A cinema of stone, wind, and silence. A cinema that seems carved directly into the ancient rock of Barbagia, rather than imprinted on film. With Bandits of Orgosolo, Vittorio De Seta does not merely continue the neorealist tradition; he takes it to another, archaic, and primordial territory, where social drama dissolves into a tragedy of classical, almost pre-Socratic stature. If the neorealism of De Sica and Rossellini was the chronicle of a humanity wounded in the rubble of recent history, De Seta's is an anthropological immersion in an immobile history, a mythical time that clashes violently with the incomprehensible modernity of the state.

De Seta, who arrives at his first feature film after the dazzling season of documentary short films of “Mondo perduto” (The Lost World), does not abandon his ethnographic gaze at all. On the contrary, he elevates it to a powerful tool of fiction. There is no trace of artifice in his Orgosolo. The faces, hands, and gestures of his protagonists are those of real Sardinian shepherds. Michele, the protagonist played by shepherd Michele Cossu, does not act: he exists, breathes, and suffers in front of the camera with a truth that the Actor's Studio could never even dream of replicating. It is the same operation, in some ways, that Robert Bresson will carry out with his “models,” but if Bresson seeks spiritual abstraction, a transcendence of the soul, De Seta seeks a telluric immanence, the rooting of man to his land, to his destiny.

The plot is disarmingly simple, the same simplicity that governs parables and myths. Michele, a shepherd who lives in symbiosis with his flock, his only source of sustenance and identity, is unjustly involved in a case of cattle rustling and the murder of a carabiniere. His innocence is irrelevant. In the eyes of the law, an abstract entity as distant as a Homeric god, he is already guilty by virtue of where he lives and what he does for a living. Thus begins his desperate escape to the rugged mountains of Supramonte, a labyrinth of limestone and Mediterranean scrub that transforms from a refuge into an open-air prison. This escape is not an action, but a reaction; it is not a choice, but a sentence. It is here that the film transcends the sociological account of Sardinian banditry to become a universal reflection on justice and determinism.

In this, Bandits of Orgosolo is the harsh, rural counterpart to Bicycle Thieves. Like Antonio Ricci, Michele is an honest man pushed to the margins by the ruthless logic of a system that neither understands nor protects him. But while Ricci's despair is consumed in the anonymous greyness of the Roman metropolis, Michele's unfolds in a landscape that is itself a protagonist, a primordial antagonist. De Seta's Supramonte is not a tourist postcard; it is a living, hostile entity that demands a tribute of sweat and blood. Vittorio De Seta's photography (yes, he was also his own cameraman) is a masterpiece of Caravaggio-esque chiaroscuro, where faces marked by the sun and fatigue emerge from the darkness like living sculptures and the landscape, bare and blinding, takes on a metaphysical dimension, almost like an ontological western.

That's right, the western. The analogy is not far-fetched; on the contrary, it is essential to deciphering the code of the film. Bandits of Orgosolo is an anti-western, or perhaps the purest and most tragic western ever made. Michele is a cowboy without borders, a pioneer of a world that is disappearing. His flock is his herd, his only wealth. The law that pursues him is not that of the sheriff who brings civilization, but an alien force that imposes an incomprehensible order. The manhunt in the Sardinian mountains has the same desperate epic quality as an escape in John Ford's canyons, but it is stripped of all romanticism. There is no lone hero who chooses his own destiny; there is a hunted man who sees his destiny crumble beneath his feet, sheep after sheep. The heartbreaking scene in which the exhausted flock plunges into the ravine is not only the loss of Michele's economic capital; it is his symbolic death, the loss of his identity as a shepherd, the erasure of his place in the world.

The narrative structure of the film follows that of Greek tragedy. There is a prologue of pastoral tranquility, a hamartia (tragic fault) that does not belong to the protagonist but befalls him like an inevitable fate, a peripeteia (reversal of fortune) that is the escape itself, and a final catastrophe that leads to no catharsis. For Michele, recognition, awareness, is not the discovery of a hidden truth, but the acceptance of an imposed lie. In the end, robbed of everything, even his innocence, Michele joins the bandits. It is not a choice of rebellion, it is not the embrace of a romantic Robin Hood-style ideology. It is the only, terrible logical consequence. It is his surrender to the label that society has pinned on him. He becomes what he has been accused of. Giovanni Verga's cycle of the defeated finds its crudest and most cinematic incarnation here. Michele, like 'Ntoni Malavoglia, is expelled from his archaic world and finds no place in the new one.

The film's soundtrack is another stroke of genius. Dialogue is reduced to the bare minimum, sparse, essential. It is the sounds of nature that speak: the wind whipping the rocks, the obsessive bleating of sheep, the labored breathing of men on the run, the sound of footsteps on stone. It is a pre-verbal language, a soundtrack that anchors us to the physical, almost animalistic dimension of the struggle for survival. De Seta forces us to feel the fatigue, the thirst, the cold. Michele's odyssey is a secular via crucis, a physical ordeal that mirrors an inner devastation.

Bandits of Orgosolo is a work that stands on a ridge. On the one hand, it is the culmination of a certain documentary trend in neorealism; on the other, it transcends it, opening up to a more abstract, more mythical cinema. It is a film that dialogues at a distance with the cinema of Flaherty (Man of Aran), due to its ability to transform ethnographic chronicle into epic, and anticipates the physicality and search for a “cinema of poetry” that will be Pasolini's. Its impartiality is its strength: De Seta does not judge, does not idealize the bandits or condemn the state. With the precision of an entomologist and the soul of a poet, it stages the mechanics of a tragedy in which individual faults vanish in the face of an irreconcilable conflict between two worlds, two codes, two historical periods. It is a film about how a “monster” is created, about how an innocent man can be forced to embody the stereotype that oppresses him. And in this, its lesson, sixty years later, resonates with formidable and terribly topical power. A black and white monolith, hard and dazzling, immovable in the canon of great world cinema.