“Ma ti ricordi come ci scrivevamo a lungo, da costa a costa?”: Cinema in the Private Letters of Lorenzo Pellizzari and Guido Fink between the 1960s and 1970s

Abstract

This essay is aimed at providing a first overview and analysis of Lorenzo Pellizzari’s network and personalrelationships, unravelling several elements within Italian film criticism that have remained untapped thus far.Amongst the hundreds of private letters preserved by Pellizzari and which span across fifty years of activity,valuable details about the critic’s activity and his social networks emerge. In particular, the essay focuses onthe correspondence between the Milanese critic and Guido Fink, which is particularly intense between the1960s and 1970s. An intimate epistolary relationship was born and consolidated between the two critics.The study of this mail exchange allows to gain insights into the personal and professional spheres of the twocritics, including their friendship, their work in film journals (e.g.Cinema Nuovo and Cinema & Cinema), andtheir evaluations of films recently released in U.S. and Italian theaters. Indeed, these are years in which Finkcollaborates with several Italian journals, and also works as a lecturer at Princeton University and Universityof California – Los Angeles (UCLA). The essay analyses 1) the private correspondence preserved by Pellizzariand Fink; 2) film criticism in the Pellizzari-Fink correspondence; and 3) film evaluations. Through that, inaddition to reconstructing a part of the history of Italian film criticism, the essay will unearth a form of “byletter” criticism that exists at the margin of journals’ editorial policies and is of critical relevance to filmhistoriography.