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Notes on the History of Italian Nonfiction Film1

Luca Caminati and Mauro Sassi

Beginnings

In recent years, debates on the nature of realism in art and mass culture and on the massive role played by nonfiction in cinema, television, and—more virally—on the Internet, have taken hold of the field of film studies. Even scholars of Italian cinema have been forced, a posteriori, to revaluate the role of documentary and recalibrate its import in the teleological narratives currently available in North America.² The role of nonfiction film and, more specifically, the intersection between fictional and documental narratives must be an essential factor in evolving discourses on Italian modernity.³

The “weak ontological frontier” (Levy 1982, 249) between fiction and nonfiction is indeed at the core of a good portion of the heroic beginnings of Italian cinema. According to a quasi‐legendary narrative, it was in Venice that Lumiére cameraman Alexandre Promio deployed film history’s first tracking shot in his Panorama du Grand Canal pris d’un bateau (1896), when he placed his device on a gondola on the Gran Canal to recreate something akin to Canaletto’s eighteenth‐century vistas (Bertozzi 2008, 40). The early years of cinema in Italy follow the model of many other European countries in which the apparatus lived a hybrid life, split between fairground entertainment and scientific device, mass attraction and sociological documentation. Among the many pioneers worth remembering here, we briefly point to Luca Comerio’s symptomatic career (1878–1940), first as a photographer (in 1898, his vivid pictures in L’illustrazione italiana reported the uprising in Milan and General Bava Beccaris’s violent repression), then as a newsreel and documentary filmmaker (Manenti, Monti, and Nicodemi 1979). During his long career, Comerio had a chance to report on the private life of the Italian royal family (he was appointed fotografo ufficiale della Real Casa), on the Italian invasion of Libya in 1911, on his travels in Africa, and on World War I combat. His work has been recently remediated in Dal polo all’equatore (From the Pole to the Equator, 1986) by contemporary artists Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi. These two filmmakers work with found and stock footage by reinterpreting and modifying its core elements (color, speed, editing). For this purpose, they build specific machines capable of rephotographing the original materials and making them available for complete recontextualization (Mereghetti and Nosei 2000, 23). Dal polo all’equatore, their longest and most ambitious film, features a powerful soundtrack by American musicians Keith Ullrich and Charles Anderson superimposed over Comerio’s original footage, which was probably shot in the late 1920s. Comerio captured an ongoing array of colonial imagery that included Italian missionaries in Africa and big game hunts, and British military parades in India. Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi’s appropriation of the material is extraordinarily effective in giving the spectators a sense of the “presence” of history and inviting them to reflect upon the role that images have in our understanding of the past. Also, it sheds light on the ideological and physical violence of the often disavowed Italian colonial adventure in Africa.

During the ventennio nero of Fascism (1922–1943), documentary and newsreels played a key role in the process of modernization brought forward by the regime both as illustration of the successes of governmental initiatives—the images of the Duce leading the way in all fields of modernization are a staple of this period—and as an integral part of a thrust toward a more direct engagement with reality.⁴ As pointed out by Gian Piero Brunetta (2009a, 100), the LUCE agency (the acronym stands for L’Unione Cinematografica Educativa), which was founded in 1924 with a clear propagandist agenda, provided Italians with a “unico testo,” a single, long, and uninterrupted history of excellence, sacrifice, commitment, and success. Even a cursory look at films produced during the two decades of the Fascist regime shows a massive and pervasive presence of nonfiction films of all sorts: newsreels, documentaries, didactic and instructional shorts—now available, with many other LUCE films, on their website (http://www.archivioluce.com/archivio/jsp/schede/).

