Programme 2

All it takes is to notice: if we live in a city, we can see how the light turns green among the leaves of the horse chestnuts. The rows of plane trees ruthlessly pruned. The occasional larch. The odd forest park with pine trees. The magnolia flowers anticipating the spring and inviting contact, meaty and fragrant and marvellous. A hundred years ago, the Malespines noticed these same trees, denaturalised nature, and were captivated by their confection and clearly in the mood for play. Thanks to the editing, the trees, not at all speedy, were incorporated into the speed of Lyon, the cars, the trams, the Rhône that never ceases.

Ten years later, the masters of that speed are at war and the boy Akio, perhaps orphaned and recently relocated to the country from the city, plays hopscotch with the girls and gets out of playing with the boys, a pack of bullies. His adopted father is worried about the absolute lack of interest the kid has in turning himself into a (little) man and the remedy shall be for him to climb a towering chestnut in the shimmering chestnut forest on the other side of the river. Shimizu, a specialist in the theme of “children out in the open”, films the tree-climbing as the intimate event that it is: very closely accompanying the fear, difficulty and, little by little, determination. In a Darwinian paradox, manliness is proven by imitating the monkey. Once proven, one can only hope, for the transformed boy, that he remember his former and weaker condition and act accordingly.

A certain mountain town is a flower that blooms when the good weather arrives, like this: practically inaccessible and at the foot of a primary coniferous forest destroyed by woodcutters and coal merchants, lies Alessandria del Carretto. At the end of winter, the men march into the almost cleared forest, they choose the slimmest fir tree, they cut it down, they strip off its bark. Later, all together, they carry the gigantic corpse to the town, singing, yelling. The women receive them with food and wine. In the square, the giant is raised again, given a crown once more and from it gifts are hung. They lather the trunk with tallow, the young men climb it. Vittorio de Seta films the tree-climbing as the public event that it is, an authentic (and not rhetorical) identitarian relic. He captures the suspense and the spectators-cum-children of the suspense: grafting onto itself each year a representative of the forces of nature, the community is rejuvenated.

Many contemporary filmmakers register, maybe against their will, the loss of world. They film by dropping hints and that distance is felt in Alberi, a film-installation that invents a ritual from rituals that have disappeared. Carnivalesque rituals that, among other things, eased the shame of being seen while begging. The day breaks in a beech forest. The camera follows it carefully (in the 21st century, the forest cannot be taken for granted). We see beech trees, ivy climbing up the trunks of the beech trees and, further below, holly. Suddenly a town appears, Satriano di Lucania. If in I dimenticati the real tree ended up transformed into the idea of tree, here the men themselves will be transformed, after passing through the forest and getting mixed up with it, undoing the figure-ground distinction. And, on the way back to the town square, they will go past a tree of church, like the texu of Bermiego. The church is in ruins, the tree remains.