Luca Malavasi

A ‘formless’ genre, which traverses the whole history of the cinema, frequently altering its appearance and functions, the ‘back-stage’ or ‘making-of’ film appears at many points of its history to converge with the immense range of amateur practices. A series of clues, relative to both the form and production strategies and to the enunciational perspective that characterize it, are in fact related to the field of those audiovisuals pro- duced and consumed within a non-professional logic and context, and where it is precisely the dimension of ‘love’, namely the dimension of the impassioned and the affective, that emerges as the driving force. The paper exemplifies the development of the genre and its frequent oscillation between amateur and profession- al approaches by means of case histories drawn from the history of the Italian cinema.

The essay proposes to study three key moments of the history of cinema from the technological perspective, using as “reagent” the Pio Pion Workshop in Milan that was active from the early twentieth century onward in the production of cinema projectors. The analysis focuses firstly on the manner in which technology served or simply encountered the programmes of the Mussolini regime, or, more generally, how cinematographic technology interacted with the socio-cultural and political milieu, both influencing and undergoing the influence of the surrounding context. Secondly, attention centres on the advent of the sound track and way Pion responded to this new element: it is shown that in relation both to the ‘body’ of the technology as well as its functions, the approach adopted by Pion reflected the overall evolutionary trend chacterising the history of cinema and consumption. Finally, the case of teleprojection, developed by Pion in the mid-1959s to allow the projection of television programmes at the cinema, embodies an attempt at technological integration which testifies to a special attitude towards the new medium: rather than magnifying the differences compared to cinema, emphasis was placed on heightening the similarities.