Elena Past
Wayne State University (USA)
Itinerant Ecocriticism in Basilicata and Italian Cinema on Foot
This presentation identifies an innovative impulse guiding Italian ecocriticism, and also a recurrent trend in Italian cinema: that of thinking on foot. Drawing I particular on the work of sociologist and philosopher Franco Cassano in Il pensiero meridiano, I consider why some contemporary Italian philosopher-filmmakers seek to understand Italy at a pace that works strategically (and at times defiantly) against petroleum-fueled speed. Three contemporary films that pass through or alight in Basilicata (Il mio paese [2006], Basilicata Coast to Coast [2010], and La lunga strada gialla [2016]) vibrantly illustrate an itinerant filmmaking technique where nostalgia for a past way of life is tempered by engaged resistance. Against the “slow violence” being perpetrated on Italian landscapes—a slow violence of toxic contamination at the hand of ecomafias, of the cementification of agricultural lands and delicate coasts—and against the speed of turbocapitalism, thinking on foot enables modes of ethics and aesthetics attuned to both historical depth and ecological crisis. In the view from Basilicata, Italy is no longer a “bel paese,” but rather an ecocultural landscape in which the seeds for meaningful change are deeply embedded.
Elena Past is Professor of Italian in the Department of Classical and Modern Languages, Literatures, and Cultures. Her research includes publications on the toxic waste crisis in Naples, Mediterranean cinema and ecocinema, and Italian crime fiction and film, and she is currently working on study of the iconic Ferrania film factory from the perspective of the environmental humanities. She is the author of Methods of Murder: Beccarian Introspection and Lombrosian Vivisection in Italian Crime Fiction (2012) and Italian Ecocinema Beyond the Human (2019). She co-edited Thinking Italian Animals: Human and Posthuman in Modern Italian Literature and Film (2014) with Deborah Amberson, and Italy and the Environmental Humanities: Landscapes, Natures, Ecologies (2018) with Serenella Iovino and Enrico Cesaretti. She currently serves as co-editor of the Italianist Film Issue in collaboration with Danielle Hipkins and Monica Seger.