Basilicata and Southern Italy Between Film and Ecology

The authors have decided to gather within this volume a collection of essays on Southern Italy, cinema, and ecology, which with different approaches and diverse viewpoints return to ponder on the Southern question and the meridian thought from a specific ecocritical perspective. The volume is divided into four parts, each of which contains three essays preceded by a brief exordium. The first section, “Travels, Paths, Narratives” (Chaps. 2, 3, 4, and 5), collects the images of a journey toward the South and through the South. It is a journey that unravels through different stories and narratives, at the slow pace of walking (or riding a mule), in which we are projected as strangers moving toward a mysterious and unknown otherness or engaged as natives in the obstinate, attentive defense of our historical-cultural heritage. At the same time, it is a journey that offers an encounter with the past, an ideal and fairy-tale imaginary, and the experience of an interior and initiatory journey toward the future. Lastly, in the face of the complexity of the South, this journey must inevitably find its end in the beginning of another. The second section, “Places, Landscapes, Relations” (Chaps. 6, 7, 8, and 9), conveys the emotions and moods of the encounter with the South. It is an encounter that embraces different places and landscapes, between fascinating and suggestive scenarios and deserted and hostile ones, with the mysterious sounds of uninhabited places and the silence of abandoned villages, through the lively voices of peasant communities and the deafening noises of cities. It is an encounter that establishes relations between landscapes and environments, centrality and marginality, places of the past and present places. It is an encounter with the archaic purity of peasant civilizations, magical and ritualistic symbolisms, and new ecocritical placeologies, in the comparison between poetics of the landscape and philosophies of the environment. In it is found the emotion of a gaze that suggests other possible gazes. The third section, “History, Memories, Identities” (Chaps. 10, 11, 12, and 13), weaves the fabric of the South through stories and remembrances, offering a comparison between real and imaginary, myth and reality. It is a plot that develops through the expressions of oppressed and uprooted characters and through lost, claimed, and recovered identities, which emerge as much from fictional representations as from documentary films. The plural identity of the South reverberates through the relationship between film, history, and cultural memory, in which images intertwine with anthropological research, meridian thought, and poetics, in a continuous dialogue made up of symbols, meanings, and interpretations. It is the construction of a history that opens up to other histories. The last section of the volume, “Conflicts, Traumas, Reconstructions” (Chaps. 14, 15, 16, and 17), attempts to reconstruct the link between present and past in a world that, full of symbols and myths, remains perpetually suspended between ancient tradition and modernity. In the sign of a world steeped in ancient gestures and rituals, struck and violated by a wild and destructive industrialization irrespective of territories and their cultures, the images return to highlight connections and meanings, opening up to new reflections on the South and its possible futures. They are images that recompose a painting that inevitably remains partially completed and not definitive, suggesting other paths and different narrations for new studies and further research.