Shaping Time: Cinema and History, Cinema Is History



The title of the course, drawn from Andrei Tarkovsky, underscores cinema’s fundamental link to time. For the Russian filmmaker, cinema is the foundation of time. The act of “sculpting” expresses the idea of becoming—of time shaping itself into art. Time, sculpted by the frame, is thus fixed—yet never loses its internal movement—thanks to the very essence of cinema, which thrives on images in their flow, a quality that brings film close to the very notion of History.

Do films make historical time visible? And how does this differ from what history itself does—is it something entirely distinct, or is there a connection? These are some of the questions the course explores, examining the complex and often intense relationship between Italian cinema and its national history, from the rise of Fascism in the 1920s to the outbreak of World War II and the Resistance to Nazi-Fascist occupation, from the economic miracle of the 1950s and early 1960s to the surge of terrorism in the 1960s and 1970s. Our approach will follow a chronological order with regard to historical events, but not with regard to the history of cinema as some historical crossroads have been variously approached in films at different times from the aftermath of the war to the present.