The historical, cultural, and economic complexity of Italian film festivals makes it necessary to identify and preserve new sources to support the historiographical activity promoted by the PRIN2022 RIFF project. Designed to ensure the digitization, accessibility, and circulation of materials collected by the research project, the database has been built to reflect the distinctly interdisciplinary nature of the festival phenomenon.
For this reason, the database is populated by a heterogeneous set of materials, in textual and audiovisual formats, which include various types of sources: A) PRESS: printed materials in specialized magazines or newspapers (reportage, reviews, advertisements, television services, web videos), B) DOCUMENTS: typewritten documents, private papers, or limited edition printed materials, little known or unpublished, produced by festivals and figures operating within them (correspondence, notes, agendas, brochures, etc.); C) CATALOGS: the catalogs of the various editions of the festivals; D) INTERVIEWS: video interviews recorded by the research team. Access to the database is open to both scholars in the field and the public, upon request access to the database manager, which will provide a private username and password.
The criteria for organizing the materials stored within the database constitute an innovation for the methodologies and practices of film festival studies, particularly in historiographical terms. Consider, in this regard, the absence of systematic and comprehensive studies of national and international film festivals, except for some generalist frameworks. This lack is largely due to the absence of conservation cultures within festival cultures, whose resources have rarely been used for the collection and preservation of their documentary base, and even less so for the establishment of dedicated archives. Additionally, there is a lack of cataloging principles specifically designed for the historical sources of festivals, which encompass textual typologies with very different discursive functions and contain information related to different operational dimensions: such as the cultural policies of film festivals, their networks of stakeholders, or their economic impacts.
In order to develop research solutions that encompass these different types of documents and facilitate their comparative and cross-analysis, the setup of the database has provided for a dual level of metadata for the collected documents. The four types of sources collected are accompanied by a first level of specific basic information, which differs according to the bibliographic level of the document under examination and is interoperable among the consultable records. This level of information includes the location and signature in the archive, publication information (in the case of printed materials and catalogs), sender and recipient (in the case of correspondence or telegrams), date and place of recording (in the case of interviews), country, people, entities/companies, festivals, and edition (transversely to all types of documents). At the first level of metadata, primarily descriptive, a second level is associated to guide the interpretation of the sources through the use of keywords related to the sphere of film festivals, their rituals, event characteristics, and forms of agency.
The keywords have been chosen based on the main research themes (transnationalism, formation of cinematic canons, star cultures, film criticism) with which RIFF engages. In this sense, this second level of metadata aims to offer clues to guide both the identification and an initial interpretation of the digitized materials.