Franco Maresco / Daniele Ciprì
Vittorio De Seta - Lo sguardo in ascolto

The leading documentarian of Italian cinema, Vittorio De Seta appears in this interview meeting in Palermo, 1995, a city that dedicated a complete film retrospective to his work; filmed and conducted by the almost intimidated and not very incisive Daniele Ciprì and Franco Maresco, along with a sulfurous and always dazzling Goffredo Fofi, the conversation revealed to us a calm and upright Vittorio De Seta, endowed with an elegant aristocratic charm, which he truly possessed, courteous and seemingly outside the modern era, which he already testified was vanishing back then, as if by implosion, towards a point of no return in which we are still dangerously immersed today. By following a personal, coherent, and human artistic journey, he has been appreciated in Italy and abroad as one of the most rigorous interpreters of auteur documentary filmmaking, which, although not graced by success, has almost never compromised with the mainstream circuit.

«Non-aligned, unreconciled, stubbornly problematic: in a word, uncomfortable. And isolated. Intolerant of dogmas, whether of party or Church (as a Marxist first and a Christian later, but always and stubbornly in his own way), De Seta never frequented, indeed often deliberately refused, the "good salons": those of the snobbish intelligentsia as well as the wealthy and easy-going Roman cinema and the routine and do-it-yourself television. Unwilling to compromise or lower standards (never even a Carosello in his career), alien to the hypocrisies of the bureaucratic procedures necessary to have any production project approved at Rai». Thus wrote Alessandro Rais correctly in the volume he curated, Il cinema di Vittorio De Seta (Giuseppe Maimone Editore, 1995).

Counterbalancing the conversation-meeting are some of his editing works such as Banditi a Orgosolo (1961) and Diario di un maestro (1973) where his poetic vision, rigorous and free from any complacency or compromise towards the powers that be, is naturally exemplified. And where that strong combination of ethics and aesthetics that has always distinguished him becomes increasingly evident, which will ultimately be his personal hallmark, chapeau!