Past and Future of a Region: Basilicata Through Documentary Cinema of the 1950s and 1960s

After World War II, Italian cinema discovers Italy and its landscape. Neorealist cinema is probably the most significant manifestation of the new season: the regime has fallen, and with it its censorship and its conditioning, a new need to narrate the country emerges strongly. Cinema goes on the road, explores Italy and discovers the South, the other side of the country in slow recovery after the war, marked by ancient poverty and underdevelopment, and an ancestral cultural distance from the rest of the country. If fictional cinema (including neorealism) prefers urban contexts, documentary cinema, through its various genres, mainly deals with the narration of the southern rural world and its paradoxes. Basilicata is a specific emblem of the distant and forgotten South in those years. Closed in its geographical and cultural isolation, hurt by an impressive misery, the region is a destination for photographers and researchers from various disciplines, who explore its meanderings. With the reconstruction and the economic miracle, timid but progressive signs of development gradually transform the Lucania landscape, affected by early forms of industrialization and the building of various types of infrastructure under the aegis of government intervention. Documentary cinema of the Fifties and Sixties offers some significant representations of Basilicata, crossed by different forces, centrifugal and centripetal, divided by pushes to change and cultural resistance. The anthropological and social documentary, often critical of reality, tells of rural Basilicata, poor and tied to ancient cultural legacy. On the other hand, institutional and industrial documentaries, expressions of voices interested in narrating the great transformation and its merits, represent Basilicata projected towards modernity, industrialization and development. Taken together, these works, although from different points of view, allow us to represent in a diachronic form the mutation of landscape, traditions and identity of the region, as well as its contradictions, against the backdrop of an epochal change. The essay, starting from the different representations, narrations and rhetoric that documentary cinema produces, intends to reflect on the definition between post-war and economic miracle of a collective imagination of the region, which in those years is symbolically representative of a South considered as a spatial and temporal edge of the country. Through the interpretations that documentary cinema offers of the Lucania reality and its landscape, it is possible to discern a way of thinking about the South, which yesterday as today belongs to our culture and directs its gaze.