Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the ideological and methodological ties between Italian anthropology’s study of folklore and Neorealism’s engagement with everyday life. This facilitates a discussion of the nature of ethnographic film and photography and its place within the arts more broadly.

Paper long abstract:

The Neorealist movement in post-war Italy was steeped in cultural, political, artistic and economic discourse. It was heavily anthropological, but there seems to be no publication that fully investigates the relationship between Italian anthropology’s study of local folklore and Neorealist filmmaking’s engagement with everyday life in Italy. Italian anthropologists and filmmakers at the time were in constant discussion and collaboration with one another: they explored various visual recording techniques to ‘rediscover’ Italy and give communities marginalised by the Fascist regime a voice. The films were of immense ethnographic value to Italy’s anthropological movement and were, to some extent, an extension of it. This fusion of anthropology, folklore and Neorealism created a movement that was unique, constantly transforming, and helped shape and define post-war Italy through film, photography and literature. This paper will evidence the close ideological and methodological ties between Italian anthropology and the Neorealist movement, and show how an anthropological discourse of photography would be incomplete without the integration of film, literature and folklore into it.