The Cinema of the Popes. Unpublished Documents from the Vatican Film-Library

Abstract

Availing itself of mostly unpublished records from the Archives of the Vatican Secretariat of State, those of the Dicastery for Communication and of the Pontifical Gendarmerie, this research paper retraces and analyses the origin and the historical role of the Vatican Film-Library and links it to the overall evolution of the relationship between the Holy See and the media. Indeed, in the same years that led to the foundation of the Film-Library, the process of shaping the Vatican institutions for the media also became fully-fledged: the Pontifical Commission for Educational and Religious Films, envisaged by Pius XII in 1948, represented the first step in the gradual broadening of views and competences towards both old and new means of communication (radio and television). All of this was simultaneously accompanied by the increasing attention of the pontifical magisterium towards the new culture shaped by the media, as corroborated by the breakthrough achieved by the Second Vatican Council. By way of collating around eight-thousand titles and establishing itself as a one-of-a-kind archive, in the sixty years of its existence the Film-Library has become the main repository of memory of the motion pictures of the twentieth-century pontificates. Today, it offers an original point of view in order to document the deep transformation of the image of the papacy.