Cinergie – Il Cinema e le altre Arti

Repositioning Film Criticism. Critical Displacements among the Film Critics from 1930 to 1970: Space, Connections, Movements

Paolo Noto — 2023-07-20

A Tale of Two Women in Two Countries: Suzanne Chantal and Paola Ojetti’s Professional Careers in the Film Press (1930s-mid 1940s)

Myriam Juan — 2023-07-20

This essay compares the professional experiences of Suzanne Chantal and Paola Ojetti in 1930s France and in 1930s and early-1940s Italy, respectively. Beyond their very different political, national, and cultural contexts, these women both occupied central positions within some of the most influential film periodicals of the era: Suzanne Chantal for Cinémonde and Paola Ojetti for Film. This study is mainly based on sources which enable us to take a closer look at their activities, their working conditions, and their feelings regarding the treatment they received while working for these periodicals. Sources include Suzanne Chantal’s memoirs and her personal diaries from the late 1930s, kept by her family, and Paola Ojetti’s extensive working correspondence, preserved in the Fondo Mino Doletti of the Biblioteca Renzo Renzi at the Cineteca di Bologna, as well as other correspondence documents preserved in Italian archives. This paper explores the working trajectories and social positioning made by these two largely forgotten but powerfully significant figures in order to establish themselves in a predominantly male professional and cultural environment, while at the same time questioning the limits of their integration. By shedding light on microhistory and questioning gender issues, this article turns its attention primarily to working practices, women’s paths, and social networks of film press and film criticism history.

Jean George Auriol (1907-1950), a Critic Mediator between Rome and Paris

Enrico Gheller — 2023-07-20

Based on unpublished sources found in French and Italian archives, this article focuses on the figure of Jean George Auriol (1907-1950), French screenwriter and one of the most important and celebrated film criticsand magazine editors of his time. The primary goal of this research is to highlight Auriol’s efforts, beforeand after WWII, to establish links between the film communities in France and Italy. In the late 1930s, Auriol began collaborating with Italian producers and directors, an activity that ended prematurely with the beginning of hostilities. After the war, Auriol made use of his magazine, La Revue du Cinéma, to reinforcehis dialogue with Italian film, and developed a unique and polemical point of view on the much-discussed topic of neorealism. In a later period, in order to prove the existence of a new generation of auteurs, and to underline the significant continuities between neorealism and previous cinema, Auriol helped to promote Italian films through the network of French ciné-clubs. In this context, he most notably celebrated the work of Alessandro Blasetti and Renato Castellani, who proved, according to Auriol, that neorealism in no way implied the erasure of creative authority.

Silence and Noise. Military Honor in the Public and Private Correspondence of the L’armata s’agapò Case

Michael Guarneri — 2023-07-20

Published in February 1953 in Guido Aristarco’s magazine Cinema Nuovo, Renzo Renzi’s film proposal L’armata s’agapò broke the long-standing Italian media silence about the fascist aggression and occupation of Greece. More than the film proposal itself (which attracted very little attention at the time of its publication), it was the arrest, detention, military trial and conviction of Aristarco and Renzi for contempting the Armed Forces in September-October 1953 that created noise and prompted Italian citizens of all ages and socio-economic, professional, political and religious background to critically re-examine the events of the Second World War. By transgressing the prohibition against discussing fascist Italy’s military campaigns, and by calling these campaigns a grotesque farce with a tragic ending, Aristarco and Renzi managed to open a debate that, from the pages of a specialized magazine aimed at a small audience of cinephiles, moved to a reporter-filled courtroom for the whole country to follow. Through the analysis of public and private correspondence about the ‘s’agapò case’, the essay investigates the concept of military honor in relation to the conduct of the Italian Army in Greece from 1940 to 1943. In so doing, the essay shows that the legal proceedings occasioned by L’armata s’agapò weren’t only a domestic matter of freedom of expression in a Christian-Democrats-run, imperfectly democratic republic risen from the ashes of the monarchic-fascist regime; they were also part of an international affair concerning the political and military positioning of Italy in the new world order of the Cold-War era.

