Early Film Theories in Italy, 1896-1922
Edited by Francesco Casetti with Silvio Alovisio and Luca Mazzei
Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam 2017

How Italian writers, scholars, clergymen, psychologists, members of parliament and philosophers reacted to the advent of cinema? How they established a common language to discuss an invention that exceeded habits and expectations, and that transcended existing forms and categories of thought? This anthology for the first time gathers a large number of social discourses that in Italy tried to define and contextualize cinema from the 1890s to 1920s. What results is an impressive picture of a culture at distress with a “scandalous” event and eager to appropriate it for the sake of modernization.

Table of contents and Introduction