Operai, contadini. Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Straub

Operai, contadini. Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Straub, Italy, France, 2001, 123’

After the Second World War in Italy, men and women of all ages and social backgrounds gather in a rundown village between Modena and Bologna, and decide to transform this abandoned place into a community that will protect them from violence and misery: “the good thing,” as the leader calls it. The members of this community talk about the installation of a power line, about how to go out to look for laurel, and how ricotta is made. They talk, and they do so in a forest clearing, where nature manifests itself, with its insect noises, its trees, its lighting effects on the leaves. Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub’s film, which adapts chapters of Elio Vittorini’s novel Women of Messina, forms a “constellation” of community moments, to borrow the term with which the filmmakers describe the writer's dialogues. It is a new beginning that could be called utopian; in fact, a beginning that, far from ignoring the threat of the fate of its determination, resists giving in to reality.