OPEN ROADS ITALIAN SERIES: GIANLUCA AND MASSIMILIANO DE SEVERIO: CANONE EFFIMERO (2024)With local traditiional music of Italy, a spell is wovenA documentary that won a prize at the Belinale about fading musical culture and customs in various parts of Italy. Moving through Italy’s regions, the De Serio brothers come across an alternative popular culture and shoot a rectangular film about polyvocal songs, music ethnology and oral tradition. Radically contemporary, energetic, close to nature, local. Lyrical.
What begins as an ode to the slow pace at which a zampugna, a form of Calabrian bagpipe, is made, opens out into an ethnological musical tour into unchartered territory: an Italy of countless small traditions, often only passed on orally. In Canone effimero, brothers Gianluca and Massimiliano De Serio present eleven local customs of performing music, passed down over generations which have survived to this day for them to find, from regions as different as Calabria, Marche, Liguria and Sicily. The square frames of the film continually find new ways to combine landscapes and their inhabitants into one unit. With calm and care and in suitably choral fashion, Canone effimero conveys a sense of the transgenerational based on practising, listening, learning and the human skill for imitation. Despite of each tradition being deeply rooted in nature as well as the region from which it originated, the film is free of the sort of nostalgic campanilismo that gets drunk on its own localities. Instead, it gradually weaves together the different local traditions into a network of possible countercultures. A film that seems anachronistic at first glance, but proves to be radically contemporary.
These strong, harsh, almost raucous, forceful voices in unison, all men or all women, singing together in thespace and theair of a small chapel or local mountain church: a holy sound, an ancient sound, almost the sound of early Christians, with their courage and simple faith.
In this film we hear and see moments of transcendence. Sometimes the raucous sound is so harsh we needthe pauses of silence, devoted to scenery, hills, mountains, trees. whispered voices as if afraid of awakening a ghost or offending a little brother Beniamino who died at seven months, making her feel always like a survivor.
These folk are preservationists, but that's the wrong word, becausethey are doing nothing so arfitiial but rather growing into a tradition the were born close to. But it takes effort, like exercizing a muscle to keep it strong when age is weakening it.
Letterboxd guy Blahr (four stars) says "If Les Blank was Italian and into landscapes instead of food" he'd have made this picture. He lovedit though it "arguably short-shrifts most of the covered traditions, going for fleeting textures rather than depth." This is true. "Sounds insane," he says, but he wanted more Calabrian bagpipe. That's true too: the demonstrations of the instruments and kinds of music need to be more extended.
Canone effimero, 120 mins., premiered at Berlin, where it won a documentary special mention. Screened for this review in FLC/CineCitta’s Open Roads: New Italian Cinema (May. 29-June 5, 2025)
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