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03 July1980
Threshing
Author
Francesco Rinaldi
Format
Super8
Credits
Original sound

Peasant life as depicted by Francesco Rinaldi, the son of farmers from Savignano sul Panaro, a worker with a Super8 camera who does not completely abandon his work in the fields, filming it. We have seen the wheat harvest, in an earlier excerpt of this incredible work on the cyclical nature of the seasons and work in the countryside entitled 'Il tempo' (Time), and now here is the threshing. We are in the middle of summer, on 3 July. We hear the voice of the granddaughter and read in the caption that opens the sequence: "Grandpa, Grandpa, run there's the threshing machine..." A huge agricultural machine runs up the driveway of the Rinaldi house dragged by a tractor. Ettore, Francesco's father and the protagonist of this and other films, and the tractor man set up the machine and start it up, the threshing begins: the machine separates the grains of wheat from the ears and straw. Irma, Francesco's mother, offers wine to her husband and the other workers as the work continues: the wheat is collected in bins while the straw is collected in bales. We are towards the end of the day, the work is now finished. The tools can be collected and the threshing machine transported away. With this film, the Rinaldi family conveys a work of eternal return like that of the peasantry (albeit updated through the use of machines) and at the same time the end of an era. The peasant world in Italy at the beginning of the 1980s is in fact disappearing. Thanks to Super8, perhaps all is not lost.

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