Gilles Deleuze remarked that your image is a “stone” and your take is a “tomb”. The earth is abandoned and yet, as it were, it is filled with generations of corpses. When, for example, towards the end of Operai, contadini, you make a long sweeping pan across the hillside, the physical space comes across as being strangely humanised in the light of what was said beforehand. The hillside seems to be populated by people. Hence history becomes the humanization of nature. What is “human” in this panning shot, and what is “nature”?