Alongside these more stilted official productions, Italy had a lively nonfiction culture in the 1930s and 1940s and hosted a dynamic cultural debate on the issue of realism in the arts and cinema. In particular, a new foreign genre called narrative documentary (documentario narrativo) caught the imagination of local filmmakers. In magazines and journals of the time, the great popularity of John Grierson’s social investigations such as Drifters (1929) and Flaherty’s narrative documentaries (Nanook of the North, 1922; Moana, 1926; and Man of Aran, 1934), along with similar docu‐fiction experiments such as F. W. Murnau’s Tabu (1931), helped inspire a wave of Italian filmmakers to create hybrid fiction–nonfiction films along the same lines. Interest in this new mode of filmmaking must be attributed to the cosmopolitan figure of Brazilian‐born, French‐ and English‐educated (but of Florentine heritage) Alberto Cavalcanti. In 1934, Cavalcanti joined Grierson’s Empire Marketing Board and then the General Post Office film unit, where he became one of the driving forces behind the British documentary movement and worked on some of their masterpieces, such as Coalface (1935). Also, he was collaborating with the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome and contributed regularly to the journal Bianco e Nero. A 1938 article titled “Documentari di propaganda” sets up a genealogy for the documentario narrativo, which should not be confused, in Cavalcanti’s (1938) taxonomy, with Grierson’s documentario puro. The documentario narrativo, also dubbed documentario poetico (poetic documentary), had its precursors in Flaherty’s Nanook of the North and Moana; Ernest B. Schoedsack and Merian C. Cooper’s Grass: A Nation’s Battle for Life (1925) and Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness (1927); and Leon Poirier’s La croisière noire (The Black Journey, 1927). Cavalcanti’s key role at the Centro Sperimentale lasted until 1942, when he left Italy because his citizenship was deemed suspicious (Aitken 2000, 82).

Cavalcanti found fertile ground at the Centro, even though Italy’s documentario narrativo did not achieve the results witnessed in other countries. However, it was certainly thought of as a possible avenue of expression and had already been explored by some directors in the early 1930s. One of the first experiments in mixing reality and fiction that predated Cavalcanti’s arrival at the Centro is Palio (1932), directed by Alessandro Blasetti, with Anchise Brizzi as director of photography. (Brizzi would perform the same role for De Sica’s Sciuscià—Shoeshine, 1946.) Blasetti’s filmmaking is described (Barbaro 1976, 474) as “a mix of documentary and narration….” Barbaro adds, “Not prone to quick cuts and Russian‐style montage, he often uses tracking shots and pan shots since he is interested in giving narrative consistency and fluidity to his films.” Other documentaries of the time were picking up on different European traditions, such as the “symphony‐of‐a‐city” films or the humanistic study of a particular event or location.⁵ This was the case for Acciaio (Steel, 1933), directed by Walter Ruttmann and loosely based on a script by Pirandello; Francesco Pasinetti’s Il canale degli angeli (1934); Vincenzo Di Cocco’s Il ventre della città (1933); and Umberto Barbaro’s Cantieri dell’Adriatico (1932). According to Barbaro (1976), the production house Cines spearheaded documentary film under the direction of Ludovico Toeplitz del Ry and Emilio Cecchi, culminating in the great critical reception of Giacomo Pozzi‐Bellini’s Il pianto delle zitelle (1939).⁶ This documentary, shot in the Simbruini Mountains in Lazio, describes the pilgrimage of hundreds of peasants from Lazio, Abruzzo, and Campania to honor the Vallepietra icon. Marco Bertozzi (2008, 81) notes its interesting use of sound, a blend of narrating voiceover and diegetic noises. Quite interestingly, in spite of being awarded a prize at Venice, the film was quickly censored by the regime. The GIL (Gioventù Italiana del Littorio) is also responsible for some documentaries beyond the mere celebration of Fascist youth. In 1937, Ivo Perilli directed Ragazzo, which follows a Neapolitan street urchin into the criminal underworld. The film was personally censored by the Duce, and its only audience was the students of the Centro Sperimentale. It was eventually destroyed by the Nazis in late 1943.

