The essay offers a survey of the literature concerning the use of cinematic texts in historical research, from the publication of Kracauer's classic From Caligari to Hitler to the most recent contributions. It singles out the principal tendencies shown by the scholars who engaged in this particular field of research such as: the use of raw unedited footage as a record of historical events and personalities; the analysis of institutionally sponsored film in order to gain insight into the motives of sponsoring institutions like governments and political parties, the idea that feature films might be indicators of the moral values, prejudices, ideas, and political and social tensions running through a society at a given time. The essay also offers an account of the major theoretical contribution by authors like Marc Ferro, Pierre Sorlin, and John E. O'Connor. The paper's ultimate purpose is to take stock of the progress made by scholars in this well-established and yet, in many respects, still controversial research thread. 'We need to study film and see it in relation to the world that produces it. What is our hypothesis? That film, image or not of reality, document or fiction, true story or pure invention, is history.'
In recent years, the use and abuse of the past for political ends has emerged as one of history's new frontiers. 2 As historian Nicola Gallerano notes, this occurs when a historiographical thread endeavors to promote a polemical reading of the past, with the aim of advancing a political agenda. 3 This article examines how tendentious or partial interpretations of the past impact on society. It does this by analyzing the emergence, in Italy, of the controversy surrounding the history of the Jewish Brigade Group (JBG). This was a five-thousandstrong British military unit stationed in Italy during World War II. The role played by JBG soldiers in the liberation of the country, largely forgotten by mainstream Italian historiography and by the general public until the late 1990s, was once again put in the spotlight in the early 2000s. This had dramatic repercussions on one of the most sacred Italian civic observances: the 25 April commemoration, which celebrates the liberation from Fascism in 1945, and the subsequent return to democracy. The rediscovery of the JBG's history exacerbated tensions between the Italian Jewish Community and pro-* I would like to offer my special thanks to the following scholars for their valuable and constructive suggestions during the planning and the writing of this article:
a small Unitelefilm crew was in Venice Lido hoping to catch some good shots of the final night of the 28 Th edition of the Venice Film Festival. In all likelihood, the footage they filmed that night, less then 3 minutes, was subsequently included in one of the attualità that Unitelefilm used to sell in those years to Eastern European countries (see Chapter 4). The mute and unedited footage is stored in the AAMOD Archive in Rome. It shows Italian and foreign celebrities, including Alberto Sordi, Luis Bunuel and Jean Sorel, posing for the usual photocall. Fans line the streets outside the Festival's venue, in front of very large posters advertising Pier Paolo Pasolini's Oedipus Rex and Damiano Damiani's The Day of the Owl. Luis Bunuel's Belle de Jour won the Golden Lion that night. Two films by politically engaged filmmakers were awarded the Special Jury Prize: La Chinoise, by Jean-Luc Godard, and China is near, by Marco Bellocchio. The former was an indictment of the capitalist system, and the latter a scathing satire of the bourgeois society. Both films included references to Maoism and China's Cultural Revolution. The political ferment that characterized that historical period would soon come out of the screen to invade the Festival's parterre. The 29 th edition of the Venice Film Festival, in 1968, saw a boycott of the festival by ANAC (Italian filmmakers association), demonstrations by students and intellectuals demanding the direction of the Festival to be entrusted to filmmakers, and even police intervention. This was not the only time that demonstrators disrupted a cinema festival that year: fringes of Left-wing students contested Pesaro Film Festival too, as shown below. Why would left-wing demonstrators target film festivals? Because cinema was gaining new status among left-wingers: a tool to investigate the political and social mechanisms of capitalist society, and
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