The Wonders and Lazzaro Felice (Happy as Lazzaro) are two Italian films by award -winning Italian director Alice Rohrwacher.
Both films offer a view to an invisible border where one culture ends and another begins, where the old collides with the new.
In the 2014 film, The Wonders, we are witness to the ripping of the fabric of farming culture by the twin scissor blades of television and consumerism. A television crew's taping of a reality show pits contestants from the farms to sing from their cultural traditions for audiences across Italy for a cash prize.
Some contestants are happy to trade in their farms for an easier-on-your-back bed- and-breakfast economy. The distrusting father of a family of bee-keepers sees the trade off as a rip-off. Others in the family, however, are eager to leave their seven-days-a-week work lives for the easier life television advertises.
Is the trade-off fair or is it a rip-off? This is the conflict that both films leave for you to judge. In The Wonders, the Earth provides the bees and the honey that the Gelsomina an adolescent girl and her family collects and sells. Using the family's profits to buy a camel for Gelsomina is a last ditch effort on the part of the father to keep his eldest girl from growing up.
The Wonders and Happy as Lazzaro are set in rural Italy. The children's names in The Wonders are old. Gelsomina, Angelica, Luna are names that remind me of my own family‘s names like Concepción, Socorro, Josefa, Angelica and Maria. Names from the past that have lost out in recent years in favor of newer style names like Yaliza, Yseña and my own name, Linda.
The films show the tug of war of evolution. At one end of the rope, Mother Nature provides: Bees are harvested for their honey with hard labor and a little help from nature. At the other end, civilization encroaches imposing a new order. Besides new hygiene rules for beekeeping, there is the intrusion of nearby hunter's firearms blasts that disturb the bee colonies. The neighboring farmer raises pigs. Weed killer sent by the state to improve his farm further damages the bees.
Dad works while dressed in his jockey shorts among his family of toddlers and nearly adult children reminding me this film reflects a less sexualized era than our's. It's interesting to me that it is less Puritan than our era with its ubiquitous sex-for-sale themes in advertising.
The conflict of old and new is captured under the electronic circus of reality television. Gelsomina, the eldest child of the beekeeping family is in the spotlight. She happens upon a production team preparing to record a show for a large cash prize. That distressed sound you hear is fabric tearing. She may know all she needs to know about bee-keeping, but that doesn't mean it is the world she wants to live in. Despite her father's wishes, Gelsomina sees her life beyond the farm and the reality show contest is her ticket out of bee-keeping. It is also her ticket out of being the only adult in a family where her parents are either not willing or prepared to face the challenges of modern time bee-keeping or child-rearing.
Both movies' greatest value is that the director, like a forensic scientist, uncovers glimpses of the natural era that are now nearly ended. In the first movie, The Wonders, ancient music is sung in harmony by the women in the reality show competition. A boy's whistling of bird songs are another relic brought out for the cameras. In the more recent film, Happy as Lazarro, there is a midnight serenade by male singers at the window of the centuries old stone farm house. The kerosene lamp lit kitchen scene after the serenade shows us singers who have entered to join the family. They pass a cup of wine amongst each other from a nearly empty glass. There is an easy accommodation to scarcity of food, drink or space. Sleeping six to a room or more, the extended family wakes and sleeps to the sun's rising and setting. The planting and harvesting of crops drives the calendar, not the other way around.
Include in the accounting of wonders the bees traversing the skies in their work of pollination also disappearing with insecticides, the ties of people to the seasons for their work and leisure under the rhythms of the sun and the stars.
Both movies trace the nearly lost treasures of communal living a hundred years ago almost everywhere on the planet including the borderlands of Texas and Tamaulipas where my family settled in farms and later in towns.
I grew up listening to my own folks at night on cool front porches talking about their elders hunting deer by kerosene lamp or driving mule packs of bootleg tequila through the desert at night to the US border, their journey guided by the stars. The labores, the fields, tended by many hands of brothers, sisters, cousins, uncles, aunts, grandparents. Families sleeping on pallets of corn husks in a one room jacal with adobe walls of logs and branches, dirt floors and warmth from the hearth where food was cooked. Kerosene lamps provided the light before the era of electricity.
Sounds awfully hard to me, but my mother spoke fondly of her times growing up there despite the family's tight quarters and hard work in the fields.
I am privileged to also study the collision of ancient and modern cultures of the rural the urban, the natural world and the world we’ve been inventing with electricity and it’s many technologies. The world these bright lights eclipsed I only glimpsed through my mother's stories.
The light that Alice Rohrwacher shines on what is nearly lost when one culture dies and another is born helps bring honor and recognition to the ancient songs and ways of living before they are gone for good.
Maybe in the discovering their scarcity we can figure out how to preserve or maybe reinvent the songs and customs within our own time. I have seen it happen before. Witness the preservation of mariachi and conjunto music in South Texas, of Gaelic language and culture in Ireland. We have seen it in the recording of Appalachian songs that were brought from the Old World to the Americas by 1930's song-catchers. We have seen it in the work of Zora Neal Hurston who captured stories and myths in the south during the Depression. We have seen it with Juan Quezada who re-pioneered the thousand-year-old Casa Grandes pottery making tradition in the Chihuahua in desert town of Mata Ortiz. Add Alice Rohrwacher and her films to this incomplete list.
