Unfinished Projects, Unmade Films, Unfilmed Objects: The Difficult Relationship between Cinema and the Italian anni di piombo

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis paper analyses a number of unmade and unfinished films about the so-called anni di piombo (leaden years). In the first part of the paper, I try to define this very elusive object of study (that of the unmade films), raising some theoretical and methodological questions. In the second part, I focus on my case study, a group of films (or rather scripts and projects) on the anni di piombo. Different filmmakers were involved in the making of these projects, written between 1978 and 2008: Ugo Pirro, Tonino Zangardi, Cesare Zavattini, and most importantly Giuseppe De Santis. I discuss these works within the larger literature on cinema and anni di piombo that flourished since 2007. I conclude that studying these unfinished films may help us shed light on the films that were actually made and on the production processes in Italian cinema, but also that these projects can be studied as texts on their own.