On: Vittorio De Seta

Two years ago I received an unexpected gift from the Italian producers of "Il Mio Viaggio in Italia" (my documentary on Italian cinema). The gift consisted of several 35mm prints of documentaries directed by Vittorio De Seta between 1954 and 1958. There were seven color films in all - each around 10 minutes long - and six of them had been shot in Cinemascope. They had haunting titles, like Time of the swordfish , Islands of fire, Easter in Sicily, Peasants of the sea, Golden parable...

I had heard about De Seta's documentaries the way one hears of a legendary place: someone must have seen it at some point but no one remembered who, or when, or where. De Seta himself was legendary and mysterious. A director who had made only three feature films in the 1960's (the first of which, Banditi a Orgosolo, was an absolute masterpiece) and who had disappeared thereafter -along with his films - into a kind of oblivion. I vividly remember seeing Banditi at the New York Film Festival in the early 1960s. It was one of the most unusual and extraordinary films I had ever seen.

It's a simple story: a shepherd, unjustly accused of a crime, is chased through an arid and silent landscape. His sheep starve and, destitute, he is forced to become a bandit. The story, however, is also the story of an island and its people. Set on the mountains of Barbagia, in Sardinia, the film reveals an archaic world, unspoiled by society. Its people speak an ancient dialect and live according to prehistoric laws. They see the modern world as foreign and hostile. In them, De Seta found the vestiges of an old society through which a nobility shone through.

I remember being impressed by the style of the film. Neorealism had been taken to another level, where the director's participation in his narrative was so total that the line between form and content was obliterated and the events dictated the form. De Seta's sense of rhythm, his use of the camera, his extraordinary ability to merge his characters to their environment was a complete revelation. It was as if De Seta were an anthropologist who spoke with the voice of a poet.

Where did this voice come from, I wondered? Forty years after asking myself that question, perhaps the answer was to be found in these documentaries. When I finally screened them, I was stunned. From the very first images I had a sense of uneasiness, of displacement. I felt unprepared for what I was seeing. I felt an intense emotion. It was almost as if I had entered into the film and I was literally there, in a world I had never known but suddenly recognized. It was a world in its twilight. I was watching my ancestral culture at the end of its history, on its way to the realm of myth. It reminded me of a scene in Fellini's Roma where a fresco disappeared in contact with light, as a subway is built -- fragments of an ancient civilization reached into the modern world and resonated with epic tones.

I now felt that beyond entering the screen I was entering into the mind of the filmmaker as if I was seeing through his eyes. As if I saw the world as De Seta had, as if I was reclaiming my roots with him. I was sharing his curiosity and his amazement and I was sadly realizing, as he must have, that the vitality of an unspoiled culture was being filmed for the very last time.

This was Sicily on the screen, the Sicily that my grandparents were the last in my family to know, the Sicily they had left behind. A place where the light of day was so precious and the nights were totally dark and mysterious. A place that had not changed for centuries, where the way of life was always the same, where natural calamities were a part of life, ready at any moment to bring death and destruction. A place where religion was of primary importance, where the hardships of life turned into the Stations of the Cross. No wonder Easter week has always been so important in Sicily. Ultimately, it is the liturgy of the crucifixion that Sicilians identified with.

These were the children of Sisyphus, who had imprisoned Thanatos so that no mortals would die, the children of Prometheus, who had stolen the fire from the gods to give it to mortals -- and were punished for eternity. Children who seek the way to redemption through the labor of their hands: in the entrails of the earth (Sulphur mine), out at sea (Peasants of the sea), over the hills (Golden parable) -- the nets being pulled, the wheat being cut, the sulphur dug. People who seemed to pray through the labor of their hands.

What kind of alchemy was this? Here was cinema in its essence -- where the filmmaker is not just recording reality but living it. I recognized in these documentaries De Seta's humble empathy that I had experienced in watching Banditi a Orgosolo forty years ago. I felt that I had witnessed not just the world of my ancestors appear before my eyes but also a cinema that no longer existed. A cinema with the power of religious evocations.

The entire screening had been no more than an hour but time passed slowly - as if I inhabited each frame as it clicked by. Something had changed in me. This was cinema at its best, a cinema that had the power to transform. I understood something I had not understood before, I experienced emotions I didn't know I had. I felt I had traveled to a paradise lost.

Martin Scorsese


copyright 2005 Martin Scorsese/Tribeca Film Festival