03 - The Vittorio De Seta Documentaries
An unforgettable view into a bygone world.
Throughout the 1950s, Italian documentary filmmaker Vittorio De Seta made a series of journeys to Sicily, Sardinia, and Calabria, to capture the remnant of its pastoral, pre-modern life before it was overturned by the final mechanistic processes of modernization. What resulted was a series of short documentaries utterly without peer in their simplicity and beauty. In Age of the Swordfish, he records some of the last spear fishermen on the hunt in a line of ancestors running two thousand years. Only a year after his camera rolled, the fishing practices he captured were banned from the seas, never to be used again. In Islands of Fire we watch townsfolk sheltering from in their ancient villages under the threat of Volcanic Eruptions. We are struck by the dignity and beauty of ease with which the women of Barbagia, carry bundles of firewood twice their own size down the slopes of hills back into their homes. Each film is a brief picture into the rhythms of life of a people who perhaps have more in common with their ancestors of many hundreds of years than with us, seventy years later.
The De Seta documentaries will shock the modern viewer for their authenticity and immediacy of action. His films betray little of their maker or their own time. You could just as near believe they were filmed in 1954, as 1854, or 1454. There is no narrator. De Seta does not assert himself in any obvious or garish way. There is none of the artifice we associate with classic Hollywood film style. Instead, what one sees are merely the people and their practices, their ways of life unadorned; as normal to them as washing the dishes. To us, seeing a world now extinct, as distant as all antiquity, we are struck by the vitality, the immediacy, and the difficulty of such a life, with backs hunched low over endless fields of grain. I want to sneeze when I watch farmers literally separate the wheat from the chaff, throwing up clouds of dusty, dry stalks seemingly into their own faces with dispassion. Yet nothing is random in a De Seta film, his editing is masterful and betrays no artifice. It is seamless in a way one expects to see only within the confines of narrative filmmaking, not within the spontaneity of documentary process, giving the films a miraculous consistency. One rarely encounters such a steady compositional eye in places so quiet and domestic; so intimate and personal.
It is really something to imagine De Seta lugging around a heavy old film camera, a wooden tripod, and heavy crates of lenses and film mags, swapping them out for every four minutes of record time. It is all the more admirable to imagine De Seta and his wife Vera amongst these people, who could not at first fathom why anyone would be interested in pointing a camera at their lives. But one must conclude that the interpersonal part of this journey was as important as the work behind the camera, winning the trust and friendship of their subjects all along the way.
All of this suggests a kind of patience of craft that I have never encountered in my own era. We who have grown up first with Handy-cams, DSLRs, and cellphones, have gone on to film nervous interview subjects totally unnoticed by us camera persons obsessed with our gear, chasing ever smoother dolly-push-ins and smoother and softer lighting sources. But the canniest modern advertisers understand the importance of the vitality and immediacy of life. Observe how modern commercials stress meaningful connection and idealize hard working altruism amongst a supportive community of friends. You too can live well if you buy our product. Wide lensed shots of beautiful young people dancing on top of camper vans. The less of real life we have encountered, the more we will be content with its facsimiles.
I, on the other hand, regret that, after a hard day’s work, I do not retire with my compatriots, and their hard worn faces, to an evening of olden song, sung by our untrained voices, on the beach where we earn our living, accompanied by the dancing of our children.
There are ten documentaries by Vittorio De Seta on Criterion Channel. I have watched eight. It might stay that way for a while. I like knowing there are still two more that wait to be discovered. Only one of the documentaries is longer than twenty minutes, most are closer to ten, but each is a world unto itself. I never want them to end.
Where can I watch them?
There are some very low resolution versions of some of the shorts floating around on YouTube, but I don’t think they are worth bothering with. The best, and only place I know of to stream these films are on Criterion Channel and their inclusion there is one of the strongest arguments I can make for signing up for it. It would be wonderful if one day they could compile them all on a single blu-ray. The restorations are beautiful and vibrant and make want to shoot on 35mm film more than I already did.