The most critically successful documentario narrativo of the Fascist era is Francesco De Robertis’s Uomini sul fondo (S.O.S. Submarine, 1941). Produced by the Marina Militare (the Italian Navy), it uses only nonprofessional actors to tell the story of the rescue of a military submarine off the coast of La Spezia. What is meant as a showcase to impress the Italian audience at the beginning of the war with the navy’s cutting‐edge technological equipment turns very quickly into a gripping story of humanistic values. With Roberto Rossellini on set and the participation of Perilli—subsequently a writer for Giuseppe De Santis’s Riso amaro (Bitter Rice, 1949) and Rossellini’s Europa ’51 (Europe ‘51/The Greatest Love, 1952)—this film combines highly dramatic moments with documentary‐style portrait of daily activities. The sailors are apparently anonymous (they all wear the same clothes and have similar haircuts and features), yet each of them possesses specific identifiers: an accent, the picture of a mother, food hidden in pockets. The narrative structure is less episodic—or “elliptical” to use André Bazin’s (1976, 35) terminology—than in Roma città aperta (Rome Open City, 1945) or Ladri di biciclette (Bicycle Thieves, 1948), but it certainly lends itself to detours that have no primary narrative motivation. The film has a clear trajectory (will the ships rescue our heroes?), but its many asides enrich the humanity of the story and augment the documentary value of the film. In the documentario narrativo, experimental Italian filmmakers learn the tricks of neorealist filmmaking.

Figure 21.1 The humanizing quality of the quotidian in Uomini sul fondo (SOS Submarine), Francesco De Robertis, 1941. Screen grab.

Italian Documentary after World War II

The postwar Italian documentary history that we present in the next few pages purposely avoids a thorough discussion of the documentary production of Italian auteurs of mainly fiction films, such as Michelangelo Antonioni and Pier Paolo Pasolini. It is not our intention to belittle the importance of their documentaries, but our first objective is to explore the less widely known history of professional documentarians who, particularly in Italy, used to live on the fringes of film production. This is especially true if one looks at the first years after the end of World War II, when Italian cinema was defined by a contradiction. Neorealism’s newsreel‐like photography, direction, and acting style put Italy at the forefront of fictional cinematic innovation, but documentary was relegated to an ancillary role, furnishing a copious but uniform and uninspired mass of short and unambitious films. The main reason for this was the system of public subventions, from Law 678 in 1945 to Law 1097 in 1959 (Bernagozzi 1980, 117). The point of the state laws was to enforce the projection in theatres of short documentaries (minimum 150–180 meters of film, maximum 1,800–2,000) and to assign them a percentage (3% for 3–4 years) of the average income of the films with which they shared the bill. Theoretically, this was designed to recognize the cultural importance of documentary. Practically, it fostered the establishment of big production companies that specialized in the mass production of documentaries with the sole purpose of receiving government money (Brunetta 2001, 485). Most of them were so uninterested in the quality of the products that, in many cases, the documentaries were not even projected, only registered in the theatre schedule for fiscal accountancy (Bernagozzi 1980, 120).

This enormous corpus of documentaries centered on just a few genres and topics: industry, art, anthropology, and nature. Industrial documentary became a training camp for young directors who sometimes headed for a career in fiction filmmaking. Ermanno Olmi worked for the Italian energy company Edisonvolta, which at that time was expanding its production facilities and was one of the major players in the modernization of Italian infrastructures. In some of his documentaries, such as Tre fili fino a Milano (1958), Olmi brought innovation to the classical formula of the industrial film: first by replacing the oppressive authoritative voiceover with diegetic sounds, and, second, by focusing his interest on hard‐working humanity rather than—as was often the case—the wonders of mechanized modernity. Special festivals and screening venues proliferated around the 1950s industrial documentary. The first edition of Monza’s Festival del documentario artigiano e industriale took place in 1957, while 1960 marked Turin’s first Festival internazionale del film industriale. Success and diffusion emphasized a contradiction that was intrinsic in the genre, namely the inevitably difficult relationships between producers and artists. This contradiction was evident in the vicissitudes of one of the most ambitious and controversial films of the period: Joris Ivens’s L’Italia non è un paese povero (Italy is not a Poor Country, 1960). Enrico Mattei, President of Eni, the state‐owned energy company, wanted to launch a message of innovation and modernization through a grandiose documentary that would counteract the pervasive image of Italy as backward and underline the immense benefits his company’s commitment to the search and development of oil and gas fields, particularly in Sicily, brought to the country. He called the renowned Dutch filmmaker Ivens and arranged a team of collaborators that included Alberto Moravia, Enrico Maria Salerno, Tinto Brass, and Paolo and Vittorio Taviani. The result would be an epic on gas distribution in northern Italy, narrated through the “voices” of various protagonists: an olive tree, an oil well, a young wife whose husband works at an oil rig. Instead of glorifying the wealth of the North as Mattei intended, the film is almost entirely shot in the residual areas of poverty of southern Italy (the footage of Matera is especially memorable). The film was meant for a television audience, but Rai refused to broadcast it in its original form, imposing censorship and manifesting the fragility of a genre suspended between the requirements of capital and directorial expression.

