La Terra Trema (The Earth Trembles) was released in 1948 and directed and narrated by Luchino Visconti. The story follows a family in rural Sicily. The family is reduced to living at the mercy of greedy wholesalers. Risking everything, the family of fisherman buy their boat in hopes of operating independently from the wholesalers and is based on a story of a fishing family that tries to break from exploitation, the limited success of a cooperative of Sulphur miners whose organizer is distraught over his inability to marry and support his pregnant girlfriend, and thirdly about land reclamation – a hot talking point for the Communist Party – where the leader of the organization encourages his group to take over uncultivated land starting a farming revolution ending in a massacre at Portella della Ginestra. These themes are intercut to demonstrate the different stages of a class action of the proletariat against bourgeois fascism. They are the idealist visions of the popular alliance Gramsci envisioned in the south between agricultural peasants and northern workers.
In part, Visconti’s initial motivation for making La Terra Trema was due to the communist party, who had commissioned Visconti to make a short film on Sicilian fishermen that could be used to help sway the popular vote as election propaganda for the 1948 election. During that time (1945 – 1948), the Italian left was progressively pushed out of power, and the two left parties united. Still, because of economic pressures from the US and the Catholic Church, the Democratic Christian Party won the vote by 48%.
Gramsci was a Marxist theoretician who focused almost entirely on the problems of Italy’s southern region and northern factory workers. Still, he is not the only writer whose importance can be seen in Visconti’s La Terra Trema. It is also Verga whose work is heavily referenced here. Visconti has stated that Verga “…offers us both the human experience and a concrete atmosphere. Miraculously stark and real, it could inspire the imagination of our cinema which looks for things in space and time of reality to redeem itself from the easy suggestions of a moribund bourgeois state.” Verga’s work is not only poetic, but it also helped the creation of a country into an epoch of society. Visconti borrows on this poeticism in his filming, such as poeticized landscapes (classical Greek mythology – the location is the land of Odysseus versus the Cyclops), mise-en-scene, the interlacing of the three episodes (by use of an adaptation of Verga’s Il Malavoglia). However, where Verga is fatalistic and pessimistic about the problems of peasant life, Visconti uses these elements to turn to political activism through the character of N’toni. La Terra Trema is extremely choral in nature. Chorality is an aspect in many of Verga’s writing and can be witnessed here through the townspeople, such as their hive mind approach, dramatic proverbs, and old sayings.
The Southern Question relates to post-war poverty in the south and Sicily. The community that lived there felt they had two options, let their land become industrialized or gather a movement of peasants to gain northern proletariat access to equipment and improve the working conditions. For this film, Visconti used only the Sicilian dialect, which is used very little except by the people in that region. It is hard to be understood even by northern Italians. Through this, Visconti addresses the question of hegemony in society. Using authentic Sicilian dialect, Visconti believed he could preserve the authentic expression of the people’s languages. Visconti was one of the first of the neorealists to turn to the south of Italy for use as a thematic device. Visconti is known for stating: “Then came the war, with the war the resistance and the discovery, for an intellectual of my formation, of all the Italian problems as problems of social structure beyond those of cultural spiritual and moral orientation. The differences, the contradictions, the conflicts between north and south began to impassion me.”
La Terra Trema can be divided into five dramatic units:
1 N’toni challenges traditional ways of living,
2- N’Toni turns to direct action throwing the balances at sea and is imprisoned. He is released because the middlemen need the fishermen. He has an insight into their value. He persuades his family to buy a boat, but he is also set apart from the rest of the community,
3- Happy family salts the anchovies together,
4-Disaster strikes, and fish are sold for nothing -the family disintegrates, the brother leaves, and N’toni becomes a drunkard,
5- Finally, N’toni, in a simple scene with a young girl, realizes the need to start again.
Continuity-wise, the repetitions of motifs throughout the film give us (the viewer) a sense of predetermination of the outcome. Shot on location with a large budget Visconti was sure to show the compositional frames as occurring “outside” of time instead of grounding the narrative in specificity. He wanted this to apply to all Italians throughout time.