Abstract

This programmatic article sets out some conceptual and methodological preliminaries to a study of Italian cinema and history capable of offering a comprehensive answer to the question: What are the modes, genres and registers in which the century-plus of Italian dramatic cinema has dealt with the history of Italy? Dramatic historical feature films are a hugely influential form of historical representation, and history has been a particular preoccupation of Italian cinema: most conspicuously in 'admirable' or epic forms but also in many less exportable films, from opera films to low-brow comedy. The article suggests that we need to answer a methodological imperative: to study the very many 'typical' and not just those 'exceptional' Italian films that have previously constituted a canon of historical cinema; and we need to trace the development of this vastly extended corpus from early cinema to the Twenty-first Century.