Adriano Olivetti had a different approach to documentary sponsorship. He was a visionary business magnate with a genuine interest in the improvement of workers’ conditions and in the redefinition of Western society as a whole. In the mid‐1950s, Ivrea, the mid‐size town in Piedmont where he was assembling his typewriter and calculator machines, became an attraction for intellectuals from all over the world (Ochetto 1985, 229). Olivetti had strong relationships with personalities such as Henry Kissinger, and his products were a source of inspiration even for J. Watson Jr., president of IBM (Ochetto, 154). His factories’ cultural activities were vibrant and well financed, and documentary, particularly art documentary, was one of the creative forms that attracted his patronage. In 1954, Olivetti began to finance a series of documentaries on historical monuments and masterpiece paintings. The man who inspired this interest and was in charge of the project was art critic Carlo Ragghianti, director of the journal SeleARTE. From 1954 to 1964, SeleARTE Cinematografica, the production company created by Olivetti and Ragghianti, produced twenty films, including Il Cenacolo di Andrea del Castagno (1954), Lo stile di Piero della Francesca (1954), Urne etrusche di Volterra (1958), and Certosa di Pavia (1962). The last movie of the series, Michelangiolo (1964), was a Technicolor feature‐length spectacular translated in various languages and presented at the 1965 Venice Film Festival. Ragghianti’s essays on his cinematic approach were later collected in the volume Arti della visione. According to Ragghianti (1975, 228), documentaries on art reconstruct through time what an artwork developed through space, and therefore presuppose that the essence of any artistic representation is narrative. Examples of this kind of “literary” approach to documentary are Luciano Emmer’s Racconto da un affresco: Giotto (1938) or Roberto Longhi and Umberto Barbaro’s Carpaccio (1947). “Critofilms,” as Ragghianti (232) dubs them, should not simply show images of artworks, and make them available to a wide audience, but be dignified by the text of an art critic. This text is the true protagonist of the documentary, to the point that, in his view, such films without a commentary would be utterly insignificant.

Ragghianti’s films are certainly an example of the instrumental use of documentary on the part of an established discipline, but not all scientists and academics used documentary in such a subservient fashion. Anthropology drove the development of Italian documentary in the 1950s in a more autonomous way. Since Flaherty’s work in the 1920s, curiosity and wonder with regard to different human habits and living conditions have always been a main topic of documentary practice. Around the world, national institutions were born with the specific intent of exploring human conditions. The National Film Board of Canada, for example, was created with the mandate of “helping Canadians in all parts of Canada to understand the ways of living and the problems of Canadians in other parts” (Ellis and McLane 2005, 121). The same applies to the British Film Board, whose mandate was even broader because of the expanse of the British Empire and the many cultural differences that it contained. In Italy, despite narrow geographical confines, the cultural differences between North and South were equally relevant and needed to be seriously addressed. Carlo Levi’s 1945 novel Cristo si è fermato a Eboli (Christ Stopped at Eboli) raised concern about the condition of the remote areas of southern Italy, igniting a fierce debate on possible solutions to the region’s economic and social poverty and renewing interest in Gramsci’s interpretation of the “the Southern Question” (Grasso 2007, 16).

