Luca Peretti
British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Warwick. I wrote "Un dio nero un diavolo bianco. Storia di un film non fatto tra Algeria, Eni, Solinas e Sartre" (Marsilio, 2023) and co-edited volumes on terrorism and cinema (Postmedia books, 2014), Pier Pasolini Pasolini (Bloomsbury Academics, 2018), and on Italian cinema and Algeria (AAMOD, 2022). My work has appeared in, among others, Senses of Cinema, The Italianist, Interventions. International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, Annali d’Italianistica, Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies, Historical Materialism, Comunicazioni Sociali, L’Avventura. I am the editor-in-chief of Cinema e Storia, and I wrote and co-produced the film Mister Wonderland (dir. Valerio Ciriaci, 2019). I also collaborate with newspapers and magazines.
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United States at the end of the 1960s, "Seize the Time" by Antonello
Branca (1970) and "Zabriskie Point" by Michelangelo Antonioni
(1970). Very different in style, production, and intended
audiences, Antonioni’s and Branca’s films share themes and
atmosphere, they are both immersed in the political environment
of the time and they are examples of Italian transnational cinema
and Italian representations of the United States. In different ways,
they show how, in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s words, ‘in America…
everything is going to begin’, but they are also examples of the
failure of this potential new beginning.
the so-called anni di piombo (leaden years). In the first part of the
paper, I try to define this very elusive object of study (that of the
unmade films), raising some theoretical and methodological
questions. In the second part, I focus on my case study, a group
of films (or rather scripts and projects) on the anni di piombo.
Different filmmakers were involved in the making of these
projects, written between 1978 and 2008: Ugo Pirro, Tonino
Zangardi, Cesare Zavattini, and most importantly Giuseppe De
Santis. I discuss these works within the larger literature on cinema
and anni di piombo that flourished since 2007. I conclude that
studying these unfinished films may help us shed light on the
films that were actually made and on the production processes in
Italian cinema, but also that these projects can be studied as texts
on their own.
regularly screen and organize screenings of Italian films. We conclude that chance, special occasions, and random choices seem to drive much of this kind of distribution of Italian films in the Anglophone countries, a conclusion that is not a value judgement but rather an observation. We
also note how a certain realist tendency of Italian cinema seems to be still accepted and promoted, as are social and political themes, in part thanks to many documentaries that do not always get distributed in Italy but that are often screened abroad. Finally, we hope this preliminary research
will soon be complemented by other research of this kind, possibly in collaboration with scholars from other disciplines ranging from cultural economics to the sociology of organizations.
Book chapters
the beginning of the 1960s. At the centre of geopolitical and economic
interests, Iran was one of the sites where the Italian company looked
for oil, signing agreements with the local government. Several teams of
geologists and geophysics worked there at the time, and together with
maps and different tools they also brought amateur cameras that they
used to shoot at least eighty short films, now preserved in the company’s
archive. The chapter discusses these films and how they came to be, at
the intersection of sponsored, amateur, ethnographic, and travel cinema.
United States at the end of the 1960s, "Seize the Time" by Antonello
Branca (1970) and "Zabriskie Point" by Michelangelo Antonioni
(1970). Very different in style, production, and intended
audiences, Antonioni’s and Branca’s films share themes and
atmosphere, they are both immersed in the political environment
of the time and they are examples of Italian transnational cinema
and Italian representations of the United States. In different ways,
they show how, in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s words, ‘in America…
everything is going to begin’, but they are also examples of the
failure of this potential new beginning.
the so-called anni di piombo (leaden years). In the first part of the
paper, I try to define this very elusive object of study (that of the
unmade films), raising some theoretical and methodological
questions. In the second part, I focus on my case study, a group
of films (or rather scripts and projects) on the anni di piombo.
Different filmmakers were involved in the making of these
projects, written between 1978 and 2008: Ugo Pirro, Tonino
Zangardi, Cesare Zavattini, and most importantly Giuseppe De
Santis. I discuss these works within the larger literature on cinema
and anni di piombo that flourished since 2007. I conclude that
studying these unfinished films may help us shed light on the
films that were actually made and on the production processes in
Italian cinema, but also that these projects can be studied as texts
on their own.
regularly screen and organize screenings of Italian films. We conclude that chance, special occasions, and random choices seem to drive much of this kind of distribution of Italian films in the Anglophone countries, a conclusion that is not a value judgement but rather an observation. We
also note how a certain realist tendency of Italian cinema seems to be still accepted and promoted, as are social and political themes, in part thanks to many documentaries that do not always get distributed in Italy but that are often screened abroad. Finally, we hope this preliminary research
will soon be complemented by other research of this kind, possibly in collaboration with scholars from other disciplines ranging from cultural economics to the sociology of organizations.
the beginning of the 1960s. At the centre of geopolitical and economic
interests, Iran was one of the sites where the Italian company looked
for oil, signing agreements with the local government. Several teams of
geologists and geophysics worked there at the time, and together with
maps and different tools they also brought amateur cameras that they
used to shoot at least eighty short films, now preserved in the company’s
archive. The chapter discusses these films and how they came to be, at
the intersection of sponsored, amateur, ethnographic, and travel cinema.