What would we lose if we forgot the past?
Italian filmmaker Vittorio de Seta is best known for the short-form documentaries he shot in the south of Italy and Sicily in the ’50s. Usually about 10 minutes in length, they featured working life in the South, which differed drastically from the labor of the North. At the time, Italy was industrializing rapidly — a shift that spread southward as time went on. Metropoles in northern Italy, like Rome and Milan, were modernized, working in the secondary and tertiary sectors. That is, labor that assembles products already transformed from raw materials, such as in car assembly plants, and labor in service production, such as medical practice. The North was also where Italian cinema was shot and produced. At the same time, some hundreds of miles away, the rural and remote villages of the South had agricultural economies comparable to their ancestors centuries prior, dominated by the labor of the the primary sector, which is mainly focused on the production of raw materials.
De Seta recalled in an interview with The Criterion Collection that his documentaries, which highlighted these villages’ labor practices, were set to be screened before films in Italian cinemas, as per governmental regulations at the time — but cinemas preferred to show advertisements instead. His films were perhaps seen as pedestrian or archaic. Aware of the tensions between “modern living” and the “pre-industrial” South (and of Western Europe’s attitude toward Italy as provincial), de Seta’s countryside films were particularized as “cultural,” as opposed to the lifestyle and aesthetics of the modern monoculture emerging among Europe’s metropoles.
De Seta’s camera would nonetheless continue to focus on these quickly disappearing ways of living as industrialization marched down the boot. While originally Sicilian himself, it would be easy for de Seta, coming from an aristocratic family, to fall into mid-century tropes about the working South, presenting it as backwater, or to film the South in a sanitized and bucolic way. But de Seta, who was able to film so intimately and frequently within Southern villages due to the cultivation and maintenance of relationships with community leaders, was careful not to film with uncritical nostalgia or romanticization — there is no moral or idealistic character to his films. He doesn’t contrast the happy, simple and uncritical peasant of the country to the alienated and depressed city worker. Rather, de Seta shot his films with no prior sense of what he would be portraying; he explained to The Criterion Collection that the documentary was built while working against the backdrop of reality. As such, the work of the countryside, from fishing to mining, is shown to be time-consuming, intense and often dangerous. De Seta simply shot aspects of contemporary life which had been marginalized in the national narrative following postwar reconstruction, and which many urban Italians viewed as far from themselves, not only spatially but also temporally.
On his trips to the South, he filmed single days of working life, which became the basis for each documentary. A day of wheat harvesting, sulfur mining or fishing, for example, were his subjects. Within these shorts, he captured the labor practices of various villages. In “Sea Countrymen” (1955), he filmed a now-endangered practice called “la mattanza,” in which nets were used by groups of fishermen to corral, then spear, schools of tuna.
One such documentary, “The Age of Swordfish,” released in 1955 but filmed in 1954, shows a method of spear fishing that dates back thousands of years to Phoenician depictions. The backbreaking process began at sunrise and ended at sunset; the titular fish are 10 feet long on average, easily weigh more than 1,000 pounds and swim in massive schools. Blood soon coated the boats’ decks, making each step precarious. Immense trust and rapid communication between the fishermen were required for success, and safety was never guaranteed. When de Seta returned to the same village two years later in 1956, the practice had ceased.
Industrialization and metropolization changed the process of these kinds of labor; it’s needless to say that these community-oriented methods of production on a larger scale couldn’t sustain the modern world. At the same time, factors like education and quality of life encouraged migration to the North or to other countries. Opportunities and resources, particularly medical ones, were scarce in the countryside; as such, there is little question why someone would emigrate.
But these labor practices tied these communities together, and as they disappeared during the industrialization of Italy, what replaced them offered little in the way of connection. These labor bonds were difficult to recreate in the context of mid-century Italy’s working life, regardless of the sector. Following the near-extinction of pre-industrial practices — the tuna hunt and the processing of the tuna, for instance — they were cut into different parts, each done by different groups of people with little relation to each other, and the labor was mechanized wherever possible. This segmenting of labor began a process of alienation, severing connection to the community and the physical world around the worker as well as their relationship to the life cycle and purpose of the goods they produced.
De Seta captures ways of living considered to be peripheral to the national narrative of Italy at a time when such lifestyles were considered regressive or embarrassing. He presents a way of life which wasn’t brought to the cities of Italy through word of mouth or through the recollection of others, which would become warped with time, distance and the framing of the storyteller. De Seta’s films invite audiences to consider the South not merely as an “other” outside of modernity but as something which, for a brief period, existed alongside it — as much a part of modernity as the cities themselves. While it may be tempting to think of the metropole as something whole and complete, which the countryside contrasts, de Seta posits that the contradiction identified the whole, and thus was part of it.
So, what would be missing without knowledge of the past? We don’t lose anything quantifiable when we lose it. We don’t lose something that we can tangibly experience either, at least outside our imagination or memory. But when the only way we can imagine something is through stories we’ve heard about it, we lack a sensory understanding that comes from sight and sound. For de Seta, we would be missing an understanding of life and labor as it was, replaced with a narrative of life as it was imagined. Through his work, today we understand that another way of life existed in a not-so-distant past.
With the progression of automation and the increasing internationalism of supply chains, as well as the continuing refinement and employment of Artificial Intelligence, de Seta’s work feels as relevant to the 2020s as the 1950s. We, too, are living through a wave of deskilling and breaking up of labor. The concept of “labor” (and the goods it produces) also becomes increasingly abstract and placeless, and alienation continues to plague the modern worker. De Seta’s documentaries highlight the role that seeing the material effect of our work and that our sense of community once played in labor. While our trade may play an increasingly little part in this “rooting” and identifying of ourselves, the digitization of our age, while exacerbating many of these issues, can be a source of succor. It’s easier than ever to find out what’s going on around us, inform ourselves and get involved in real life, from volunteer groups to hobbyist circles. We may find the synthesis between work, community and self that de Seta recorded elusive, but he allows us to put our finger on what’s missing.
Daily Arts Contributor Max Resch can be reached at nataljo@umich.edu.