Anthropologist Ernesto De Martino’s work contributed to the debate. De Martino (1959, 182) analyzed magic and religious practices in southern Italy, claiming that they were not a product of intrinsic characteristics of the area’s inhabitants but rather the result of psychological defense mechanisms and historical circumstances. His research prompted documentarians such as Michele Gandin, Luigi Di Gianni, Gian Vittorio Baldi, Cecilia Mangini, and Lino Del Fra to film folkloric and religious practices in southern Italy. Their efforts were enthusiastically backed by De Martino and proved influential in Italian culture, encouraging well‐known intellectuals to collaborate on projects including Mangini’s Ignoti alla città (1958), Stendalì (suonano ancora) (1960), and La canta delle marane (1963), all written by Pier Paolo Pasolini (Caminati 2010, 14). The anthropological documentaries also caused a debate in the scientific community over the extent to which film was a reliable source of data. For example, Gandin’s Lamento funebre (1953), a precious testimony of an ancient and almost extinct grief ritual in the small village of Basilicata, was criticized because of cooperation between the film director and his subjects: to improve image quality, the people of the village agreed to perform the ritual in an open space instead of a closed room as was their custom (Marano 2007, 148). The already cited Stendalì was also denounced by the ethnologists of Rome’s Museo delle arti e tradizioni popolari on the basis of the supposed inadmissibility of an edited film for scientific purposes; to them, only a sequence shot or long take would count as an objective document (Bertozzi 2008, 149).

Despite this debate’s interesting consequences for a definition of documentary practice, it’s fair to say that serving as data collections for scientific analysis was not the documentaries’ sole or main purpose—and this is even more the case if the documentaries in question are those of Vittorio De Seta, who produced a corpus of brilliant simplicity and enduring appeal. De Seta knew and respected De Martino’s books and research, but he had too much fondness for the artistic side of his work to be interested in its scientific aspects (Fofi and Volpi 1999). He had no qualms about telling his characters what to do or choosing the best angle for a shot; he was not interested in producing objective cinema or data for a better understanding of, say, Sicilian fishermen. He wanted to make meaningful cinematic portraits of cultures, practices, people, and communities that he cared about and felt were about to vanish. His short documentaries about southern Italy, shot between 1954 and 1959, may look simple, but they are extremely innovative and in some aspects radical. They were self‐produced with a limited crew but used the latest technical innovations: color film, cinemascope, and light and portable sound recording equipment. In that period and for years to come, the voiceover commentary was not only a standard presence in any documentary but almost a defining feature of the genre. De Seta abandons it, and uses instead a recorded soundtrack of voices, songs, and noises as a base for film editing. He does not simply juxtapose images with their recorded direct sound, but uses the recorded soundtrack as a reference for an original and powerful image editing. Isole di fuoco (1954) shows the epic fight of the inhabitants of the Aeolian Islands against the elements: strong wind and big waves make it difficult for the fishermen to return to the harbor. De Seta’s camera is on one of the boats and captures the ominous colors of the sky, the violent rolling of the rowboat, and the fear on the fishermen’s faces lit by the red color of Stromboli’s lava. Contadini del mare (1955) follows a narrative as well: a day of tuna fishing on the Sicilian coast. The fishermen sail off at dawn for a precise spot where tuna have been passing every year for centuries. There are moments of idle waiting when some of the men eat while others sleep or repair the nets; then tuna arrive and action becomes hectic, until the nets are recovered and the huge fish are harpooned into the boats, bleeding and violently shaking. De Seta directed feature‐length fiction movies in the following years, some of them highly praised, such as Banditi a Orgosolo (Bandits of Orgosolo, 1961), and even films and documentaries for television, such as Diario di un maestro (1973), but his short movies of the 1950s are his truly outstanding works. They had an enduring influence on Italian cinema, and even nowadays some of the most talented young Italian directors pay explicit homage to his cinema: Franco Maresco does in more than one interview (Fofi and Volpi 1999, 5) and Michelangelo Frammartino cites De Seta’s I dimenticati (1959) in his latest film Le quattro volte (2010).⁷

De Seta’s work is also central to the last important genre in Italian post–World War II documentary: the nature documentary. Indeed, De Seta began his career collaborating with Panaria Film, a small Sicilian production company that specialized in maritime documentaries. One of its producers, Francesco Alliata, invented a camera case that allowed him to shoot underwater images for the 1946 documentary Cacciatori sottomarini (Bertozzi 2008, 153). Ten years later, the most ambitious and successful nature documentary of the period, Folco Quilici’s Sesto continente (The Sixth Continent, 1954), appeared. In 1952, the young Quilici embarked on the boat Formica with a team of Italian scientists on a 4‐month expedition to the Red Sea (Caputi 2000, 33). After a few weeks, he was appointed director of the film department and was able to capture the colorful inhabitants of the coral reefs. The film was screened in 1954 at the Venice Film Festival and widely acclaimed by critics and the public.

