Giuliano Danieli (Università Statale di Milano)
Meetings "New Frontiers of Musicological Research"
Martedì 11 giugno, ore 15, Aula Nino Pirrotta
11/06/2024
After World War II, Italian cinema with rural settings participated in the broad movement of rediscovery of folklore that pervaded the Italian intellectual world. Many neo-realist films and documentaries of the 1950s approach the popular universe, interpreted as subaltern and anti-hegemonic, and thus opposed to bourgeois society, from an almost Gramscian perspective. In these films, new visual and narrative strategies are developed, aimed at recounting the life of peasants, shepherds, and fishermen in a direct, unfiltered manner. But how are the music, sounds and voices of rural communities rendered?
According to some scholars, the world of the peasants has no place in the soundtracks of post-war Italian cinema, which are often extremely conventional in their use of extradiegetic symphonic music, with a late Romantic flavour, totally incongruous with the subjects depicted. This assertion appears to be correct for many films of the period, but there are some notable exceptions, traceable in the productions of Luchino Visconti (La terra trema, 1948), Giuseppe De Santis (Caccia tragica, 1947; Riso amaro, 1949; Non c'è pace tra gli ulivi, 1950) and Vittorio De Seta (the documentaries of the years 1954-1959). My contribution questions the audiovisual strategies devised by these three directors to remediate, let resonate, enhance and strengthen the voices, music and sounds of the popular world. Through filmic analyses and the scrutiny of archival sources, I show how, in the works of the three directors, the sound element is indeed decisive in celebrating the popular world in its 'anti-hegemonic' cultural dimension, but I also note the emergence of contradictory, perhaps inevitable, gestures that muddy the picture of the relationship between Italian cinema and the folkloric-rural universe.