A Film Canon

This ambitious fusion of natural history and Marxism attempts to envisage that moment in the dialectic at which the inanimate becomes animate, under the first apprehensions of revolutionary consciousness. To this end, Visconti renders an entire village of non-  professional actors continuous with their coastal environment, dwelling at length on those ceremonies and activities that transform them into a single, fluid mass, analogous to the ocean that they desperately fish. Although the evolutionary moments themselves are fairly predictable - a series of humiliations and privations that force one particular family of fishermen to recognise their part in a class ecology, of which the most immediate manifestation is exploitative wholesaling - they are delivered with a calm, quasi-scientific objectivity that is banal, or even ambient, in the best possible way, frequently eliding any sense of the camera's presence. Even the occasional, didactic voiceover largely partakes of this detachment, as do the observations of the revolutionary fisherman himself, which are generally phrased in terms of analogies taken from the local landscape and, more specifically, from the omnipresent sea ("The currents will catch us beyond the rocks....as sure as water wears away a stone...like fish trying to find a way out of the reefs"). The result is both an original translation of the surreal, defamiliarising potential of neorealistic aesthetics from an urban to coastal mileu (only partly anticipated by Paisan), as well as a concomitant clarification of the extent to which the original defamiliarisation lay in reducing the post-war city to a metaphorical seascape, barren of any orienting topography, and dooming its inhabitants to a endless drift that, in this case, is only remediable through class struggle, as opposed to the Christian and sentimental humanism of Rossellini and De Sica.