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Thinking Cinema: The Essay Film Tradition in Italy1

Laura Rascaroli

The Origins and Development of the Essay Film

Far from being a new phenomenon, or even a new term,2 the essay film has today become newly relevant owing to the impact of a wave of first‐person, reflective, nonmainstream audiovisual work that has surged worldwide, attracting the attention of critics and audiences alike. This work is contributing to the reshaping of the nonfictional field that we have been witnessing since the late 1980s—so conspicuous a reshaping that we now talk of a “new documentary” (Bruzzi 2006). It encapsulates some of the key features of contemporary nonmainstream and interdisciplinary artistic trends, in which openly subjective, autobiographical, and even partial accounts are favored for being more sincere and trustworthy than traditional narratives purporting to show the objective truth about a person, event, or topic. In the same vein, these recent personal films may be seen as a product of postmodern, post‐grand‐narrative, postcolonial thought and perspectives, wherein the audience is no longer to be subjected to the authority of an official, institutional, “objective” discourse. The impact of new technologies of film production and distribution, in particular digital video and the Internet, have much contributed to the phenomenon, both in terms of the enhanced accessibility of the new medium and its products, and as a result of the highly responsive, personal, even intimate, features of filming in digital video. Films that represent this trend vary for country of origin, topic, length, technical support, artistic ambition, budget, visibility, and approach—and not all are essays. Some of these, such as Errol Morris’s The Thin Blue Line (1988) and Agnès Varda’s Les glaneurs et la glaneuse (The Gleaners and I, 2000), have been made by prominent international documentarians and auteurs. Others, such as Alan Berliner’s Intimate Stranger (1991) and Péter Forgács’s Dunai exodus (The Danube Exodus, 1998), are the work of independent and avant‐garde artists. Still others, such as Jonathan Caouette’s Tarnation (2003), Nathaniel Kahn’s My Architect (2003), Sandhya Suri’s I for India (2005), and Liu Jiayin’s Oxhide (2005), are the product of young, new, or one‐time directors. Furthermore, the video essay is increasingly used to convey alternative and dissenting viewpoints by reflective documentarians, engaged filmmakers, guerrilla reporters, and amateur videographers working under conditions of limited freedom of expression and information.

The essay film, however, goes back at least to the 1950s, if not earlier; a number of films made before that decade have been described as essays, including Dziga Vertov’s Chelovek s kino‐apparatom (Man with a Movie Camera, 1929) and Luis Buñuel’s Las Hurdes (Land Without Bread, 1933). The first theoretical contribution explicitly devoted to the essay film is probably Hans Richter’s “Der Filmessay, eine neue form de Dokumentarfilm” (Richter 1992), which was published in 1940 in Nationalzeitung, in which Richter announced a new type of intellectual but also emotional cinema, able to portray concepts. A category complex to define, the essay film is the cinematic evolution of the 400‐year‐old tradition of the literary essay. A form if not a genre,3 the literary essay is characterized by hybridism, by unorthodoxy (as Adorno [1991, 23] famously contended, “the essay’s innermost formal law is heresy”), and by reflexivity and self‐reflexivity. The most important stamp that Michel de Montaigne, author of the famous Essais (1580), left on the form—and one that links the essay to classical philosophical traditions—is skeptical evaluation. Such evaluation includes the probing of the author’s own conclusions; the essay, thus, is a self‐conscious metalinguistic form that incorporates a trace of the act of reasoning itself: “the essay aims … to preserve something of the process of thinking” (Good 1988, 20; emphasis in original). Its performativity, which derives from the need to include thinking in its discursive unfolding, implies the necessity for the essay to manufacture the conditions of its own existence; as György Lukács (1974, 11) argued, “the essay has to create from within itself all the preconditions for the effectiveness and solidity of its vision.” Such self‐sufficiency, which accounts for the essay’s heretical nature, points also to another important feature of the form: subjectivity. The literary essay is always the expression of a distinct authorial voice, which speaks in the first person and conveys a personal reasoning on a theme or set of themes, sharing it with the reader. As an evolution of the literary essay, the filmic essay inherits the former’s main features. However, cinema is not literature, and its complex audiovisual language as well as composite apparatus account for the differences between written and filmic essays. As Paul Arthur (2003, 23) has observed,

since film operates simultaneously on multiple discursive levels—image, speech, titles, music—the literary essay’s single, determining voice is dispersed into cinema’s multi‐channel stew. The manifestation or location of a film author’s “voice” can shift from moment to moment or surface expressively via montage, camera movement and so on.

