Docu-musical, migration and media reflexivity in The Harvest (2017) and Dimmi chi sono (2019)

ABSTRACT

In the documentaries The Harvest (2017, Andrea Paco Mariani) and Dimmi chi sono (Sarita, 2019, Sergio Basso), the directors seek to raise awareness of a rarely told story, true to the tradition of politically engaged documentary. The Harvest denounces the slavery-like conditions in which Indian harvest hands work in Italy, while Dimmi chi photosono serves both as an archive for forgotten stories of the stateless Lhotshampa (an ethnic group displaced from Bhutan to Nepal) and to reveal the role of audio-visual media as vehicles for individual and collective memory. Though they tell very different stories, the films are united by their search for a suitable documentary language, since they can no longer rely on the authenticity effects that have been made hackneyed by the mass media to lend credibility to their accounts. The directors therefore combine conventional documentary methods with intermedial references to painting and photography, in particular pastiches of Hollywood/Bollywood musical scenes, so as to question Western concepts of authenticity.

KEYWORDS:

• Authenticity
• Bhutan and Indian refugees
• Bollywood
• collective memory
• exploitation, Italy

Introduction

Documentaries, as Max Ophüls so charmingly put it, are ‘little rascals’ that purport to be realistic or true¹ and promise a direct window onto living reality. The same is true of the two films that this article will focus on, The Harvest (2017, Andrea Paco Mariani) and Dimmi chi sono (Sarita (2019), Sergio Basso), both of which feature white text on a black background informing viewers that the events shown are real, and yet they subvert documentary conventions in an original manner through their intermedial references and self-reflexivity.²

The Harvest is a critique of early capitalist exploitation in the agricultural sector. It shows the daily routine of two protagonists of Indian descent: thirty-four-year-old Gurwinder, who has lived for years as a low-paid harvest worker in the Agro Pontino in Italy’s Lazio region; and Hardeep, a second-generation immigrant of a similar age who is politically engaged as a mediator between Indian and Italian cultures. The film was directed by Andrea Paco Mariani, who in 2009 founded SMK Videofactory, an independent Italian film collective based in Bologna, which also produced this film and organized the crowd funding. His initiative seeks to co-finance documentaries, with the goal of making them more professional and allowing ‘democratic’ access via an online streaming platform.³ While the events of The Harvest take place in Italy, the German – Italian co-production Dimmi chi sono plays out almost entirely in a refugee camp with over 100,000 inhabitants in Khudunabari, Nepal, where the film’s protagonist, the thirteen-year-old Sarita, was born. The film is about a search for individual and collective identity, and also deals with themes of forgetting and remembering. It is in Nepali with subtitles. Despite the serious themes, and very much unlike The Harvest, it is a light-hearted, humorous film. According to the director Sergio Basso, he visited the refugees in the UNHCR camp over a period of ten years. The film was produced by the Turin-based production company La Sarraz Pictures, which specialises in political documentaries, and was supported by Rai Cinema and state/regional funding bodies (MIBACT – Direzione generale per il cinema; Film Commission Torino Piemonte; Fund Regione Lazio). Both films were not primarily commercial film but successful on documentary or human right film festivals and are aimed at audiences with a particular interest in human right and/or the documentaries’ themes.⁴

The Harvest and Dimmi chi sono have very different visual styles and they narrate very different stories, The Harvest focuses on Italy, the Italian filmmaker Basso shows migration that is not directly connected to mobility directed toward (nor coming from) Italy, but yet they are united by the filmmakers’ attempt to depict underrepresented migrant lives.

Moreover, in both films scenes of singing and dancing are woven into the depiction of everyday life. The music and dance scenes’ secondary importance relative to the plot is reminiscent of the classical Hollywood musical, while the colourful costumes and music are in the style of Bollywood.⁵ The concept of a docu-musical⁶ is exciting from the perspective of Western genre aesthetics, because it combines film genres that are normally mutually exclusive. As Steven Cohan explains, the highly stylised and self-reflexive music and dance numbers form something of a counterpoint to the traditional, interactive and participatory mode of authenticity (Cohan 2002, 2). This apparent docu-musical paradox is reflected in both films’ intermedial aesthetic plurality, in which image, sound and narrative are brought into contrast with each other. I shall therefore offer some preliminary thoughts on the visual and aural effects of authenticity and intermediality in Western documentaries.⁷

