Michelangelo Antonioni - Gente del Po aka People of the Po Valley (1947)

Documentary on the people of the Po valley. A family on a barge travels down the river and stops to get medicine for their sick daughter. Inhabitants of the Po valley delta prepare for a storm. In Antonioni's film the river is a chief character, defined by her colossal will, but not her impatience, to reach the sea. When she does, the sea, instead of embracing her, gives her a leg up and she clambers into the white bed of the sky.





“Gente del Po” is very much a neo-realist work of its period, even though it’s completely a documentary rather than just having the trappings of reality. The film follows a family of fishers through their day-to-day life, inflecting a semblance of narrative onto things at the end by explaining a journey into town as a trip for medicine, but for the most part, the film is simply descriptive. Of course, Antonioni has never been particularly known for his narratives, which usually consist of little more than pretty young people angsting around, but here the difference is that the family doesn’t even approach characterization, described only as “a man, a woman, and a girl.”

In and of itself the film is not particularly interesting, but within the context of Antonioni it’s fairly enlightening. “Gente del Po” is a movie whose entire value comes from its style, and in contrast to the verite documentary style that’s best known, all of its shots are carefully composed. It’s remarkable how much the film in fact evokes Antonioni’s later works. Smoke across a river feels like a piece cut from Red Desert, while a gliding shot later in the film, with characters moving laterally while a camera pans to the side, could be pulled from nearly anything else he directed. His camera, in contrast to a lot of American documentaries at the time, not only doesn’t remain remotely still, but also gives us some canted angles and oddly-situated shots. With no real subject to constrain him, it’s a movie purely made for visual pleasure. The film’s narration in fact feels intrusive to something that perhaps should have been left as simply pictures and music. “Gente del Po” is a beautiful movie, with nearly as interesting visuals as his features, that also points to the direction his later films would take. (Sean Gandert)







Antonioni rodó su primer cortometraje, el documental Gente del Po, entre 1943 y 1947, luego de colaborar en el guión de Un pilota ritorna, de Roberto Rossellini, y trabajar como ayudante del director Marcel Carné. Antonioni registra aquí los hombres y mujeres a la orilla del río, sus tareas cotidianas, su mundo, que el régimen fascista no quería ver reflejados en la pantalla. En la orilla opuesta del río, para esa fecha, Visconti filmaba Obsesión, película en la cual Musolini salió horrorizado diciendo que eso no era Italia. Gente del Po, rodada en 1943, recién se estrenó después de 1947. Se trata de un pseudo-documental, ya que Antonioni utilizó algunos actores profesionales.








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