Green Cameras: Media Production and Social Movements Between the 1970s and the 1990s in Italy

Diego Cavallotti

2024-01-01

---

Abstract

The main objective of this paper is to outline the relationship that, starting from the Seventies, is established between environmental movements and the media in Italy. It is a multilayered relationship in which it is possible to observe a dialectic between the representation of these movements provided by newsreels or television news and the (self-)representation that emerge within them, especially through small gauge film cameras and camcorders. Several oppositional pairs are linked to this dialectic, such as those of "formal/informal", "official/unofficial", "professional/amateur", "individual/collective", etc. In particular, we will highlight how the ecological theme is reflected in "movement ecologies" in which more systems and practices of protest are intertwined. From this point of view it is not surprising that, at the beginning of the Nineties, one of the main actors in the protest against the first Gulf War was precisely the Green Party, engaged in the anti-nuclear campaign in previous years. Furthermore, another layer is added to the "ecologies of movement", which pertains more properly to the ecologies of the media in which these processes of representation take shape. In other words, I will reflect on the way in which audiovisual materials produced within the movements relate to processes of collective enunciation: here the enunciator is no longer an individual/single figure, but a stratified multiplicity that refers, in turn, to complex dynamics of production of subjectivity, which are reflected in audiovisual products.