The complex nature of cinematic language, which offers different though imbricated channels for the expression of subjectivity and for the articulation of argument, complicates the basic formal requirements of the literary essay. Nevertheless, the essay film may similarly be described as the expression of a personal, critical reflection originating from a distinct viewpoint, that approaches the subject matter not in order to present a factual report (the field of traditional documentary), but to offer a personal reflection shared with a thinking spectator.

A strongly auteurist tradition, the essay film became established in France in the 1950s and 1960s, thanks to the work of intellectual directors linked to the nouvelle vague, such as Chris Marker, Alain Resnais, Varda, and Jean‐Luc Godard. This flourishing of the form may be explained by historical circumstances. A 1940 law of the Vichy government boosted the production of nonfiction cinema in France, with an increase from 400 documentaries made during the German occupation to 4,000 made between 1945 and 1955 (Sorlin 2005). Subsequently, France experienced a productive decade for the making of short films after the introduction in 1955 of a new system of grants that, together with the work of such sympathetic producers as Anatole Dauman (Argos Films) and Pierre Braunberger (Les Films de la Pléiade), fostered the debut of many young directors in a situation of increased creative freedom (Lupton 2006). The making of short films in France promoted the growth of personal documentary, either as a result of the influence of poetic impressionism and naturalism, as in the case of Alberto Cavalcanti’s Rien que les heures (Nothing But Time, 1926) and of Jean Vigo’s À propos de Nice (1930), or of surrealism, in the case of Buñuel’s already cited Las Hurdas and Jean Painlevé’s L’hippocampe (The Sea Horse, 1932). As Lupton (2006, 48) has argued, the new postwar poetic documentaries, including works by Alain Resnais and Georges Franju, were made in a climate in which, thanks to the surrealist (and, I would add, impressionist) antecedents, the boundaries between documentary and fiction (and art film) were fluid, and the filmmaker’s use of a personal style in his or her approach to the representation of reality was valued, in contrast to other established documentary practices, especially those linked to John Grierson’s legacy:

In France, documentary flourished within a continuum of short film production, and came to be regarded at its best as a mode of personal reflection on the world, more closely aligned to the authored literary essay than the social or legal document.

While these productive, legislative, and artistic circumstances may be credited for the establishment of the form in France, the situation in postwar Italy with regard to nonfictional film production was very different, and certainly not conducive to the same level of experimentation and authorial freedom of expression. Introduced for the purpose of promoting nonfiction cinema, a 1945 law granted to documentary producers 3% of the gross made by each theatrical show, which was composed of the screening of a feature film preceded by a short (which could be a newsreel, a fiction, or a documentary). As Marco Bertozzi (2008, 124) informs us, the new law resulted in a boost to production and, in 1955 alone, 1132 shorts were produced in Italy, most of which were documentaries. All of them, however, had to obey the rigid rule that limited their duration to 10 minutes (one reel)—hence the somewhat disparaging definition of these films as “Formula 10.” A 1965 law corrected the mechanism of the state financial support for shorts, establishing a yearly number of 120 quality awards (premi di qualità), that is, incentives that were assigned only to films that were distributed through at least 500 cinemas (Bertozzi 2008, 125; see also Rizzetto 2011). However, an unspoken agreement among producers, distributors, and film theaters meant that the shorts were not screened at all, while for at least three decades, the public money continued to be paid to the producers. Bertozzi elucidates,

The system strongly damaged the independent authors and producers, who, once obtained the quality award, struggled to find a distributor for their films. In order not to surrender the award, independent filmmakers were forced to sell their work, often for risible sums, to the few companies that held the monopoly and managed the business of the fake books. (125)

It was hardly a situation conducive to the development of new linguistic forms; rather, the style that it produced was shaped by cultural and productive impositions and limitations. Bertozzi concludes that, in a system so profoundly shaped by speculation, “[t]here is no space for the director” (126)—the opposite, in other words, of what was needed to promote the birth of an authorial, unconventional, and innovative nonfiction cinema, as happened instead in France.