Habla sobre cine. Notes on Ugo Casiraghi

Sara Tongiani — 2023-07-20

The Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos - ICAIC was established by the Cuban government in March 1959. The institute promoted a peculiar interpretation of the revolution and its imagery, also presenting itself as a new space for an international discussion on cinema. In a such context, directors, critics, and intellectuals from all over the world were welcomed to Cuba by the government menbers and by the Cine Cubano group. In December 1966, Ugo Casiraghi was welcomed to Cuba by Alfredo Guevara, one of the creators and the first president of the Institute. The story of these relationships and this journey is intertwined with Casiraghi's encounter with cinema, authors and the reality of "Third World Cinema". This occasion allowed Casiraghi to meet in persona or see again cubain directors, critics, intellectulas, artists, from ICAIC and Cine Cubano, while the journey iteself was made possible by the link between Italian film culture and the development of the Cuban film industry and film-educational structures. According to Mariani and Venturini perspective (2017), this article aims to interpret the figure of Casiraghi, reading the work and experience of the critic in the light of two important definitions and notions, such as that of " cultural intermediary” (Andreazza 2014) and “cultural agent of translation” (Salazkina 2012).

Alessandro Blasetti’s Producer’s and Critic’s Game. Repositioning from the Fascist Regime to the Post-war Period

Francesca Tesi — 2023-07-20

Alessandro Blasetti’s career reaches a turning point in 1942: at the end of the year Quattro passi fra le nuvole is released. The film is retrospectively considered a forerunner of Neorealism. Since then, Blasetti focuses on realistic dramas in humble settings e.g., Nessuno torna indietro (1944), up to the partisan resistance themed Un giorno nella vita (1946). However, from the late 30s to the first half of 1942, Blasetti works mainly on historical films, such as Ettore Fieramosca (1938), Un’avventura di Salvator Rosa (1939), La corona di ferro (1941) and La cena delle beffe (1942). As a result of this productive repositioning, how does Blasetti change his critical posture to reconfigure himself within the field? The paper aims to retrace Blasetti’s works in parallel with his public statements on the press to find fluctuations and shifts. To do so, the author uses the concepts of producer’s game and critic’s game derived from Altman’s genre theory, together with some of Bourdieu’s tools. Blasetti’s repositioning takes place within a context of drastic political and cultural changes, from the first signs of the Second World War to the Postwar period, from the fascist Regime to Neorealism.

“The Important Thing is the Fusion”: Giuseppe Marotta and Film Criticism

Mattia Cinquegrani — 2023-07-20

Novelist, screenwriter, dramaturgist, lyricist and journalist, from the late Twenties, Giuseppe Marotta also worked as a film critic for many magazines. However, he definitively established himself as a critic in 1954, when he started his collaboration with the column of the news magazine L'Europeo. Mixing analysis, autobiographical account and narration, the film review acquired, with Marotta, an original and unconventional nature. The hyperbolically ironic style, the recourse to digression as well as to a richly elaborated phrasing characterized his reflection on cinema, which combined the desire to affirm the autonomy of cinematographic language, to oppose the narrative strategies of neorealism and to promote a cinema freed both from the features of popular film production and from the more mannered forms of authorship.

“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

Marco Zilioli — 2023-07-20

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.

Antonio Covi: An Institutionalized Militant for the Emergence of Film Culture

Steven Stergar — 2023-07-20

Padua, 30s. A young Antonio Covi contributed to making the city’s Film Club possible by playing a crucial role as a cinephile militant amongst public debates, filmmaking experiences, and film critics mainly published in local journals. In less than a decade, he obtained his Literature degree with a dissertation on film aesthetic in 1940, attended then film courses at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, and, finally, he joined the Jesuits Society in August 1945. The Ignatian confreres immediately acknowledge his aptitude for film and arts, enough for obtaining pivotal roles in Jesuit cultural policies over the years. This step from “militancy” toward “institution” allowed him to embrace national perspectives, establishing him as a reference point for Catholics in film knowledge widespread both in the Fifties and Sixties. During these two decades, father Covi published several articles and essays on film criticism and aesthetics, led the Antonianum Cineforum in Padua and film courses throughout Italy, and ran a local film production company. Film criticism as a form of cultural diplomacy and education represents the thread for all these activities. The paper aims to point out Antonio Covi’s contribution to Italy’s film culture from the 1930s to the 1960s. Firstly, by questioning the shift from “militancy” to “institution” and his role as a film critic during those years. Secondly, by underlying his discourses on film knowledge spread over national and local journals, books, public statements, and film courses as well, proposing, therefore, a diagnostic analysis of terms and themes he dealt with.

Guido Aristarco: From Lascia o Raddoppia? to Broadcast Media

Matteo Macaluso — 2023-07-20

This paper analyzes various documents from the archive at the library of the Cineteca di Bologna, "Renzo Renzi", which corroborate a professional collaboration between film critic Guido Aristarco and the state-run broadcaster Radiotelevisione Italiana (Rai) for the popular TV show Lascia o raddoppia? in 1956. These materials, including lists of questions about history of cinema, are a resource for recent studies that regard Italian film criticism as a relational system. More precisely, it is yet another in step in the historicization of a high-profile figure like Guido Aristarco and investigates the ways in which Aristarco used broadcast media, which occupied a central position in the media system during this period, as a pace for action within the complex dynamics of modern mass society.