Documentary, authenticity and intermediality

Documentary ‘relies heavily on being able to convey an impression of authenticity’ (Nichols 2010, xiii), while authenticity in turn is based on an immediate, unadulterated, unbiased truthfulness. The close connection between documentary and authenticity lies not least in the problematic belief in film’s indexical referentiality, that is, the assumption of a ‘privileged relation of representation and represented object in the sense of a transparent mediatisation that neither obscures nor aspectifies the view of the object’ (Wortmann 2003, 14). The adjective ‘authentic’ means recognised, legitimate, binding, authorised (Knaller 2006, 17–18). The latter aspect highlights how authenticity is always relative, since we always experience authenticity effects against the background of dominant cinematic genres and styles. According to Bill Nichols, “the comfortably accepted realism of one generation seems like artifice to the next. New strategies must constantly be developed to re-present ‘things as they are.’’ (Nichols 1985, 259; Thompson 1988, 198) Thus, authenticity is not to be understood ontologically, but rather is bound up with historically produced concepts of credibility and intelligibility. In other words, this credibility is paratextually asserted through a documentary promise or pact (Eitzen 1998, 25), and signalled by recognised, conventionalised authenticity effects. At the narrative level, these include a focus on marginalised sociopolitical themes – ‘documentary films stand for a particular view of the world, one we may never have encountered before even if the factual aspects of this world are familiar to us.’ (Nichols 2010, 13) – with politically motivated documentaries about migration often presenting counter-discourses that challenge those disseminated in the mass media. At a visual level, authenticity effects include captions with details of places and times (as in The Harvest and Dimmi chi sono), deviations from the continuity system (such as a fragmentary structure or use of montage) and handheld camera effects (such as hectic, blurred, unevenly lit shots and abrupt, spontaneous movements) (Kuhn 2013, 93).⁸ If we regard world-reference and self-reference not as binary opposites but a sliding scale (Wolf 2009, 23), we can observe that while the former tends to dominate in documentaries, there are also intermedial and/or reflexive modes of narration that can (though do not necessarily) serve a media-critical function. They are able to relativise perspectives or emphasise ‘epistemological doubts’ or scepticism about ‘the authenticity of sound and images’ (Nichols 1991, 32). Although Nichols explicitly mentions sound here, it only plays a subordinate role in this context.⁹ Authenticity effects conventionally include fluctuations in sound quality, a somewhat unstructured ambience and at most only very discreet use of intradiegetic music for illustrative purposes (Ruoff 1992, 228; Rogers 2015, 2).¹⁰

In Italy, TV coverage of the riots at the G8 summit in Genoa in 2001 gave renewed impetus to the need for alternatives to mass-media representations (Bertozzi 2008, 276), an aim that extends into contemporary documentary treatments of migration (Angelone & Clò 2011; Piccino 2012; Zhang 2018). At the same time, conventionalised authenticity effects are now thoroughly bound up with the mass-media-produced economy of attention. The island of Lampedusa, for instance, has for over twenty years primarily been depicted through the lens of ‘alarmist state-of-emergency discourses’ (Reckinger 2014, 219; Bruno 2015, Friese 2017) disseminated by the media, always using the same confected images and reality effects. This ‘overdose di immagini realistiche a bassa pulsazione simbolica profusa dai media’ not only leads, as Bertozzi observed of Italian documentaries in general in 2008, to narration in prima persona (Bertozzi 2008, 305), but in recent years has inscribed the mediatisation of migration into documentary filmmaking in a whole host of ways. Even if directors like Dagmawi Yimer in Soltanto il mare (2011) and Gianfranco Rosi in Fuocoammare (Fire at sea 2016) (these directors, incidentally, almost always tend to be men) stage migrant agency very differently (Schrader 2020; 2022a), on an aesthetic level they opt for long, sedate, often stylised shots that create an epic slowness. In other words, they use slow-paced editing and cinematography as a way of opposing the forms of dramatised attention fostered by the mass media. The Harvest and Dimmi chi sono may represent the start of another tendency, in which directors likewise celebrate slowness while also giving central place to immigrants’ cinematic and musical traditions. Let us now turn to consider these films.

“Molti sono i frutti che il raccolto porterà” (The Harvest, 2017)

‘Many are the fruits that the harvest will bear’, a line from The Harvest, could be taken as a figurative reference to the various documentary modes described by Nichols. At the level of narration, the participatory mode dominates; Mariani becomes a social actor through interviews that criticise the exploitation of migrants in the agricultural sector. In the film’s visualisation of landscape, meanwhile, we can observe a poetic mode that is combined with a reflexive use of sound.