System notwithstanding, important instances of an essayistic imagination emerged in Italy in both film theory and film practice at about the same time as in France or even earlier, first as a result of the reflection on the function of the cinema that originated within neorealism and, subsequently, as an authorial practice that developed under the influence of the new French cinema.

Cesare Zavattini is the key figure who imagined, invoked, and prepared personal and essayistic approaches to the medium in Italy. His writings powerfully prefigure highly modern modalities of filmmaking, including first‐person film, diaristic cinema, the sociological essay film, and inexpensive, “instant” cinema. Zavattini’s flash‐film or instant‐film (film‐lampo), for example, theorized in the early 1950s (Zavattini 1979c, 1979d), was to be made in no more than 2 weeks, on a very small budget, and with people willing to be filmed while something was happening to them. Zavattini believed that this was the best way of recording reality by means of film, and since the flash‐film would also be cheap to make, he felt it would escape the laws of the market, thus granting full freedom of expression to the filmmaker.

Zavattini’s interest in a new type of cinema, however, was not limited finally to realizing the purest neorealist aspiration to witness the life of an individual as it unfolds. While originating from the neorealist sphere of influence, Zavattini’s theoretical contributions on the nonfictional cinema of the future went well beyond it. In Zavattini’s idea of filming a woman who goes to buy shoes, which then becomes the pretext for a complex socioeconomic analysis (1979a, 103), Mino Argentieri (1979, 23) rightly sees the nucleus of a new cinema that “is no longer only documentary and descriptive, but essayistic, and that, springing from an ordinary episode, introduces the entire socioeconomic organism and its laws.” Zavattini argued for a cinema that would truly be in the first person, based on his belief that “we should not talk on behalf of others, but in the name of ourselves…” He adds, “for this reason I believe that it is actually necessary to be autobiographical, that it is necessary to use the first person” (quoted in Fortichiari 1992, 66). Such was his interest in more personal forms of filmmaking that the potential relationship between diary and cinema came to assume a key importance in his thinking about film:

Diary and cinema represent the components of a radiograph of existence, observed through a screen that magnifies its contours; the diary performs the function of a camera pointing at reality and producing an instantaneous analysis of the facts. (Quoted in Fortichiari 1992, 72)

Zavattini planned more than one diary film, but none were ultimately made.4 He did conceive and develop a collective film, however, that can be seen both as a continuation of his neorealist principle of the “shadowing” of real people and as a precursor of the cinéma vérité of the 1960s: L’amore in città (Love in the City, 1953), which was intended as a filmed magazine, with “essays” directed by Michelangelo Antonioni, Federico Fellini, Alberto Lattuada, Carlo Lizzani, Francesco Maselli, Dino Risi, and Zavattini himself. An inquiry film, L’amore in città, was an analysis of contemporary society through the theme of love. However, it was probably his Cinegiornale della pace (“Peace Newsreel”) of 1963, as well as his Cinegiornali liberi (“Free Newsreels”) of 1968, that fulfilled Zavattini’s prophecy of a cinema made by ordinary people in total freedom, using light and inexpensive technology, and apt to communicate its maker’s personal thoughts and opinions, as well as to document events, both public and private.

Zavattini’s conception of first‐person cinema, thus, was shaped by the exigencies at once of autobiographical and of political expression. These factors combined to produce the idea of a countercinema that places the director at its center, and makes him or her accountable for the film’s discursive engagement with reality. Zavattini’s writings about the cinema of the future are visionary to the point of anticipating the democratization of the medium introduced by digital technology. They predate important texts such as François Truffaut’s (1976) famous 1954 Cahiers du cinéma article “Une Certain tendance du cinéma français,” which is recognized and celebrated by the video bloggers of today as a precognition of their practices, and some of them even predate “Naissance d’une nouvelle avant‐garde: la caméra‐stylo,” the legendary article by Alexandre Astruc (1999) first published in L’Ecran français on March 30, 1948, which has come to be seen as a key manifesto of authorial self‐expression in the cinema. As early as the 1930s, in fact, Zavattini predicted that the day would come when the cost of a camera would be so low that anybody would be able to buy one, turning the country into an immense stage for new sociocreative experimentation (Argentieri 1979, 24–6). Writes Zavattini (1979b, 71–72) in 1950:

The camera must be placed in the hands of young people; the camera, and not a screenplay. These young people, as they come out of their homes, will have to report what they see, what most strikes them. Some will film people, some just windows; others will turn the camera onto themselves.

