Diary of a School Teacher (1973)
Directed by Vittorio De Seta
260 minutes
Adapting Albino Bernardini's "A Year in Pietralata", an account of teaching schoolkids on the impoverished outskirts of Rome, De Seta cast the actor Bruno Vicino as Bruno D'Angelo, a reform-minded teacher, and placed him in a classroom of real eleven-year-old boys from Tiburtino III. Fiction makes way for what Frederick Wiseman once dubbed, in a different context, reality-fiction: the kids eventually forget they're acting and bring their own lives into the film. Shot handheld on 16mm in long, circling takes and assembled laboriously over thirteen months as the boys aged and some even died, this forgotten masterpiece exists at the porous border between staging and observation, a close cousin of Jean Rouch and Jacques Rivette's own epic, early-'70s television experiments of the same time.