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        Article contents

  Folk Music in De Santis’s Caccia tragica
  The Power of the Peasants’ Soundscape: Whistles and Bells
  Sounds on Paper: Noi che facciamo crescere il grano
        Conclusion
  Appendix
Footnotes
		
    


    
     
		
	

    ARTICLE
    
Folkloric Voices in Neorealist Cinema: The Case of Giuseppe De
            Santis
                *
            
		

    Giuliano Danieli
    


    Sound Stage Screen, Vol. 2, Issue 1 (Spring 2022), pp. 31–70, ISSN 2784-8949. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. © 2022 Giuliano Danieli. DOI: https://doi.org/10.54103/sss16776.




    In 1952, the screenwriter and film theorist Cesare Zavattini (1902–1989)
    published “Alcune idee sul cinema” (Some Ideas on the Cinema), which is
    generally regarded as the retrospective manifesto of neorealism. The
    article extolled the “factual” nature of the new Italian cinema, notably
    its quasi-documentary approach to the harsh reality of poor people living
    at the periphery of the Nation, the use of nonprofessional actors playing
    themselves, the adoption of dialect, and the abolition of the cinematic
    apparatus. However, Zavattini failed to acknowledge that the music and
    voices of subaltern subjects also merited consideration, if their world was
    to be faithfully captured on screen.
    
        [1]
    
    Antonella Sisto, among many others, has ascribed this inattention to sound
    to the supposed “lack of audiophilia” of neorealism, deriving from its
    “monosensory, visual foundation.”
    
        [2]
    
    This formulation of the problem surely contains a degree of truth—in his
    article, for instance, Zavattini adopts a language that refers almost
    exclusively to the semantic field of “seeing”—, but it relies too much on
    the dubious polarization “image vs. sound,” which may be unhelpful for a
    more nuanced understanding of neorealist filmmaking. Zavattini’s
    inattention to sound derives not so much from the supposed hierarchical
    superiority of the image as from the absolute precedence given to the
    broader concepts of plot, narrative, and characters. Thus, it would be more
    accurate to introduce the issue of music and sound in neorealist film from
    the perspective adopted by Richard Dyer in his pivotal article “Music,
    people and reality,” where he noted that a discrepancy existed between the
    plots, situations, and environments portrayed by neorealism—“a movement
    presumed to be about creating a cinema genuinely expressive of ordinary
    people’s reality”—and their seemingly conventional soundtracks.
    
        [3]
    
    In other terms, Richard Dyer has observed that neorealism often relied on
well-established norms of film-scoring practices, despite the fact that, on    every other level, it wanted to overcome cinematic convention. The
    soundtracks were the work of composers such as Alessandro Cicognini, Mario
    Nascimbene, Goffredo Petrassi, Giuseppe Rosati, and Renzo Rossellini. Their
    late-romantic or modernist symphonic style clearly contradicted the
    purported aim of providing a transparent recording of the reality of the
    films’ protagonists—sub-proletarians, disadvantaged workers, beggars,
    peasants, fishermen, and so forth. In fact, the “music of the people” (folk
    tunes, popular and military songs, religious chants) featured in only a
    small minority of neorealist works, most often as source music. A
    fundamental incongruity lurked behind the fact that while neorealism’s
    ambition was to reduce “the distance between the films and their
    protagonists”, its typical subjects “cannot speak for themselves: music is
    needed to speak for them. But that music will not be their music.”
    
        [4]
    
    Neorealist soundtracks, notes Dyer, established an implicit hierarchy: the
    point of view on narrated events, usually expressed by non-diegetic music,
    was entrusted to a musical idiom that was foreign to the cultural world of
    the subjects portrayed; as such, their voices risked being drowned out and
    disempowered by the voices of the filmmakers.



    While agreeing with Dyer’s general observation, I think that the assertion
    that neorealist films were oftentimes deaf to the music and voice of the
    people portrayed deserves further thought. The case of Giuseppe De Santis
    (1917–1997), one of the leading figures of Italian postwar cinema, helps
    complicate Dyer’s account.
    
        [5]
    
    De Santis allocated a special place to folk songs and melodies, which were
    often the vehicle through which he allowed his protagonists—peasants and
    proletarians—to express a socialist worldview (one that he himself shared).
In 1953, De Santis even planned to make a film entitled    Canti e danze popolari in Italia (Folk Songs and Dances in Italy).
    The project, rejected by Goffredo Lombardo, head of the film production
    company Titanus, was conceived as a celebration of folk culture and music
    through the cinematic representation of traditional songs and dances from
    various parts of Italy as collected, recorded, studied, and edited by the
    director and his assistants.
    
        [6]
    
    The rationale of Canti e danze showed analogies with the
    ethnographic and ethnomusicological field research that was being carried
    out across Italy around this time. In 1948, ethnomusicologist Giorgio
    Nataletti founded the CNSMP (Centro Nazionale di Studi di Musica Popolare,
    currently known as the Archivi di Etnomusicologia) at the Accademia
    Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, which promoted fieldwork campaigns that made it
    possible to record and study an unprecedented amount of folk music. The
    most famous of these expeditions was the one with Alan Lomax and Diego
    Carpitella (1954–55), who travelled backwards and forwards between South
    and North Italy, collecting thousands of folk songs and drawing an
    extensive map of Italian musical folklore, which ignited a growing interest
    in this multifarious repertoire, especially among leftist intellectuals. A
    few years earlier, Carpitella had joined Ernesto De Martino’s team
    expeditions to Basilicata, Calabria, and Apulia. Such experiences were
    informed by the idea that the cultural (and musical) world of the folk
    deserved to be studied and rescued from imminent extinction, not least
    because it was considered the bearer of positive values that the hegemonic
    capitalist system was obliterating.
    
        [7]
    
    The ideology and concerns of these campaigns had much in common with De
    Santis’s Canti e danze and, more generally, with his rural cinema.
    As I will show in this article, De Santis’s films proved important agents
    in the process of elaboration and popularization of discourses about folk
    music in postwar Italy, and the director attempted to empower voices that
    until then had remained unheard. The undeniable fact that this process was
    all but unambiguous makes it even more urgent to study it in depth.



    In keeping with this tenet, this article listens to, and looks at, the
folkloric voices in De Santis’s Caccia tragica (    Tragic Hunt, 1947).
    
        [8]
    
This film—as the others De Santis made in the following years, such asRiso amaro (Bitter Rice, 1949) and    Non c’è pace tra gli ulivi (No Peace Under the Olive Tree
    , 1950)—focuses on the cultural and political conflict between peasant
    communities and rapacious oppressors—the former group representing
    anti-hegemonic socialist values, the latter being symbolic of capitalist
individualism. In the first part of the paper, I consider how music in    Caccia tragica provides De Santis with a fruitful means of
    establishing the dichotomy “folk culture vs. capitalism” that was to become
    a trope between postwar Italian Marxist intellectuals, ethnographers, and
    ethnomusicologists who proclaimed the subversive power of the folk. Not
    only did De Santis’s representation of folk music sanction such discursive
    divide; as I shall show, at certain key junctures De Santis’s films
    short-circuit the relationship between folk music and capitalism. I
    therefore ask whether blurring the boundaries between these two opposite
    poles might help to arrive at a more nuanced understanding of the ways in
    which folk music was perceived in 1950s Italy. By posing this question, my
    contribution resonates with Maurizio Corbella’s recent article on the
    musicscape of Riso amaro, which “unintentionally reveal[s] fields
    of tension between the cultural values, hierarchies, and divides” in
    postwar Italian culture, notably the precarious position occupied by
    popular music.
    