Through interviews and speeches at meetings with the harvesters, we learn in reportage style about working conditions bordering on slavery (people paid no more than three euros an hour working twelve to fourteen-hour days), the harassment by the Italian caporale (or capo),¹¹ the high suicide rate among the harvesters and the difficulty or impossibility for clandestini to take any action to change the situation. These are the core themes of The Harvest ‒ Gurwinder’s backbreaking work and the attempts by Hardeep, Marco and his colleagues to get the harvesters to revolt and strike.

It is a film about today’s Indian migrants in Italy, and thus also a film about Italy itself. Italy is constantly present during this detailed examination of the farm workers’ slave-like pay and working conditions and the capo’s despotic behaviour. After numerous documentary-style scenes of gruelling work, the film’s depiction of exploitation culminates in a sequence in the style of a western as the workers receive their wages. A dark-coloured shot shows the men lining up to collect their money (Figure 1). Somewhere, out of shot, a rooster crows and a door creaks. We see a man leaning against a door. The soft, Indian-tinged sounds give way to American rock; we see and hear the band performing in the wooden hut, and suddenly see the capo as a singer, making accusations of unfair treatment, consonant with the recurring theme of exploitation. His grimacing face is presented in a wide angle (Figure 2). The capo becomes the prosecutor in this scene, an obvious case of roleplay. To put it bluntly, one could say that the Italian can be anything he wants to be.

Figure 1-2. Screenshot The Harvest: western genre and the caporale-singer.

Figure 3-4. Screenshots from The Harvest: the Italian landscape from static, central perspectives.

The scene in which the workers receive their wages is filmed in a way that combines the western and musical genres, creating a dual estrangement effect: the viewers are shocked, but the genre subtext is relevant. The western genre involves fixed boundaries between cultivated and uncultivated land and a primordial confrontation between two individuals (thus anticipating the later quarrel between Gurwinder and the capo), and the film primarily presents the harvesters’ work as a primitive form of exploitation. But the traditional western genre is not a musical, thus adding another layer to the estrangement effect. On the one hand, the lyrics call for rebellion; on the other, the sequence enacts a kind of media reflexivity that asks how the story of this exploitation should be told.

The promise of the Italian landscape

Italy itself is presented primarily through its landscape, and I would like to briefly touch on this aspect. By landscape, I mean ‘the subjective aesthetic experience of sensuously perceived nature’, including cultivated nature (Frank & Lobsien 2001, 617; Lefebvre 2006). This structured gaze is found in both feature and documentary films. In The Harvest the subjects of this picturesque setting are the cinematographer Nicola Zambelli and the viewers, not the film’s protagonists, who seem (due to Zambelli’s avoidance of point-of-view shots) to have no eyes for the Italian landscape. Central perspective is widely regarded as a scientific form of assurance that the presentation of reality is adequate and objective” (Bordwell 1985, 51; Koschorke 1990, 62), so that camera shots become the guarantor of the normative and the authentic at the same time. In the shots, we see geometrically organised images of the Agro Pontino’s fertile landscape (originally marshlands until they were drained by the fascist regime). These well-composed, centrally organised shots keep us at a distance, which we as viewers need in order to admire the landscape (Figures 3–4). With these landscape shots, the director and his cinematographer depict a non-socialised, primordial Italy. It is an undeniably affectionate view of Italy and its nature as a promise of salvation, or a visual appeal for peaceful coexistence (see Schrader 2022).

These landscapes are conveyed to us using frozen images and slow camera movements and cuts. One could say that slowness opens our eyes to things that we would otherwise not see. Moreover, the slow pace invests the Italian landscape with emotion and a sense of primordiality. According to Arnheim (1974, 138), cinematic techniques of slowness (he is talking specifically about slow motion, but his point could be taken more generally) are used whenever the speed of a movement exceeds human comprehension. And so The Harvest joins two important tendencies from contemporary transnational documentaries. This primordialisation and/or sacralisation of landscapes is quite common in Italian cinema of migration: for example, in Giorgio Diritti’s Il vento fa il suo giro (The Wind Blows Round (2005)) or Andrea Segre’s Io sono Li (Shun Li and the Poet (2011)) and La prima neve (First Snowfall (2013)) (Schrader 2013; 2019). The epic slowness is once again a response to the multimedia economy of attention and signifiers of authenticity that have become conventional in the mass media, such as the shaky handheld camera.

