Fifty years of Italian cinema (1955)

46 netti, who was also an efficient and sensitive documenter of his native Venice. The institution of the International Film Festival had already made Venice the meeting-place for all of the international film hierarchy. Since the inception of the Venice Festival, similar festivals have developed abroad, and are still developing. The Istituto Luce was, indeed, the most substantial and tenacious propaganda instrument of fascism, but it is likewise true that it was also the training ground for Italy's best creators of documentaries. Corrado d'Errico, Romolo Marcellini, Giorgio Ferroni, Ubaldo Magnaghi — ■ these film-makers enriched the Institute's film library with excellent documentaries. So did that admirable craftsman and artist of the scientific motion picture, Rodolfo Omegna, creator of such memorable documentaries as La nascita del pulcino (The Birth of a Chick), La zanzara (The Mosquito) and / canarini (Canaries). In these films, scientific information is presented poetically with the patience, wit and loving attention of a Fabre. At the Istituto Luce there were set down and studied for the first time the technical and educational methods of the Scholastic Film Library, now transferred to the Ministry of Public Instruction. Looted by Germans, Americans and English, the Institute's film archives still remain among the finest and most important in the world, especially in the field of newsreels of historical interest. Besides the Experimental Center and the Istituto Luce, the new Italy inherited from the defunct regime the huge Cinecitta plant, the renting and distribution organization ENIC-ECI and the CINES production company. Together with these organizations which are controlled and managed by the State, a group of private companies appeared during the period we are examining (Titanus, S.A.F.A., Scalera) plus a number of related industries, such as the developing and printing laboratories, synchronization and dubbing studios, which have done much to make Rome a film metropolis. The best guarantee of the future of the Italian film may well be its refusal to transform itself into an enormous industry. It could easily have grown into a concentration of capital with the consequent founding of giant trusts or monopolies, with bureaucratic production, standardized, and guided by a technocracy in which the idea of the machine and production line methods becomes dominant, to the detriment of human values and initiative. From a creative point of view, nothing more pernicious could happen to a motion picture enterprise. The Italian cinema was born as a craft and its greatest hope for the future is to remain a craft, since the germination and life-giving strength of the cinema is based on individual initiative. In conclusion, let us look again at some of the major exponents of the Italian cinema. What was said about Alessandro Blasetti and Mario Camerini back in 1932 can be repeated today. They were then the white hope of the Italian film. They fulfilled that hope and are fulfilling it still. Their school developed such directors as Mario Soldati, Renato Castellani, F. M. Poggioli, and to them the Italian film is further indebted for the discovery of some of its outstanding actors. The directors of the preceding generation, too, must be remembered. They, too, followed the cinema as a trade (This does not mean that others have not done the same. Without this very trade, the cinema cannot live. It cannot continue in time and space as a progressive activity, but remains a haphazard and intermittent experience). The