        [9]
    



    The second part of my study stretches beyond music alone by considering the
    broader folkloric soundscape invented by De Santis. In particular, I claim
    that the sounds of bells, whistles, and clapping are just as important as
    music in constructing the anti-hegemonic values and force of De Santis’s
    protagonists. Dyer’s point on music in neorealist films—his implicit
    question about the disempowerment of the Other’s voice—is complicated by
    this more comprehensive scrutiny of De Santis’s soundtracks, which
    testifies to the director’s attempt to empower the subaltern through a
    number of sonic elements that would become characteristic of folkloric
    soundscapes in Italian film. To substantiate my analyses of music and sound
    in Caccia tragica, I do not limit the discussion to the released
    version of the film, but I also look at archival documents that shed light
    on De Santis’s and his collaborators’ creative process. Furthermore, I
    complement the discussion of this film with the examination of the
unpublished script of Noi che facciamo crescere il grano (    We Who Grow Grain, ca. 1953), which I could study at the Fondo De
    Santis of the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, Rome. This unfinished
    project proves not less crucial to understand De Santis’s construction of
    the folkloric voice.
    
        [10]
    



Folk Music in De Santis’s Caccia tragica



    De Santis always demonstrated a marked interest in folklore and peasant
    culture.
    
        [11]
    
    Between 1947 and 1950, he shot the so-called Trilogia della terra 
    (Trilogy of the Land), comprising three films set in rural areas
    of northern and central Italy (the minefields and paddies of the Po Valley
    and the Ciociarian mountains) which focused on farming communities and
their stories of solidarity and resistance (Caccia tragica,    Riso amaro and Non c’è pace tra gli ulivi). In some ways,
    De Santis’s works can be seen as a continuation of the rural strand that,
    under the Fascist regime, had resulted in films such as Alessandro
Blasetti’s Sole (Sun, 1929) and Terra madre (    Mother Earth, 1931). Yet, whereas Fascist cinema generally
    portrayed field workers in an idyllic fashion, exploiting their alleged
    authentic rural traditions to reinvigorate a sense of national pride, De
    Santis’s was a cinema of crisis that aimed to delve into the open wounds of
    postwar Italy, notably by criticizing the status quo from the
    perspective of subaltern people and by extracting socialist messages from
    his rural exempla.
    
        [12]
    



    De Santis’s cinematic output seems both to be informed by and act as a
precursor to principles that resemble the Gramscian notion of “    nazional-popolare,” which became a common theme in Italian
    intellectual debates during the 1950s. Mention could be made of a few
    essays by Antonio Gramsci in his Prison Notebooks, published in
    1950: for example, “Osservazioni sul folklore” (“Observations on Folklore”)
    encouraged the critical study of folk culture as a historical, subaltern
    “conception of the world,” one which was autonomous and in opposition to
    hegemonic culture.
    
        [13]
    
    In notebook 21 on popular literature, Gramsci introduced the concepts of
    “national-popular” art and that of the “organic intellectual.” He claimed
    that “a national-popular literature, narrative and other kinds, has always
    been lacking in Italy and still is” because of the gulf that existed
    between the worlds of intellectuals and ordinary people; an “organic
    intellectual” should arrive and finally bridge the gap between these
    universes, so as to guide (and be guided by) the folk towards higher levels
    of self-awareness and socio-political agency.
    
        [14]
    



    Although De Santis was unaware of Gramsci’s vision, his work was not far
    from it, given that he wanted to make a national-popular cinema that could
    give voice to and empower the subaltern.
    
        [15]
    
    However, as many scholars have noted, his films do not offer an entirely
    straightforward rendition of the world in which his characters move. De
    Santis’s was a “poetic realism,” a re-elaboration of reality that enabled a
    number of questions about society to emerge in a quasi-Brechtian way.
    
        [16]
    
    The director himself defined his films as an instance of hybridity:
    “hybridization of genres is, in my opinion, the key to my cinema”.
    
        [17]
    
    Thus, while narrating stories of peasants, he adopted a cinematic language
    that was also informed by American popular movies and Russian cinema.
    
        [18]
    
    His poetics of hybridity often blurred the line between established
    cultural divides, such as the one that saw folk culture as essentially
    opposed to the capitalist universe.



    Such ambivalences speak of the director’s own contradictory impulses, and
    leave a permanent mark on his films. This also applies to their music, the
    soundtracks interspersing preexisting folk repertoire (or, better, what at
    the time was considered to be “musica popolare” [folk music]),
    popular music, and newly composed film scores in symphonic style. In the
    pages that follow, I ask what values were attached to these musical
    repertoires (especially folk music and popular music) and explore what they
    reveal about the different ways in which postwar Italian culture listened
    to the folkloric voice. Given the space available here, I limit my
    discussion to Caccia tragica, the first chapter
    of the Trilogia della terra.



    Caccia tragica
    takes place in the Po Valley immediately after the Second World War. It is
    a parable of national reconstruction and class solidarity after years of
    devastation caused by the conflict, a story of desperate veterans returning
    from the front and poor peasants trying to unite to start a new communal
    life built on socialist values. There are four main protagonists. Giovanna
    and Michele are peasants working in a cooperative and, along with the
    community of field workers, they represent the film’s positive pole;
    representing the bad side of human nature is another couple, Daniela and
    Alberto, who are bandits. At the beginning of the film, the latter couple
    commits a robbery, stealing the money needed by the cooperative to lease
    land and agricultural machineries, and kidnapping Giovanna (Michele’s
    wife), whom they take as a hostage. Daniela and Alberto embody
    individualist and consumerist values, posing a threat to the peasant
    community’s peace and unity. Yet Alberto is an ambiguous villain: although
    Daniela, his lover, has convinced him to become a bandit, he had actually
    been Michele’s comrade during the war, sharing the shocking experience of
    the German concentration camps with him. As such, there is an unspoken bond
    between Alberto and Michele, preventing the former from being totally
    subsumed by an individualist vision of the world. Indeed, as the film
    unfolds, we witness Alberto’s gradual repentance. Although he initially
    supports Daniela and tries to flee with her from the community, who “hunt”
    them down to retrieve the money and rescue Giovanna, he ultimately gets
    tired of his criminal life, sabotaging his partner’s evil plans and freeing
    their hostage before then embracing the cooperative’s socialist values.



    The soundtrack for Caccia tragica includes several popular songs
and folk melodies as sung and heard by members of the farming community (“    canti popolari,” as the director often calls them in the script).
    These pieces are associated with various rural traditions, as well as
    political songs heard and sung by the portrayed farmworkers. Alongside
    these, several cues composed by Giuseppe Rosati also punctuate the action.
    Rather than having a mere denotative role, popular music is here infused
    with values that help define the characters and develop the sociopolitical
    message that De Santis had in mind. He typically associates folk music with
    the good characters, while reserving the use of popular music—the voice of
    capitalism, of mass culture—for the villains. In so doing, he contributed
    to the musical articulation of the “folk music vs. capitalism” dichotomy,
    which, as noted above, was becoming fashionable at the time. Yet the
    boundary between these two poles is not always as clear-cut as one might
    imagine.


        


    Fig. 1. Giuseppe De Santis, Caccia tragica (1947). Still frame
    at minute 00:42:19 (see note 19).



    The film’s central scene provides a good example of how De Santis creates a
    link between popular music and the villains. At minute 00:41:07,
    
        [19]
    
    we see the bandits with their hostage Giovanna in a country villa, a secret
    refuge where they have gathered to discuss their criminal plans. The place
    is filled with visual references to consumerism, such as advertisements, a
    bottle of champagne, and a radio (see figure 1). We hear the broadcast of a
    series of well-known wartime songs: the swing tune “Begin the Beguine,” the
    patriotic American march Stars and Stripes Forever by John Philip
    Sousa, a partisan song (“Avanti siam ribelli”), and the Nazi-tainted tune
    “Lili Marleen” (which had become popular during the war both in Germany and
    among its enemies). As Guido Michelone has observed, De Santis here wants
    to “narrate and explain, through the music, the Italian situation at the
    time” by drawing attention to the increasing “intrusion of Americanism at
    the level of mass culture, a model that was replacing both the Fascist
    rhetoric and genuine folk culture.”
    