While it is not within the scope of this chapter to evaluate whether the democratization of the medium has finally taken place with digital cameras and the Internet, I wish to call attention to the fact that a thinking cinema in the first person, displaying an essayistic attitude and a keen interest in sociocultural and political comment, did emerge in Italy in the 1960s. It was particularly indebted to another figure of paramount importance for the theoretical reflection on subjectivity in the cinema: Pier Paolo Pasolini. Pasolini’s famous essay on what he named the “cinema of poetry” (1988), while referring to authorial fiction cinema, is relevant here, for it played a significant role in theorizing the possibility of expressing subjectivity and subjective point of view in the cinema. Even more importantly for the purposes of the present discussion, Pasolini effected a true break within Italian cinema, reflected in his debut as an inexperienced director, during a brief phase marked by the attempt to generate a wave that could reproduce the success of the nouvelle vague in France. A unique figure within Italian cinema, who was already an established intellectual, writer, and critic before making his first film, Pasolini worked within a cultural milieu influenced by international experiences, which helps explain why his documentary cinema was closer to certain essayistic and political products of the rive gauche of the nouvelle vague (Marker, Resnais, Varda) than to any other form of film that had thus far been made in Italy.

The nouvelle vague’s first‐person essayistic documentary production developed alongside experiments in cinéma vérité and in sociopolitical ethnography such as Chris Marker’s Le joli mai (1963), punctuated by the director’s poetic and witty commentary, and Edgar Morin and Jean Rouch’s Chronique d’un été (Chronicle of a Summer, 1961), where, inscribing themselves in the film as the source of the act of communication, the filmmakers made both ethnography and meta‐ethnography. Similarly, Pasolini made nonfictional first‐person films characterized by an acute attention to the social sphere and to ethnographic values and shaped by an overt ideological stance and by persistent intellectual inquisitiveness. Some of these films are essays on topics that were central to Pasolini’s reflection and interests. His segment of the controversial La rabbia (The Rage, Giovanni Guareschi, Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1963) is a reasoned denunciation of the shortcomings and offenses of Western civilization. Comizi d'amore (Love Meetings, 1965) is a socioethnographic inquiry about sexuality in contemporary Italy that, like Chronique d’un été, includes a self‐reflexive authorial presence, as Pasolini places himself in dialogue with other intellectuals including Alberto Moravia and Cesare Musatti. In Pasolini e … la forma della città (1974, with Paolo Brunatto) Pasolini denounces the destruction of the original shape of the town of Orte, Lazio, as a consequence of rampant building development and property speculation. Le mura di Sana’a (1971) is a filmed letter exhorting UNESCO to make the ancient capital city of Yemen a world heritage site, thus saving it from what Pasolini saw as the effects of “progress,” which had already devastated the western world.

Other nonfictional works had for Pasolini the function of notebooks in preparation of films to be made: Sopralluoghi in Palestina per il Vangelo secondo Matteo (The Gospel According to St. Matthew, 1965), Appunti per un film sull’India (1968), Appunti per un romanzo dell’immondezza (1970),5 and Appunti per un’Orestiade africana (Notes Towards an African Orestes, 1970).6 While ostensibly about location scouting and about developing and probing the ideas at the basis of specific projects, Pasolini’s notebook films are composite, multilayered works. Broadly thoughtful pieces, they are deeply concerned with self‐representation: the director is present through the image of his body and via voiceover, and carries out an essayistic reflection not only on the places he visits and the topics that concern his future films, but also on his involvement as director and as intellectual—as well as on his point of view and agency. In his Third World notebooks, in fact, Pasolini fully embraced a participatory, self‐reflexive method of approaching the Other; by constantly addressing his participation, Pasolini simultaneously authenticated his encounter with the Other and undermined the objective/scientific approach traditionally required of a documentary, thus stepping into an experimental first‐person mode largely unseen in Italy to that point. The metalinguistic value of these films becomes fully explicit in a passage of Appunti per un film sull’India, in which Pasolini explains in voiceover, “I did not come here to make a documentary, a chronicle, an inquest on India, but to make a film on a film on India.”

