The parable of private cinema

Luca Ferro has been reflecting on the family film since the 1970s, realising its cultural importance (and thus the need to safeguard it) and emphasising not only its subjective nature but also its 'unconscious documentary design'. As a pioneer of private cinema, who has always struggled to assert his productive, expressive and formal autonomy, he has always moved outside the canonical paths of documentary and independent cinema, starting with Impressioni a distanza (Impressions from a distance) of 1975: the first case of a filmic work reflecting on family cinema, through three moments filmed from a distance: the war images of his father Giuseppe, a soldier in Ethiopia in the mid-1930s, the 'set' sequences of the bourgeois Ferro family of the 1950s and of Luca filmed as a child, and finally the images produced by Luca himself in the 1970s, himself a father filming: over time the gazes change, the relationships and intimacy of the family are somehow liberated, the landscapes and the surrounding world are transformed, as well as the technologies, films, colours and techniques of filming and self-representation. Starting from this 'realisation', Ferro reflects on the function of private cinema also in the light of his later productions, up to Rabbit, Lions and Various Circumstances (2009) and Family Investigation (2013), which mark further stages in the relationship between family stories, audiovisual practices and archives.