This book is a rare English-language contribution to the scholarly study of modern Sardinia. It provides an overview of how Sardinia was represented by various filmmakers during the course of the twentieth century, without claiming to offer a comprehensive account of that subject. Silvio Carta ventures through the fields of anthropology, film studies, literary and cultural studies, and philosophy in his consideration of how Sardinia and its identity have been constructed in documentaries and ethnographic films. The result is an intriguing study of what he describes as ‘the particular and somewhat peculiar’ filmic discourse (back cover) on an island frequently constructed as an ‘Other’ in relation to mainland Italy. On the way, he also considers the relative advantages of film as a medium in contrast to conventional academic texts, as well as the ethics and practice of ethnographic filmmaking.

Visual Anthropology in Sardinia focuses exclusively but by no means exhaustively on films shot on one of Europe’s largest and most culturally distinctive islands. Carta suggests that producing a comprehensive history of Sardinia in film would be too massive a task to be manageable, focussing instead upon a number of case studies that enable him to analyse the construction of popular, political, and intellectual images of the island. In most cases, Carta’s chosen examples were shot by Italian filmmakers, but he also gives significant consideration to the work of foreigners. The book contains five chapters of varied lengths, the first of which provides an introduction to the volume, as well as a broad survey of documentary filmmaking in Sardinia during the twentieth century. The second chapter is chiefly concerned with the ethics of making documentaries, not least regarding how the manner in which a film is shot can affect viewers’ perceptions of its subject matter, by accentuating or diminishing certain characteristics. This discussion provides a useful foundation for what follows, as one of the most significant changes in the direction of ethnographic filmmaking in Sardinia appears to have been the move from images accompanied by voice-over narration during the early years to film accompanied by the actual dialogue of protagonists dubbed into Italian and, most recently, the Sardinian language itself.

The third chapter sees Carta’s broadly chronological examination of filmic material commence, as he considers the treatment of Sardinia by the filmmakers of the Fascist era, whom Carta judges to have wilfully downplayed the island’s cultural distinctiveness on account of Mussolini’s aim to forge a greater sense of nationhood in Italy. At the same time, Fascist filmmakers often portrayed Sardinia as ‘a virginal land’ (p. 51) undergoing a process of modernisation and revitalisation through the various initiatives of the Mussolini regime. Carta focuses in detail on Raffaello Matarazzo’s Mussolinia di Sardegna (1933), Gino Rovesti’s Fertilia di Sardegna (1936) and Fernando Cerchio’s Carbonia (1941), all of which portray the Fascist state’s creation of new towns – Mussolinia (now named Arborea), Fertilia and Carbonia – as a process of ‘internal colonisation’ by which the dictatorship aimed to modernise a land perceived to be locked in its past. An ‘illusion of modernity’ is presented on film, Carta argues, to contrast the new Sardinia of modernist Fascist architecture against the swamps and marshes of the wild island of old (pp. 67-9). However, the chapter does not end with Fascism. It goes on to show how the Fascists’ tendency to orientalise continued long after the fall of Mussolini, as Ubaldo Magnaghi’s Viaggio in Sardegna (1953) and Fiorenzo Serra’s Il regno del silenzio (two parts; 1954/1962) similarly portrayed Sardinia as peripheral and only semi-civilised.

The final two chapters focus respectively on two important examples of more recent filmmaking in relation to Sardinia: Vittorio De Seta’s documentary-style feature film Banditi a Orgosolo (1961), and the Australian filmmaker David MacDougal’s documentary Tempus de Baristas (1992). In both cases the author shows the effectiveness of the medium of film in providing an ethnographic account. Although a fictional film, Banditi a Orgoloso features real people from the village of that name and, being filmed in one of the last parts of Europe to be afflicted by banditry, it aimed to portray with realism a sense of the desperation and the hardship of its protagonists. The one significant criticism that Carta levels at Banditi a Orgosolo is the decision of De Seta to dub the film into Italian (p. 111); by contrast, the Australian maker of Tempus de Baristas opted for subtitles in order to preserve the Sardinian language, and therefore the realism of its content (p. 137). Carta concludes that the latter film – of which he is evidently a fan – offers ‘an inspiring model that challenges the adequacy of established methods and genres of ethnographic representation’. Interestingly, he suggests that it does this not only through its use of the Sardinian language, but also through its use of silence (p. 172); it is through images combined with silence that the film best captures the bond between the Sardinian people and the unique landscape of their island.

The book is handsomely packaged, being jacketed in a clean, modern cover, and printed on quality paper. On the front is a photograph, presumably taken by the author, which shows a young man and woman wearing traditional Sardinian dress. Inside are an impressive 48 further illustrations; these are mostly film stills, but there are also photographs of films being shot, and filmmakers on location. The filmography is more than five pages long, while the bibliography stretches to more than sixteen pages. The text is copiously footnoted throughout. From the point of view of an empirical historian, the language in which the book is written can occasionally be frustrating for its use of unnecessarily complicated terminology, but for the most part the author writes in pleasingly unpretentious prose. The result is an informed and interesting introduction to the ethnographic filmmaking in Sardinia.