        [20]
    
    As in De Santis’s other films (such as Riso amaro), the presence
    of musical reproduction devices (such as the radio or the gramophone)
    symbolizes the threat posed by mass culture, particularly American popular
    culture.
    
        [21]
    
    In this scene, the radio seems to commodify American music, war, and
    resistance songs by featuring them in a continuous stream that reduces all
    music into mere objects of aesthetic consumption.



    Daniela, the antihero of Caccia tragica, is passionately fond of
    the radio. As she talks to Alberto about their crimes and future
    aspirations, she expresses her individualist vision of the world and desire
    to become famous like a star (“today everyone is thinking about us [because
    of our robbery]”, she exclaims). This moment is accompanied by
    “Lili Marleen,” which she is particularly fond of (indeed, “Lili Marleen”
    is her nickname). Daniela is thus linked with a tune that, although
    appropriated in the 1940s by the Allied troops, also had strong Nazi
    connotations.
    
        [22]
    
More importantly, she is associated with the world of popular music     as epitomized by the radio. Alberto’s position towards “Lili
    Marleen” and the radio, by contrast, is somewhat different. When the song
    starts, he tries to turn the device off (figure 2), yet Daniela insists the
    song be allowed to play on. These simple gestures clearly signal the gap
    between the two protagonists and their cultural models. Alberto oscillates
    between Daniela’s individualism and the allure of capitalist culture on the
    one hand, and the more traditional values of solidarity embodied by
    Giovanna and Michele on the other. The parable of sin and repentance that
    ultimately leads him to embrace the cooperative’s communal life at the
    film’s ending is therefore prefigured in this scene on a musical
    level—i.e., as an attempt by Alberto to reject popular music (and the
    radio) along with the values which are implicitly attached to it.





    Fig. 2. De Santis, Caccia tragica. Still frame at minute 00:47:40
    (see note 19).



    While Daniela is unequivocally associated with “Lili Marleen,” Alberto is
    here musically characterized by the partisan song “Avanti siam ribelli.” It
    is surely not coincidental that this music—which obviously had a positive
    connotation for De Santis as well as, most likely, much of his
    audience—begins to play just as Alberto tells Giovanna of his guilt over
    his immoral life. As observed above, Alberto is not a real villain and
    Daniela’s dangerous appeal proves for him to be only a temporary departure
    from the good values associated with his rural upbringing. The allure of
    capitalism brings him to the verge of losing contact with the “genuine
    folk”—i.e., the peasant community. The scene thus seems to represent
    Alberto’s unsettled and confused state of mind through a musical analogy.
    “Avanti siam ribelli” is a reminder of the folk’s revolutionary power, and
    yet its juxtaposition on the radio to American popular music and “Lili
    Marleen” suggests that it has been commodified. In linking “Avanti siam
    ribelli” with Alberto’s remorse, De Santis talks of the positive values
    embodied by this music; at the same time, he imagines a scenario in which
    the partisan song could be corrupted (just like Alberto when he embraces
    Daniela’s values), becoming an object of mere aesthetic consumption as it
    enters the domain of popular music mediatized by the radio.



    In other scenes in the film, folk music serves as a powerful agent of moral
    development and solidarity. In the sequence that precedes his final
    repentance (01:07:33), we see Alberto fighting an irate Michele who wants
    revenge for the kidnapping of his wife by his former comrade. Michele hits
    Alberto, calling him a “coward” and a “traitor.” While this happens, we
    hear the utterances of some veterans in the background; they are speaking
    at a meeting for the creation of the National Popular Front, which is
    taking place nearby. Ironically, their speech is all about solidarity,
    peace, and mutual support (“no discord, no divisions between us”); yet the
    two fighters—particularly Michele—seem oblivious to these words. It is only
    when one of the veterans’ chants is heard (01:09:17) that Michele stops
    hitting Alberto and forgives him for his crimes, thereby enabling him to be
    readmitted into the community. Folk music thus acts as a cohesive agent: it
    provides the most effective expression of a mutually supportive community,
    the vehicle through which the sinner (Alberto) can be pardoned and reject
    his individualistic ambitions.



    The fact that folk music in Caccia tragica is imbued with
    socialist values and poses a serious threat to those who represent
    capitalism is also suggested by a scene in the original script that was
    ultimately deleted from the final cut:
    
        [23]
    




        
    Daniela is on a boat with the hostage Giovanna. While they are rowing down
    a river, the singing of the veterans heading towards their meeting resounds
    from one of the riverbanks. The scene’s physical, political, and moral
    space is defined through music. Daniela wants to remain in the middle of
    the river because the song, which threatens her individualist conception of
    the world, grows louder when the boatman gets closer to the banks. Folk
    music is perceived by the villain as a powerful and haunting presence.



    From what has been said above, it is apparent that De Santis generally
    adheres to a straightforward binary opposition between folk and popular
    music, respectively, as the repositories of revolutionary/progressive
    values on the one hand and regressive/consumerist principles on the other.
    Nevertheless, certain moments in Caccia tragica complicate this
    rather simplistic, black-and-white divide. I have already noted how the use
    of “Avanti siam ribelli” in the radio scene touches on this problematic
    dichotomy. At other points in the film, we find folk music accompanying the
    emergence of reactionary values. A good example occurs at the beginning of
    the film. Here, the field workers are being forced by some of their
    despotic landowner’s henchmen to return the lands and agricultural
    machinery that they have been leasing; at the same time, a smaller group of
    peasants who have just arrived on some carriages help the henchmen to
    execute the landowner’s orders. The local community is thus internally
    divided, and the mercenaries mock the other peasants by singing the
    “Osterie,”—i.e., certain well-known sarcastic folk songs (00:09:22). Here,
    folk music becomes a divisive element rather than a tool that encourages
    social solidarity.



    The broader idea that the folk, as a revolutionary force, is immune to and
    rejects hegemonic culture is questioned in certain scenes within this film
    as well as in others that De Santis directed. There are moments in which
    the peasants are shown to be enjoying the morally equivocal sounds of
    capitalism. The complex scene with the veterans’ train is a case in point
    (00:58:32). In this instance, some of the villains (Alberto and a few black
    market dealers) and the peasants share the same physical and sonic space,
    since they are both on a train where a band is playing a “boogie-woogie”
    (see figure 3). While the performance is a musical index of deleterious
    Americanism, the peasants nevertheless seem to be enjoying it. In the
    original script, De Santis indicated that he wanted a folk tune to be
    performed here, whereas in the film’s final version the voice of the
    peasants has been erased and replaced by American music. Of course, this
    might be read as the director’s critique of the risks of cultural
    contamination. On the other hand, this musical choice could also be
    interpreted as indicating the director’s penchant for hybridization, which
    informs at least part of the soundtrack and enables unexpected exchanges to
    emerge between folk culture and mass-mediated culture.






    Fig. 3. De Santis, Caccia tragica. Still frame at minute 00:58:56
    (see note 19).



