Cortile Cascino

Robert M. Young, Michael Roemer: Cortile Cascino (US 1962).

US 1962. Director: Robert M. Young, Michael Roemer. Scen., M.: Robert M. Young, Michael Roemer. F.: Robert M. Young. Prod.: NBC Television. 16 mm. Bn. 46 min

    Il Cinema Ritrovato, Bologna 2023: Recovered and Restored

    Copy from La Cinémathèque francaise. Original commentary in English. Sottotitoli italiani: Eleonor Garolini.

    Introduced by Goffredo Fofi, hosted by Gian Luca Farinelli.

    Viewed at Cinema Lumiere - Sala Scorsese, 27 June 2023

Haden Guest (Bologna 2023 catalog): " Michael Roemer and Robert Young co-directed their visually striking essayistic portrait of impoverished Southern Italy for an NBC documentary series whose producers were so shocked and troubled by the film’s frank depiction of hardship that they immediately cancelled the broadcast and fired Young, then on the channel’s payroll. By NBC orders, the film’s negative was destroyed but a print was saved by a dedicated NBC employee who believed in the film’s merits. Seen today Cortile Cascino – despite the English language voice-over imposed by NBC upon the film – is an extraordinary document that captures a pocket of Europe forgotten by postwar progress, where the difficult conditions of pre-WW2 stubbornly persist. " Haden Guest

AA: Like the classics of the city symphony genre, this powerful documentary film starts with a train entering the city and ends with the train leaving it.

Goffredo Fofi in his introduction compared Cortile Cascino with Los olvidados. Only the poverty and squalor here is even more devastating, so much so that Luis Buñuel reportedly refused to believe it.

We are in a land of unacceptable misery where living quarters are indistinguishable from a garbage heap. The children of the community are dealt the worst possible hand. Boys dream of the mafia as the way out. Girls are made to feel the temptation of prostitution.

Mafia indeed is a central social power, "like death, always with us". Goffredo Fofi reminisced of the era of Salvatore Giuliani. I was reminded of a woman who knew both Luis Buñuel and Salvatore Giuliani: the Swedish anti-fascist fighter Karin Lannby / Maria Cyliakus. 

The terrain vague circumstances and the theme of the salvage of garbage remind us of Agnès Varda's Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse. 

It is not all misery. We see gorgeous landscapes, observe a beautiful wedding and hear haunting Sicilian songs that seem to carry messages from thousands of years of Mediterranean life and beyond.

In general I have misgivings of candid camera footage of poor, defenseless people. We are meant to feel guilty and uneasy, but would these people like us to see them this way? It is impossible to say. Anyway, Robert M. Young's and Michael Roemer's film maudit is not a case of social porn but of dignity and solidarity.