«Così e non diversamente». Comunicare il territorio attraverso il cinema documentario: uno sguardo sul Rione Traiano di Selfie (A. Ferrente, 2019)

Abstract

«Così e non diversamente». Communicating the territory through documentary cinema: a look at Rione Traiano in Selfie (A. Ferrente, 2019). The paper aims to present, through a critical geosemiotic approach, the proposal of a possible architecture of knowledge for the reading of the territory as a hypertext (Deridda, 1971; Mudie 2016), starting from the Ricoeurian project of "grafting the hermeneutic problem on the phenomenological method" (Ricoeur 1969). This was done in order to explore the dynamics of the conflict between the possible interpretations – and, therefore, narrations – of reality. Conflict, in fact, is a fundamental theme of every dialectical conception and a privileged occasion for the exploration of a new hermenéia for the study of the communicative potential of territories. To this end, however, it is essential to resort to exploratory practices useful to decode and make intelligible the territory-text and, at the same time, to give meaning to the territorial con-text, through cultural actions of symbolic re-signification. Among these, we will deal, in this research, with the cine-documentary practice through the analysis of the scopic regime (Metz 1977) operating in Selfie (A. Ferrente, 2019), a work that has met with critical acclaim and aroused the attention of academic debate (Chauvin, 2019; Ravesi, 2019; Tantillo & Carlino, 2019; Bandirali, 2020), which narrates Rione Traiano, the scene of the tragedy that occurred in 2014, when 17-year-old Davide Bifulco was accidentally killed by a carbineer. The story is carried forward by the tale of two teenagers from the Rione, Alessandro and Pietro, to whom the director hands over a smartphone, asking them to film themselves in their daily lives: the practice of the videoselfie thus ceases to be an egocentric exercise and offers, instead, a collective self-portrait of the territory, a story from below of a place that seems to almost impose itself as a destiny on the lives of those who inhabit it.