Many factors contributed to Italian cinema’s late 1960s and early 1970s descent into what was perceived by many as an irreversible crisis (Grassi and Aprà 1978, 11). Arguably, television became the major force in the audiovisual entertainment industry. In 1964, Italian households spent half their total entertainment expenses on cinema, down from two‐thirds just 10 years before; cinema spectators were decreasing sharply, while television ownership was increasing at an annual rate of 18% (Pinto 1980, 45). This transformation produced radical changes in all Western societies—and, in some parts of the world, fresh and promising possibilities: for example, documentary series specifically intended for television, such as were already appearing by the mid‐1950s in Great Britain, Canada, and the United States (Ellis and McLane 2005, 180). However, in Italy this same transformation opened a divide between commercial and independent cinema that still largely characterizes Italian audiovisual production.⁸

Politics was a main factor as well, at least until the end of the 1970s. Radical ideas and revolutionary intentions split or transformed educational institutions such as Rome’s Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia and professional associations including ANAC (Associazione Nazionale Autori Cinematografici) and AID (Associazione Internazionale Documentaristi) (Bertozzi 2008, 209–10), challenging the way documentary filmmaking was traditionally taught, and claiming for it a different place within film institutions. New kinds of film distribution were tested as well. In 1967, Turin’s Cooperativa Cinema Indipendente and Rome’s Filmstudio 70 attracted cinephiles, intellectuals, and students willing to invent more participatory and politically engaged forms of film experience (Carabba 1978, 64). Authors felt the need to work free from commercial constraints and to express their creativity without abiding by restrictive rules, cultural organizers began to conceive of films as opportunities for debate and as political tools, and spectators flocked to small theatres and private projections. But Italian screens were also invaded by thousands of soft‐porn films and sex comedies (Micciché 1980, 8–10). As a result of this polarization, institutional practices such as the public subvention of documentaries for theatrical release languished on the verge of extinction. Between 1952 and 1977, only 286 documentaries were produced with government funds (Bertozzi 2008, 213). The national broadcaster Rai, however, thanks to the absolute lack of competition it enjoyed in its first 20 years, provided some space for what its managers judged as culturally relevant documentary projects, which were, most of the time, works by well‐known fiction film directors. Such is the case with Luigi Comencini’s I bambini e noi (The Children and Us, 1970), a TV series centered on interviews of Italian children of different social and geographical backgrounds, and Vittorio De Seta’s fiction–documentary hybrid Diario di un maestro, a touching portrait of a young school teacher and his students in a poor district of Rome.

Even fruitful collaborations between Rai and independent producers were not so rare. An example is the series of films and videos by the collective Videobase, which was formed in 1970 by Anna Lajolo, Guido Lombardi, and Alfredo Leonardi—among the first Italian filmmakers using video technology. They put their expertise in light and movable recording equipment to the service of underground, experimental, and political cinema, documenting and reporting on some of the most controversial issues of the period. The titles of some of their works are self‐explanatory (we provide the translations here, though the films do not exist in English versions): La casa è un diritto, non un privilegio (A Home is a Right, not a Privilege, 1970), Valpreda è innocente, la strage è di stato (Valpreda is Innocent, the Massacre is the Work of the State, 1972),⁹ and Lotta di classe alla Fiat (Class Struggle at FIAT, 1973). Rai produced many of their documentaries, particularly L’isola dell’isola (1974), on a small community in Sardinia, and E nua ca simu a forza du mundu (1971), on the high number of on‐the‐job deaths in the construction sector.

