Teorema (1968) and Porcile (1969) are works that clearly share common elements. They both tell stories that focus on sex and eroticism, showing faces and non-bodies. These two movies form a diptych that has its epilogue in Salò or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975). They are two philosophical films that, through allegory, show a bourgeois world that has lost its cultural roots. A world doomed to lose its way. It is a cinema of logos, a cinema of modernity, that raises questions about itself and about other forms of representation. It is a cinema that contains reflections on language, film, theatre and painting, similar to reflections, with their veiled semiotic perspective, which Pasolini wrote between 1965 and 1971, and later collected in Empirismo eretico (Garzanti, Milano 1972).

The article examines both content and style in two of Glauber Rocha’s writings on Pier Paolo Pasolini; an Italian translation is published below. Um intelectual europeu (A European Intellectual) was written in 1974 and first published in Portuguese in 1983, two years after the author’s death. In a vehement rejection of the increasingly paternalist attitude of Pasolini’s last few films, Glauber Rocha hints satirically at the colonialist implications in his representation of sexuality. Amor de macho (A Man’s Love) was published in 1975, just a few days after Pasolini’s assassination, in the alternative Brazilian magazine «O Pasquim». Glauber Rocha was living in exile in Paris at the time because of the military government ruling his country. In this piece, he evokes Pasolini as a kind of dopplegänger, whose death calls forth a host of memories and ghosts from the past, in an allegorical flow of figures and images that is very similar to the style of his films.

The conflict between television and the cinema of the Fifties hides the conflict between widescreen and stereoscopic movies, for the revival of cinema itself as a movie-theatre experience. At first, 3-D spread across the world for its practicality; it was offered both as an exhibition technology, for the screening of Hollywood productions, and as a production technology, for the screening of local productions. This essay reflects on the penetration of 3-D cinema in Italy, through the study of the only national feature film shot and projected using 3-D technology at the time: Il più comico spettacolo del mondo (1953) by Mario Mattioli, produced by Carlo Ponti and Dino De Laurentiis, for Antonio Altoviti’s Rosa Film company. This essay presents an attentive film analysis, together with the results of archival research based on film journals and production documents.

The Italo-Turkish war, between Italy and the Ottoman Empire, was the first war portrayed not only in the press and photography, but also in the movies, in documentaries (reconstructed chronicles) and fiction films. In the Cineteca Nazionale Film Archive there are many titles about the war in Libya in 1911-1912. The most interesting titles are by Luca Comerio, such as La presa di Zuara and La vita dei nostri ascari eritrei in Libia. Other exclusive images come from the newsreel series from the war front produced by Cines. The Italo-Turkish War, in fact, saw numerous technological advances used in warfare, notably the aeroplane, and cinema documented the first flights. Other frequent topics in these movies are soldiers in the trenches, cannons, waving flags and life in desert oases during breaks in the operations of war. An example of fiction films is Raggio di luce, set in Tripoli, that shows religion’s role in the war.

During the course of 2011, two spools of newsreels dating back to 1911 were found in the Historical Museum of the Bersaglieri (Museo Storico dei Bersaglieri). The event leads us to wonder about when these spools were given to the museum and why such a donation was made. Using the findings themselves as sources, together with film magazines, articles of the time and military archive documents that have come down to us, this essay recreates the historical context in which the donation actually took place and the cultural background against which such a decision was made. The conclusion that can be drawn is that the idea of keeping the two films in the museum met needs that were very strongly felt at the time, but which were, however, quite far from the reasoning behind the emergence of the first film libraries and archives.

In the variety of relationships between cinema and literature, the presence of a poet like Andrea Zanzotto is a singular exception. First, cinema emerged here and there in some of his poems; then, following Federico Fellini’s invitation, it became a collaboration on screenplays; and finally, that experience generated the critical essays dedicated to specific movies. Of particular interest is E la nave va (in «Trafic», fall 1994) – the most extensive, dense and important of his analyses and interpretations of a film – in which the poet passes easily from the film to the author, and from the author to cinema itself.

In 1978, a group of women and feminists filmed a rape trial that took place in the courthouse of the town of Latina. Loredana Rotondo and the other “girls with a video tape” made a collective documentary film that shows how female rape victims are treated in court. Public service television, in the years of experimentation and open-mindedness, became a political tool that women took advantage of, in order to represent themselves, “an unexpected subject,” and assert their right to be recognized.

Forest of Bliss (1986) can be considered an exploration of the ancient Indian city of Benares, focusing on both funeral and religious practices. The viewer comes to know the city through the eyes of the ethnographic filmmaker Robert Gardner. He describes the city through the use of complex editing that allows this documentary to be included in the sub–genre of city symphony. The film stands out both for its dense network of visual and aural symbols with which the cycle of death and regeneration is represented, and for its ability to communicate the sensory experience of “being there.” The filmic procedures of Forest of Bliss evoke synesthetic perception, increasing the viewer’s participation in the daily life of the culture shown. Because of these features, the film can be considered in relation to anthropology’s recent attention to the role of the senses in a given culture.
Forest of Bliss shows some possibilities for rendering ethnographic films effective from an anthropological point of view, thanks to the peculiarities of the film medium.