This brief, intense book will be of particular interest to students of folklore and folklorism in southern Europe and in the relationship between local tradition and film. Addressing the production of (in the broadest sense) ethnographic film on the island of Sardinia, Silvio Carta offers a clear understanding of how filmic folklorism followed the political pressures of fascism and parliamentary democracy alike. Sardinia, an island that is internally variegated in cultural terms, nevertheless resists the homogenizing forces of mainland Italian culture. Even those Sardinians who do not especially favor political independence will insist, for example, that sardo is not a dialect but a language—a distinction that is in itself profoundly political in character.
It is in this context that we must read Carta’s account of the evolution of ethnographic film from and about Sardinia. The story he tells is of a progression from the crude propaganda of fascism—in which distinctive Sardinian values and ways of life were elided as either embarrassingly threatening to state authority or just as embarrassingly backward—to the increasingly nuanced and culturally sensitive work of such filmmakers as Vittorio De Seta and, especially and most recently, the Australian David MacDougall. Carta, to his credit, is not out to prove that only a Sardinian can make a good film about Sardinia; indeed, MacDougall appears in his narrative as the outsider who has learned to watch, listen, and respect, rather than distort the visual through preconceived ideas about local lives. Seeing in De Seta an important attitudinal and methodological transition that anticipates the respectful humility of MacDougall, Carta argues that De Seta’s “Copernican” camera is an instrument of observation rather than of imposing order.
De Seta used locals as key figures in enactments that fulfilled a narrative purpose rather than documentary goals. Nevertheless, his Banditi ad Orgosolo escapes both the voyeuristic romanticism that he sees in so many folklorists’ treatment of the famed mountain village and the condemnatory attitude that characterizes its treatment in historical works and in the public media. In that sense, his film provides a useful backdrop to studies of Orgosolo by anthropologists Tracey Heatherington (2010) and Antonio Sorge (2015). Carta lauds De Seta’s participatory approach (“not about… but… with the Sardinian shepherds,” p. 125) and his ability to convey the stillness of their slow-moving interactions with the natural environment— an intriguing prelude to (and perhaps explanation of) the villagers’ ferocious defense, so well described by Heatherington, of their deep cultural and historical investment in that environment against the ecological policies of the Italian state.
For Carta, however, it was MacDougall who has produced the profoundest filmic work on Sardinia. He attributes this to MacDougall’s capacity to let local voices and actions speak for themselves, and praises the filmmaker’s decision to use subtitles as a means of enabling non-Sardinian viewers to appreciate the qualities of a language that MacDougall himself had not mastered. Carta treats what would have been regarded as a weakness in a folklorist or anthropologist as, instead, an instantiation of MacDougall’s humility—a quality that did not prevent MacDougall from criticizing De Seta’s dubbing in standard Italian, but that led him to engage local skills to highlight what he did not have the knowledge to touch. MacDougall thereby rendered palpable the sonar qualities of a spoken idiom that audiences could thereby appreciate as something different from standard Italian.
In a short review, it is impossible to summarize the many points so compactly bundled into a prose that, ironically, sounds peculiarly Italian in its sometimes abstract constructions. These produce an almost Brechtian epistemological voiceover effect that reminds us that what we are reading about is actually a visual idiom. Folklorists will especially appreciate the way in which Carta describes early fascist attempts to use film to prettify local practices or erase them altogether in favor of Mussolini’s grandiose construction projects aimed at civilizing Sardinia; these heavy-handed propaganda pieces complement the clumsy manipulation of local traditions for nationalistic ends by the regime’s appointed scholars. They are as “functionalist” and “rationalist”—in Carta’s astute terminology—as the manipulations of local lore, and equally barren of the real-life tensions and rhythms that the later filmmakers have been able to capture. The representation of lived social experience required, as he shows, abandoning fascism’s bourgeois aesthetics and paternalistic folklorism and dropping the scarcely less condescending gaze of its bifurcated successors in post-World War II national politics. Today’s filmmakers working in Sardinia have learned to let the islanders represent themselves within a cinematic discourse of intimate engagement.
WORKS CITED
Heatherington, Tracey. 2010. Wild Sardinia: Indigeneity and the Global Dreamtimes of Environmentalism. Seattle: University of Washington Press.
Sorge, Antonio. 2015. Legacies of Violence: History, Society, and the State in Sardinia. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
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[Review length: 781 words • Review posted on February 25, 2019]