For more than fifty years Gian Piero Brunetta , professor emeritus of history and criticism of cinema at the University of Padua , has cultivated a great love: that of Italian cinema . In an interview about twenty years ago, it is no coincidence that he defined himself as «an undisciplined scholar, an omnivorous traveler in images, who does not feed only on cinema, restless and curious who loves to mix tools, contaminate methodologies, work both from only in groups even on projects that are anything but academic. I used all the available mass media to talk about Italian cinema, to try to describe its greatness within international cinema with nationalistic pride (but I didn't try to hide its crises and miseries)."
Brunetta has dedicated studies and an insatiable passion to local cinematography which has resulted in some fundamental books for understanding the seventh art of our home .
" Italian cinema. A great story 1905-2023 " (Einaudi, 2024, pp. 592, also e-book) belongs to the group of these indispensable texts for those who love Italian films. Born with the intention of offering many students of cinema a first overall look and suggest new avenues of research, the book takes on, in fact, the characteristics of a ride through directors, actors, films, film genres, a ride capable of dragging even the simple enthusiast, inviting him to enjoy the enormous and until a few years ago unimaginable possibilities of immersion in the Italian cinema of the past, which has come back to life in all its forms thanks to restorations, the internet and digital platforms.
The adventure of Italian cinema is then revealed as a story of stories which, at various times, has oriented and modified the course of world cinema. A story that has profoundly changed the narrative, stylistic, expressive and productive ways of many cinemas and to be approached from a new perspective, being able to count on film sources and their easy accessibility to an extent unimaginable only a few years ago.
The path of Brunetta's volume thus takes into account the micro and macro history, the rediscoveries and the recent work of restoration and valorization of the heritage of silent cinema and that between the two wars. Above all, the volume dedicates ample space to the last twenty years of Italian cinema , a period still little studied by critics and on which Brunetta invites deep reflection. It is a period that sees a profound change in all production, authorial, technological and consumer landscapes. Thanks to the advent of digital and the disappearance of films, cameras and slow motion cameras, a new way of telling stories with ever-wider boundaries has established itself in recent years.
In this context, Italian cinema continues to demonstrate great vitality, reinterpreting the main genres of its tradition, from films of civil commitment or revisiting recent history, from drama to crime, to those of psychological excavation to comedy and comedy. . Thus, alongside the great names of the classics, the reader will encounter, in a perspective always attentive to telling the history of Italian cinema in the broader social history of Italy, the recent production of directors with consolidated fame (from Avati to Bellocchio, from Olmi to Moretti, from Verdone to Mazzacurati, from Giordana to Tornatore), but also the new and in many cases prestigious voices : Sorrentino, Garrone, Martone, Virzí, Archibugi, Comencini, Rubini, Soldini, Özpetek, Andò. Names that make us understand that the long adventure of Italian cinema is far from over .