Beyond “Ethnographic Spectacle”

Ernesto De Martino wrote extensively about ancient religious and pagan rituals in the South such as funeral lament, sorcery, Apulian tarantism. His research inspired a group of young filmmakers who shot documentaries in the South between the 1950s and the 1970s: Cecilia Mangini, Michele Gandin, Giuseppe Ferrara, Gianfranco Mingozzi, Lino Del Fra, Luigi Di Gianni. The aim of this article is to explore how De Martino’s assumptions were represented in these postwar documentaries. De Martino helped the filmmakers by suggesting topics and filming locations for documentaries that served primarily as an auxiliary medium for ethnographic research. Yet, rather than staging an “ethnographic spectacle” of the South, Demartinian documentaries promoted a new way of representing and understanding Southern Italian culture.