Immaginari sospesi: la provincia nel cinema italiano contemporaneo.

Since the last twenty years, the imaginary of Italian province in contemporary Italian cinema, has changed. Previously represented with typical exoticism — a representation that foreign viewers understood not only as the expression of a seductive and unexplored world but also as the lexicon of a geographical and cultural homogeneity — Italian province in the Italian movies of the last two decades is still an exotic location but is shown as completely unknown also to its inhabitants. In this context, on the one hand the land of the province is an omnipresent close-up and looks like a petrified world; on the other hand, spectators are presented with a continous movement of crossing of the various regions. This dialectic relation shows a kingdom of unstable thresholds and brittle memories. Furthermore, countries and characters form temporary islands where the dimension of interval is predominant. ‘Space between things’ and ‘time in space’ become the cardinal points of this kind of imaginary. The various kinds of province represented by Italian movies and analyzed in this paper are completely permeable to each other. Every province has therefore external and internal borders. External borders are weak, almost invisible to each other, this feature constituting the trigger of narratives. Internal borders are hard and bring about the difficulty of narrative advancement: they are marked by constant roadblocks, challenges to overcome, allegorical characters, and ancient familiar ghosts.