Il cinema fatto dai bambini

"On the hill of Mount Olimpino in the years between 1962 and 1972, Bruno Munari, my five children and I reinvented the cinema how to produce, make,and distribute a film. And finally we discovered film made by kids". This is the opening of Marcello Piccardo's recent book La collina del cinema (Nodo Libri, Como, 1992) in which he relates the fascinating activities of a group of young people involved in film research. It is within this research that the experience of Kids Make Film takes place. It originated by chance out of the intuition of a woman elementaryschoolteacher and was gathered in by Piccardo as an authentic and surprising expression of a certain way to make film. Research cinema is a cinema without preconceived methodologies except for those that emerge from the structure of the medium itself. It frees film from the fetish of technology and from the myth of the "story". It frees kids from the guardianship of teaching and gets them to enter onto a route rich in personal, social, and cultural learning. In Kids Make Film there is a happy meeting and a coincidence of the child's wholistic nature with that of the filmic medium. A new "pedagogy of the medium" comes out of the coincidence cut deep inside the structure of the child and of the medium. It contains a wealth of new things. The differences among the children disappear. All the children decide on what to do by themselves. All are good. And they do things that grownups look at and learn from. The time and space of the school and of learning expands. The class's involvement remains alive from the beginning to the end without any effort. Kids Make Film does good for the kids, for film, and for the school. It could do good for us adults too if we are interested in getting real answers from children. And so it is time to keep a little silence and a medium like film helps us to keep an active silence. This project went through extensive development from 1966 to 1979. In the 1980s the work continued at Pisa, Como, and Turin. However, it was an important period for the reflection on and diffusion of the project. In 1986 Marcello Piccardo and the Piedmont CEMEA took up the project again, offering the schools ample opportunities for the making of new films by children. Stefano Vitale, in particular, is involved in this initiative, whose presence in the schools and in film research is now, more than ever, relevant and urgent.

Cinque film realizzati dai bambini della scuola elementare tra il 1990 e il 1992, a cura del CEMEA del Piemonte.

Five films done by the elementaryschool children 199092 under the aegis of CEMEA Piedmont.

Quanto sono buoni i dolci
How Good These Candies Are
6', col.

Il picnic
The Picnic
9', col.

Ricordiamoci così
Let's Remember Like This
6', col.

Il pittore
The Painter
7', col.

I numeri
Numbers
8', col.