La voce e il fotogramma. Il racconto soggettivo come strumento d’indagine nel cinema dei ragazzi di Emilio Sidoti

The present essay intends to investigate the need for an ethnographic approach to amateur media and private cinema, alongside with traditional archival and textual analysis methods – with a particular focus on Emilio Sidoti’s in-school amateur filmmaking practice. Small-gauge, educationally-produced films “with children”, it is argued, inhabit the very same familial space generally defining home movies. A case is made that researching family films and certain audiovisual works within the amateur sphere requires both the awareness of the uncertainty about the borders of such objects, continuously shifting, and the empathetic contact with a witness providing emotional and personal touch with the images. Empathy, however, can cause a shift from authority to trust toward the person identified as the source of information, thus generating a bias that needs to be restrained in order to provide a scientific interpretation of the films.