Castelli, poligoni, gallerie: alcune considerazioni sugli spazi nel cinema di Massimo D‘Anolfi e Martina Parenti

What is the role assigned to places in the contemporary cinema of reality? How do documentarians deal with the spatial dimension as they are engaged in experimenting new narrative approaches towards reality? Being central and problematic features in contemporary documentaries, places have brought directors and filmmakers to search for their very essence and reflect upon their function in relation to the story narrated and the people involved in the filming process. This paper aims to analyse the relevance of places and 'nonplaces' - in their institutional, political and even bureaucratic manifestations – in three films made by a couple of Italian documentarians, Massimo D‘Anolfi and Martina Parenti. More precisely, the purpose is to verify to what extent their filming method coincides with a precise audio-visual research practice, which seems to be a widespread tendency in contemporary filmmaking.