Certas crianças: a infância em documentários italianos do pós-guerra

The essay investigates the representation of childhood in Italian second post-war author documentaries. The analysis wants to keep together the imagination of childhood with the urban suburbs. Although apparently distant, these figurative and conceptual motifs are perfectly interrelated in the Italian case, especially in the decades of reconstruction and economic boom. Focusing on the forms of documentary non-fiction, the article analyzes some short films made in Italy between the forties and the sixties - by directors such as Mario Soldati, Luigi Comencini, Francesco Maselli, Raffaele Andreassi, Cecilia Mangini, Michele Gandin, Damiano Damiani and Dino Risi – that well attest to the presence and the euphoria of a peculiar ‘gaze on childhood’, that combines the ethical and aesthetic tensions of the neorealist experience with the lyricisms and formal prerogatives of auteur cinema. Linking together the theme of childhood and suburbs means confronting consolidated and historicized mythologies within the panorama of Italian cinema, but that have been poorly analyzed in their iconographic and expressive synergy. The suburbs and childhood are, in fact, both emblems of a human and social condition that lives on the sidelines, in the light-heartedness and trepidation of a tomorrow to be built. The analysis wants therefore to shed new light on these relationships, both in the perspective of film studies and in that of pedagogical sciences, to try to reinterpret, through the filmic form, the representation of childhood and some educational approaches in Italy in the years of reconstruction and the economic boom.