Abstract

Publications written by and/or for professionals in the film industry have a complex relationship with film history. Long used simply as a source for historical research, they have only recently begun to be studied as a phenomenon in their own right. In the Italian context, however, a comprehensive study of these materials is lacking: the present contribution aims to fill this gap by mapping out the trade journals in Italy from the 1940s to the 1970s and by investigating their functions. The basic assumption is that these publications, far from being mere information sheets, were an essential part of a film industry characterised by a strong relational dimension, in which financial and production practices were defined by the interaction of a complex group of stakeholders