    The above examples show that different values are associated with folk
    music in De Santis’s Caccia tragica. Even if its connection with
    the positive characters generally seems to prevail, folk music can also be
    entrusted to negative characters that are driven by individualist
    interests. Moreover, members of the folk community seem at times to be
    allured by the sounds of consumerism. These short circuits certainly add
    complexity to the simplistic dichotomy “folk music vs. capitalism” (which
    is nevertheless at work in many scenes) and point to a broader tension that
    characterized postwar Italian culture at large. Indeed, the wave of
    folklorism that emerged in the wake of the publication of Gramsci’s
    “Osservazioni sul folklore” in 1950—a wave which found its immediate outlet
    in the aforementioned ethnographic and ethnomusicological expeditions, and
    culminated with the folk music revival movement in the 1960s and 1970s—was
    plagued with latent and unavoidable contradictions. In an article published
    in 1978, Diego Carpitella denounced the “false ideology” that informed the
    rediscovery of musical folklore. In his view, questionable paternalism and
    essentialism often lurked behind the revivalists’ attitude towards folk
    culture, depriving it of its agency. Furthermore, Carpitella noted that the
    call for “authenticity” by those who wanted to popularize folk music was in
    fact leading to a commodification of the repertoire, which was almost
    always decontextualized and spectacularized. Such inconsistencies in the
    “ideology of folklore” were the result of the impossible attempt to deny
    the dialectical relationship existing between the revived folk music and
    the (capitalist) cultural system into which it was being introduced.
    
        [24]
    
    I contend that these insightful reflections—especially the point on the
    dialectic between folk music and capitalism—can be fruitfully applied to
    the representation of folk music in De Santis’s soundtracks, for they
    appear to foreshadow questions that would become burning in the following
    decades.



The Power of the Peasants’ Soundscape: Whistles and Bells.



    There are other productive ways to explore De Santis’s approach to the
    voice of the portrayed folkloric communities, and to address Dyer’s
    questions about hierarchies and sonic representation of the subalterns. One
    such way is to abandon a music-centered perspective and focus instead on
    sound effects. Elena Mosconi has claimed that neorealism was characterized
    by a new sensibility towards sounds and noises. Indeed, many Italian
    postwar films portrayed not only landscapes, but also soundscapes “that
    were neglected by previous cinema.”
    
        [25]
    
    These soundscapes, I would add, were invested with cultural, ideological,
    and political values. This is particularly true for De Santis’s films,
    where recurring sonic elements characterize and tend to empower the
    represented subaltern communities and their space. In the following pages,
    I shift my attention from traditional musical values to a consideration of
    the complex folkloric soundscape in Caccia tragica. I discuss, in
    particular, the crucial role played by whistles and bells.
    
        [26]
    
    While I acknowledge that these sounds belong to different fields of human
    expression, discussing them together enables me to show how they achieve
    similar communicative and political functions in Caccia tragica,
    and how they both provide the represented people with means to threaten the
    film’s villains and their values.



    The act of whistling pervades a scene in Caccia tragica which
    follows the aforementioned “radio” episode. At 00:52:25, we see the bandits
    leaving their refuge, which has been discovered and put under siege by
    Michele and his fellow companions. Daniela, Alberto, and their accomplices
    make their way through the surrounding crowd by using Giovanna, their
    hostage, as a human shield. However, their escape is soon transformed into
    a walk of shame. One of the peasants starts whistling, and the gesture is
    repeated by his companions (see figure 4). A choir of whistles subsequently
    accompanies the bandits. Daniela is the only one who shows indifference,
    while Alberto looks nervous and frightened. Whistling simultaneously
    empowers the peasants whilst also weakening the bandits.






    Fig. 4. De Santis, Caccia tragica. Still frame at minute 00:53:33
    (see note 19).



    Whistling is a sonic signifier of peasants and proletarians in many Italian
    films.
    
        [27]
    
    A systematic examination of the role of whistling in narrative cinema is
    long overdue. Here I will limit myself to a few general observations.
    Whistling is often connected with ideas of difference and excess. In fact,
    with its potential noisiness and its distance from verbal language,
    whistling occupies a disreputable position. People have always whistled,
    but this sonic act inhabits the fringes of official culture, as testified
    by the difficulty of finding studies that explore its history, and by the
    rarity, in the musical realm, of professional whistlers.
    
        [28]
    
    Whistling is often associated with the lowest classes and their supposedly
    rude behavior. It is not surprising, then, that well-mannered bourgeois
    rarely whistles in Italian postwar films; this act is generally associated
    with people living on the edge of society, in particular peasants, miners,
    rascals, proletarians, and protesters. Whistling implies the violent
    emission of high-pitched sounds, which defy the rationale, measured logic
    of verbal discourse, the dominant norm of logos. A good way of
    thinking about whistling—or at least some forms of whistling, which can be
    heard and seen in Italian films portraying folk communities—is by drawing a
parallel with Nadia Seremetakis’s definition of “the screaming” (    klama) in her ethnography of women’s mourning practices in Inner
    Mani, Greece. Seremetakis understands screaming in women’s laments as a
    bodily, excessive acoustic utterance that, for its violence and distance
    from the hegemonic acoustics based on low voices and “rational” sounds
    related with language, retains a certain degree of “transgression.” She
    argues that Inner Mani women “disseminate the signs of transgression
through screaming. Screaming is tied to the condition of    anastatosi, disorder and inversion.”
    
        [29]
    
    For its excess, screaming participates in “dangerous” and “contagious”
    threatening attitudes against dominant powers, and it “demarcates and
    encloses a collectivity of subjects in exile.”
    
        [30]
    



    In a similar vein, we can read whistling as a marker of cultural, social,
    and political difference, which may be why Italian directors frequently
    link it with folkloric or peripheral worlds that are believed to resist the
    hegemonic realm. As with klama, the excessive, abnormal whistling
    can represent a threatening and transgressive sound. This emerges with
clarity if we go back to the aforementioned scene in    Caccia tragica. While the peasants are holding rifles, they cannot
    use these against the villains because a gunfight would potentially harm
    Giovanna, the hostage. Whistling, then, offers an alternative form of
    resistance. One of the peasants starts whistling and is immediately
    followed by the others as a sort of vocal ensemble that submerges the
    bandits—an effect that is visually reinforced by the dolly shot of the
    whistling people, and the shot/countershot showing the reaction of the
    villains. The idea of a threatening choral sound that stems from the
initiative of an individual is a strong metaphor of solidarity, and the    crescendo effect that is obtained through this process of sonic
    accumulation is a particularly effective way to show the overwhelming power
    of the folk’s whistling.
    
        [31]
    



    The sound of bells, like whistling, is another index of the folkloric
    space. In Caccia tragica, bell sounds provide an
    additional way of symbolizing the peasants’ power.
    
        [32]
    
    If one thinks of the historical significance of bells in rural communities,
    this comes as no surprise. In his seminal study Village Bells,
    Alain Corbin discusses several values with which bells have been connected
    throughout different periods of European history, and he shows how they
    have been fundamental in shaping social time and space (one that is
    physical, spiritual, and political). Indeed, before the advent of
    industrialization, bells were one of the most important sounds, and
    although their centrality and power declined with the onset of metropolitan
    soundscapes, they nonetheless retained a certain degree of relevance in the
    “peripheries” (i.e., towns and rural villages), hence their connection with
    the folkloric soundscape.
    
        [33]
    
    Steven Feld, who has also devoted himself to studying and recording bells,
    has reflected on how they can “signal both authority and disruption”—that
    is, they are invested with power in certain historical and social contexts.
    
        [34]
    



    Caccia tragica
    is only one of many Italian films in which bells are used to define the
    folkloric world.
    