Photo of Pier Paolo Pasolini taking notes in his essayistic notebook film with a man in dark suit standing right at his back.

Figure 19.1 Pier Paolo Pasolini taking notes in his essayistic notebook film, Sopralluoghi in Palestina per il Vangelo secondo Matteo (1965). Screen shot.

While Pasolini was undoubtedly the foremost Italian director to engage with various guises of the essay film in the 1960s, the decade (and the following one) saw a wave of interest in and experimentation with various forms of nonfiction—from ethnography to the political film, from social inquiry to the documentary investigation of memory and history—that truly tested and stretched the boundaries of Italian documentary filmmaking. These experiences were in dialogue with those of contemporary international directors, including prominent documentarians and essayistic auteurs who worked also in Italy: for instance, Joris Ivens with L’Italia non è un paese povero (1960), Godard and Jean‐Pierre Gorin with their Groupe Dziga Vertov’s Lotte in Italia (1971), Jean‐Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet with Chronik der Anna Magdalena Bach (Cronaca di Anna Magdalena Bach/The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach, 1967). While it is beyond the scope of this contribution to give account of these numerous and important developments, it is necessary to mention at least the programs by Roberto Rossellini produced by Rai television in the 1960s and 1970s (e.g., La prise de pouvoir par Louis XIV, 1966; La lotta dell’uomo per la sua sopravvivenza, 1970; Blaise Pascal, 1972) as an example of a reflective documentary work that had the ambition of the didactic/historical essay for the broad television audience. Also within the context of a didactic use of the camera, and important for the development of the idea of an intellectual nonfictional cinema in Italy, was the experience of the “critofilm” (thus baptized by its author) carried out by art historian Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti—an attempt, developed through 18 films made in the 1950s and 1960s (from La deposizione di Raffaello in 1948 to Michelangiolo in 1964) to produce a cinematic form of art criticism, not by relying on a traditional lecture‐like voiceover, but almost exclusively via the visual means of film language: camera movements, lighting, editing, composition, point of view (Costa 1995). Ragghianti’s films explore the ability of filmic language to produce critical essays.

Paul Arthur (2003, 62) tried to capture the hybrid “in‐betweenness” of the essay film when he suggested that “one way to think about the essay film is as a meeting ground for documentary, avant‐garde, and art film impulses.” In one of the earliest sustained theoretical contributions on the essay film, first published in 1969, Noël Burch (1981, 159) discussed films such as George Franju’s Le sang des bêtes (Blood of the Beasts, 1949) and Hôtel des Invalides (1952) as essays that represent “the first use in the documentary film of a formal approach that previously had been exclusively employed in the fiction film.” The essay film is best defined for Burch as a “dialectics of fiction and nonfiction” (164). Two Italian films that can be described as essays, and that subtly challenged the distinction between fiction and nonfiction, are I dannati della terra (1969) by Valentino Orsini and Non ho tempo (No More Time, 1972) by Ansano Giannarelli. The former is about a young African film director who, at his death, leaves his first, unfinished, film to his former teacher, Italian filmmaker Fausto Morelli (Frank Wolff); the latter attempts to reconstruct and finish the incomplete film from the notes left by his pupil. Based on Franz Fanon’s writings, I dannati della terra is an investigation of themes such as colonialism, Western Europe’s responsibilities toward Africa, and the role of the intellectual in society. Mixing historical reconstruction and fictionalized biography, Non ho tempo—which recounts the exceptional life of French mathematician Évariste Galois (1811–1832), spent between scientific research and political engagement—is partly didactic film, partly political treatise. Both works are examples of an intellectual approach to filmmaking that experiments with the interface between documentary and fiction and between historical reality and cinematic narrative.

