After Brunetta: Italian Cinema Studies in Italy, 2000-2007 (original) (raw)

After Brunetta? Only in the sense that Italian cinema studies is written in the wake of Gian Piero Brunetta’s pioneering work, and is always indebted to it. In fact, Brunetta remains our contemporary. The range of his work means that scholars with very different interests find valuable material therein. Aspects adumbrated or underdeveloped in Brunetta’s writing continue to suggest new perspectives to others. At the same time, single volume histories of the Italian cinema must always seem to be written in the shadow of Brunetta’s work, or suffer unfavourable comparison with Brunetta’s own redactions of his multi-volume histories. The late Lino Micciché writes in the premessa to the first of the published volumes of the Storia del cinema italiano overseen by Micciché for Einaudi in terms of ‘una collettanea mega-storia del cinema italiano’ to be distinguished from the ineluctable point of reference, ‘la Storia di Gian Piero Brunetta, che costruisce a nostro avviso l’encomiabile massimo sforzo storiografi co che un solo individuo possa compiere sui primi novanta anni di un fenomeno così ampio, così diffuso, e così rilevante’. Brunetta, it seems, covered the ground first; the only possible successor is really a ballooning palimpsest: a fifteen-volume history written by dozens of authors. Or, just perhaps, it might be the whole range of recent publishing on Italian cinema, which is my subject in the remainder of this article. Brunetta himself has noticed that ‘sulla spinta della crescita della domanda universitaria, si assiste a una fi oritura dell’editoria cinematografi ca’, and it is this fioritura that I hope to give an account of here. This article presents an overview, selective and necessarily subjective, of the concerns and themes that have occupied scholars and critics of Italian cinema since the turn of the century.

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