Paper short abstract:

The paper will discuss and analyse a given corpus of films, from the point of view of the encounter between the Italian artist and the people of India.

Paper long abstract:

My interest has focused on the analysis of Italian documentaries on India and how Italian filmmakers turn their look to the Other. And if considering a period of time, from 1958 to 1998, the documentary taken into account has changed the way the West looks at the East.

First of all, I had to answer a basic question: what India is it talking about? In the research, which is not limited to the history and criticism of film, but relies on interdisciplinary work between film, visual anthropology, ethnography, discourse analysis and semiotics, I discovered that India is a nation fluid. I also had to consider a concept of progress that is not the same than once, according to which the present of India was the Europe of the past. I kept in mind when analyzing the films, the mosaic of peoples, languages and religions that was India before the arrival of the British Empire.

As I consider the film a meeting, I wanted to test the hypothesis that the meeting between people so distinct, the meeting proposed for the documentary film, is not merely a mirror for self-knowledge, but above all is an exercise to reinvent itself, to discover new answers to all the meetings now so distinct. That is, the question is whether when we speak of otherness in film, we're talking about actually being the Other and the possibility of meetings, or if we are talking about oneself and only of the reduction to oneself, without any chance of meeting.