In 1976, a decision by the Italian Supreme Court (Corte costituzionale) imposed the end of the national public broadcaster’s monopoly. The dawn of private television was a time of unbridled experimentation and witnessed the budding of dozens of local broadcasters throughout the peninsula, some of them eager to put to work a new generation of filmmakers who were testing lighter and more affordable technologies and formats, such as Super‐8 and Betamax. This period ended in 1980, when Silvio Berlusconi’s TeleMilano was transformed into Canale 5 and, thanks to its immediate success, set the standard for both public and commercial Italian television, which became entangled in a race to maximize both audiences and profits (Sinclair and Turner 2004, 78). Some critics have suggested that the media clash between private and public television in the 1980s left Italian cinema dead on the battlefield. Lino Micciché (1998, 5), for example, calls the 1980s “the long grey decade” of Italian cinema, as television absorbed all the attention and energy of the media sector. And yet, looking at documentary, we find major new figures taking the Italian cinema stage: Silvano Agosti, the aforementioned Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi, and Daniele Segre. Agosti’s first important work is Matti da slegare (Fit to Be Untied, 1975), a film codirected with Marco Bellocchio, Sandro Petraglia, and Stefano Rulli that joined the debate around the reform of psychiatric institutes, promoted by psychologist Franco Basaglia and culminating in the reform of the asylum system 5 years later. The film follows three men, fortuitously released from an asylum, and witnesses their difficulties reintegrating into society because of traumatic experiences (Bertozzi 2008, 225). Agosti continued to collaborate with this institution in the following years, notably for D’amore si vive (1983), a report on sexuality and love reminiscent of Pasolini’s Comizi d’amore (Love Meetings, 1965). Agosti’s documentaries are never guided by a predetermined thesis and always inspired by a sincere pursuit of truth and a profound respect for reality. Daniele Segre began his career as a set photographer for Matti da slegare, but rapidly developed an original and prolific approach to filmmaking that established him as a reference point for the Italian documentary scene of the last three decades. In his early movies, he developed an outstanding ability to focus on the fringes of Italian society and make public what was ignored. Perché droga (1976), shot in the Mirafiori factory in Turin, was the first Italian documentary on the problem of drug addiction, and Ragazzi di stadio (1980), a film on the Juventus football club’s supporters, was the first look at the frequently neglected phenomenon of football hooliganism. His pragmatic attitude toward documentary production has allowed him a prolific and longstanding filmmaking career, including the drive to found a school in 1989, I Cammelli, which would teach to younger generations his idea of documentary as “conscious resistance to homologation” (Lischi 1997, 14).

In the past 20 years, Italian documentary has evolved at an unprecedented pace. Brilliant young directors made their debuts during the 1990s. Roberto Nanni’s L'amore vincitore—Conversazione con Derek Jarman (Derek Jarman Conversations, 1993) reinstated the interview genre at that time associated with old‐fashioned documentary practices; Alessandro Rossetto made Il fuoco di Napoli (1995), a compassionate portrait of a family of fireworks manufacturers in Naples; Gianfranco Rosi began his international career with Boatman (1994), a film on the tranquil cycle of life and death along the banks of the Ganges; and Marco Amenta directed Diario di una siciliana ribelle (One Girl Against the Mafia, 1997), the story of Rita Atria, the daughter of a Mafia boss, who decided to denounce her father’s and brother’s killers despite fear of reprisals. At the end of the 1990s, two events brought fresh promise of new spaces for documentary in television schedules. In 1999, the birth of Doc/it, an association of documentary professionals, gave the category an official representative to deal with broadcasters and politicians. In 1997, Canal + acquired 90% of Telepiù, the first Italian pay television platform, and started to invest in documentary production, importing the business model that proved so successful in France.¹⁰ Even if some of the promises of the late 1990s were left unfulfilled, the last decade has seen an amazing number of internationally acclaimed documentaries, demonstrating the extraordinary vitality of the sector. Costanza Quatriglio debuted with her movie Ècosaimale? (2000) on the street life of young female children in an old Palermo neighborhood. Her interest in the condition of women continues to inspire her latest movies, such as Triangle (2014). It tells the story of two specular events: a terrible fire in a New York factory in 1911 that killed 146 people, most of them Italian female migrant workers, and an accident in Barletta in 2011, in which female textile workers died under the rubble of a building that was housing an illegal knitting mill factory.