Essayist Nonfiction Today

The protean nature of the essay, which is reflected in the different types of films that have been discussed thus far, translates into frequent classificatory difficulties and divergences of opinion among critics, so much so that the label “essay film” is at times used in a generic manner to define all contemporary work that is noncommercial or experimental or otherwise unclassifiable—leading Suzanne Liandrat‐Guigues (2004, 10) to write that, today, “this essayistic quality becomes the sole means by which we can identity a form of film‐making that is able to resist the commercial system.” I have argued elsewhere (Rascaroli 2009) that essay films can and should be distinguished from other forms of nonfiction, art‐house, independent, or experimental film on the basis of their textual commitments and communicative structures. Not all the films I have mentioned in my discussion thus far share in these structures; indeed, I have considered here a somewhat broader field of reflective nonfictional filmic work in order to give a more complete account of the establishment and development of this tradition in Italy in its various embodiments and guises. I have thus included films that incorporate the essay as one strategy among others, as well as films that experiment with forms of discourse that are cognate to the essay—such as travelogues, notebooks, diaries, and epistolary films.

I will continue in this vein as I come to focus on the contemporary panorama of essayistic nonfiction in Italy. I opened my discussion by noting how relevant the essay film and first‐person nonfiction film have become today worldwide, on account of the spread of personal and autobiographical filmmaking practices that are encouraged not only by postcolonial and postmodern discourses, but also by the availability of cheaper and more accessible digital technologies and new channels of distribution (e.g., streaming and file sharing). While this applies to Italy as well as to the rest of the world, the national situation with regard to the production and distribution of the documentary film is, as has always been the case, far from ideal. Dario Barone (2003) rightly defines the recent Italian nonfictional panorama as an anomaly at a time when documentaries are enjoying higher box‐office success and attention internationally than at most other times in film history. The issue, as Barone explains, is both cultural and systemic. In Italy, “the documentary is thought of within the tight framework of the televisual product only, and predominantly within its ‘educational’ function” (25); in other words, documentary equals television. This state of affairs heavily impinges upon the possibility of producing creative, experimental, and authorial nonfiction, which does not easily adapt to the limitations of language and format that are imposed by the televisual medium, especially when this is thoroughly dominated by a purely commercial attitude, as is the case in Italy. The specific condition in which contemporary Italian television finds itself, indeed, further affects the fortunes of the national documentary, on account of “the presence of a televisual duopoly [Rai or state television and Mediaset, Silvio Berlusconi’s privately‐owned channels] that controls the market and, in fact, ‘is’ the market; a duopoly that applies illiberal and unprogressive policies [and] bears the responsibility of Italian backwardness within the European and international competition” (27). Such a duopoly, in fact, keeps the supposedly independent nonfiction film producer in a state of marked dependency and, more specifically, “in the marginal role of the [mere] provider of the work, that is to say of the external—and thus malleable and controllable—productive support, deprived even of those residual rights (which are established by the law) that are a pivotal precondition for the development of a true industry” (27). It should also be mentioned that this duopolistic control of the market is not only an obstacle to formal experimentation, but also to the production and distribution of independent films of sociopolitical inquiry, analysis, and denunciation.

In spite of this, a growing number of noteworthy nonfictions have been produced or coproduced in Italy since the 1990s, so much so that Adriano Aprà (2003) has talked about a documentary renaissance.7 This phenomenon can be said to have culminated in the excellent box‐office performance of Gianfranco Rosi’s documentary Sacro GRA (2013), the first piece of nonfiction ever to win the Golden Lion prize at the Venice Film Festival. A number of established and new filmmakers continue the experimentation with reflective nonfiction that started in Italy in the 1960s, some of the most important examples of which I have mentioned in the course of my discussion. Most of their films are by independent producers, some have been coproduced by Rai, and some have been made with new technologies and distributed via the Internet. I will single out those that I feel are of particular relevance to my discussion, given the prominence of the filmmakers, the originality of their approach, and/or their impact on Italian cinema and society.

