Marco Iuliano (University of Naples “Federico II”)
Celluloid cities: the impact of Istituto LUCE on the urban imaginary
The LUCE (L’Unione Cinematografica Educativa - Cinematographic Educative Union) was founded in Rome in 1924: it is the ancient public institution devoted to the popularization of cinema for a didactic scope. Its archive contains more than eighty years of memory, with 12,000 cinematographic journals (cinegiornali), 6,000 documentaries and a rich archive of photographs.
The cinegiornali, showed to the public in the projection rooms before the film, have certainly a propagandist scope, as we may read in the foundation act: the Institute was devoted to the “diffusion of popular culture and of general education with cinematographic visions, sold at the lowest price and handed out for charity and national propaganda”. Besides the propaganda aspect we find a huge interest for the representations of architectures and cities worldwide: this aspect, in particular, is an undervalued one of the short films that definitely influenced and oriented the collective imagination with the vision of the urban landscapes in the making and the aerial images of the cities.
The paper aims at analyzing a significant part of the production of the Istituto LUCE, mostly in the interwar period, with the show and the analysis of some short films: from the aerial view of Manhattan (1928) to the Italian urban renovation in the Fascist period.
The cinegiornali, showed to the public in the projection rooms before the film, have certainly a propagandist scope, as we may read in the foundation act: the Institute was devoted to the “diffusion of popular culture and of general education with cinematographic visions, sold at the lowest price and handed out for charity and national propaganda”. Besides the propaganda aspect we find a huge interest for the representations of architectures and cities worldwide: this aspect, in particular, is an undervalued one of the short films that definitely influenced and oriented the collective imagination with the vision of the urban landscapes in the making and the aerial images of the cities.
The paper aims at analyzing a significant part of the production of the Istituto LUCE, mostly in the interwar period, with the show and the analysis of some short films: from the aerial view of Manhattan (1928) to the Italian urban renovation in the Fascist period.