The narrative level, however, contrasts sharply with this peaceful visual one. At the end of the day, which also marks the end of the film, Gurwinder, who has gone on strike and is slowly struggling along the road on his bike, is harassed by one of the capi in a car and knocked down (we do not see this happening, but only hear it – which further goes to show the important role played by sound in The Harvest). Hardeep returns to her apartment in the dark and we hear (the sound effect of) a siren.

Music, dance and rebellion

This slowness, which forces us to look and listen closely and hence functions as a reality effect, can also be observed on the audio track. In the exposition, sound is used to emphasise parallels and contrasts between Gurwinder’s and Hardeep’s morning routines. It begins by emphasising daily life: while Gurwinder listens to Indian music on his smartphone, Hardeep’s remains silent. After that, we hear everyday morning sounds in both apartments, such as the sound of Gurwinder tying his turban, the running water in the bathroom or a tablet box being opened. Amplification effects – known as ‘sound close-ups’ or ‘close-miking’ (Altman 1989, 54; Chion 1994, 61) – are also used to intensify the static, visual close-ups. Their tonal resonance simultaneously conveys a certain spatiality, what Altman calls a spatial signature. More importantly, the visual and aural focus on the protagonists creates a great intimacy, thus authenticating them through sound and image. At the end of the five-minute exposition, the music on a television show connects the two Indian-Italian worlds, the worlds of the first and second generations; both protagonists sit in front of their televisions, their morning windows to the world, which stand in ironic contrast to their everyday lives.

Another, more prominent feature is the extradiegetic soundtrack composed specially for the film, which is performed by the Italian-British singer Stephen Hogan and his Brescian band Slick Steve and the Gangsters.¹² In the film, the band members play the roles of the capo and his helpers. Since Hogan comes from Brescia, he does not speak the local dialect that viewers would expect, which creates an estrangement effect. The dancers, meanwhile, come from Cremona and Mantua and belong to the dance group I Bhangra Vibes, whose members are second or third-generation immigrants who have creatively adapted their ancestors’ traditions.

While the sound effects remain in the background despite the close-milking, the soundtrack that plays throughout much of The Harvest is always in the foreground. This differs from the discreet, authenticating sound that is conventional in documentaries. The first of the five songs, ‘The Harvest’, suggests a contrapuntal reading that comments on the events being depicted. A deep voice sings ‘You can’t wait any more’ like the following songs (including in the western musical sequence), it is a call to rebel against the harvest workers’ exploitation. This first song calmly accompanies the two protagonists to the temple, which also functions as a political meeting place, and so unites the protagonists and the individual scenes. It also melancholically comments on the slow beauty of the landscape. The landscape once again appears very static. The rock music draws attention to itself both because of its prominence and because the song is in English (to be authentic, it would have to be in Italian, Hindi or the local dialect). It is also strikingly reminiscent of the Handsome Family’s ‘Far from Any Road’, featured in the US HBO series True Detective.

Here and in all later scenes, the soundtrack confounds the expectations that come with Western documentary traditions. Further into the film, the music and dance scenes call for a revolt. Interrupted by the shouting of the capo, we hear sound close-ups of the wind, the crickets and the harvesters’ rakes, presiding over or ‘morphing’ rhythmic sounds of ploughing by hand in one moment, and an Indian musical scene the next. The harvesters suddenly become determined, graceful dancers in traditional Indian garb. The rhythmic singing at the beginning denounces modern slavery, after which we hear traditional Indian music. The harvest work turns into a stylised Punjab bhangra dance in harmonic unison (Figure 5), and the scene itself again becomes a Bollywood setting through its editing and costume changes, albeit hybridised by the English singing. The choice of dance is not accidental, because traditionally bhangra was mainly performed by Punjabi farmers during the harvesting season. This popular music came to Europe with Indian-born migrants and has taken on a life of its own in Western pop music since the 1970s.

Figure 5. Screenshot from The Harvest: music and dance of rebellion.

The next musical scene (whose lyrics are about liberation from slavery) is also highly stylised. The camera first directs the focus to the ground, then the sky (searching, once again, for revelation). In between, the film cuts to Gurwinder on his bike, then on his break, then in the temple. In fairly quick succession for this film, we see – almost in the style of a Russian dialectical montage – first the dancing men, then the moving crowds, again seemingly driven by song. Just like the western genre, the Golden Age Bollywood films of the 1970s depict an angry young man and his desperate search for justice (Uhl & Kumar 2004, 49; Anjaria 2021, 150). I interpret this scene as the workers being given back something of their culture and dignity, and in the community ‒ spurred on by the blues singer’s voice ‒ one can sense the potential for revolt.

