[leggi in italiano]

The womb of Matera hosts the extraordinary triptych Lucania ’61 by Carlo Levi, containing many of the values that, now just as formerly, characterise Basilicata and its people. Essentially, this means frugality, slowness, attachment to the land and environment that make Matera today not only a landmark of “lucanità”, of the South and the Mediterranean, but a prototype of an ecological town, in which the archetype finally merges with modernity. The Piedmontese intellectual achieved this monumental work for the one-hundredth anniversary of the Italian Unification, dedicating it to the Lucanian poet Rocco Scotellaro to honour their mutual profound esteem. Scotellaro, in the first picture on the right, harangues the crowd of peasants on the square of Tricarico with its usual momentum of active citizens, in order to praise that new cultural dawn for the Lucanians, which today finds its turning point in Matera European Capital of Culture 2019. This allows the town to shake off the unpleasant label of “national shame” (quoted Palmiro Togliatti, 1948) and open with resilience to a new destiny and a new identity. Lucania ’61 is consequently the best “anthropological film” that speaks of us, people of the South: a work in which the utopian figure of the town crier-poet, the citizen-mayor, is sculpted, inciting his fellows toward progress and the emancipation of the “last”, with the force of words and ideas, as weighty as millstones in the great vice of “choral autism” that all too often oppresses the Italian South. It was Levi and Scotellaro: they were the flames that inspired the MaTerre project carried out by Rete Cinema Basilicata co-designed with the Matera Basilicata 2019 Foundation and numerous other local, national and international partners.

Episode Cos Endins, by Gianluca Abbate, poetry Eduard Escoffet

In the verses of La mia bella Patria (My Beautiful Homeland, 1949) we elected fragility as the identifying factor of vulnerable modern man, increasingly subjugated to the ravenous contemporary panopticon that is seriously upsetting the individual and collective imaginary. Limiting the project’s geography of action to the Euro-Mediterranean area (currently the most vital in Europe), we invited five film directors and five poets belonging to this cultural environment to take part in a Euro-Mediterranean Poetry Film Workshop (an international artistic residence held at Matera from 18 April to 2 May 2019) to contend in situ with a prototype of 360° virtual reality immersive poetry film connecting light, landscape and local cultures with a Euro-Mediterranean gaze. Five creative couples were consequently formed, each with a director and a poet, to produce a collective VR film. The point of departure was thus Lucanian cultural tradition combined with the most recent (post-) cinematographic technological innovations.

Episode Ate ca Tu, direction and poetry by Domenico Brancale, in collaboration with Blerina Goce

Our fundamental question is: who nowadays are the new peasants portrayed in Levi’s picture with regard to contemporary Europe? For an answer, we put our trust in the democratising exercise of the word, the recited word, verses not written but performed as spoken word by Eduard Escoffet, Yolanda Castaño, Domenico Brancale, Aurélia Lassaque and Nilson Muniz, the poets invited to the MaTerre workshop. We followed the idea of raising an intercultural chorus for Europe, a plural and inclusive chorus dwelling in the heritage of the Sassi and Rupestrian Churches of Matera, creating a magnificent short-circuit between the origin of the sign and word. Beside the poets were five filmmakers, mainly from the documentary field (Giuseppe Schillaci, Elena Zervopoulou, Blerina Goce), video-journalism (Vito Foderà) and video-art (Gianluca Abbate). Five cross-Gazes, five (techno)-peasants provided with action-cam as a tool-device to restore an original collective Gaze at Matera, free from the codes of major international prduction, which has now identified the town as the ideal type for a mainstream Christological series of films. These new (techno)-peasants are, moreover, shamans who do not till the land, but interrogate it in an increasingly fluid and hybrid identitarian game of belonging, where the border is just a new linguistic, poetic and cinematographic code, not a finis terrae.

Episode Mai Terra, by Vito Foderà, poetry Yolanda Castaño

Thus, the five poets produced an original poetic composition (in the minor languages of Galician, Catalan, Occitan and the Lucanian dialect), inspired by the values in Scotellaro’s La mia bella Patria: land, freedom, fragility and active citizenship. These new verses became the outline of the screenplay used by the five directors for their episodes (which are discontinuous), employing, for the mise-en-scène, the poets themselves as actors/performers. The onerous path of codesign chosen triggered the question of the feeling of belonging to Europe with a southern, Mediterranean point of view. The final result, which can be appreciated in the exhibition curated by Bruno Di Marino, in the rupestrian church of Santa Maria de Armenis, speaks of a strongly innovative experience of expanded cinema that frees the eye and shuns the film theatre, affirming its new identity in museums, art galleries and unconventional spaces.

Episode Transhumance, by Giuseppe Schillaci, poetry Aurélia Lassaque

As compared to classical cinema, by using VR technology, the directors tackled a different way of considering the mise en scène and also of looking: no longer through a frame, a window on reality, but at 360°, without borders (like Europe we hope) between on-screen and off-screen, in the code of classic cinema. The new audio-visual techniques, still being perfected, were a challenge to reach an aesthetic reflection (also thanks to the blog Identity Card and the Aenigmata and Harmonic Identities sections on the project’s website), as well as a poetic and juridical one of the contemporary identitymaking Gaze. MaTerre is a film to be enjoyed individually, through an individual perspective very similar to the atomised experience of gaming that is weakening the collective view of the movie theatre, which fortunately will never die, but which has already given way - in industrial terms – to video-games and the ubiquitous use of audio-visual content on digital devices.

MaTerre is a film that, as with Jonas Mekas (“to free the cinema!”), frees the cinema from classic codes and consolidated practices, bringing it to a crisis, reformulating it without seeking alliances with past grammar. A filme falado, as Manoel de Oliveira might say, collective and vibrant, which, a completed imperfection, exempts us from the tyranny of the Gaze of the classical cinema, soaring itself, opening itself to co-authorship with the modern spectator, increasingly hungry for experiential content in which the new game of self-identification is found.