28/01/2025 - Anja Dreschke and Michaela Schäuble transport us to the heart of Apulia where dancing becomes a form of catharsis, allowing scores of women to liberate themselves from the pain of everyday life

Before landing at the Solothurn Film Festival where it was selected for the Feature Films Panorama line-up, the intriguing and challenging movie Tarantism Revisited, written, directed and produced by anthropologists Anja Dreschke and Michaela Schäuble, was presented in a world premiere in DOK Leipzig (where it won the Golden Dove for Best German Documentary) and nominated Best Documentary Film at the Preis der deutschen Filmkritik. The power of this movie doesn’t just stem from the archive footage it brings to light but also from its capacity to forge strong and pertinent links between the past and the present, between tradition and modern-day utopias.

The film opens with an intriguing scene taking place in Apulia at the end of the 1950s. We witness a mysterious ritual enacted by women dressed in white and moving spasmodically to repetitive drumbeat rhythms, caressed by the sound of several violins. Their movements – free and provocative for the social norms of the time, but also almost choreographic, based on schemas unknown to the uninitiated - intrigue the audience from the film’s opening frames. What are we watching? Why are these women, like brides devoted only to themselves, dancing like this? What are they trying to tell us? Since the ‘50s, these questions and many others along these lines, have been the driving force behind a handful of Italian anthropologists (spearheaded by religious historian and anthropologist Ernesto de Martino) travelling to Salento in order to document and try to understand this “ritual dance” which is passed on from one generation to the next.

Tarantism Revisited follows in the footsteps of these pioneers, visiting the places they explored and lending a voice to those who’ve witnessed these dance-based catharses. And it’s one of these very witnesses who highlights the difference between the convulsions of these women who were believed to have been bitten by a venomous spider (a tarantula) and the seizures experienced by people suffering from epilepsy, or “hysteria”, as it was thought to be at the time. Unlike the latter, who couldn’t control their movements, as if their bodies were no longer answerable to their will, the so-called “tarantate” were performing a ritual whose movements – mimicking a spider’s gait - were pre-defined, like the steps of a liberatory dance which, for many women, was the only alternative to a life full of pain and constraint.

Through archive footage, in which the women in question speak reservedly and with a certain level of resigned amazement about the sickness of their souls, the film conveys the need they felt to free themselves from the burden of a life full of suffering where individuality was smothered on a daily basis. For the very first time, these Italian scholars have given a voice to women who’ve never had one. What’s particularly striking in this respect is the richness of the choreographic vocabulary the “tarantate” possessed compared with the limited range of words they used to express how they felt, as if verbal expression couldn’t even begin to compete with its physical counterpart.

The link the film forges with the present reality of women who still submit themselves to the same ritual today, is particularly interesting. The reasons behind their dance-based rebellion might be varied (the poison of the patriarchy when it comes to their ancestors and the poison of the pesticides which are suffocating their land in the case of their younger heiresses), but the power of this mysterious ritual has remained intact, as if to remind us that oppression changes shape but doesn’t ever lose its devastating force.

The product of a decade of research, Tarantism Revisited is a demanding film which works like a spiderweb to create fruitful connections between the past and the present realities of an Italian region which is still suffering today, but which is anything but resigned to its fate.

Tarantism Revisited was produced by EMB - Ethnographic Mediaspace Bern and Petit à Petit Köln.

(Translated from Italian)