Fantasmi della Storia. L’impronta del documentario etnografico italiano nel cinema di Alice Rohrwacher

The aim of this essay is to stress the dual nature of Alice Rohrwacher’s films. Looking back to Ernesto De Martino’s work and to his influence on Italian cinema, Rohrwacher updates the analytical tools of the Italian Ethnographic Documentary in order to investigate the Italian contemporary society. At the same time, her films always propose a highly symbolic coming-of-age narrative. I want to argue that Rohrwacher integrates these two different narratives in order to depict a double transition – both of the character and of the environment. Or, perhaps, the transition of the character «through» the transition of the environment.