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What would we lose if we forgot the past?<\/p>\n
Italian filmmaker Vittorio de Seta is best known for the short-form documentaries he shot in the south of Italy and Sicily in the \u201950s. 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<\/a> rapidly<\/a> \u2014 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.<\/p>\n De Seta recalled in an interview with The Criterion Collection that his documentaries, which highlighted these villages\u2019 labor practices, were set to be screened before films in Italian cinemas, as per governmental regulations at the time \u2014 but cinemas preferred to show advertisements instead. His films were perhaps seen as pedestrian or archaic. Aware of the tensions between \u201cmodern living\u201d and the \u201cpre-industrial\u201d South (and of Western Europe\u2019s attitude toward Italy as provincial), de Seta\u2019s countryside films were particularized as \u201ccultural,\u201d as opposed to the lifestyle and aesthetics of the modern monoculture emerging among Europe\u2019s metropoles.\u00a0<\/p>\n De Seta\u2019s 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 \u2014 there is no moral or idealistic character to his films. He doesn\u2019t 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n