Alessandro Blasetti - La lunga strada del ritorno

Alessandro Blasetti’s documentary La lunga strada del ritorno is perhaps one of the earliest cases, at least on Italian television, of the systematic reutilization of library footage, in conjunction with purpose-made interviews, to create an auteur nonfiction film focused on historical memory. Broadcast in three parts in June 1962 on the second Italian TV channel (set up just a few months earlier as a vehicle for more original and experimental programs), La lunga strada del ritorno gathers, in fact, the accounts of Italian veterans of the Second World War, combining the story of the conflict with the experiences of the men at the front. To help him write the script, Blasetti turned to the poet Alfonso Gatto. La lunga strada del ritorno is the result of painstaking research work in Italian and foreign film archives, where Blasetti also went to look for not strictly war-related material. With this Blasetti’s documentary the Rai took part in the Venice Film Festival for the first time; it is now presenting it again in an uncut version that has been restored by Rai Teche in collaboration with the Archivio Nazionale Cinema d’Impresa.

I accepted the responsibility of directing La Lunga strada del ritorno when I was sure that I would be able to keep control over the transmission, from the first to the last moment, in other words that I would be able to make, using the means of the film director, even though I ought to have been guided by a quite different criterion given the purpose for which the work was made.

Alessandro Blasetti, Scritti sul cinema, ed. Adriano Aprà, Marsilio, Venice, 1982