, and recovered identities, which emerge as much from fictional representations as from documentary films. The plural identity of the South reverberates through the relationship between film, history, and cultural memory, in which images intertwine with anthropological research, meridian thought, and poetics, in a continuous dialogue made up of symbols, meanings, and interpretations. It is the construction of a history that opens up to other histories.
The last section of the volume, “Conflicts, Traumas, Reconstructions” (Chaps. 14, 15, 16, and 17), attempts to reconstruct the link between present and past in a world that, full of symbols and myths, remains perpetually suspended between ancient tradition and modernity. In the sign of a world steeped in ancient gestures and rituals, struck and violated by a wild and destructive industrialization irrespective of territories and their cultures, the images return to highlight connections and meanings, opening up to new reflections on the South and its possible futures. They are images that recompose a painting that inevitably remains partially completed and not definitive, suggesting other paths and different narrations for new studies and further research
Basilicata Inside and Outside. Lucanian Landscape and Postwar Nonfiction Cinema
No full textThis chapter investigates how Italian nonfiction cinema portrayed Basilicata during the post–World War II years, paying special attention to the dynamics between inside and outside as a key aesthetic factor in understanding the image of the region. During the 1950s, the Lucanian cinematic landscape, devoid of any recognizable landmarks when compared to other regions of the South, gained the special status of an archaic and mysterious world. In the wake of Carlo Levi’s Christ Stopped at Eboli (1947) and the research conducted by Ernesto de Martino, many artists and documentarists visited the area in order to grasp its secrets, making the interpenetration of internal and external a recurring trope in representing public and private activities. The main argument of the chapter is that in films like Michele Gandin’s Cristo non si è fermato a Eboli (Christ Did Not Stopped at Eboli, 1952), and in many other documentaries such as L’Italia non è un paese povero (Italy Is Not a Poor Country, Ivens 1960), towns like Matera and its surrounding areas have frequently been described as highlighting the unique connection joining inside and outside, as well as chronotopes, such as the road and the threshold. Many photographers working in Basilicata at that time approached the Southern landscape in the same way: in particular, ethnographic photography and photojournalism have represented a visual language deeply affecting the style of Italian documentaries and, more generally, neorealist aesthetics since the end of the 1940s
Ecophilosophy and the Human/Nonhuman Relation in Michelangelo Frammartino’s Alberi
No full textWithin the broad context of arboreal rites and symbologies of the tree, as well as in reference to metamorphoses into plants in ancient mythologies, and starting from transdisciplinarity, on which this volume is based as the interconnection and hybridization of disciplinar corpora, this chapter focuses on relations and interactions between human and nonhuman. In this regard, the representation of human body (corpus) metamorphosis appears to be a key aspect of ecological thinking, to sustain an environmentalist ethics based on the idea that all living beings form an ecologically interconnected system. Through the link between memory and tradition, present and past, visible and invisible, the metamorphosis of human being into a tree becomes the expressive means for a film-ecological investigation on the real that abandons anthropocentric vision and offers the sense of belonging to the world in an original, pure connection with the nonhuman. From an eco-philosophical perspective, the chapter proposes a reflection on Michelangelo Frammartino’s cinema and, in particular, focuses on his work Alberi (2013), in which the Italian filmmaker considers the Lucanian tradition of the romito as an expression of fusion and deep, inherent connection between humans and nature
Lucania, Land of Fairy Tales and Cinema: Gigi Roccati’s Lucania and the Eco-Fairy-Tale Film
No full textGiambattista Basile’s (1634–1636) Lo cunto de li cunti from the seventeenth century attests to the deep connection between fairy tales and Lucania. Basile drew from oral tradition, transcribing the folktales gathered in his travels through Southern Italy, in Campania, Puglia, and—especially—Lucania. However, Basile transformed these tales by taking inspiration from customs and rituals of the daily life of his time to criticize courtly society and literary tradition. While metamorphosis is central to fairy tales, seeing how shape-shifting is one of their dominant and characteristic wonders, the fairy tale itself has been subject to a continuous process of transformation and change. Many scholars have recently emphasized that it is at the intersection between fairy tales, media, and cultural studies that it is possible to analyze and understand the symbolic space in which these tales exist and act.
How have the fairy tales collected by Basile metamorphosed in recent decades? What significant relationship exist nowadays between Pentamerone, cinema, and ecological thought? From an ecocritical perspective, reconsidering some Italian cinematic adaptations of Basile’s work, such as Francesco Rosi’s C’era una volta (1967), Matteo Garrone’s Il racconto dei racconti (2015), and Alessandro Rak et al.’s Gatta Cenerentola (2017), this chapter focuses on Gigi Roccati’s film Lucania (2019) and its ethics of interconnectedness and interdependence between humans and nature, which appear to be crucial for overcoming individual and collective traumas
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