This dossier’s short selection of essays is meant to shed light on cinema sperimentale, a peculiar phenomenon that developed during Italy’s fascist period. The term translates literally to “experimental cinema” and was applied to all amateur cinema practice during the period in which it became institutionalized, from approximately 1934 to 1943. The amateur film movement originated in the loose liberal organizations usually—but not always —called Cine-clubs, from the French model, when in 1926, a literary circle in Milan (Convegno) inaugurated film sessions, hosting projections of silent film, avant-garde, or amateur films. From 1926 to 1933, a few groups began organizing film activities and producing short films, too. But in 1934, liberal film clubs and associations were pressured into joining with existing university organizations for fascist students called the Gruppi universitari fascisti (University Fascist Groups) or Guf for short. Some Guf actually existed beginning in 1921, a full year before the fascist ascent to power with the March on Rome, but became much more widespread afterwards. Under this umbrella organization, young and aspiring filmmakers could continue developing their amateur practices within these formal groupings, which became officially referred to as the Guf’s Cinema Sections, or Cineguf.
Amateur film practices were thus centralized and reformed along a hierarchical model, which was intended to monitor and control independent film activities and educate a new generation of filmmakers who could serve the fascist state. These top-down policies pushed fledgling collectives of amateurs, working primarily with small-gauge film formats, to substantially reinvent Italian cinema. Guaranteed financial support from the National Fascist Party of Italy helped propel the amateur cinema movement, with membership in Cinegufs surging nationwide. The Cineguf network upwards of 60 branches across Italy, as well as in its colonies and protectorates abroad, and produced numerous short films of all genres and in all regions of the country. Young people joining these groups were not just filmmakers and technicians; they also wrote about cinema in various film journals and booklets, theorizing their own practices and speculating what the future portended for Italian cinema. These excerpts offer a glimpse into their cinematic worlds.
Amateur Film as Experimental Film
The first excerpt comes from an influential manifesto of the movement, Cinema Sperimentale, published in 1937 in Naples. The author, Domenico Paolella, was a member of the Cineguf of Naples and became an acclaimed film director in the post-war period. These translated pages aim to convey some of the cultural and linguistic innovations the author attempted to codify in order to argue for a new and experimental fascist cinema that would diverge from its liberal antecedent. The author stresses a pivotal difference between “experimental” (“sperimentale”) and “amateur” (“dilettante”). He sets this difference in historical perspective, evoking the “dawn” of a new kind of film practice, one that stems directly from the creation of the General Directorate of Cinematography at the Under-Secretariat for Press and Propaganda in 1934. This watershed moment for the Italian film industry was part of the rethinking of amateur films practices, particularly emphasizing their central role in regenerating Italian cinema under fascism.
Paolella freely substitutes the word “experimental” for “amateur” in this text, discarding the set of pejorative associations the latter immediately conjures up. However, his adoption of “experimental” as a modifier is notably circumspect; he distances his use of the term from its pre-conceived associations with modernism, intellectualism, and formalism. Instead, his celebration of “experimental” practices insists on practicality and utility, connoting non-commercial technical operations that can be learned through apprenticeships to the end of building a fascist society. In another translated excerpt from the journal Libro e Moschetto (Journal of the Guf of Milano) Attilio Giovannini states this principle directly: “The Guf serves the national film industry through the work of the Cineguf.”
Experimentality is essentially a creative attitude for Paolella, who goes out of his way to highlight the adaptable qualities of 16mm film—the only stock widely distributed by the state to the Cinegufs. He notes that small gauge technology was particularly suited to “experimentation” in a range of different contexts, and even provides the following example: “The minimal encumbrance of the small format’s devices and the limited light intensity needed for the shooting speed of 16mm makes it very well-suited for filming surgical operations.” He calls experimentality a “posizione” or “attitude” that scrutinizes the world through cinematic processes. The ability to control all the productive stages of a film to novel ends, whatever the genre, be it documentary, scientific and industrial film, or fiction and even animation, is the essence of experimentality in Paolella’s conception. Thus, the idea of the amateur or hobbyist of old must be discarded for its unseriousness, supplanted by the rigor of the experimental.
