The Italian film criticism of specialized magazines, from the post-war period to the end of the 1950s, is going through an expansionary phase which involves the most consistent period of modernization of the national cultural industry. In this same period, the canonical critical notions that will influence the taste and reception of the cinema show by high culture are defined. Critical work on specialized periodicals plays an important role in the cultural legitimization processes of cinema-related knowledge. And it has some peculiarities. I propose to investigate them by privileging some aspects. At first I put film criticism under observation in relation to Fascist culture. In a second moment I identify the elements of discontinuity in the panorama of specialized magazines, that is to say the ways in which they differ from each other in terms of setting, content and profile of collaborators. In a third moment I present five traits that periodicals of the period share in terms of the interpretation / evaluation of films, regardless of the different ideological alignments of belonging. Finally, in the conclusions, I return to the question of the periodization of post-war criticism in relation to the previous twenty years and to the problems relating to the relationship between film criticism, sector magazines and sources for the history of cinema.
19 maggio 2020