Ermanno Olmi, a veteran of the lyrical and reflective documentary, continues to produce authorial, essayistic films that reflect on themes that are central to his poetics, and on environmental concerns and the relationship between people and the land. In particular, I will make reference to two pensive, lyrical works from his recent production: Lungo il fiume (1992), coproduced by Rai1 and Cinema Undici, and Rupi del vino (2009), a coproduction supported by institutions such as the Fondazione ProVinea, the Provincia di Sondrio, the Fondazione Cariplo, and the Banca Popolare di Sondrio. Lungo il fiume is an investigation of life and nature along the Po River, and a reflection on the themes of ecology, pollution, and the relationship between the human being and the environment, which combines Olmi’s images with texts from Konrad Lorenz and the Old and New Testament, and music from the Messiah by G.F. Händel. Rupi del vino explores the vineyards of Valtellina, Lombardy, both as a natural and a built environment and as an example of a heroic agricultural practice; it uses texts from Mario Soldati’s (1986) travelogue L’avventura in Valtellina and from Ragionamenti d’agricoltura (1988) by Pietro Ligari (1686–1752), a painter and architect from the Valtellina region.

The nonfictional work of Guido Chiesa is often essayistic, starting with his first documentary, Memorie di una fabbrica (1994, with Luca Gasparini), about a brick factory in Cambiano, Piedmont, a site linked to the director’s youth. The story is told via interviews, photographs, and archival footage. The film intertwines family history with commentary on society, social classes, technology, and work. An essayistic approach also characterizes Chiesa’s recent Le pere di Adamo (2007), an international coproduction that also uses animation. The film ponders the curious analogy between cloud formations and social movements, and touches upon a number of topics including meteorology, science, the Enlightenment, politics, unemployment, and short‐term (versus permanent) work.

Davide Ferrario has explored essayistic themes in works such as La rabbia (2000), in which he revisits Pasolini’s film on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of his death, and reflects on themes such as modernity, consumerism, sexuality, and war with the purpose of tracing what is left of Pasolini’s intellectual inheritance in today’s Italy. In 2006, Ferrario made a noteworthy road movie essay, La strada di Levi (Primo Levi’s Journey), in which he retraced the route covered by Primo Levi from Auschwitz back to Italy. Rather than offering a traditional treatment of its subject, this film enacts an open‐ended exploration, juxtaposing texts from Levi’s La tregua (The Truce) and other texts, archival images, and contemporary footage. Through the subtle comparison between Levi’s post‐Holocaust Europe and the contemporary post–Berlin Wall Europe traversed by the filmmakers, the film invites reflection on the past’s continued relevance for the present, on the recurrence of history, and on new Europe and its direction (Figure 19.2).

Photo of Primo Levi smiling and wearing glasses, in Davide Ferrario’s La strada di Levi.

Figure 19.2 Archival footage of Primo Levi in Davide Ferrario’s La strada di Levi (Primo Levi’s Journey, 2006). Screen shot.

While they are closer to the field of experimental and expanded cinema than to that of the essay film, Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi deserve mention within this section on established directors. They have been active since the mid‐1970s and continue to explore topics such as colonial violence, war, genocide, exile, and migration through postproduction work on found footage that includes rephotographing, hand tinting, and altering the film’s speed (Lumley 2011). Their more recent work includes Prigionieri della guerra (Prisoners of War, 1995), Su tutte le vette è pace (On the Heights All Is Peace, 1998), Images d’Orient—Tourisme Vandale (Images of the Orient: Vandal Tourism, 2001), and Pays Barbare (Barbaric Land, 2013). Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi’s films/installations, which have been hosted by leading international venues including the Venice Biennale, MoMA, and Centre Pompidou, may be said to be essayistic insofar as they induce, by means of a deliberately slowed‐down textuality, an inquisitive, pensive spectatorship, and a relentless, though also lyrical and disquieting, critical rereading of the documentary and ethnographic record.

