"Indifference towards the reality, sterile quotationism, overambitious attempts to emulate ‘professional’ cinema, pseudo-intellectual onanism". This is how independent cinema was presented ten years ago, today little seems to have changed.

Unlike France, Great Britain, Australia, Brasil, etc., Italy has only recently re-discovered the great artistic and educational value of short films. A format visited by all great Italian filmmakers of the past. Festivals dedicated to shorts now mushroom all over Italy but not always they promote adequately the format as distinct from TV and cinema commercial, video-art and video-clip.

Also, both the private enterprise and the political-institutional one do not seem to stimulate efficient, accessible and competitive structures.

The production system
Apart from a few cases, shorts production in Italy is a courageous act of the filmmaker who self-finances the work. Most of the time films are shot with very little money. But when they come with a very strong idea behind them they never fail to be successful. This is the case of Clinicamente Fabbro (Clinically Blacksmith) by Matteo Pellegrini, consisting only of a brilliant shot sequence, or Una Strada Dritta Lunga (A Long Straight Road) by Werther Germondari, selected at Cannes.

The two main production centres are Rome and Milan. Milan is ahead in terms of number. Many companies make shorts in order to sponsor and relaunch their own directors on the commercials market.

Milan is a key city in order to understand the recent history of Italian short film. It is in Milan that the first independent film festival (Filmmaker, 1980) took place. Here was born the idea of a cinema removed from the influence of Rome’s studios and which could be supported by commercials, TVs and public structures. During the eighties Milan experienced the growth of a huge number of private television stations and with it the expansion of the already well established circuit of commercials production. This media environment, together with a commitment from the local authorities towards culture and spectacle, seemed to hail the coming of a new era for shorts production. Unfortunately very little emerged out of these promising conditions and Milan failed to nurture a new and innovative group of filmmakers significantly different from the aesthetics of the commercials. Mannerism, while easily applicable to tv commercials, fails whenever appears in cinema and is not inspired. Award-winning films like Ketchup (Carlo Sigon, 1995), for instance, while formally well executed fail to deliver an original approach to genre cinema and finally leave the audience unsatisfied.

As far as shorts are concerned, Rome finds herself behind places like Palermo, which is expressing an original aesthetic, and Naples where theatre and music support a kind of renaissance of cinema –the so-called Scuola Napoletana (Neapolitan School).

Rome is at the centre of mainstream production and public television and hosts the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia. However, filmmakers are left on their own. With the exception of a few films made for the television. Filmmaking in Rome differs from Milan or Turin [the latter worth noting for the production of documentaries with filmmakers like Daniele Segre, Ritratto di un Piccolo Spacciatore (Portrait of a little Pusher) and for the role of the Archive of the Resistance, L’orecchio Ferito del Piccolo comandante (The Wounded Ear of the Little Commander, 1993) by Daniele Gaglianone]. Rome is possibly permeated by a more ‘cinematic’ culture, like in La Matta dei Fiori (The Mad of the Flowers, 1997): thirty minutes of intense B/W reminiscent of Pasolini’s work in the slums of Rome.

Cane Capovolto in Catania is a case on its own with works circulated more to the undeground circuit and more abroad than locally. They work with found footage and produced a series of 20 works entitled Plagium, like Evil and Pop Culture (1997), a demonic revisitation of mass culture through apocryphal videoclips of Elvis, Abba and Take That.

Very few invest in shorts. But things may change. Soon a new legislation (DL n.3 - January 1998) will be financing Italian shorts to the tune of £33,000 per film...

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