Dimmi chi sono (2019)

The title Dimmi chi sono, ‘Tell me who I am’, articulates the individual and cultural turmoil experienced by refugees from the perspective of thirteen-year-old Sarita. Her search for identity is framed by shots of two locations, occurring around two minutes after the start and two minutes before the end, over which the locations’ names are superimposed: ‘Khudunabari Refugee Camp (UNHCR)’ and then, against a backdrop of panoramic images in greyish tones, ‘Oslo’. Just under five minutes after the first name appears, we see a black title screen: ‘Dimmi chi sono’. Sarita knows no world other than the camp. She is very worried about her upcoming resettlement, especially as her beloved grandmother does not want to accompany her. She would rather return to Bhutan, the home of her parents and grandparents. Faced with this predicament, Sarita goes to the temple to ask Shiva for help.

Like The Harvest, the film interweaves conventional documentary modes (as described by Nichols) and constantly subverts them. Many of the sequences in Dimmi chi sono possess a visual poetry (as per Jakobson’s concept of self-referentiality), though the shots are less overtly aestheticised than in The Harvest. The many borrowings from Hollywood/Bollywood musicals have a media-reflexive function, and Basso also deploys techniques of participatory documentary. However, it is Sarita, rather than the director and his team, who serves as a social actor and seeks out interviewees. She gains agency, the „ability to act or perform an action. […] the corollary is that any action performed by that subject must also be to some extent a consequence of those things” (Ashcroft, Griffiths & Tiffin 2007, 6–7). Through her active search and through song and dance. The film thus represents an exception to the male-dominated Italian cinema of migration, insofar as the action is driven not just by a female refugee, but one who is a young girl.

Basso uses a dramaturgical conceit to motivate the search. When Sarita talks to the god Shiva, he gives her amnesia, which her devoutly religious family dismiss as adolescent nonsense. This single mystical scene is shot with hectic camera movements and rapid cuts accompanied by a voice-over from Shiva, so as to ironically visualise this supernatural boon. The boon (or curse) figuratively frees Sarita from the hegemonic version of history and allows her to begin her own investigation. Sarita normally skips school, because she finds the lessons they are taught about displacement, exile and resettlement too dogmatic, and her quest for knowledge becomes her true school instead. Individual identity, it becomes clear, can only be understood through collective identity. In her encounters with other people, Sarita is curious, undaunted and slightly cheeky. Her unclouded perspective and critical questions help make her a role model for anyone who wishes to understand the history of the Lhotshampa (‘southerners’). The result is a kaleidoscope of stories about brutal repression, rape, destruction, torture, ethnic expulsion (only visualised with archival material in a few instances), PTSD and the life of deprivation, devoid of any prospects, that the people we come face to face with through Sarita have endured in over twenty years of statelessness. This lack of prospects is especially evident in the hopes and dreams that children of her age pin to migrating to a country like Canada. Alongside her autodiegetic quest, there are two secondary strands. The first concerns the brutal murder of a critic of the resettlement policy in the camp, the second her hopeful family’s interview at the resettlement office.

Media and memory

Sarita’s grandmother is explicitly critical of the mass-media economy of attention, which she believes is responsible for the world apparently being interested only in exiled Tibetans rather than the fate of the Lhotshampa, a far larger group. ‘Bhutan’s refugees aren’t fashionable,’ she cynically remarks (69′). At the end of the film, we see Sarita in her new home in Oslo, gazing at a grey sea of houses. The camera shows a close-up of her silent, despairing scream, which prompts the idea that the stories of Dimmi chi sono may be Basso’s answers to the silence (or concealment of the facts) about the Lhotshampa. But the connection between audio-visual media and memory is rather more complex than that. The last ten minutes of the film suggest that Sarita recorded the footage herself to create an archive of stories and songs about the Lhotshampa’s displacement that she could take with her into her future exile. At the start of the film, a friend gave her a basic video camera (intended for her new life after resettlement) and her teacher gave her a voice recorder, and so at the end we once again see the grainy close-ups that opened the film and hear the traditional songs sung by people in the camp, some old, some young. By looking back to the start, the film reflects on Sarita’s oral history project and reveals memory’s ‘constructed’ nature. Alternating between shaky handheld shots and steady close-ups, the camera accompanies people on their day-to-day lives at the camp. The impression created by the handheld camera effects is reinforced by the slightly blurred, grainy footage, whose aesthetics evoke the picture quality of early camcorders like the one we eventually see in Sarita’s hands (Figure 6). However, Basso also combines these conventional authenticity effects with other techniques.

