Documentare il racconto: le vie del reportage italiano

The essay starts from the fact that documentary and reportage both work starting from a capture of reality and it is this aspect, and its relationship with a narration and with a direction of the gaze (i.e. with the intentionality, the purpose with which the images build a story), that interests us, that allows us to think of reportage, especially contemporary, as a form of narration, and therefore as a political discourse on reality. We do not want to affirm that video-reportage is actually one of the forms of documentary. The aim of this essay is rather to interrogate the forms of contemporary Italian reportage in order to highlight its specificities, not as a documentary form, but as a form of narration and as a way of looking (therefore as an ethical and political operation), highlighting those common spaces that are pertinent both to the forms of contemporary reportage and to the documentary in some of its forms.