In a post-war Italy ravaged by two decades of fascism, reckoning with the ruins of its urban landscape, young photographer Cecilia Mangini preferred the pavement to the studio. She would smoke and take pictures – a simple act that gave her “a sense of freedom that is ‘mine’ only” – and whenever she forgot her lighter she would knock on car windows to ask strangers for theirs.1 She worked her way up in the thriving post-war filmmaking scene by collaborating on the projects of her peers (the majority of them, of course, were male), writing film reviews for trade magazines and, crucially, landing an office job at the Italian Federation of Independent Cinema in Rome. She soon turned her attention to documentary cinema, despite a lack of funding from public institutions and her exceptional status as a woman within the industry. Later in her life she was asked – in three separate interviews – about the role her gender played in shaping the early years of her career as a street photographer.2 Each time Mangini responded with a variation of “I was told photography was not a job for young ladies,” before adding: “Because we go around in the streets. And you know who else stays out on the streets”. It’s no wonder, then, that both her photographs and documentaries exhibit a hyper-awareness of public geography, tuning in to how social landscapes are moulded by clashes of power.
Mangini grew up between the developing North and the rural South: she was born in Mola di Bari (Puglia) in 1927, but after her family’s relocation to Florence in 1933 she would only return to the South for summer holidays (and later, location scouting). Over the course of her childhood, years of fascist autarchy and war contributed to the widening of a historic divide that prevented the complete economic, cultural and political unification of Italy. The South carried on despite a patent shortage of resources, inadequate welfare, rudimentary infrastructure, and an archaic, feudalistic agricultural system. The postbellum decade of the booming Italian economy – years of unprecedented economic progress led by large-scale industrial developments – was fostered by the steady availability of a cheap workforce flowing into Northern urban centres (in richer regions such as Piedmont, Lombardy and Veneto) after Mussolini’s ban on internal, northbound migration had been lifted. Mangini’s early documentaries, shot in the late ’50s, chronicle the landscape of the South, attempting to capture its ancient religious and magical rituals, whose discontinued practice and subsequent disappearance are closely linked to the departure of the diaspora tearing rural communities apart. Her methodology is reconstructive, didactic and inherently political: the pressure to emigrate northward, to swap the seasonal pace in the fields for day and night shifts in factories, is felt throughout Mangini’s documentary oeuvre.
Despite identifying as a Southern woman herself, Mangini moves with the caution of a visitor in the rural world she perceives without a nostalgic filter: “A terrible world, composed of hunger and illiteracy, deprived of anything that eases life, like reading, or cinema”.3 But Mangini is as interested in folklore as she is in preserving the memory of the economic blow suffered by the South: in her early, para-anthropological documentaries, she frames the South as a fully-fledged cultural presence. In her colour documentary Maria and the Days (‘Maria e i giorni’, 1959), Mangini presents a portrait of the woman she considers her godmother, Maria di Capriati, a farmer who emergency-christened her right after her birth. Maria lived as the morganatic wife of a Neapolitan aristocrat – tending his estate in rural Puglia all year long and acting as his companion despite the lack of any official matrimonial arrangement – and also took on the role of spiritual guide and healer for the farming community that lived onsite. Throughout the documentary, Mangini presents Maria’s spirituality as twofold: her Catholic faith is complemented by a profane ritualism. In one scene she is shown awake past her bedtime, kneeling in front of a tall Virgin Mary statuette, praying in a low whisper: it is hard to tell whether she is repeating the canonical prayers by heart, or freestyling devotion. Her deep connection with the natural world seems to outstrip Christian doctrines. When a chicken roams into the bedroom, Maria gently lifts it up and takes it outside, walking under the yellow light of the moon until she reaches a barn whose beams are covered in thick cobwebs. When the camera circles round to show the animals inside, Maria becomes the centre of the world, her wisdom stitching together conflicting layers of knowledge: “This is magic for old people: the ability to foster, in secret, an internal defence against the unexpected blows of the unknown,” comments the voiceover. When Maria ties a knotted rope to the goat’s chain – an unexplained but evidently meaningful gesture – she has the same bright stare as she did before the image of the Virgin Mary, or the horse she cured from evil influences.
