Vittorio De Seta :: The Lost World (1954-1959)

In Surfarara the pickaxes build underground into a kind of percussion, faster and denser, and then stop all at once because something in the rock has shifted. For a few seconds the sulphur miners and the audience are listening to the same silence.

Between 1954 and 1959 Vittorio De Seta made ten short films in Sicily, Sardinia and Calabria. Swordfish boats in the Strait, Stromboli throwing fire over the Aeolian fishermen, a village passion play, the harvest, sulphur miners, tuna and sardines, the shepherds of Orgosolo and the Barbagia, and finally a mountain village in Calabria in I dimenticati. Ten minutes each, more or less. He shot a good deal of it himself, cut it himself, paid for much of it himself, and Isole di fuocotook the documentary short prize at Cannes in 1955. Nobody is interviewed.

Apart from the last film, nobody explains anything either.

The title came later, from De Seta, and it is under that title, restored by the Cineteca di Bologna at L’Immagine Ritrovata from the original 35mm and now streaming on the Criterion Channel, that most of us meet the films. I would keep it at arm’s length. The Lost World is an elegy, written once the world in question had already been tidied away by roads, motors and emigration, while the films themselves are stubbornly in the present tense. The men on the swordfish boat in Lu tempu di li pisci spata have no idea they belong to anything lost; they are waiting for a fish, which takes a long time, and De Seta lets it take a long time, glare on the water, a man up the mast, everyone facing the same stretch of sea as if staring could make the thing surface sooner.

Each film follows the shape of a job, the watching and the sighting, the burst, the slack after it, and the singing on the boats and in the fields keeps the count of the work the way a rope keeps a net together. You hear it before you understand it. De Seta leaves the dialect untranslated, a courtesy towards the people singing and, for anyone from outside, a small locked door, which I happen to like, having grown up within earshot of songs I could follow only halfway.

Then there is the colour, the widescreen, the composure of every frame, and here the films get into trouble they never quite get out of. Contadini del mare opens on fish hanging almost still in clear water, aquarium-calm, and ends in the churn of the haul, men and tuna thrashing in foam turned pink with the animals’ blood. Because De Seta, born in Palermo into an aristocratic family, refuses commentary out of tact, the image has to carry everything, and an image asked to carry everything drifts towards beauty. The widescreen and the colour lend the killing a composure it should not have, and the film never seems to notice that its own form is softening what the tuna are going through.

I find the scenes with animals hard to watch, and the films give me no way of standing back from them. What I cannot settle is whether, in those years, the relationship between these men and the creatures they killed still had a measure to it, or whether the measure had already gone and De Seta arrived just in time to film the gestures that outlived it.

I dimenticati, the Calabrian film and the longest, gives way. A narrator turns up, the only one in the series, to tell us that the village is isolated, forgotten, left behind, things the other nine films trusted us to see for ourselves. Whatever forced the change, it reads like impatience, and only then, with a voice laid over the pictures, does the restraint of the other nine become audible as a choice.

Use proper speakers, or headphones at least. Half of each film is sound, the pickaxes, the volcano, the voices on the boats, and the restoration gives that layer back its grain, which matters more than the colour, prone as it is to sliding into postcard whenever the light gets too kind.

Pescherecci ends after a storm, the men under shelter and a rainbow standing over the boats, so finished a picture that you half wait for a caption to come and explain it. None comes. The boats are tied up, the weather has turned, and tomorrow there will be sardines again, or not.