Other original and provocative recent documentaries are Francesca Comencini’s Carlo Giuliani, ragazzo (Carlo Giuliani, Boy, 2002), a staggering portrait of the young man killed by Italian police during the 2001 G8 meeting in Genoa, told through his mother’s voice (Sassi 2011), and Michelangelo Frammartino’s metaphysical and environmentally attuned film of transmigration and nature, Le quattro volte. In 2009 alone, around 300 documentaries were produced in Italy, 15 of which received theatrical release (Viganò and Sovena 2010, 131). Among them were such gems as Sergio Basso’s Giallo a Milano (Giallo a Milano: Made in Chinatown), on Milan’s Chinese community; Marcello Sannino’s Corde, on the life of a shy Neapolitan boxer; Federica di Giacomo’s Housing, on the inhabitants of a Bari neighborhood who cling to the walls of their housing projects for fear of their apartments being squatted; and Pietro Marcello’s La bocca del lupo (The Mouth of the Wolf), the intense love story of low‐life Enzo and transsexual Mary in the old alleys of Genoa, told through amateur found footage (Caminati 2011a).

Figure 21.2 Three barely discernible human figures, surrounded by the fruits of their labor, capturing the integration of the human and the natural in Le quattro volte (Michelangelo Frammartino, 2010). Screen grab.

Documentary is also the medium of choice of minorities who still struggle to make their voices heard in the sadly homogeneous Italian media landscape. It is the case, for example, of Italian–Ghanaian director Fred Kuwornu, who tackled the issue of the denial of Italian citizenship to children born of immigrants in his 18 ius Soli (2012).

To conclude, it is essential to notice that while “Italian cinema” is perennially waiting for the rebirth of a strong fiction presence (Ghelli 2009, 19), documentary is clearly becoming its most innovative and vibrant face. Suffice to mention Gianfranco Rosi’s big budget nonfictions, which are gaining international praise: Sacro GRA (2013), filmed around the highways that circle Rome and winner of the Golden Lion at the 70th Venice International Film Festival, and Fuocoammare (Fire at Sea, 2016), painstakingly representing the struggle of migrants landing in Lampedusa, which was awarded the Golden Bear at the 66th Berlinale.

References

1. Aitken, I. 2000. Alberto Cavalcanti: Realism, Surrealism and National Cinema. Trowbridge: Flick Books.
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3. Bazin, A. 1976. What Is Cinema? Vol. 2, translated by H. Gray. Berkeley: University of California Press.
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Notes

1 Editor’s note: For related discussion, see the chapters in this volume by Lischi and Rascaroli.

2 The traditional lack of attention to nonfiction Italian film is evident even in Peter Bondanella’s A History of Italian Cinema (2009) and the recently translated The History of Italian Cinema by Gian Piero Brunetta (2009b).

3 On this topic, see Ruth Ben‐Ghiat’s seminal Fascist Modernities (2001), which reassesses the influence of European “realist” trends on Italian modernism, and Luca Caminati (2011b).

4 As Francesco Casetti (2008) has recently pointed out, cinema represents the true eye of the twentieth century, not simply as a representational device, but more importantly in the way in which it influenced the outlook of the arts on reality. On the relationship between cinema and modernity, out of a very long relevant bibliography, I suggest Casetti (2008), Gunning (1986), and Hansen (1995).

5 Marco Bertozzi (2008) discusses these documentaries in some detail.

6 With a text by Emilio Cecchi. The director of photography was LUCE’s Angelo Jannarelli and the music by Luigi Colcicchi. See Mancini (1981, 154).

7 Both movies show the Festa della Pita, a traditional ceremony in which the tallest pine tree of a forest between Calabria and Basilicata is cut down by hand and tugged up to the village of Alessandria del Carretto. The tree is erected in the middle of the village’s central square, and the bravest men climb it to the top.

8 An example of this fierce divide in contemporary Italian cinema is the oppositional relationship between independent documentary producers and the public national broadcaster, Rai, despite exceptional instances noted in the body of the text. The fraught relationship is evident from the survey commissioned by Doc/it, the Italian documentarian association in 2006. See Teodosi (2006, 28–29).

9 Pietro Valpreda was an Italian anarchist, sentenced to prison on charges of being responsible for the 1969 Piazza Fontana massacre, before being cleared of all accusations 16 years later.

10 The channel had a short life and was shut down in 2003 when Rupert Murdoch’s Sky Network entered the Italian market.