In the late ’50s, Mangini started reading ethnographic essays by Ernesto De Martino, whose anthropological research came from his first-hand experience of the everyday life and culture of rural communities in Southern Italy. In works such as ‘Death and Ritual Mourning in the Ancient World’ (‘Morte e pianto rituale nel mondo antico’ 1958), ‘The Land of Remorse’ (‘La terra del rimorso’, 1961) and ‘Magic: A Theory from the South’ (‘Sud e magia’ 1959), De Martino explores forms of popular spirituality such as tarantism, magic practices and mourning rituals. In her efforts to capture ritual performances – the mastery over and memory of it, both of which were waning – Mangini similarly embraces a ‘didactic’ anthropological scope. Her filmic research belongs to an aestheticised mode of history telling of the collective flight from the South and its related trauma: one that favours idealised traditions over narratives, either shared or personal. Maria’s personal history is not the focus of Mangini’s work and in ‘Maria e i giorni’ she performs a role for Mangini. Gone are any mentions of her unusual living arrangements and even of the special respect and esteem she enjoyed in her community – instead she is presented as the strong, wise crone, whose every action has a social scope, but whose body is often alone. Mangini’s scripted documentary takes place in the dark hours, starting with the evening commute, on a horse-drawn wagon, back from the fields, when “tiredness becomes anger, becomes drowsiness, becomes hunger”, and ending the next day, at dawn. A poised, male voiceover thoroughly explains the action, describing Maria’s conscious effort “to be alive, to be useful”, and interpreting her unpleasant entanglement in domestic quarrels as “but the umpteenth proof that Maria says ‘No!’ to the silent wait for death.”
In his essay ‘The Magical World’ (‘Il mondo magico’, 1948) De Martino develops the concept of crisi della presenza (crisis of presence) to validate the profound cultural relevance (and to explain the wavering influence) of magical, mythical and ritualistic devices. Whenever distressing situations occur, individuals, as well as entire communities, are able to process their grief and overcome despair through symbolic, formulaic practices. Magic rituals, De Martino argues, provide a sheltered, narrative dimension that preserves the self’s cultural agency. By showing a peasant woman’s will to “impose her presence, right now”, Mangini not only draws on De Martino’s observations, but points out how, despite the structural suffering endured in illiterate, underdeveloped rural areas, the capacity to develop complex cultural reactions to fearsome mysteries lives on.
‘Here They Play Again’ (‘Stendalì: Suonano Ancora’, 1960) records the staged performance of a traditional mourning song in griko dialect in the town of Martano, near Lecce. The group of adult and elderly women whom Mangini casts is not a complete choir but a gathering of the last surviving performers proficient in that art, who live scattered among the small villages of the Grecìa Salentina area of Puglia. Mangini is determined to make her subject intelligible to an audience, however geographically and culturally distant: the opening credits inform us that female neighbours join the home in mourning to console the wife, mother, and sisters of the deceased – as only men are allowed to attend the funeral and the burial – and a dramatic voiceover ‘translates’ the songs. The Italian rendition, performed by actress Lilla Brignone, is in fact a reconstruction by Pier Paolo Pasolini, who retrieved the best passages from a 19th century translation and reassembled them to create an artificial mourning song. In their song, the women express their grief in lyrical references to domestic labour and affection: “Who’s going to wash your shirt? The gravestone will. Who will iron it for you? The gravestone, the earth will. Who will wake you up, my son, when the sun is high? Down there, it is only slumber. Always the night, pitch black.” They are the sole protagonists of their distress and the extant narrators of their parenting chores: “I will wait for you, my son, until three in the morning. When I realise you’re not coming I will go out looking for you, […] then I’ll lose all hope, and if you’re not back by 10, I’ll have already turned into dirt, soil to sow you in. If you’re not back by 10, I’ll turn into soot.”
The camera skips from one face to the next, freezing the women’s blinking eyes and the scarves wrapped around their temples into poses that give each frame a dusky, portrait-like quality, recalling the films of Carl Theodor Dreyer or Robert Wiene. Besides the music, the ritual has distinctive visual features. The women’s white handkerchiefs, folded into triangular shapes, are flapped, waved, and whirled, as each singer adds her own interpretation to the choreographed movements. Theirs is a stylised desperation, and Mangini seizes on the movable nature of the camera to explore the setting. Mangini captures strands of hair, the comic potential of the women’s modest heels, their sensible work slippers, all of them black, like their hand-sewed stockings and long skirts, as they bounce in rhythm. Women’s voices are the only intradiegetic instruments, but as the ritual concludes – the chants intensifying, turning into shrill outcries of despair, and the choreography lost to the haphazard swinging of bodies and heads – a tribal-like drumming sound is heard from outside the room. Over the course of the film, the crucial importance of these collective bonds is made evident. “The social role of these women was fundamental, and widely respected in protecting the grief-stricken family, a guarantee that mourning does not deliver a fatal blow to their psychology” commented Mangini in a 2013 interview.4 ‘Here They Play Again’, however, is hardly anthropological in tone and value. Stemming from De Martino’s scientific speculations, it explores a social environment that keeps rituals alive in memory, but no longer performs them. The ethical conundrum raised in Mangini’s request that the ritual be staged for the camera is to some extent assuaged by her solidarity with the women who want their art to be remembered. “If we die, our lamentations die,” she reports them saying. Although Mangini’s documentaries hardly qualify as reliable, first-hand ethnographic research they possess a hybrid character that is in keeping with Mangini’s intention to “talk concretely and correctly with the audience, inspire thinking, rather than conviction”.