        [35]
    
    What is interesting, here, is that the peasants’ bells exhibit a powerful
    agency of their own, an acoustical force that stands in opposition to the
    capitalist world. They can be heard at many points in the film, notably
    when the peasants ring them to mobilize the whole community in chasing the
    bandits (00:29:02: “Sound the alarm with town bells, too!”). Beyond this
    narrative circumstance, however, it is the quasi-expressionist treatment of
    their sound which makes them such a powerful signifier of the peasants’
    antagonism. By using this acoustic device, De Santis tends to blur the
    lines between the diegetic and the non-diegetic, and to play with our sense
    of space: indeed, in many scenes, the villains’ voices are drowned out by
    loud bell ringing, which seems to come from nowhere. For example, the
    bandits’ refuge is clearly located in an isolated area, and yet bells
    invade and pervade this space, often disrupting the communication between
    the villains in a way that reinforces the idea of folk as representing a
    haunting, controlling presence. At 00:39:40, Daniela is shown entering a
    room to meet some of her accomplices. When she opens the door, the bells
    suddenly fill the air. The unnaturalness of the sync-point somehow empowers
    their sound by making it seem abnormal, strange, and unexpectedly spectral.
    Later in this scene (00:45:40), Daniela enters another room: the bells,
    which had stopped ringing, now invade her space once again. One of the
    accomplices hears them and makes an ironic comment about the peasants’
    uprising (00:45:53); Daniela will do the same while talking to Alberto only
    a couple of minutes later in the film (00:47:47). This seems to contradict
    the idea that the bells occupy a non-diegetic space, but the sync-points
    prepared by De Santis and the anomalous volume create an expressionistic
    effect of estrangement that would not be possible without the ambiguous
    blending of the diegetic and the non-diegetic. Elsewhere
    (00:32:26–00:33:11) De Santis opts for more traditional sonic bridges:
    different scenes and spaces in the film are connected through the bells’
    sound—something which gives the impression that the bells (and by extension
    the peasants and their voices) are everywhere.



Sounds on Paper: Noi che facciamo crescere il grano



    Before concluding, it is worth devoting a few words to an unfinished film
project which De Santis conceived in relation to theTrilogy of the Land. The script for the film in question, entitled    Noi che facciamo crescere il grano (We Who Grow Grain),
    is kept at the CSC archive, and it was written in the 1950s by the director
    himself, in collaboration with Corrado Alvaro and Basilio Franchina. The
    aim of the authors was to narrate the precarious conditions of farm
    laborers in Calabria in the years following the Second World War, where
    latifundism, unemployment, and poverty were long-standing problems. Drawing
    on real events that took place in Corvino, near Crotone, the film aimed to
    focus on peasant resistance against the exploitative system enjoyed by the
    landowners. Folk music and sounds would have played a crucial role in
    relaying this conflict and in conveying the film’s progressive message.



    The film’s main protagonists are Annibale Zappalà and his family. With the
    aid of the town’s schoolteacher, who somehow epitomizes the Gramscian
    “organic intellectual,” Annibale tries to obtain the usufruct of the fief
    of San Donato—an area of uncultivated land which figures among the
    territories managed by the authoritarian Don Carmelo Zampa on behalf of the
    latifundist Baron Balsamo—from the Crotone authorities. Annibale convinces
    the community to rebel against Don Carmelo and sign a petition to obtain
    the fief, to which the peasants had legal rights. This consequently
    triggers a violent conflict between the peasant community and Don Carmelo.
    Arrested by corrupt policemen, Annibale is then released; he subsequently
    goes on to lead a peasant revolt which culminates in their reclaiming of
    these lands, Don Carmelo’s defeat, and ultimately Annibale’s death, through
    which he becomes a sort of martyr.



    Since the project was never completed, it is impossible to ascertain
    whether De Santis planned to accompany this film with an orchestral score,
    as he had done in his previous productions. Nevertheless, the script’s
draft provides an insight into the role that sound and    musica popolare would have played in the film. Apart from
    decorative, atmospheric moments where folk music would have primarily added
    a touch of local color to the events portrayed, there are several other
    scenes in which this repertoire fulfills a crucial dramatic and ideological
    role.
    
        [36]
    
    A notable example occurs halfway through the film. After his initial
    attempts to occupy the lands and return them to the peasant community,
    Annibale is arrested and imprisoned in La Castella, a fortress built on a
    small island. Tragic events follow: a landslide hits the village of Corvino
    and causes the death of Titta, one of Annibale’s sons. Out of despair,
    Assunta secretly goes to the prison where her husband is confined and
    breaks the terrible news to him. In order to circumvent the jailers’
    control, she improvises a dirge beneath the fortress’ walls.






    Assunta performs her funeral lament from a boat, just below the cliff where
    Annibale’s prison is located, and her song conceals the act of informative
    and emotional exchange that is happening between the pair. Folk music
    thereby serves as a powerful way to transgress the oppressors’ control. A
similar thing happens in Riso amaro, where one of the    mondine (rice weeders) explains to one of the protagonists,
    Francesca, that “they [the landowners] don’t let us talk; if you have
    anything to say, sing it.”
    
        [37]
    
    An even more striking connection with Noi che facciamo can be
found in Vittorio De Sica’s Ieri, oggi, domani (    Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, 1963).
    
        [38]
    
    In the film’s first episode (Adelina, set in Naples), the
    protagonist (a cigarette smuggler) is put in jail. One night, her husband
    Carmine manages to reach the prison walls where he begins to sing a
    serenade under her window. Carmine’s song provides a means to bypass the
    guard’s control and inform Adelina of the mercy petition that has just been
    submitted. As this example reveals, the trope of using folk music to
    express subversive power seemingly had a long life in Italian film.



    But, once again, it is especially through sound that De Santis seeks to
empower the folk’s voice. Even in the case of Noi che facciamo, the folkloric soundscape is not composed exclusively of songs,
    for it also includes numerous non-verbal signals that seeks to undermine
    the capitalist oppressors’ order. The first attempt by Don Carmelo and the
    police to disband the peasants fails. In this instance, the weapon used by
    the community against their enemies is the sound of clapping. This scene
thus invites comparison with the one discussed earlier in    Caccia tragica that makes use of whistling. In both
    cases, whistles and clapping are used in a crescendo that goes
    from individual to group performance, and from low volume to high.




        


        [39]
    



    Steven Connor has provided an insightful ethnography of clapping, noting
    how the principle of “adversity”—an impact of things, namely hands—is a
    precondition of this gesture. As he explains, “clapping retains its
    associations with violence, functioning as an emblematic display on the
    body of the aggressor of what may be in the offing for his victim.”
    
        [40]
    
    Of course, this violent, oppositional understanding of clapping is just one
    of many possible cultural interpretations of this gesture. Connor
    acknowledges, for example, that clapping can also be linked to magical
    actions, therapy, and celebration, among other things. Yet this reading
fits perfectly with the situation relayed by the script of    Noi che facciamo. What is more, Connor highlights how clapping
    “makes you aware of yourself” and facilitates a “circulation of energies”
    between the clapping subjects, which is precisely the same kind of
    empowerment that De Santis’s peasants seem to experience.
    
        [41]
    



    The last fight between the peasants and the landowners is also accompanied
    by a complex audiovisual dramaturgy—one that is not dissimilar from the
    strategies that De Santis had already employed in Caccia tragica,
    with its alternation of villain and peasant sounds. Here, the opposition is
    between a sowers’ song initiated by Annibale and imitated by all the
    peasants, and the sound of the trotting horses of Don Carmelo’s henchmen.


