‘Among Those Who Stay and Those Who Depart, the Happiest are Still the Tunas Sailing the Oceans’: Amateur Cinema as a Vernacular Source for the Ecocritical Thought

Can amateur films and home movies serve as valuable primary sources for the environmental humanities? If so, what insights can they offer? These are the main inquiries that guided my doctoral research, during which I analysed through an ecocritical lens more than 300 vacation home movies filmed in Italy between 1950 and 1980 . To achieve this goal, I used a mixed methodology both in archival research and in visual analysis including tools from digital humanities and social sciences. The focus of this contribution will be on one of the themes that emerged from the research, specifically, the relationship between tourists and fishermen during the Italian economic boom of the late second post war period. It will be demonstrated how touri sts from affluent and modern areas perceived and represented the labour of rural fishing in poorer areas. The narratives reveal a contrast between the perceptions of tourists and fishermen on the relationship between humans and non human animals, specifica lly during dramatic scenes such as traditional tuna and swordfish fishing.