The everyday life that occasionally appears in ‘Here They Play Again’ also appears in Mangini’s short ‘Divine Love’ (‘Divino amore’, 1963), set in the Roman countryside. Here, Mangini’s focus is enlarged: as the last pockets of popular spirituality thriving right outside the country’s capital are being commodified into acts of scripted collectivism – the performance of a religious pilgrimage conflated with a weekend leisure trip – Mangini includes them in her atlas of vanishing rituals, a slight deviation that fittingly caps her previous recordings of Southern magic practices. ‘Divino Amore’ chronicles a day at the shrine of Our Lady of Divine Love, a site of pilgrimage on the outskirts of Rome, starting with the early morning ritual walk and ending with the late afternoon farewell to the holy icons. By the time Mangini starts filming, profane piety has turned into a performance of secular commonality to be enjoyed by urban residents in their spare time, and Mangini’s interest in the corollary apparatus that makes the performance of the pilgrimage possible arguably becomes more significant than the focal description of the sacred act and its underlying reasons. While ‘Stendalì’ and ‘Maria e i giorni’, with their intrusive voiceovers, linger between artistic didacticism and abridged testimony, in ‘Divine Love’ the commentary disappears, synchronised sound recordings replaced by a sinister yet delicate score (composed ad hoc by Egisto Macchi) which Mangini describes as “astral music”.5
When reassembling the pilgrimage experience, Mangini slips into an ironic observational mode: different speeds in walking break up the group, and the devotees blend into a crowd of local, cigarette-smoking country workers on their daily commute; votive candles are blown out. The catalogue of devotional acts includes classic scenarios including walking barefoot, kissing the ground, holding out newborns for benediction, expressions of spiritual angst – but also distinctive gestures and unexpected details. Dressed in his Sunday best, a man walks with his umbrella tucked into his collar: it swings against his back. In another scene, one woman stands apart from the rest, who are assembled in rows with their heads covered, and holds onto the marble church wall, touching the very material of the temple as she partakes in the mass. A Black priest offers the Eucharist. Once 100 lira offerings have been made and ex-votos affixed, Mangini shows the devotees taking their time to pose for the souvenir photos a professional photographer develops on-site, crouching down to wash each picture in the chemical bath he keeps in a tin next to his camera. At lunchtime, Mangini’s amused gaze is at its best. Her camera slides to capture the scattered parties of visitors eating pasta on the grass and bounces up to observe a horse eating the green shrubs. In-between moments – the changing of garments, the lighting of cigarettes, the feeding of babies with milk bottles, the laughs between spouses – are the focus here. As the mysticism of the morning wears off, the afternoon exists in an increasingly fast-paced projection of slide-like stills that offers an overview of the secular and mundane. The final sequence, however, returns to a devotional mood: women are filmed leaving the shrine walking backwards because they are not allowed to turn their backs to the Virgin, their steps equally slowed by faith and prudence. 
‘Divine Love’ is a departure from strictly ‘De Martinian’ documentary practice: besides its embrace of experimental film grammar, it affirms Mangini’s interest in composite accounts of real-life experiences that require the individual to meddle and merge with a larger group. Disappearing rituals are only a small part of the interwoven tensions and conflicts that Mangini would go on to explore more explicitly in the following decades, with lengthier, interview-based documentaries on life and work in urban factories such as ‘Tomasso’ (1965), ‘Being Women’ (‘Essere donne, 1965) and ‘Brindisi ’65 (1966). The topic of popular, collective spirituality persists, enriched by and embedded in urban tales of class disparity and normative social and gender roles. Southern magic outstrips its geography and is used to make a symbolic case for all the potential alternatives discarded in favour of nationally sponsored industrial progress and ensuing cultural homogenisation. Mangini’s archaeology of national character adds depth to official history: she does not look for the truth in dusty archives, but in kitchens and country roads, honouring a forgotten enchantment through her loving and political portrayal of a lost culture.
1. Radio interview with Cecilia Mangini for Rai Radio3 programme ‘Hollywood Party’, July 2011. All translations from interviews and quotations from films are mine. 2. a Ibid.; b Rai Storia video documentary and interview with Cecilia Mangini ‘Cortoreale: gli anni del documentario italiano. Il cinema documentario di Cecilia Mangini’, April 2013; c radio interview with Cecilia Mangini by Marcello Anselmo for Rai Radio3 programme, June 2017. 3. Radio interview with Cecilia Mangini 4. Ibid. 5. Ibid.
Francesca Massarenti is a PhD student at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice (Italy) and co-authors Italian feminist newsletter Ghinea.
