Diego Carpitella
The “Sounds” in Aspromonte are precious bearers of a cultural identity. We listen to them, vivid and very musical, from traditional instruments, singers and dancers as therites of old shepherds and farmers of remote communities keeper of ancient knowledge. But in the last decades a large quantity of cultural wealth, tied to the territory, risks to get lost because the latest generation is turning off from oral tradition towards inexorable modern trends. The art of popular music risks not to be recognized property of Calabrian culture, or worse risks to finish into cultural oblivion.
This trailer represents the first extract of a work-in-progress film conceived and actually being shooted by the videomaker Nino Cannatà on the traditional music in Aspromonte. It is the result of an intense on-field research led with Mimmo Morello, musician and resercher within the large and various “sounds” traced on the territory. The research has immediately assumed the character of a true recording campaign similar to the etnomusicological method of investigation and on the footprints of all those who already studied in the past the popular forms of the traditional music.
The strong artistic motivation has necessarily answered to the sound of this world, very rich but over extinction risk. The presence of a young and competent player close to the video camera has represented a formidable access to that reality setting up a complicity that only music, with his universality, is able to produce. That allowed us to penetrate the structure of a rare and simple workaday, done of handed down gestures, heritage of an empiric wisdom reached in the course of time. The digital audio-video filming has been realized with a mini-troupe that, with low production costs and high degree of agility, has moved in the wonderful landscape from the seacoast to the summits of Aspromonte, registering by oneself unforgettable moments, as the unrepeatable sounds of the ephemeral tools, or improvised in the night near the fires of shepherds.
The consciousness of the cinematographic tool captures the life rhythm in his most essential expressions, in that cinema of the instant, played on the boundary between handicraftly and authentical expressiveness of a people. Whereas the landscape is inscribed in the protagonists’ gestures and the poetics of the territory marked by the customs which smell of holy.
The film “Sounds in Aspromonte” aims at contributing to the safeguard of this “immaterial” property, documenting their wealth and fascination, and stimulating the wish, in the new generations, to rediscover the origin of their culture and the duty to preserve and to increase the value of it. Actually many young people are approaching to “traditional music”, while the last holders of this art are disappearing in the indifference of big part of the community, in favour of new etno-pop musical trends.
This work moves in the perspective of researches grounded by important scholars as Raffaele and Luigi Mt. Lombard Satriani, Roberto Leydi, Alan Lomax, Diego Carpitella, Roberta Tucci, Antonello Ricci etc. with the auspice of the constitution of a single archive in Calabria for the cataloguing and the documentation of all the expressions of the traditional music, submitted to the attention and the safeguard of the Unesco.
Nino Cannatà
From a recent interview to director Vittorio De Seta:
“…I’m thinking about this movie as a revolutionary documentary film because it shows a reality just never pointed out since I was shooting my documentaries long time ago, in the fifties. Today I feel that we need to show that reality in which there are the roots of our calabrian culture. The sites and lifestyle of the inhabitants in Aspromonte, we can see in this movie, appear as a fossil coming out into the light telling us an ancient way of life that was not outdated, rough, unlearned or superstitious… it was, on the contrary, a well integrated, rich and full way of life that was brutally disrupted and overcome, without a precise reason, during the struggle for the unification of our country, under the first Reign of Italy, about 150 years ago… “
Commentary by etno-musicologist Antonello Ricci and Roberta Tucci at “La Sapienza” University in Rome:
“ ‘Sounds in Aspromonte’ is a documentary film introducing the complex and structured world of folk music in Aspromonte in a rigorous but poetic way. It shows musicians playing and making their traditional instruments while they are, even today, strictly related with their social and cultural context. We can admire a rare and harmonious mixture among various elements: musicians, nature and beautiful landscapes, a strong ethic sense of community life and the joy of playing music together.”
Communication of Anna Lomax Wood, President of Association for Cultural Equity, NY, U.S.A.:
“This promises to be a very beautiful document. The photography is fine, and very unusual, and of course instrumental music and polyphony of Calabria have no equal.”
CREDITS
Director and cinematographer
NINO CANNATÀ
Etno-musicological researcher
MIMMO MORELLO
Editor
ANTONIO IVAGNES
Editing Studio
PROGETTI DIGITALI
Executive producer
VALENTINA DAMIANI
Press Agent
PATRIZIA MACRÌ
Producer
NINO CANNATÀ
Production
VILLANUCCIA - SENTIERI DEL SUONO 2009-2011