Figure 6-7. Screenshot Dimmi chi sono: Sarita and the camcorder, Sarita and the red window.

At the start of the film, he uses a visual style more akin to painting. Following the caption with the name of the camp, the film cuts to a completely red screen. Sarita’s hand then slowly wipes the bright red off the window until we see her face (Figure 7). In the next sequence, this red is revealed to be sindur, the traditional red cosmetic powder. The way this play of colour is filmed creates a highly poetic sequence that draws attention to the colour itself. The editing also gives it a symbolic meaning: Sarita is opening a window onto the story she will be telling.

There are visual indications of what kind of story this will be right from the start: we see close-ups of an old man’s face and then a baby rocking in a basket. These two shots are paradigmatic of Basso’s focus (atypical in Italian cinema of migration) on the individual stories of people who are mostly either very young or very old, and hence implicitly on the diversity that exists within communities and in the sharing of memory. His camera alternates between medium and close-up shots of faces and fragmentary scenes of everyday life in the camp (cooking, filling containers with rice, weaving), where there is no electricity or running water. Just as The Harvest contemplatively captures the Italian landscape with slow shots, Dimmi chi sono has shots of children playing, focusing on details that tell us children can still play despite the poverty and deprivation. These shots interrupt the generally quick camerawork and cuts. Variations recur regularly throughout the film, giving it rhythm and, like in The Harvest, forcing viewers to adopt a contemplative stance. These shots serve no narrative function, but are given equal weight to those showing people, thus reaffirming this world’s ontological ‘thereness’. In combination with the synchronous sound of children laughing and shouting, the director invites us to appreciate how life in the camp is still worth living despite all the deprivation. There is also a visual poetry in the way time seems to stand still while the children play, which neither romanticises these people’s lives (the images are slightly out of focus, the colours muted and muddy) nor reduces them to victims (for they are shown to have agency).

We also see photos in the shanties of family members who are missing, dead or have run away. Photographs, we know from Roland Barthes, presuppose an ontological presence but are themselves always a sign of disappearance. The film shows photographs in this ambivalent state in a scene that calmly cross-cuts between the family checking in at the airport as they prepare to depart to Norway and wind-stirred photographs tied to a tree, under which the grandmother is sitting (Figure 8). Photography and film thus become a way of confronting the past and experiencing its ambivalence. For the reference to the real does not disappear with photography and film; rather, their media apparatuses invite us to consider the paradoxes involved in bearing witness to the real. According to Barthes, this is the effect of the photographic medium, which is false at the level of perception, but true at the level of time: ‘car la photographie, c’est l’avènement de moi-même comme un autre: une dissociation retorse de la conscience d’identité’ (Barthes 1980, 184).

Figure 8. Screenshot from Dimmi chi sono: the photo tree.

Another key structural element is the bird’s-eye perspective, with which the camera distances itself from Sarita’s subjective narration. Some of these shots show the camp, others people singing and dancing. While the shots of the camp reveal a vista of endless, unvarying bleakness, this is subverted firstly by smaller and larger dots of colour and secondly by the geometrically arranged shots of the music and dance scenes (Figure 9). In other words, we can already discern in the bird’s-eye shots the positive function played by the music and dance scenes, which will be discussed in the next section.

Figure 9. Screenshot from Dimmi chi sono, bird’s-eye view of a musical scene.

Music, dance and commentary

Sarita is very close to her strong-willed grandmother, who has wallpapered her room with film posters; consequently, Bollywood films are visually marked in the family’s life. Hollywood and Bollywood have always influenced each other, but there is no question that Bollywood today is a genre of its own, both quantitatively and qualitatively, for which, nevertheless, theoretical approaches of the Hollywood musical also have to be applied. Therefore in The Harvest it is not easy to assign the musical scenes to one side or the other; they lack Bollywood’s dominance of music over narrative and the extravagant sets and costumes (see Anjaria 2021, 59; 84), but (with one exception) the clothing, language and music in the scenes do make reference to the refugees’ countries of origin and hence to Bollywood, whose film culture Nepal and Bhutan are strongly influenced by.

