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Writer's pictureLaurel Creighton

My Italian Neo-Realism Picks No. 1 - Padre Padrone



Padre Padrone is an adaptation of a novel written by Gavino Ledda, ab illiterate shepherd who became a renowned artist through hard work and the patriarchal trauma inflicted upon him by his strict upbringing by his father and his society as a whole. Directed and produced by Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, the film takes place in Sardinia, the southern region of Italy, and mixes the Sardinian dialect, Italian and Latin. The Taviani brothers were initially daunted by the book because of its eloquence and felt they must originate a new audio-visual language to retell the story. Like this, they created a "Brechtian" experience that is non-natural.

In Padre Padrone, two main self-reflexive techniques are primarily utilized in the film. On the one hand, there is an obvious and direct address to the audience that what they are seeing is a film based on the book by the author, Gavino, and on the other hand, the directors call self-reflexive attention through the stylistic use of sound. The first experience -the one of direct address - is precise; we begin Padre Padrone with an introduction from the author himself, prefacing what we are about to see. Next, Gavino gives the actor who plays his father, Efisio (Omero Antonutti), the switch that the father carried around with him to beat his son. Gavino is correcting the actor playing his father, which authenticates the acting and provides the audience with a reference point. The film ends with a statement from Gavino of what happened after the movie ends. More visual cues are when the town's patron saint in the parade becomes an image of Efisio, and the arching transition between the flag in the army to the flashback of Gavino working hard as a battered and abused youth. Cinema of duration, elongated scenes such as the long, lonely moments of solitude out in the pasture can also awaken an audience to self-reflexivity due to the non-action. Montage scenes such as the linked performances with pans, camera movements, music, and rhyming of songs and action can indicate both audio and visual aspects. Visual because the montages play with the back-and-forth perspective of the on and the objective perspective of the camera.

Sound is essential for shepherding, and the sequence when Efisio is training young Gavino to listen to the surroundings is also a reminder to those viewing the audience to perceive the film with acute sensing. Later in the movie, the audience sees Gavino in the army utilizing these senses to the great astonishment of his army comrades. More examples are when the goat speaks Italian and when Gavino almost dies. The father sings a dirge in a cacophony with other male voices indicating that this is an overall experience for other fathers. Another exciting audio montage is the sexual awakening of Gavino and other young boys, where each voice echoes and adds to the other in sympathy. The sense of music through Gavino with the accordion makes sense when explained with the heightened audio senses he earned instead of an education. One more audio montage of them schoolchildren, in the beginning, links us with a prevalence of the southern experience of leaving school to begin working.

Many of these montages are also examples of how the Taviano brothers infuse chorality into the narrative to showcase how the southern values can be considered backward and patriarchal. Along with the previously mentioned montages, the lament sung by Gavin's father, the schoolchildren's thoughts, and the sexual awakening montage, there is a scene of women cutting their hair in different households before the emigration of the young men to Germany. Another prevalent one is the duplication of the punishment of both Gavino and his young neighbor friend is another example. Later, the family works together in the olive grove. This shows the value of community and family work instead of the solitude of the pasture with the sheep. The last aural chirality is when the piazza is empty, but the audio track is full of street-sounding babble.

Language for Gavino begins as a daunting experience until he joins the army. Around 1 hour and 16 minutes, Gavino speaks in his Sardinian dialect because he does not know how to express himself in Italian. This dialect earns him trouble as it is forbidden to use in the army. This is not the first time Gavino's illiteracy has created problems. One scene in which his father abuses this aspect of Gavino's life is when Gavino tries to emigrate to Germany. Because of his inability to read the visa paperwork, his father (who can read) neglects to sign the documents needed. This is a specific abuse of his power to control and author Gavino's life. Later Gavino's friend, Cesare (Nanni Moretti), lends Gavino a dictionary and tells him to improve his vocabulary. This begins with a series of words that start semantically, then etymologically through the Latin root, and finally through metaphoric justification for authority, political, economic, or spiritual.

Gavino's anti-authoritarian struggle is a refusal to accept the strict social codes without at least rebellion of some fashion. Gavino's willingness to put himself in the line of his interests is the way of his self-emancipation. Despite the father's determination to have Gavino relive his own experience, the father's experience is a systematic leveling through exploitation from shepherd to loan shark. Gavino masters the leveling of the successive social codes needed to upscale his life to literacy; these codes are nature, music, technology (radio communication, the written word, spoken word, and linguistic science. Because sound frees Gavino from his predicament, it is also how the Tavianis liberates the film to its cinematic stylistic anti-realism. While the soundtrack often seems to contradict the image, this is how Gavino interprets and understands the natural world around him. By disintegrating these codes and re-establishing them, Gavino can rise above his status of Shepherd to the literary author.

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