Gente Del Po Documentary

As discussed in class Michelangelo Antonioni’s early documentaries rely a lot on silence, which seemingly helped bring a more real presence to the world within the films. Antonioni’s first documentary was Gente Del Po, about the inhabitants of the Po valley near his hometown. It covered every aspect of the hard lives the fishermen of the Po Valley had to face. One interesting thing about the film is that a bulk of it was lost due to damage. However, Antonioni’s showed determination as he created the documentary with what he had. It seems that he displays this level of determination commonly throughout the making of his films. Around the time of his first documentary, he also filmed several more. Another is Superstizione, a documentary about
This focused on a humanitarian outlook of ordinary people’s every day struggles. These were all shot on-location but throughout the films, it seemed like everything in them was staged. This was done in attempt to dramatize the subject’s daily hardships. This is shown most clearly in Gente Del as the narrator went into details about the lives of people living on barges, including individual scenarios, like the family with the little girl. Even in his film Sette Canne, un Vestido, everything said in the narration was highly dramatized. The narrator used whimsical words to describe what was going on, like “castle” and “miracle”
Antonioni’s documentaries all commonly focus on the “behind-the-scenes” of things we use or see every day. He gives us fresh eyes into worlds that we may take for granted. For example, in his film Netteza Urbana, we are shown the lives of Rome’s street cleaners. Antonioni gives us a (stylized) glimpse at the mistreatment of the uncaring residents whose waste is being cleaned up. Not only that, we also get to see the lives of street cleaners when they are doing their job. They’re starving and digging through scraps of