Università Roma Tre

Academic year 2018-2019
Documentary cinema workshop
By Gianfranco pannone

The human face as landscape (a practical-theoretical path between past and present)
The human face can be found in all documentary cinematography, from Nanook the Eskimo, the pioneering movie by Roberr Flaherty, to this day.
Therefore, the workshop proposes itself at first as a short historical overview through some documentaries where man is at the core of the narration, from Flaherty, as mentioned before, to contemporary authors like Errol Morris, Nicholas Philbert and Michael Glawwoger, Pietro Marcello, passing through Frederick Wiseman and the Maysles brothers, not only through verbal witness, but above all by examining the vision of faces within a landscape, examined both on an anthropological side and a poetic-narrative one.
The workshop is going to have a practical outlet through the realization of 5-6 visual exercises, realized in some neighborhoods of Rome, in work groups.
During the passage from theory to practice some problems regarding the “cinema of the real” will be taken into account:
-what does it mean to approach to a face? And to what point one can get to explore it by respecting a person? The border between urgency and legality.
-the relationship with “the other” before and during the making of a documentary
-the difficult border between real and fiction. Where and when the hand of the filmmaker intervenes? To document or to docu-lie?

Recommended books
-l’officina del reale, by Mario balsamo and Gianfranco pannone (Cdg edition)
-un paese, by strand/zavattini (alinari)
-propizio è avere dove recarsi, by emmanuel carrère (Adelphi)
-l’altro, by ryszard kapuscinski (Feltrinelli)

Note
- not more than three justified absences are allowed
-the choice of the people admitted to the workshop will be taken according to the acquired credits (not less than 30 cfu)
-it’s expected a maximum admission of 30 students to the workshop.