Integrating unmade films into Italian cinema history
In this paper I discuss a number of unmade Italian films of different kinds. Examples will include films by auteurs such as Federico Fellini and Pier Paolo Pasolini, on topics such as mafia, the Holocaust and terrorism during the so-called years of lead, and a film proposed to an unusual production agency, the national oil company of Italy. Looking at these films I propose a counter history of Italian cinema that simultaneously opposes and integrates the “official” Italian film historiography.
Some of these films were not made because their topics were too controversial, others because they would have been too expensive, finally some others for a combination of different factors. Rather than seeing these unfilmed objects as failed attempts to make films, I wish to reconsider unfinished projects as fully part of the history of Italian cinema. Studying them contributes to the rewriting of the history of cinema “that is not centrally about films”, as Richard Maltby suggests. Unmade films in Italy have hitherto only studied anecdotally or as part of the career of famous directors: in this paper I try a more systematic treatment of those projects as an integral and active part of Italian cinema history.
Unmade, Unfinished, Unseen: Shadow Histories of Cinema and Television 