This compilation of private films allows us to ‘watch’ history unfold – scenes of war and peace, from the rise of Fascism to its culmination at the end of the war. We will show previously unseen amateur and home movies shot throughout Italy from the Home Movies Archive, either in excerpts or in their entirety. The programme will include: a virtual snapshot of a “happy” nation in dance scenes on a Mediterranean cruise; military life in Ethiopia, in both its violence and the banality of everyday life; the arrival of an industrial fair that professes both pride in economic self-sufficiency and expansionistic goals on the eve of the war; the departure of soldiers and their return from the front; an officer’s journey to the east, towards the Russian front, full of hope; the ironic staging of the fall of the regime (and the changing symbols of power) in a military hospital; the ambiguous conviviality of the German invaders and the local population; the jubilations and free dancing in the spring of 1945. These episodes form a dense and nuanced historical picture, far from stereotype and rich in questions. Home-movie reporters oblivious to the times? The “spontaneous” images they produced serving as eyewitnesses to an alternative history? Fragmented glances and micro-stories intertwine with great narratives, resisting and sometimes contradicting them. In recent years, the attention of archivists, curators, historians and directors has been directed towards such sources: marginal, local and peripheral productions in small gauges, whose circulation – with very few exceptions – was extremely limited and exclusively private (families, associations, clubs, underground circuits). Today, these images are public and shown beyond their original context: we question how they should be watched and how they should be shown.
Starting from the programme’s theme, then, festival spectators are asked broader questions about the recovery and public presentation of fragile images, often lacking in narrative yet richly suggestive. On the borderline between the visible and the invisible, these sources are ever more necessary: a counterpoint or a reverse shot to the official representations of history

Paolo Simoni

Research, selection and edition: Paolo Simoni, Michele Manzolini. Digitalization: Mirco Santi. Prod.: Archivio Home Movies. DCP. D.: 40’