Meridian Landscape and Documentary Image: Luigi Di Gianni’s Short Movies

Abstract

Is there a meridian landscape? If so, how does it map? Is it possible through the archival work to read Southern Italy’s landscape history and imaginary? This chapter offers an overview of the relationship between landscape and documentary in a crucial period for Italian history and cinema: 1948–1968. In discussing different kinds of documentary materials from audiovisual archives located in various parts of Italy and available online, this analysis aims to show how the landscape has been represented and how it can be considered a mirror of transformations, changes, life practices, and of the South’s memory. The discourse will focus on Luigi Di Gianni’s works filmed in Basilicata as a case study. In particular, I want to highlight the gap between the first documentaries of the 1950s—Magia Lucana (1958), Nascita e morte nel Meridione (S. Cataldo) (1959), Pericolo a Valsinni (1959), Frana in Lucania (1959)—and the subsequent works of the 1960s. In Viaggio in Lucania (1965) and La Madonna di Pierno (1965), the magical-religious themes dear to the author are subordinated to the absence of formal research and greater attention given to everyday life. These aspects make the short films more similar to reportage, returning an image of the Southern landscape no longer as a distant place suspended in another dimension, where nothing happens and time passes slowly, but as a landscape in which old and new, modernity and tradition, coexist in a dialectical process, even if it is an apparently new but actually ancient reality.