Experimentation, Documentation, Censorship: A Joris Ivens’ Industrial Film and the Italian National Broadcasting Television

Around the period of the Italian ‘economic miracle’ (1958-63) documentary and television films became fields of deliberate audio-visual experimentation. A number of industrial films were commissioned to some prominent authors of filmmaking (directors, composers, scriptwriters and graphic artists) in order to legitimate the economic, social and cultural functions played by the companies they referred to. The massive introduction of electroacoustic and avant-garde as well as vernacular folk music idioms is one of the most interesting elements in this scenario. Whereas the first two were often used as sonic extensions of the innovative technological processes illustrated by the films (chemical, mechanical, electronic machinery etc.), the latter functioned as signals of the (especially southern) Italian ancestral rural identities. All these features can be tracked in the most controversial industrial film of the early 1960s: L’Italia non è un paese povero (1960), a three-part documentary commissioned to Dutch director Joris Ivens by the administrator of the Italian national energy company (ENI) Enrico Mattei, murdered in 1962, to be broadcasted on the Italian national television (RAI). The film was planned to illustrate Mattei’s ambitious economic and industrial vision, through opposing the poverty of some Italian regions to the prosperous future promised by the discovery of oil and gas fields. Mattei’s resorting to a celebrated foreign filmmaker whose radical views were broadly known is at the basis of the censorship affairs that afflicted the film before its broadcasting, which eventually led Ivens to abandon the project. Our paper will point out how Ivens’ experimental ideas about image and sound recording, the TV target of the film and the number of personalities involved in it (Alberto Moravia, the Taviani brothers, Tinto Brass, Valentino Orsini, and composer Gino Marinuzzi jr.) configured the film as an extraordinary sounding board for the complex representational issues underlying Italian economic transformation.