        

        


        [42]
    



    This scene occurs immediately before the end of the film. The land has been
    reoccupied by the peasants following the authorization on behalf of the
    Crotone committee. Yet Don Carmelo refuses to capitulate and sends instead
    three horsemen to kill Annibale and convince the peasants to vacate the
    property. While Don Carmelo’s plan ultimately fails, Annibale does indeed
    get killed, in a portrayal of the villain’s last atrocity before the final
    triumph of the community of peasants. The conflicting groups are sonically
    characterized by the opposition between the sewers’ song, which becomes a
    threatening weapon that invades the villains’ space through a few sound
    bridges, and the trotting horses, whose noise periodically emerges and
    occasionally drowns out the other sounds. The juxtaposition of these two
    auditory elements creates the necessary counterpoint to enhance the
    underlying tension of this climactic scene. In keeping with the socialist
    ideal, we witness a shift from the individual singer to the singing
    community, and from a fleeting solo voice to the full-bodied chant of a
    whole group, magnified by the choral reprise of Annibale’s song after his
    death, at the end of the planned film.



Conclusion



    In the script of Noi che facciamo crescere il grano, folk music
    functions as a repository of anti-capitalist values, a socially-binding
    agent that inspires the peasants to rebel against the oppressors and their
    individualistic mentality. The discourse on folk music that emerges from
    this film, then, seemingly fits in well with the “folk culture vs.
    capitalism” dichotomy outlined by many leftist intellectuals and folk music
    rediscoverers at around the same time. Such a dichotomy became even more
    marked during the 1960s, when the use of folk music became increasingly
    political, the surrounding debates displaying an obsessive concern about
    its alleged separation from consumerist, bourgeois society. De Santis’s
    films are prescient in that they anticipate the tenor of these debates
whilst also offering a complex picture of their subject. In    Caccia tragica the border between folk and capitalist culture is
    sometimes blurred. Admittedly, short-circuits in this discursive divide are
    quite exceptional in De Santis, but such exceptions are of particular
    interest, not least because they highlight ongoing tensions in Italian
    society that cannot be addressed by black-and-white narratives that
    enshrine folk music as an antidote to capitalist culture. The seeming
    contradictions in De Santis’s soundtracks show that a simplistic view of
    folk music (i.e., as repository of anti-capitalist values) in fact belies a
    more complex, dialectic reality. Hence the importance of studying the
representation of folk music in neorealist films, in spite of (or maybe    because of) Dyer’s observation that their soundtracks
    were inconsistent with the aims of this kind of cinema.



    The case of De Santis’s films also shows that the claim about neorealism as
    being indifferent to the voices of subaltern groups is not entirely
    accurate. A study of the soundscapes constructed by De Santis in his rural
    films gives a vivid impression of the director’s attempt to
    empower—literally and metaphorically—the voice of the folk (albeit through
    the inevitably artificial means and conventions of narrative cinema). The
“resonance” given to bells, whistles, and clapping in    Caccia tragica and Noi che facciamo endows the peasants
    with a strong, haunting sonic presence that poses a serious, tangible
    threat to their enemies. In this respect, the sonic strategies adopted by
    De Santis to characterize his protagonists appear to be less ambiguous and
    more robust than his musical choices. Mapping the folkloric soundscapes in
    other films by De Santis and his contemporaries is the next step of a
    research—to my mind long overdue—aimed at exploring in a nuanced fashion
    the modus operandi and cultural politics that underpin the construction of
    subaltern voices in postwar Italian cinema.


        

    ****



        Appendix



        Transcriptions of the original scripts in the Fondo Giuseppe De Santis,
        Biblioteca Luigi Chiarini, Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, Rome.
    


    Doc. 1: Excerpt from Caccia tragica. Sezione Sceneggiature,
    Sceneggiatura 1946–1947, SCENEG 00 09691. 292 unbound pages, A4; typescript
    with autograph annotations.







    Doc. 2: 
    Excerpt from Noi che facciamo crescere il grano. Sezione
    Sceneggiature, Sceneggiatura 1949, SCENEG 00 09686. Bound volume, A4;
    typescript with autograph corrections.






    Doc. 3: 
    Excerpt from Noi che facciamo crescere il grano.






    Doc. 4: 
    Excerpts from Noi che facciamo crescere il grano.








    

    

   
        
            
                *
            
            I want to express my gratitude to the staff of the Biblioteca
            Chiarini at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia (Rome), who
            allowed me to study the archival documents kept at the Fondo
            Giuseppe De Santis. All translations from Italian (including the
            original scripts from the director’s archive) are mine, unless
            otherwise indicated.
        

    

    
        
            
                [1]
            
Cesare Zavattini, “Some Ideas on the Cinema,”            Sight and Sound 23, no. 2 (1953): 64–69; originally
published as “Alcune idee sul cinema,”            Rivista del cinema italiano 1, no. 2 (1952): 5–19. For an
overview of the history and theory of neorealism, see: Mark Shiel,            Italian Neorealism: Rebuilding the Cinematic City (London:
Wallflower Press, 2006); Gian Piero Brunetta, Il cinema neorealista italiano: storia economica, politica e culturale (Bari: Laterza,
            2009); Torunn Haaland, Italian Neorealist Cinema
            (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012).
        

    

    
        
            
                [2]
            
Antonella Sisto,            Film Sound in Italy: Listening to the Screen (New York:
            Palgrave MacMillan, 2014), 83. In the fourth chapter of her book
            (“The Soundtrack after Fascism: The Neorealist Play Without Sound”)
            Sisto links the “lack of audiophilia” with neorealism’s passive
            acceptance of dubbing practices deriving from Fascist cinema, and
            with the directors’ resistance against technologies of direct sound
            recording. However, this does not necessarily mean that neorealist
            filmmakers had no interest in sound as such, nor that their
            fabricated soundtracks played ancillary roles. The case of De
            Santis’s rural films explored in this article demonstrates quite
            the opposite.
        

    

    
        
            
                [3]
            
            Richard Dyer, “Music, People and Reality: The Case of Italian
            Neo-Realism,” in European Film Music, ed. Miguel Mera and
            David Burnand (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 28–40: 28.
        

    

    
        
            
                [4]
            
            Dyer, “Music, People and Reality,” 28. See also: Sergio Bassetti,
“Continuità e innovazione nella musica per il cinema,” in            Storia del cinema italiano, vol. 8, 1949–1953,
            ed. Luciano De Giusti (Venice: Marsilio, 2003), 325–35.
        

    

    
        
            
                [5]
            
            Dyer mentions De Santis’s films in his article and devotes part of
            his discussion to Riso amaro. However, his method and
            questions are partly dissimilar from mine, as I shall clarify in
            the following pages.
        

    

    
        
            
                [6]
            
            A copy of the thirteen-page project of Canti e danze and a
            letter attesting Goffredo Lombardo’s feedback on the film proposal
are held at the director’s archive (Giuseppe De Santis, “            Canti e danze popolari in Italia,” SCENEG 00 09796,
            Sceneggiature Soggetto 1950–1960, Fondo Giuseppe De Santis, Centro
Sperimentale di Cinematografia, Rome). For a transcription of            Canti e danze (without the related correspondence with
            Lombardo), see Antonio Vitti, ed.,
            
                Peppe De Santis secondo se stesso: conferenze, conversazioni e
                sogni nel cassetto di uno scomodo regista di campagna
            
            (Pesaro: Metauro, 2006), 491–95.
        

