(Re)Discovering the Italian Reception of NAC Through the Archives of the Unione Culturale

Abstract

(Re)Discovering the Italian Reception of NAC Through the Archives of the Unione Culturale Claudio Panella (bio) and Silvia Nugara (bio) The aim of this paper is to offer you a guided tour through the presence of New American Cinema (from now on NAC) in the archives of Unione culturale "Franco Antonicelli," the cultural association in Turin (Italy) that organized a whole NAC showcase in May 1967 and a second one in June 1968. These archives1 preserve several typologies of materials: letters, telegrams, programs, posters, pictures, recordings, and various other documents testifying to the extent of the association's cultural activity ranging from music to literature to cinema, with relevant guests both on the national and on the international level. After reconstructing the process that led to the organization of the first NAC exposition in Italy by referring to the correspondence between Unione culturale and both Jerome Hill and Jonas Mekas, we will show the role Unione culturale (from now on UC) played in the circulation of NAC in Italy by taking into distribution an important number of films over the years 1967–1968. We will then address one aspect of the Italian reception of NAC by underscoring the impact the first exposition had on young underground filmmakers who decided to create their own co-op in 1967 and to whom UC dedicated the first Italian Independent Cinema showcase in 1968. 1966–67: UC going underground UC was created in Turin in 1945, and since the following year it's had its base in Palazzo Carignano, a palace that once belonged to the Savoy's royal family and where the unification of Italy had been proclaimed in 1861. Different locations [End Page 168] within the palace hosted it until a renovation in the early sixties left it without a proper venue. The association finally reopened in the springtime of 1966 with a big new theater in the undergrounds of the palace. At the time, the President of UC was Franco Antonicelli, a former member of the antifascist Resistance but also a man of letters, a literary critic and publisher, the first to print Primo Levi's Se questo è un uomo/If this is a man in 1947 with his publishing house, De Silva. The statement he wrote at the opening of the season 1966–67 says that UC's new activity "could not be plain, conformist and elitist […] but should create instead a rupture with a state of sleepiness"2 he loathed in the city. As Giaime Alonge's essay in this issue of Framework underlines, the driving force behind the program was the drama critic Edoardo Fadini, thanks to whom the very opening night (May 5, 1966) saw The Living Theatre on stage with Mysteries and smaller pieces. Other than theatre, literature and independent cinema were already at the core of the association's cultural offer. One of the very first screenings of that new era (May 17, 1966) was La Verifica Incerta/The Uncertain Verification (IT, 1964) by Gianfranco Baruchello and Alberto Grifi, a masterpiece and forerunner of Italian experimental cinema that had been shown at New York City's Museum of Modern Art and Guggenheim in March 1966. In Turin, the film was introduced by the poet and critic Edoardo Sanguineti, who oversaw the literature section and who, during those very same weeks, also invited and debated with René Girard, Jean Starobinski, Juan Goytisolo, and Roland Barthes. The printed program of that season refers to Flavio Ruffatto as the head of the cinema section. He was one of the left-wing independent activists or art students that UC engaged as staff. He was based in Ivrea, the city of the technologically and culturally influential firm Olivetti, with which UC entertained a special relationship, as we are going to observe further in this paper. Cinema being his passion, Ruffatto was appointed head of the contemporary cinema programming (while Gianni Rondolino supervised the historical part). He mostly had an operational role like Carlo Repetto's, whose name often appears in the correspondence dealing with screenings promoted by UC in the late sixties. The 1967 NAC Group Exposition Organizing the screenings in Turin took time and negotiations between UC...