Music plays a key role in giving the protagonists a home (at least in the realm of sound). Even outside the musical scenes, Nepalese pop music plays on the intra- and extradiegetic soundtrack. Dimmi chi sono has almost as many music and dance scenes as The Harvest, but they are integrated far more directly into the flow of the narrative. The stories, rhythms, songs and dances that Sergio Basso collected during his visits to the camp between 2009 and 2017 form the basis for the soundtrack, which was put together by the accomplished film composers Pivio and Aldo De Scalzi, and for the dance scenes choreographed on location by Matteo Gastaldo. The Bollywood musical scenes primarily serve to comment on the diegesis. In the first musical scene, people sing, at once joyfully and ironically, about their terrible living conditions. But it is the only life Sarita knows, and so she doesn’t want to leave it: ‘I live in a refugee camp, I was born in a refugee camp, isn’t it wonderful? … It’s the best place in the world. I have all my friends here. No need to go anywhere,’ she sings (3′51″). The song describes life in the camp as medieval (the camera shows a donkey cart) or as like a perpetual camping holiday. The musical scene’s artificiality is heightened by the fact that people appear to start singing and dancing spontaneously. In the first example, Sarita goes down the street singing and dancing; more and more young people join her and start dancing themselves; community, this scene shows, can be performatively created by music. The irony and highly positive energy make this a scene of self-empowerment and hence a positive comment on the bleakly depicted day-to-day life that people transcend through music and dance. The melody is taken up again in the middle of the film; the washing of laundry by the river merges into a choreographed dance, and everyday sounds are absorbed into the music.

The third dance scene also turns gruelling day-to-day life into a harmonious choreography by cross-cutting the packing of rice with interludes that combine traditional dance and break dancing (Figures 10–11). The combination of image and sound, especially the bird’s-eye perspective, allows a transcendence of the refugees’ lives through song and dance.

Figure 10–11. Screenshots from Dimmi chi sono: choreography of everyday life.

I would like to briefly draw attention to two other scenes that illustrate two more functions played by the musical interludes. In the second music and dance number, the melancholy lyrics tell the story of the Lhotshampa, a Nepalese ethnic group living in Bhutan who have preserved their customs and language (Nepali). They have frequently been subjected to severe repression, in the period around 1990, most Lhotshampa were stripped of their Nepalese citizenship, and some 100,000 were deported to Nepal or forced to flee there.¹³ The camera reinforces the melancholy song sung by the mother and grandmother by showing panoramic shots of the landscape as a site of longing and yearning, followed by archive footage of police violence against demonstrators.

In the middle of the film is the only musical scene in English. It is also highly jarring, with the estrangement effect functioning almost identically to the western scene in The Harvest. The perspective shifts: the family is invited to an interview for their upcoming resettlement. Looking like a ‘hyperactive Gene Kelly wannabe’ (Bordwell 2020), the official dances over his desk and through his office towards Sarita’s bewildered family (Figures 12–13). Accompanied by ultra-cheery music, his English song ‘Welcome, everybody’ rings out through the room. The irony comes from the contrast between the lyrics and the melody; while the music is buoyant and carefree, the official is singing about the lottery for places, families torn apart and his own omnipotence. Just like the capo in The Harvest, he is made to seem ridiculous by the tilted camera and wide angle, and depicted as a grotesque, inhuman Western monster. The resettlement policy, this scene suggests, is simply a farcical pantomime in which the Western world pulls all the strings.

Figure 12–13. Screenshots from Dimmi chi sono, ‘Welcome, everybody’.

Conclusion

In both The Harvest and Dimmi chi sono, the directors seek to raise awareness of a rarely told story, true to the tradition of politically engaged documentary. The Harvest denounces the working conditions of the clandestini, while Dimmi chi sono serves both as an archive for forgotten stories of the stateless Lhotshampa and to reveal the role of audio-visual media as vehicles for individual and collective memory, without which, it suggests, these identities would not exist. Unlike in many other migration films, we encounter migrant actors who are shown in both films as capable of agency. But the directors can no longer rely on the authenticity effects that have been made hackneyed by the mass media to lend credibility to their accounts. The Harvest and Dimmi chi sono stand out from conventional documentaries firstly by deploying multiple documentary modes, and secondly by incorporating musical scenes that interact in various ways.

At a visual level, the directors use intermedial techniques drawn from sources such as central-perspective painting and photography. Intermedial references to painting or photography as frozen images are interesting not least because the depiction of photography in film plays with the presence and absence of reality, stopping the cinematic continuity and thus making reference to the film itself (Kirchmann & Ruchatz 2014, 27). The slowness of the images critically opposes the mass-media economy of attention, and invites the viewer to rediscover the lives of refugees in Italy and Nepal. Italy is shown as a beautiful, primordial landscape offering new possibilities, and life in the refugee camp has its dignity restored.