    

    
        
            
                [7]
            
            On the organization of the expedition, and the development of
            ethnomusicology in postwar Italy, see: Diego Carpitella, ed.,
            
                L’etnomusicologia in Italia: primo convegno sugli studi
                etnomusicologici in Italia
            
            (Palermo: Flaccovio, 1975); Alan Lomax,
            
                L’anno più felice della mia vita: un viaggio in Italia
                1954–1955
            
            , ed. Goffredo Plastino (Milan: Il saggiatore, 2008); Francesco
Giannattasio, “Etnomusicologia, ‘musica popolare’ e            folk revival in Italia: il futuro non è più quello di una
            volta,” AAA – TAC 8 (2011): 65–85; Maurizio Agamennone,
            ed.,
            
                Musica e tradizione orale nel Salento: le registrazioni di Alan
                Lomax e Diego Carpitella (agosto 1954)
            
            (Rome: Squilibri, 2017). On the figure of Ernesto De Martino, his
            work and his collaboration with Diego Carpitella, see: Ernesto De
            Martino,
            
                Morte e pianto rituale nel mondo antico. Dal lamento funebre
                antico al pianto di Maria
            
            , ed. Marcello Massenzio (Turin: Einaudi, 2021; 1st ed. 1958); De
            Martino,
            
                La terra del rimorso. Contributo a una storia religiosa del Sud
            
            (Milan: Il saggiatore, 2020; 1st ed. 1961); Diego Carpitella,
            “L’esperienza di ricerca con Ernesto De Martino,” in
            
                Conversazioni sulla musica (1955–1990): lezioni, conferenze,
                trasmissioni radiofoniche
            
            (Florence: Ponte alle Grazie, 1992), 26–34; George R. Saunders,
“‘Critical Ethnocentrism’ and the Ethnology of Ernesto De Martino,”            American Anthropologist 95, no. 4 (1993): 875–93; Maurizio
            Agamennone, ed.,
            
                Musiche tradizionali del Salento: le registrazioni di Diego
                Carpitella ed Ernesto de Martino
            
            (1959, 1960)
            (Rome: Squilibri, 2008); Giorgio Adamo, ed.,
            
                Musiche tradizionali in Basilicata: le registrazioni di Diego
                Carpitella ed Ernesto De Martino
            
            (Rome: Squilibri, 2012).
        

    

    
        
            
                [8]
            
            I fully agree with Michel Chion’s notion of “audio-vision,” which
            implies a re-evaluation of the intertwined nature of all the
components of audiovisual media. See Michel Chion,            Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, 2nd ed., trans.
            Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019). In
            this article I attempt to show parallelisms and contrasts between
            sound, montage, and framing in film, for these elements complement
            each other and all are fundamental for the emergence of discourses
            on folklore.
        

    

    
        
            
                [9]
            
            Maurizio Corbella, “Which People’s Music? Witnessing the Popular in
the Musicscape of Giuseppe De Santis’s Riso amaro (1949,            Bitter Rice),” in
            
                Music, Collective Memory, Trauma, and Nostalgia in European
                Cinema After the Second World War
            
            , ed. Michael Baumgartner and Ewelina Boczkowska (New York:
            Routledge, 2020), 45–69: 47. See also Francesco Pitassio, “Popular
            Tradition, American Madness and Some Opera: Music and Songs in
            Italian Neo-Realist Cinema,” Cinéma & Cie 11, nos.
            16/17 (2011): 141–46.
        

    

    
        
            
                [10]
            
For reasons of space, this paper does not take into account            Riso amaro and Non c’è pace tra gli ulivi.
            Nevertheless, it is my intention to devote a future article to the
            discussion of folk music, sound, and audiovisual strategies in
            these films (particularly on the less-studied Non c’è pace
            ), which will enable me to expand on some of the points examined
            here.
        

    

    
        
            
                [11]
            
For an overview of De Santis’s cinema, see: Antonio Vitti,            Giuseppe De Santis and Postwar Italian Cinema (Toronto:
            University of Toronto Press, 1996); Marco Grossi, ed.,
            
                Giuseppe De Santis: la trasfigurazione della realtà / The
                Transfiguration of Reality
            
            (Rome: Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, 2007).
        

    

    
        
            
                [12]
            
            Pepa Sparti, ed.,
            
                Cinema e mondo contadino: due esperienze a confronto: Italia e
                Francia
            
            (Venice: Marsilio, 1982); Michele Guerra,
            
                Gli ultimi fuochi: cinema italiano e mondo contadino dal
                fascismo agli anni Settanta
            
            (Rome: Bulzoni, 2010).
        

    

    
        
            
                [13]
            
Antonio Gramsci, “Observations on Folklore,” in            The Antonio Gramsci Reader: Selected Writings, 1916–1935,
            ed. David Forgacs (New York: New York University Press,
            2000), 360.
        

    

    
        
            
                [14]
            
Gramsci, “Concept of ‘National-Popular’,” in            The Gramsci Reader, 368.
        

    

    
        
            
                [15]
            
On this topic, see: Vitti,            Peppe De Santis secondo se stesso, 189, 231 and 235.
            Revealing of some connections between De Santis and Gramsci’s
            thought are also the director’s reflections in “Cinema e
            Narrativa,” Film d’oggi 1, no. 21 (1945): 3.
        

    

    
        
            
                [16]
            
See Joseph Luzzi,            A Cinema of Poetry: Aesthetics of the Italian Art Film
            (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014).
        

    

    
        
            
                [17]
            
            The translated passage is quoted in Corbella, “Which People’s
            Music?”, 48.
        

    

    
        
            
                [18]
            
            One point that triggered harsh criticism and that appears to have
            been a source of anxiety for De Santis himself is the director’s
            ambivalent attitude towards American culture. De Santis was
            strongly influenced by American film, but at the same time he
            criticized American capitalism and its articulation through
mass-media; see Peter Bondanella,            Italian Cinema: From Neorealism to the Present (New York:
            Ungar, 1983), 82-85. De Santis never denied his admiration for the
            literature of the New Deal era, which he considered one of
            neorealism’s sources of inspiration, and for American Western and
            Musical films. Nevertheless, De Santis’s reactions to interviewers’
            and critics’ comments sometimes betrayed an anxious need to
            establish some distance between his cinema and the American models.
            In an exchange with Antonio Vitti, for instance, he bypassed this
            intuitive remark of the interviewer: “I’ve always wondered why you
            feel bothered when critics notice elements in your films coming
from American Westerns” (see            Peppe De Santis secondo se stesso, 189; see also, in the
            same volume, Vitti’s interviews with De Santis at pages 61, 66 and
            170–73, and Vitti’s article “L’influenza della letteratura
            americana sul neorealismo”, 21–36). Moreover, while De Santis
            declared on several occasions his respect for American democracy,
            he also took a stance against the consumerist side of American
            culture, symbolized by “boogie-woogie, chewing gum, easy
            money”—elements that are nevertheless extremely seductive in his
films; quoted in Francesco Pitassio,            Neorealist Film Culture, 1945–1954. Rome, Open Cinema
            (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019), 40. On the ambiguous
            cultural politics and ideologies that informed postwar Italian
            leftist circles, see Stephen Gundle,
            
                Between Hollywood and Moscow: The Italian Communists and the
                Challenge of Mass Culture
            
            , 1943–1991 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000).
        

    

    
        
            
                [19]
            
            I refer here to the streaming file available online: “Caccia tragica (Giuseppe de Santis) 1947,” YouTube, uploaded on October
            12, 2021. The film has never been
            distributed on DVD, but, to my knowledge, some VHS copies were
            released in the 1990s by Gruppo Editoriale Bramante – Pantmedia,
            Mondadori Video and VideoClub Luce – VideoRai.
        

    

    
        
            
                [20]
            
            “Raccontare e spiegare, attraverso la sola musica, la situazione in
            cui versava l’Italia di allora,” “un’invadenza americana a livello
            di cultura di massa che ha sostituito sia la retorica fascista sia
            la genuinità popolaresca.” Guido Michelone, “Dal boogie al
            neorealismo: musiche e colonna sonora in Caccia tragica,”
            in Caccia tragica: un inizio strepitoso, ed. Marco Grossi
            and Virginio Palazzo (Fondi: Quaderni dell’Associazione Giuseppe De
            Santis, 2000), 29.
        

