DIARY OF A SCHOOL TEACHER
Dir. Vittorio De Seta, 1973.
Italy. 260 min w/ intermission.
Italian with English subtitles.
SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 29 – 5 PM
Vittorio De Seta’s reputation today rests on his magnificent technicolour shorts documenting the “lost world” of South Italy’s vanishing social traditions as well as “Bandits of Orgosolo” (1961), which was considered upon its release as a sort of neo-realist revival and remains a beloved classic of the period. What followed for De Seta was a decade of struggle and disappointment, culminating with the spiteful critical reaction to his “Almost a Man” in 1966 and the indifference shown to his French co-production “The Uninvited” a few years later. In 1969, the master turned to television and reinvented his practice with “Diary of a Schoolteacher” (1972), a four-part RAI production whose final episode drew fifteen million viewers in Italy.
Adapting Albino Bernardini’s “A Year in Pietralata”, an account of teaching schoolkids on the impoverished outskirts of Rome, De Seta cast the actor Bruno Vicino as Bruno D’Angelo, a reform-minded teacher, and placed him in a classroom of real eleven-year-old boys from Tiburtino III. Fiction makes way for what Frederick Wiseman once dubbed, in a different context, reality-fiction: the kids eventually forget they’re acting and bring their own lives into the film. Shot handheld on 16mm in long, circling takes and assembled laboriously over thirteen months as the boys aged and some even died, this forgotten masterpiece exists at the porous border between staging and observation, a close cousin of Jean Rouch and Jacques Rivette’s own epic, early-’70s television experiments of the same time.
Scarcely available outside Italy, this complete 260-minute cut will be presented by Christopher Small of Outskirts Film Magazine, co-editor of the print magazine that devoted an extensive dossier to Vittorio De Seta. Among other distinctions, “Diary of a Schoolteacher” shows another side of the enigmatic De Seta, and remains likely the greatest film ever made about the act of teaching.