The Everyday Geopolitics. The Overbuilding of the coasts through amateur filmmaking

The touristic phenomenon which interested Liguria Region in Italy during the Second Post-War radically changed the urban aspect of involved localities, with an almost uncontrolled building development tied to the growing need of “second houses”. From this context it is very useful to understand how tourists perceived mass tourism and how they represented the suffocating concrete sea surrounding them. Amateur cinema could represent an innovative way to look at this past phenomenon since it gives the possibilities to directly look at how the touristic practice was perceived by the tourists themselves. With an interdisciplinary approach that mix geography and media studies, more than two hundred digitalized films from the National Enterprise Cinema Archive have been analyzed. The films were produced between the Fifties and the early Eighties by filmmakers who were residing in Piedmont and Lombardy. The aim of the contribution is to display possible uses of amateur cinema in environmental humanities and to understand pass behaviors, cultural “taken-for-granted”, and perceptions towards environmental damages like the overbuilding of the coast.