NEWS - 49° FESTIVAL DEI POPOLI - Florence - November 14th -21st, 2008.

November 15th, 2008: NANOOK'S LEGACY: round table on the status of the documentary.

The act of documenting is as old as the hills. In the beginning the desire to know oneself and others produced oral reports and rock painting. This developed into written accounts and finally with the coming of mechanical reproduction of real life, billions of fixed and moving images. While the act of challenging man's fallible memory sinks back into the recesses of time, the word "documentary" referring to a cinematographic account, is comparatively recent, dating back in fact to the early decades of the last century. As many people know, Grierson used it to define Flaherty's Nanook of the North despite the fact that at that time he was already aware that such a definition was insufficient: "To define a film as a documentary is a clumsy description, but it continues to thrust itself upon us. The French, who were the first to use it, meant by it a travel film. (...) Starting off from this exotic vision the term has ended up including dramatic films like Moana or Zemlya (Earth). And at the same time it will embrace other genres, different in form and in aims (...)".

The validity of such foresight is to be found not only in the string of examples which have followed one after the other through time but above all in the vast range of present-day productions which are today defined as documentaries, and are thus recognized as being part of a homogenous category when in actual fact they differ considerably "in form and aims".

In Grierson's day a variety of widely different types of film all lived together under the roof of the "genre" in a kind of promiscuous dialectic: ingenious edited films like Dziga Vertov's The Man With a Movie Camera, socially committed works like Drifters by Grierson himself, rythmic-visual experiments such as Walter Ruttman's Berlin: the Symphony of a Great City poetical-humanistic explorations such as Manoel de Oliveira's Douro, Faina fluvial, documentations of a personal point of view such as Jean Vigo's A propos de Nice and documentary dramas such as Robert Siodmak and Edgar Ulmer's Menschen am Sonntag (People on Sunday). Now that the cinema has passed through the experience of free cinema, direct cinema, cinèma vèritè, and fictional reality the panorama has gradually opened out going from films which push the concept expressed by Andrè Bazin in his essay Montage interdit to the limits ("When the essentials of an event depend on the simultaneous presence of two factors of the action, montage is prohibited") to reporting, from independent news films to filmed essays, from the cinema as an extension of the hand to that which aims to be an extension of thought, from autobiography to documentary fiction, from found footage to art installations, and finally arriving at the so-called animated documentary.

In this light, on the threshold of the 50th anniversary of the Festival dei Popoli we thought it important to take a step backwards and attempt to put the "genre" into perspective examining the status of this film form. At the same time, however we are fully aware of the fact that it is consubstantial with cinema itself, a means which, by its very nature, has documentary value. Scholars of pre-cinema are well aware of this, having seen in their first experiments a study and a scientific recording of the movement. No less so indeed are historians, who read in the images of a film the signs of an age and a society which reproduces itself and of the events and contradictions by which it is animated.

What we are interested in doing is not so much to impose limits or boundaries, but rather to observe from year to year where reality cinema is heading, reflecting, through discussion on the underlying phenomena in progress. The 49th edition will therefore be the setting for a round table, which we have decided to entitle Nanook's Heritage, as a tribute to the "first to be so baptised" and to the legacy with which it has endowed us. Our aim is to gather together critics, scholars, cineastes, producers and cinema propagators and to invite them to analyse and to debate the state of the art, with the aim of arriving not so much at a scientific conclusion but at thoughts which will stimulate further thoughts and future processing.