Of the newer generation of Italian filmmakers who are producing essayistic nonfiction, Alina Marazzi stands out for the first‐person, reflective, and idiosyncratic approach displayed by her independently produced documentaries. Un’ora sola ti vorrei (For One More Hour with You, 2002) courageously interrogates a personal tragedy—of the psychological illness and suicide of the filmmaker’s mother—but also goes beyond the private sphere, by exploring broader women’s issues, as well as the fragility of the human condition. The image of the young mother, preserved in the family’s home movies, is obsessively and longingly scrutinized, but remains deeply mysterious in its beauty and the apparent happiness it conveys, while her words from her letters and diaries ask the spectator unsettling questions about the meaning of life, gender equality, social roles, responsibility, love, desire, and human relationships. Vogliamo anche le rose (We Want Roses Too, 2007), a MIR Cinematografica production with Rai Cinema—the first Italian film available to download for iPhone—is based on the private diaries of three young women in the Italy of the late 1960s and of 1970s, struggling with their emancipation and the sociopolitical ferment in Italian society. Marazzi constructs her reflection on the women’s movement by collating photographs, archival footage of various types (including home movies, television reportage and other programs, independent and experimental films, political footage, and advertisements).

A text criticizing contemporary Italian television shows’ salacious display of sexualized women’s bodies, Il corpo delle donne (2008) by Lorella Zanardo and Marco Malfi Chindemi is an interesting example of the oppositional nonfictional work that, for obvious reasons, cannot find space within the productive system and programming schedule of Italian television. A homemade video spliced together from hundreds of hours of television shows originally broadcast by both Mediaset and Rai, and accompanied by Zanardo’s reflections in voiceover, the film was made available through the Internet, first from Zanardo’s blog carrying the film’s title (http://www.ilcorpodelledonne.net/) and then from other sites, including YouTube. It is estimated that the film has been viewed online over 4 million times (Zanardo 2015). Il corpo delle donne has raised much debate and has been parodied by Striscia la notizia, one of the Mediaset television shows at the center of the filmmakers’ critique. In 2010, a book by Zanardo of the same title was published by Feltrinelli, in which the author explains the genesis of the documentary and discusses its reception (Zanardo 2010).

I wish to close this partial, provisional, mapping of contemporary essayist nonfiction in Italy with two films characterized by high formal and aesthetic values and notable for their innovative approach, both made by young directors with only a small corpus of work. La bocca del lupo (The Mouth of the Wolf, 2009) by Pietro Marcello is an Italian coproduction commissioned by the Genoa‐based Fondazione San Marcellino, a Jesuit order dedicated to helping the poor and marginalized, and supported by the Liguria Film Commission. It was chosen as best film at the 2010 Turin Film Festival and also won prizes at the Berlin Film Festival. It integrates both archival and contemporary footage to recount an unforeseeable love story born between two convicts in Genoa: working‐class Enzo, originally from Sicily, and middle‐class Mary, a transsexual drug addict originally from Rome. The film is as much about two marginal characters and their 20‐year romance (10 years of which were spent separated, while Enzo was in prison for shooting a policeman) as it is about Genoa, with its prosperous past and its present, postindustrial decline—and with its waterfront, underbelly, history, and people (Figure 19.3).

Photo of a scene from the 2009 film La bocca del lupo(The Mouth of the Wolf), with a man walking and carrying a bag on his left shoulder.

Figure 19.3 Enzo and the environs of Genoa, which the story of his relationship with Mary serves to explore in Pietro Marcello’s La bocca del lupo (The Mouth of the Wolf, 2009). Screen shot.

An international coproduction with a much richer budget, Le quattro volte (2010) by Michelangelo Frammartino, first screened at the Cannes Film Festival, received much critical praise and was distributed internationally. Shot in Calabria and inspired by the teachings of Pythagoras, who lived there in the sixth century B.C., Le quattro volte presupposes a fourfold transmigration by which the soul is passed from human to animal to vegetable to mineral, and it offers thoughtful observation of the life cycle and of the land, culture, and rituals of Calabria. Devoid of dialogue and extradiegetic music, this slow‐paced, contemplative film consists of a poetic reflection on space and time, on the natural elements, and on how we inhabit the earth.

The Mouth of the Wolf and Le quattro volte are two innovative, idiosyncratic works that open new paths for a nonfictional cinema of essayistic and lyrical research in Italy. It is to be hoped that their success may encourage more Italian producers to support quality, experimental, unconventional nonfictional filmic expression. At the same time, we now look to the Internet as a potential new arena of documentary creativity in Italy.

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Notes