Page 37 - Milano Periferia

amorous persistence by which surviving images and vanishing traits of a
past world are re-proposed, brought back to an obsessive and moving
fixity.

The documentary opens on the suburbs of the dormitory-quarters, almost
to show that this is the fatally taken-for-granted and undifferentiated
entrance to every big town: Milan, Turin, Rome, Hamburgh, Chicago, pri-
soners in an iron and concrete belt, wrapped up in a forest of odd adverti-
sements, afflicted by the hypertrophy of the absurd conurbations grown
up at random on a sick and over-swollen body (photo 4, 5, 6, 14, 22), the
withered and dirty meadows (23, 24), and then the squalor, the anonymity,
the self-emptied people crowding the shopping-store which is the only
forced meeting-place (36, 37, 38, 39), the children keeping watch over
empty dull dwellings or playing on grounds soon to be dug up by the
bulldozers (17, 22, 25, 29, 30), the old people strolling toward an only
imagined shelter looking like deported convicts, drunk and decomposed
by solitude (43).

As the camera lens continues its research, eager to single out a problem
or to discover a tragedy, the town already seems to become alive, coming
into touch with the old suburbs. Also here, however, the annotations are
of an ambivalent thickness, a characteristic peculiar to any thoughtful
work which is to be interpreted. The tones of the photographic language,
not emotive at all, are among the least noticeable and the least romantic

It would be only too easy to give oneself up to the elegy of the recovery
of the retrieved time. But no! Also these outskirts are subject to preca-
riousness, hanging from the invisible thread of temporariness. The factories
emerge still intact in a pathetic atmosphere suggestive of the past (54,
55, 56, 57, 63), and so the quiet off-road cafes for the repose and the
chatters (104), the small bakeries and the barbers’shops ornated with the
flowery-style (91, 92), the household shops (89, 103), the dark passages
of the old railed staicases, the simple inns with a portico (94, 107, 125,
126), the age-old drinking-fountains which the Milanese call "vedove"
(weeping widows) (105), the peaceful and unobtrusive wings of the first
popular quarters (79), the skeleton of an overbridge (59).

Only certain lead-coloured landscapes of cars, trellis-works and sheds
(56, 78), the penetrating portraits of the turners, faces of intense expres-
siveness relieved by the work (70, 72), the concentrated figures in ove-
ralls of the cable-winders of the Bicocca (73, 74, 75, 76), reassert again
the value of the milieu harmonizing with the inhabitants and supporting
them: even the children jumping around the gates or the doors look dif-
ferent and less sad (108, 109, 111) the women, again become housewives
with their hanging hand-bags, express confidence and solidary fervour in
their rendez-vous at the square markets which offer peaches and cheap
clothes (97, 98, 99, 100) the pensionner walks quietly, reading the news-
paper on the pavement in front of his house (103), the family gathers,
as they have done for centuries, around the caretaker of the picturesque