L’infanzia della paranza: considerazioni a margine di un film

The essay aims to read sub specie educationis the movie directed by Claudio Giovannesi La paranza dei bambini [Engl. Piranhas] based on the novel of the same name written in 2016 by Roberto Saviano, who edited the screenplay together with the director and with the writer Maurizio Braucci.Even though the director has said on several media occasions that his movie “has no pedagogical aims”, we are convinced that the adolescence marginality issue, masterly depicted, cannot be missed by an attentive pedagogical look in dialogue with other narrative forms. Thanks to the synergy of spoken, visual, sign and musical language, as well as thanks to the ability to tell a story in the short time of a video and the strong emotional impact of the audio-visual language, filmmaking, in fact, can turn into a useful instrument to investigate, analyse and problematize social, political, historical, environmental phenomenologies, which are pedagogically marked. Assuming filmmaking as a valuable source of pedagogical reflection, an attempt will be made to read, see and interpret the images of a violated, vilified, scandalized childhood-adolescence, which seem to have no way out. Childhood and adolescence, captured in the peculiar hermeneutic circle arising between the page and the reader, the screen and the image user described by Roberto Saviano and depicted by Claudio Giovannesi, become a literary-cinematographic topos and a pedagogical paradigm. Moving from this paradigmatic site, an attempt will be made to highlight and boost some pedagogical proposals, here assumed as possible ‘alternative’ areas for formative investment.