Author: Luca Mosso and Giulio Sangiorgio (eds.)

Year: 2025

Pages: 191

Publisher: Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia; Minimum Fax

ISBN: 9788833896618

Description

The latest volume of Bianco e nero opens with an issue which focuses on the precursor of the best Italian films of recent times: the documentary, or – as it was once called – “cinema del reale” (film of reality). This cannot be considered as an actual genre but rather a series of techniques that can be applied to film products that are not necessarily meant for the movie theatre screen: from the film-essay to the first-person diary, from the biopic to true crime. And even further, from cinema to galleries, from television to new media. Each documentary takes its own stance towards the world, is the result of an aesthetic and ethical choice that questions the relationship between the filmmaker, what is being filmed and the audience.

Over the last twenty-five years, the Italian documentary has covered history and its traumas – from the G8 summit in Genoa to the pandemic – investigating how to portray power, a reality that is heavily influenced by media, migration and the self. It has renewed its formats, engaging with the masters of the past and thus offering tools to filmmakers such as Pietro Marcello, Alina Marazzi, Leonardo Di Costanzo, Michelangelo Frammartino and Alice Rohrwacher.

This issue attempts to convey the complexity of a creative and critical ecosystem, from practice to theory, from schools to support organisations. A mosaic of images that still teach us how to observe.