In Canone effimero, the De Serio brothers place their camera, with great restraint and careful attention, on the mountainous landscapes of various regions of rural Italy and on some of their inhabitants. The choice of a square image format, quite rare nowadays, highlights the faces of the people the filmmakers capture. Moreover, it encourages a certain verticality of vision. A more rectangular frame would have directed the viewer’s attention more toward the horizontality of the image and reduced the space above the heads of the interviewees. Given the religious character of most of the traditional songs performed by the film’s participants, this somewhat anachronistic choice also evokes a form of spirituality in the broadest sense, with the skies occupying a large portion of the nature shots.

This idea of verticality is also at the heart of the documentary’s final scene, where the editing reverses the sequence of images shot from a car speeding along a snow-covered road. This creates the illusion that the snow, instead of falling toward the ground as terrestrial gravity dictates, is actually being drawn upward. It is the same kind of transcendence and elevation of the soul that watching Canone effimero inspires.

Jean-Philippe Desrochers
Critic