Abstract

Agostino Ferrente and Giovanni Piperno created the project "Intervista a mia madre" in 1999 for Italian public television. The success of the film and the personal and professional relationships established with the four characters (two twelve-year-old boys, Enzo Della Volpe e Fabio Rippa, and two fourteen-year-old girls, Adele Serra e Silvana Sorbetti) pushed the creators to return to the project ten years later. Though the filmmakers conceived "Le cose belle" as an independent documentary, they also treat it as a work in progress, recovering some sequences of unused shot of the previous films and adding some scenes after the presentation of the documentary. Inspired by the theories of «duration» of Bergson and their cinematic application by Deleuze, this article presents the genesis and the evolution of "Le cose belle" as an emblematic case of Italian documentary production in the last decade. It investigates in particular the concept of a «becoming» art piece, through an analysis of the documentary's structure.