Neorealismo e antropologia: Visconti e De Martino in Lucania

Abstract

In the late nineteen fifties in Lucania, an area that became symbolic as regards the peasant condition which would be redeemed and changed through new programmes and politics, Ernesto De Martino studies and records the ancient mythical and ritualistic performance of the "game of the sickle". In the same period Luchino Visconti studies the location and makes a detailed anthropological research for "Rocco and his brothers", one of the masterpieces of Italian neo-realism, released in Italy in 1960. That same year L. Del Fra presents "A passion for wheat", a documentary based on the documents and archive material of the research conducted by De Martino. Visconti's neo-realism and the anthropological studies in southern Italy are connected by the same methodology used and the creation of the paradigms of the first "anthropological cinema" or documentary which in Italy is, in its beginnings, the "meridional" cinema.