What is "the critic's trade"? A glimpse into Guido Aristarco's correspondence

Abstract

The goal of this article is to present and comment upon the findings of some preliminary surveys in the archive of Guido Aristarco, and to outline a few operational hypotheses for a research that investigates Italian film criticism as a field of professional and cultural relations. The figure of Aristarco and the experience of his journal Cinema Nuovo are analyzed through the copious mail archive of the critic, an ideal source to reconstruct both the private and professional relationships in which he was involved. The employed materials come largely from the personal archive of Aristarco, divided into two different repositories, one kept at the library of the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia “Luigi Chiarini” in Rome, the other at the library of the Cineteca di Bologna “Renzo Renzi”.