A heady blend of frenzied dance and religious ritual, with overtones of demonic possession and symbolic exorcism, tarantism is a bizarre tradition mostly associated with women in impoverished farming communities in southern Italy. Drawing on a wealth of historical research, plus their own newly shot footage, film-makers and visual anthropologists Anja Dreschke and Michaela Schäuble explore this fascinating phenomenon through a 21st century lens in Tarantism Revisited, a free-ranging documentary that blurs the line between academic investigation and impressionistic audio-visual artwork.
A little esoteric at times, Tarantism Revisited is an uncompromising essay-film. But even if the director duo’s formal approach sometimes lacks cohesion, the raw material is rich, the visuals very artfully packaged, and subject matter never less than fascinating. A feminist-leaning agenda to reclaim and reframe this erotically charged, heavily gendered, politically anarchic folk subculture will also give the film extra audience traction. After winning the Golden Dove prize for Best German Documentary at DOK Leipzig film festival, this engaging, lightly experimental work should secure further festival, scholarly and specialist interest.
First recorded in journals as far back as the 11th century, tarantism was once attributed to peasant women being bitten by deadly spiders or scorpions, and thus having to sweat the poison out through wild dancing. But the science behind this interpretation is very shaky, and in any case the practise soon became entangled with folklore, magic, superstition and Catholic church custom.
Video and audio archive material in Tarantism Revisited shows women dressing in white bridal gowns and congregating around the church at Galatina, typically around the feasts of Saints Peter and Paul in June. Rituals of remorse and sacrifice, their ecstatic dances sometimes involve rubbing themselves against saintly in a sexually suggestive manner, or hitting them, or even urinating on the church floor. Dreschke and Schäuble do not make this connection, but there are distant echoes here of Linda Blair’s spider-walking, foul-mouthed, diabolically possessed Regan in The Exorcist (1973).
In 1959, an interdisciplinary team led by Ernesto De Martino travelled to Apulia in the heel of Italy to try and demystify tarantism using scientific scrutiny. Dreschke and Schäuble draw heavily on this group’s extensive audio-visual archive, plus a wealth of subsequent journalistic material, news reports and books. Woven though the film are spoken-word extracts of 65 letters sent by Michela Margiotta, an epileptic peasant woman who became a tarantata, and anthropologist Annabella Rossi, part of De Martino’s original team, who later published the correspondence as part of her research. These impressionistic snapshots lends a modicum of narrative shape to a fairly unstructured film, though they only offer fragmentary insights rather than any definitive account.
Over the past few decades, some southern Italian communities have embraced tarantism as a purely aesthetic music-and-dance subculture. In 1998, Salento began hosting an annual festival based on this subgenre, Notte della Taranta, with composer Ludovico Einaudi later serving as artistic director. As Dreschke and Schäuble demonstrate, tarantella dances are now banned in churches, but promoted as part of the tourist industry. A group in Galatina is even campaigning for UNESCO to give this eye-catching folk art protected status as a piece of intangible cultural heritage.
Dreschke and Schäuble pepper their dreamlike mosaic film with some dry visual in-jokes: a Spiderman poster, a balloon with a demonic face, children on a fairground ride whose shaky movements resemble the tarantella. More seriously, the directors also highlight how women drawn to tarantism were often unmarried, marginalised, uneducated outsiders, sometimes seeking escape from abuse and trauma. It is a gutsy reading of historical events, which resonates with contemporary gender politics, but it only manifests in frustratingly opaque hints rather than as a persuasive body of evidence. While Tarantism Revisited is a rich, atmospheric, sporadically mesmerising piece of work, a little more focussed feminist analysis would have given this fascinating story more bite.
Directors screenwriters, producers: Anja Dreschke, Michaela Schäuble
Cinematography, editing: Anja Dreschke
Sound: Birgit Minichmayr
Music, sound design: Carlo Peters
Production companies: Ethnographic Mediaspace Bern (Switzerland), Petit à Petit (Germany)
Venue: DOK Leipzig film festival (German Competition Documentary)
In Italian, German, English
105 minutes