The Distant Roar of Battle: The Italian Film Criticism Unions in the Press of the Period

Matteo Berardini — 2023-07-20

Throughout the twentieth century, Italian film criticism ran into various moments of crisis; three of these triggered the foundation of a union organization, a political instrument with little affinity for the intellectual elites and yet cyclically present in the history of our criticism. The years in question are 1916, 1925 and 1971, to which we owe, respectively, the Syndicate of the Film Press, the Syndicate of Intellectuals of Cinematography and the National Syndicate of Italian Film Critics. They are profoundly different moments and in any case in dialogue with each other, as phases of an identity repositioning in which the professional and ideological, political and social levels intersect. The aim of this essay is therefore to recover the studies that interpret the discursive practice of criticism as an entity ontologically connected to a state of crisis (de Man, Frey) to place them in a more accentuated historical framework. To do so, the three quoted periods will be reconstructed and analysed, using an archival corpus of period press as sources, and the cultural industry as an additional theoretical framework in the context of Italian literary theory of the sixties (Ferretti, Fortini), in order to restore facets and complexities of crisis that would otherwise not be resolved in purely endemic and ontological terms.

Una cartografia di sguardi. Fabio Andreazza (a cura di), Fare storia del cinema. Metodi, oggetti, temi , Carocci, Roma 2022

Andrea Gelardi — 2023-07-20

Serialità/Comunità. Utopia e ideologia nelle serie televisive contemporanee. Massimiliano Coviello, Comunità seriali. Mondi narrati ed esperienze mediali nelle serie televisive, Roma, Meltemi 2023

Federico Pagello — 2023-07-20

La natura mediale della moda. Adriano D’Aloia, Marco Pedroni (a cura di), I media e la moda. Dal cinema ai social network, Carocci, Roma 2022

Sofia Panza — 2023-07-20

Maschere e volti dell’età infantile. Bruno Surace, I volti dell’infanzia nelle culture audiovisive. Cinema, immagini, nuovi media, Mimesis, Milano-Udine 2022

Giuseppe Previtali — 2023-07-20

Frammenti visivi. Lucia Tralli, Vidding Grrls. Nuovi sguardi sulle pratiche di genere nei fandom, Meltemi, Milano 2021

Eleonora Santamaria — 2023-07-20

Festival di Berlino. Uno sguardo alla 73ª edizione: il concorso e la retrospettiva

Cinzia Cattin — 2023-07-20

Bodies to Explore: 60th New York Film Festival

Angela Dalle Vacche — 2023-07-20

Sanremo expanded: the Transmedia Transition of the Narrative Ecosystem of the 2023 Festival between Brand, Storytelling and Participatory Practices

Luca Bertoloni — 2023-07-20

This essay we analyze the characteristics of the transmedia transition of a well-known event in the Italian cultural, social, and media scape: the Festival of Sanremo. Starting from the analysis of the 2023 edition, and contextualizing it within the contemporary media landscape, within the new convergent, social and transmedia television and within the current media system, we will observe some phenomena of hybridization with the storytelling of other media, like cinema and tv series, highlighting the transmedia turn of this medial event, which repositions it within the cultural consumption of Italians as a brand, which configures it as a narrative ecosystem with expansions and extensions, and which puts it at the center of some participatory practices by viewers. In this way, the new expanded Sanremo offers new and increasingly transmedia gateways to the television experience, and at the same time also to the world of popular music that it places on the screen.

The Anti-television of Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville: Six fois deux émissions télévision cinéma (1976) and France tour détour deux enfants (1978)

Alberto Scandola — 2023-07-20

The television series Six fois deux émissions télévision cinéma (1976) and France tour détour deux enfants (1978), written, producted and directed by Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville, retain, after half a century, much of their poetic and political force. The main goal of Sonimage, the experimental audio-visual laboratory established by Godard and Miéville in the 1970s, is to reflect on a civilization living under communication. Godard and Miéville, operating within a Post-Structuralist framework, use video as a research tool through which to analyze contemporary communication processes. The objectives of this article are twofold: firstly to examine the aesthetics of two television series and secondly to investigate the purpose of the Sonimage project, aimed to unmask the hypocrisy of a medium which, if not used to simply tell stories, is reduced to a speaker of the Power. Once again Godard proves that, even on the television screen, a face is nothing but an image and a word is simply a sound.