But the most interesting part comes to the fore above all through intramedial references such as the musical scenes, which at first glance seem highly artificial, but evoke the migrants’ heritage and try to give them back their history and identity. In the musical sequences, agency, collective memory and rebellion are embodied in a visionary way. Both films are thus opposed to discourses of victimhood. The musical sequences follow an external logic, to use Michel Chion’s expression; they interrupt the narrative and thus become a counternarrative. In The Harvest they challenge both the exploitation endured in everyday life and the archaic romanticisation of the Italian landscape. In Dimmi chi sono, music and dance have an affective and reflective effect on the viewers that celebrates the dignity of refugees. And last but not least, in both films they have an estrangement effect, at least for Western viewers. We are kept at a distance by the fractured genre. However, since the songs are played out in full, in The Harvest we get enough time to think, and in Dimmi chi sono enough time to feel our way into the setting.

Music and dance can also be understood as self-reflexively questioning the Western expectation of authentic, documentary narration. Both docu-musicals interrogate the notion of authenticity that is so central and standardised in the Western world. Bollywood films in particular have no interest in authenticity in the Western sense; the rapid changes of scene (for example, from the palace to the Swiss mountains) primarily serve to open up a world of excess, plurality and fantasy, and that is the standard against which the films are measured (Rajadhyaksha 1998, 542; Uhl & Kumar 2004, 19). In both The Harvest and Dimmi chi sono, within this seemingly unreal setting of the heterogeneous and the possible, life and revolt become legitimate, authentic and conceivable ‒ contrary to the narrative, the action, the facts.

Disclosure statement

I confirm that there are no relevant financial or non-financial competing interests to report.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Austrian Science Fund, grant P 30537.

Notes

1. Marcel Ophüls (1985), ‘Closely Watched Trains’. American Film 11 (2), cited in Eitzen (1998), 13.

2. On this terminology, see our introduction to this special issue.

3. Mariani also co-directed the documentaries Tomorrow’s Land (2011) and Vite al centro (Lives in the Malls, 2014) with Nicola Zambelli.

4. For The Harvest I’ld like to quote some festival and prices: Special Mention on Warsaw Human Doc Film Festival 2017 (Poland); Winner Best Documentary Noida International Film Festival 2018 (India); Second Prize Finca Buenos Aires 2018 (Argentina); San Francisco Green Film Festival 2018 (USA); CinePobre Film Festival 2018 (Mexico); Independent FilmFestival Osnabrück 2018 (Germany). In Italy: Cinemambiente Torino 2018; Pesaro Doc Festival 2018; Special Mention on Terra di Tutti Film Festival 2018; Festival Cinema Diritti Umani di Napoli 2018. The film Dimmi chi sono was in a way victim oft he pandemic lockdown in 2020. It was shown e.g. on Hamburg International Film Festival 2019; Vancouver International Film Festival 2020; Nepal International Film Festival 2021. Instead of the cinema release (spring 2020), the film was very quickly available on the most popular German arthouse streaming platform Kinoondemand.de and in Italy on Rai Play which did the co-production: https://www.raiplay.it/programmi/dimmichisono.

5. Hollywood musicals have had a strong influence on Bollywood, and the latter cannot be understood in isolation from the former. Bollywood adopts and transforms American conventions, for instance by making the music more dominant than the plot (Uhl & Kumar 2004, 31; Anjaria 2021, 59).

6. This is how the films are described in their own marketing materials, see https://www.openddb.com/movies/the-harvest/ and https://www.facebook.com/dimmichisonofilm/. The first film of Italian cinema of migration associated to the concept of docu-musical,is L’orchestra di Piazza Vittorio (A. Ferrente, 2006) (Schrader in print).

7. This work was supported by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF, Grant P 30537).

8. Kuhn speaks of ‘effects’, because since the advent of Steadicams it is now a stylistic choice, rather than an inevitable consequence, for handheld shots to be shaky or blurred.

9. As regards the marginalisation of sound in documentaries, it is notable that there are very few chapters specifically on this topic in the relevant literature.

10. Nonetheless, it is a fact that the on-location sound that is considered to add authenticity can sometimes make speech inaudible and require post-editing. Hence, in post-production ambient noise is generally filtered out, meaning that the sound is no longer unmediated but instead intelligible, i.e. rationally comprehensible based on what is shown and told.

11. See https://www.treccani.it/vocabolario/caporalato/ or https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caporalato.

12. On the band, see http://www.slicksteveandthegangsters.com/. The band’s other members are Alle B. Goode (guitar), Pietro Gozzini (contrabass) and Beppe Facchetti (drums).

13. See Amnesty International (1992).