Formato famiglia. Angelo Donelli, il Marchiondi e il cinema nella sfida educativa

Through an analysis of the home movies collection of Angelo Donelli (1922-2011) – a child neuropsychiatrist, Director of the Marchiondi Spagliardi Institute in Milan, an educational and assistance institute that took in children in psycho-social distress – the essay deals with the singular case of a production that crosses private and collective history. Indeed, the images testify to a feeling towards the world as a community, of which the Marchiondi, with its modernist architecture, is the frame and the horizon. A type of document of an extended family that welcomes children without a family, Donelli's cinema seems to observe and give shape to an educational experiment; the images are not limited to witnessing activities with children (camping vacations, parties, sports competitions), but define an "insertion", a literal entry into the "family format." The children of the institute burst into the images and the Donelli family life, imposing themselves on the viewer’s gaze and demanding more-than-visual attention. Their entry into the visual range is more than a joyful incursion or a childish desire for protagonism; it is the desire to be part of a recognition process, to which the image gives form. A historical trace, even before being a private memory, both of an exemplary place such as the Marchiondi, as well as of an avant-garde educational method, Donelli's films were regularly screened at the Institute, in a sort of rite of recognition that completes their cognitive, affective and social agency