The outbreak of the student movement in 1968 started a ten-year period of social and political confrontation in Italy that had no equal in the rest of Europe. All sectors of society and all aspects of personal life underwent attempts to change, criticise and revolt.
How to represent this multi-faceted movement? How to communicate and disseminate the workers’ struggles, the new forms of organisations, the urgency of revolution? Whose voice should finally be heard?
The need for counter information on one hand and for self-representation on the other led to the proliferation of groups and experiences of the, so-called, militant cinema. Even if few traces have remained of it in comparison to the well-known American or French militant cinema, in the late 60s and 70s, it had some (non-commercial) distribution and a place in the theoretical and critical debate. Strongly rooted in that specific historical moment, in the revolutionary momentum and its subsequent failure, Italian militant cinema fell into oblivion in the following decades. These notes try to sketch a reconstruction of this unwritten page of the history of the moving image in Italy.
In this evening's programme, film curator and historian, Annamaria Licciardello will present excerpts of films on feminist and urban struggles from the 1960s and 1970s video activism movement in Italy. Amongst them, films from the 1968 workers and student protests, Videobase's Quartieri popolari on struggles for housing from the early 70s and works by the feminist collective Collettivo Femminista Cinema from the same period.
Annamaria Licciardello works as a film curator and historian with a special focus on Italian experimental film and militant cinema from the 1960's and 70's. She works at the Cineteca Nazionale in Rome and curated with Jacopo Chessa the programme Prima della rivoluzione. Cinema militante italiano ’60-’70 shown in Turin and Rome in 2012.