In this time of limited travel because of the pandemic, take a trip back in time to the way most of us lived in rural areas not cities, before the advent of electricity and electronic media, when we lived closer to nature.
Some contestants are happy to trade in their farms for an easier-on-your-back bed- and-breakfast economy. The distrusting father of a family of bee-keepers sees the trade off as a rip-off. Others in the family, however, are eager to leave their seven-days-a-week work lives for the easier life television advertises.
Is the trade-off fair or is it a rip-off? This is the conflict that both films leave for you to judge. In The Wonders, the Earth provides the bees and the honey that the Gelsomina an adolescent girl and her family collects and sells. Using the family's profits to buy a camel for Gelsomina is a last ditch effort on the part of the father to keep his eldest girl from growing up.
The Wonders and Happy as Lazzaro are set in rural Italy. The children's names in The Wonders are old. Gelsomina, Angelica, Luna are names that remind me of my own family‘s names like Concepción, Socorro, Josefa, Angelica and Maria. Names from the past that have lost out in recent years in favor of newer style names like Yaliza, Yseña and my own name, Linda.
The films show the tug of war of evolution. At one end of the rope, Mother Nature provides: Bees are harvested for their honey with hard labor and a little help from nature. At the other end, civilization encroaches imposing a new order. Besides new hygiene rules for beekeeping, there is the intrusion of nearby hunter's firearms blasts that disturb the bee colonies. The neighboring farmer raises pigs. Weed killer sent by the state to improve his farm further damages the bees.
Dad works while dressed in his jockey shorts among his family of toddlers and nearly adult children reminding me this film reflects a less sexualized era than our's. It's interesting to me that it is less Puritan than our era with its ubiquitous sex-for-sale themes in advertising.
The conflict of old and new is captured under the electronic circus of reality television. Gelsomina, the eldest child of the beekeeping family is in the spotlight. She happens upon a production team preparing to record a show for a large cash prize. That distressed sound you hear is fabric tearing. She may know all she needs to know about bee-keeping, but that doesn't mean it is the world she wants to live in. Despite her father's wishes, Gelsomina sees her life beyond the farm and the reality show contest is her ticket out of bee-keeping. It is also her ticket out of being the only adult in a family where her parents are either not willing or prepared to face the challenges of modern time bee-keeping or child-rearing.
Both movies' greatest value is that the director, like a forensic scientist, uncovers glimpses of the natural era that are now nearly ended. In the first movie, The Wonders, ancient music is sung in harmony by the women in the reality show competition. A boy's whistling of bird songs are another relic brought out for the cameras. In the more recent film, Happy as Lazarro, there is a midnight serenade by male singers at the window of the centuries old stone farm house. The kerosene lamp lit kitchen scene after the serenade shows us singers who have entered to join the family. They pass a cup of wine amongst each other from a nearly empty glass. There is an easy accommodation to scarcity of food, drink or space. Sleeping six to a room or more, the extended family wakes and sleeps to the sun's rising and setting. The planting and harvesting of crops drives the calendar, not the other way around.
Include in the accounting of wonders the bees traversing the skies in their work of pollination also disappearing with insecticides, the ties of people to the seasons for their work and leisure under the rhythms of the sun and the stars.
Both movies trace the nearly lost treasures of communal living a hundred years ago almost everywhere on the planet including the borderlands of Texas and Tamaulipas where my family settled in farms and later in towns.
I grew up listening to my own folks at night on cool front porches talking about their elders hunting deer by kerosene lamp or driving mule packs of bootleg tequila through the desert at night to the US border, their journey guided by the stars. The labores, the fields, tended by many hands of brothers, sisters, cousins, uncles, aunts, grandparents. Families sleeping on pallets of corn husks in a one room jacal with adobe walls of logs and branches, dirt floors and warmth from the hearth where food was cooked. Kerosene lamps provided the light before the era of electricity.
Sounds awfully hard to me, but my mother spoke fondly of her times growing up there despite the family's tight quarters and hard work in the fields.
I am privileged to also study the collision of ancient and modern cultures of the rural the urban, the natural world and the world we’ve been inventing with electricity and it’s many technologies. The world these bright lights eclipsed I only glimpsed through my mother's stories.
The light that Alice Rohrwacher shines on what is nearly lost when one culture dies and another is born helps bring honor and recognition to the ancient songs and ways of living before they are gone for good.
Maybe in the discovering their scarcity we can figure out how to preserve or maybe reinvent the songs and customs within our own time. I have seen it happen before. Witness the preservation of mariachi and conjunto music in South Texas, of Gaelic language and culture in Ireland. We have seen it in the recording of Appalachian songs that were brought from the Old World to the Americas by 1930's song-catchers. We have seen it in the work of Zora Neal Hurston who captured stories and myths in the south during the Depression. We have seen it with Juan Quezada who re-pioneered the thousand-year-old Casa Grandes pottery making tradition in the Chihuahua in desert town of Mata Ortiz. Add Alice Rohrwacher and her films to this incomplete list.
In this time of limited travel because of the pandemic, take a trip back in time to the way most of us lived in rural areas not cities, before the advent of electricity and electronic media, when we lived closer to nature.
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