The historical background of Italian experimental film is important to consider in the context of Paolella’s ideas. Animating his writings is a sense of urgency to renew Italian cinema in the wake of the crisis of the Italian Film Industry in the 1920s. Italian amateur film culture of the late 1920s and early 1930s reflects this need for reformation and transformation. These efforts cast aesthetic and technical research as the core of the experimental practice, and a perennial gaze toward new technological and aesthetic horizons characterized the experimental movement Paolella was trying to cultivate. Attilio Giovannini also captured this ethos in the Guf newspaper Libro e moschetto: “It is not a matter of perpetuating an already established art such as painting, music and theatre, but rather of building from scratch and in the shortest possible time, out of necessity that it is no exaggeration to call contingent.” In this passage he insists that the cinematic medium is still open to new forms of reinvention and reconceptualization and that this reboot must reflect the contingency of the fascist present and imagined fascist future. Arrigo Colombo, writing in the poetry review, Il Ventuno, echoed this creative attachment to the unifying and clarifying ideology of the same fascist present as an aid to creative practice. Colombo insists that when the collaborative aspect of cinema is simplified by the shared ideals and principles of fascism, it becomes useful, “technically speaking, for the purpose of realizing a film.” Thus, the ideology of fascism is cast as a technological necessity to students experimenting with new filmmaking practices.
Experimental cinema is therefore envisioned as the “future” of Italian cinema. Unsurprisingly, experimental filmmakers were explicitly heralded as “le avanguardie della cinematografia” –
literally the “vanguard of cinema”—a moniker routinely applied to them by the journal Eco del cinema in their periodic reports about Cineguf activities. Given the fascist state’s suspicious attitude towards modernist and intellectualist avant-gardes, the meaning of the term “vanguard” should be considered primarily with militarist, rather than strictly artistic, connotations. This semantic ambiguity of the term “experimental” and urge to redefine and expand the existing lexicon undergirds the revolutionary tension permeating the youth cultures and discourses of Italian fascism.
Amateur Film as Silent Film
The sense of history (and of an impending triumphant future) that Paolella sketched out in his introduction to the Cineguf films, and which so singularly characterizes the Cineguf’s reappropriation of the idea of “experimentality” in cinema, alters our understanding of film history writ large. “The experimental film, with or without intertitles, post-synchronized with discs or not, is always silent and in black and white,” writes Paolella. If the affinity between amateur cinema, experimental cinema, and early silent cinema emerges in the same period in different national contexts, then the reflection on the origins of cinema taking place in the Cinegufs reinforces the idea of a new, or newly virgin, cinema, a sort of parallel story of cinema to be authored in the present. The discourse promoted in the Cineguf network stressed an essential silentness as the origin of cinema. This silentness was the overarching premise for the birth of another cinema, one that marked another time in film history, which was construed as a time of experimentation, revolution, and regeneration in the wake of small-gauge film technology.
If cinema’s silentness belongs to the past (at a time when the push toward synchronized sound was acutely felt in all cinematic industries), the silentness of small-gauge film technology asserts the peculiar characteristic of experimental film and recaptures its cinematic origins—its potential to start anew the history of cinema. This was deemed the aesthetic solution for cinematic revitalization by fascist theorists like Paolella: “The muteness of the medium will constrain the experimentalist to resolve everything in silent scenes that offer the equivalent of a brutally honest analysis of reality that breaks feelings into small pieces.” From this point of view, silentness becomes necessary for a reinvigorated treatment of reality, and a new mode of realism in film aesthetics. It was deemed a way to make the present (the immediacy of the present, and the will to act, is a recurring rhetorical obsession of fascist writers) patent in the film image.
In February 1943 this topic remained relevant, as seen in an excerpt by Virgilio Sabel, written in Pattuglia, the Journal of the Guf of Forlì. He writes, “It seems to me that silent film is a good school of cinema.” Later, he expands on the same point: “Indeed, in cinematic storytelling, visual resolutions are the ones that are most direct and most intense and should form the backbone of the story, just as resolutions through dialogue are necessary to the story only when a visual technique would be overly drawn-out, gratuitous, anti-cinematic, or unclear.” This last sentence seems to favor the pureness of silent film, contrasting it with the aesthetic betrayal of sound, which does not belong to the cinematic sphere. Not coincidentally, this sentiment echoes Rudolf Arnheim’s polemics about the advent of sound, published in Italy in 1936 and 1937.
Conclusion: Political Legitimacy
Fascist state legitimized and encouraged experimental practices to impart technical expertise to young filmmakers to serve pragmatic political ends. These filmmakers would then possess the competence and artistry in service of shaping the new fascist citizen. A new generation of filmmakers trained in the Cinegufs would be inclined to publicize and propagandize for the Fascist state that had indirectly formed them. Experimentality therefore emerged as a hallowed pursuit not exclusively or explicitly associated with attaining professional status in the Italian film industry. Neither was it explicitly juxtaposed with work in commercial cinema, but rather, experimentation in the Cinegufs represented an intermediate stage in cinematographic maturity.