"The Equation of Liberty": Self-sufficiency and Expressive Freedom in De Seta’s Documentaries of the 1950s

Between 1954 and 1959, Vittorio De Seta shot a series of ten short documentary films set in Sicily that established him as among the most significant directors in the Italian documentary tradition. De Seta knew very well that the commercial, semi-industrial nature of film production was an insurmountable limit to his own value system and freedom of expression and that adherence to the studio system and its modus operandi had to be negotiated with great care. He attained a complete mastery of the technical medium by working practically alone. De Seta was at once a director, camera operator, cinematographer, editor, recordist, sound and music editor. This premise was essential to guarantee the director his creative independence and unfettered access to the profilmic, free from the constraints of coeval documentary practices. When, on making his first feature film, De Seta took up the challenge of abandoning the role of “one-man band” and embracing cinema as a collaborative effort, his difficult relationship with the production machine will become one of the central themes of a broad reflection on the practice of cinema.