Nastri d’acciaio and Vita di un porto. Industrial Poems of Post-War Reconstruction in the Italian Non-Fiction Cinema

Abstract

Utility and industrial films belong to a specific form of the cinematic language, defined as non-fiction. If fiction cinema is based on the construction of a story and on the criterion of narration, “other” audiovisual forms (non-fiction) can be traced back to alternative criteria of construction of meaning: namely, «in producing non-fiction, a communicator uses some unit of motion picture footage in an e!ort to assert that something is (or was, or will be, or could be) the case»1. Within the macro-category of non-fiction, utility films draw a peculiar relationship between visuality, power, and industrial organizations: in the 1950s, industrial films and photography have seen a period of maximum flowering, taking place in other countries besides Italy.