    

    
        
            
                [21]
            
            See Corbella, “Which People's Music?”, 58.
        

    

    
        
            
                [22]
            
            In the film, these connections are indirectly reinforced by the
            fact that “Lili Marleen” is heard immediately after the end of
            “Avanti siam ribelli”.
        

    

    
        
            
                [23]
            
            “Caccia tragica – Sul fiume c’è ancora la guerra
            ,” SCENEG 00 09691, Sceneggiature 1946–1947, Fondo Giuseppe De
            Santis, Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, Rome. De Santis
            erased a few sentences in the original script, as reflected in my
            transcription (see Appendix, document 1).
        

    

    
        
            
                [24]
            
            See Diego Carpitella, “Le false ideologie sul folklore musicale,”
            in Diego Carpitella, Gino Castaldo, Giaime Pintor et al.,
            
                La musica in Italia: l’ideologia, la cultura, le vicende del
                jazz, del rock, del pop, della canzonetta, della musica
                popolare dal dopoguerra ad oggi
            
            (Rome: Savelli, 1978), 207–39; Diego Carpitella, “Etnomusicologica.
Considerazioni sul folk-revival”, in            Conversazioni sulla musica, 52-64. See also: Goffredo
            Plastino, “Introduzione” and Marcello Sorce Keller, “Piccola
            filosofia del revival”, in
            
                La musica folk: storie, protagonisti e documenti del revival in
                Italia
            
            , ed. Goffredo Plastino (Milan: Il Saggiatore, 2016).
        

    

    
        
            
                [25]
            
            Elena Mosconi, “Per un paesaggio (sonoro) italiano: ri-ascoltare il
neorealismo,” in            Invenzioni dal vero: discorsi sul neorealismo, ed. Michele
            Guerra (Parma: Diabasis, 2015), 239–54: 246.
        

    

    
        
            
                [26]
            
In this article I must limit my discussion to            Caccia tragica, but other Italian postwar films feature
            whistles and bells as distinctive elements of rural/folkloric
            soundscapes. Some examples are mentioned in notes 27, 32, and 35.
        

    

    
        
            
                [27]
            
            Like Caccia tragica, some films use the subalterns’
            whistles in a non-musical way. This is the case of the whistling
            boys in the last scene of Roma città aperta (dir. Roberto
            Rossellini, 1945): the noisy sound they produce can be intended as
            an expression of solidarity to Don Pietro and protest against his
            execution. In many other Italian films—especially from the 1960s
            and the 1970s—whistles acquire musical value; nevertheless, they
            are almost always associated with folkloric, rural, and exotic
            contexts—i.e., with ideas of spatial and cultural otherness. Pier
            Paolo Pasolini’s films abound in scenes where the “sub-proletarian”
protagonists whistle folk tunes (e.g., Ninetto Davoli in            Decameron, 1971, and Canterbury Tales,
            1972). Other films adopt the whistle as an element of the
            extradiegetic score: particularly famous are the whistles of
            Alessandro Alessandroni that resonate in the music by Ennio
            Morricone for Lina Wertmüller’s I basilischi (1963) or for
            Sergio Leone’s western films.
        

    

    
        
            
                [28]
            
            There is scant literature on whistling. The most recent and
            comprehensive study is A Brief History of Whistling, by
            John Lucas and Allan Chatburn (Nottingham: Five Leaves
            Publications, 2013). See also: Peter F. Ostwald, “When People
            Whistle,” Language & Speech 2, no. 3 (1959): 137–45;
A.V. van Stekelenburg, “Whistling in Antiquity,”            Akroterion 45 (2000): 65–74. The reflections by Steven
Connor in            Beyond Words: Sobs, Hums, Stutters and other Vocalizations
            (London: Reaktion Books, 2014) might also prove useful to make
            sense of the act of whistling and its communicative values. Connor
            focuses on “the world of sound events beyond articulate speech”
            (10); whistling does not feature in his analysis, but Connor’s idea
            that “the [non-articulated, non-verbal] noises of the voice” (10)
            can have semantic, political, and cultural values might be
            productively applied to an ethnography or a history of whistling
            (both in cinema and beyond).
        

    

    
        
            
                [29]
            
Nadia Seremetakis,            The Last Word: Women, Death, and Divination in Inner Mani 
            (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 72.
        

    

    
        
            
                [30]
            
            Seremetakis, The Last Word, 101.
        

    

    
        
            
                [31]
            
            The use of sonic crescendos associated with the folkloric
world will become a trope in De Santis’s films (for instance, in            Riso amaro and Non c’è pace tra gli ulivi) and
            was also employed by other postwar Italian directors (e.g., Roberto
            Rossellini, Vittorio De Seta), a topic I will discuss in another
            article.
        

    

    
        
            
                [32]
            
            In “Per un paesaggio (sonoro) italiano,” Mosconi examines the
            presence and role of bells in various neorealist films. As an
            example of bells used by peasant communities to resist the
oppressors, she mentions the case of Vivere in pace (            To Live in Peace, 1947, dir. Luigi Zampa).
            Mosconi’s article does not provide close readings but proves a
            stimulating starting point for further analyses.
        

    

    
        
            
                [33]
            
            Alain Corbin,
            
                Village Bells: Sound and Meaning in the 19th-Century French
                Countryside
            
            , trans. Martin Thom (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998).
See also: Luc Rombouts,            Singing Bronze: A History of Carillon Music (Leuven:
            Lipsius Leuven, 2014).
        

    

    
        
            
                [34]
            
Steve Feld and Donald Brenneis, “Doing Anthropology in Sound,”            American Ethnologist 31, no. 4 (2004): 469.
        

    

    
        
            
                [35]
            
See, for instance, the opening of Luchino Visconti’s La terra trema (1948) and Cecilia Mangini’s            Stendalì (1960).
        

    

    
        
            
                [36]
            
            The first scenes are full of references to “joyful” folk songs and
            instrumental pieces for mouth harp and accordion, which help
            construct the idea of a folkloric environment. See, for instance,
            scene 2: “nell’aria il suono sottile e struggente di uno
            scacciapensieri” (in the air, the thin, heartbreaking sound of a
            mouth harp); “[Paolo, one of Zappala’s sons] suonando allegramente
            il suo scacciapensieri” (cheerfully playing his mouth harp); scene
            3: “ogni tanto una fisarmonica fa sentire la sua stanca musica”
            (every now and then, you could hear some weary music coming out of
            an accordion); scene 5: “[Paolo] canticchia allegramente” (sings
            merrily); see “Noi che facciamo crescere il grano,” SCENEG
            00 09686, Sceneggiature 1949, Fondo Giuseppe De Santis, Centro
            Sperimentale di Cinematografia, Rome (see Appendix, document 2).
        

    

    
        
            
                [37]
            
            See Corbella, “Which People’s Music?,” 52–56.
        

    

    
        
            
                [38]
            
            For a comprehensive overview of this film, see Gualtiero De Santi
            and Manuel De Sica, eds., “
            
                Ieri, oggi, domani” di Vittorio De Sica: testimonianze,
                interventi, sceneggiatura
            
            (Rome: Associazione Amici di Vittorio De Sica, 2002).
        

    

    
        
            
                [39]
            
            See Appendix, document 3.
        

    

    
        
            
                [40]
            
            Steven Connor, “The Help of Your Good Hands: Reports on Clapping,”
            in The Auditory Culture Reader, ed. Michael Bull and Les
            Back (Oxford, New York: Berg, 2003), 68.
        

    

    
        
            
                [41]
            
            Connor, 72–73.
        

    

    
        
            
                [42]
            
            See Appendix, document 4.
        

    




    



                

            

                

            

          
          
        
        
        
