The project’s goal is to lay the ground for the reconstruction of the histories of Italian film festivals by conceiving an ad hoc theoretical and methodological approach, and by creating and developing digital tools capable of supporting historiographical research and valorizing the wide documental heritage of Italian festivals. The relevance of RIFF is rooted in three, different spheres. Firstly, Italy boasts one of the most wide-ranging and rich histories of film festival organisations. Already in the late-1950s and increasingly throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Italy Italy was the European country with the greatest number of local and international mostre, rassegne, festivals and any other sort of film-related events, such as the Filmvideo – Mostra Internazionale del Cortometraggio di Montecatini Terme (1949), the Film Festival Internazionale di Montagna ed Esplorazione Città di Trento (1952), the Giove Capitolino in Rome (1958), the Taormina Film Festival (1955) and the Trieste International Sciencefiction Film Festival (1963) – to name a few. Considered their cultural, social and economic relevance and wide diffusion in national territories, the histories, agency and networks of relations of Italian film festivals is a rich and yet vastly uncharted territory. In fact, notwithstanding the undeniable centrality of festivals in Italian film culture, research focused on their cultural, social, and economic role has remained thoroughly under researched thus far.
Along with that, the project draws its relevance from contemporary scholarly research. Over the last couple of decades, film festival studies have become a prominent field of research in in international film scholarship, contributing to reposition the study of cinema within a productive, transdisciplinary dialogue with other disciplines from humanities and social sciences. RIFF builds on a variety of theoretical and methodological insights provided by this specific field of scholarship, also drawing from a wider network of contemporary research regarding the material conditions in which films circulate, are received, and are valorised. However, within film festival studies, we have recognized a significant lack of historiographical methods, research tools and theoretical reference models to approach the histories of festivals.
The project’s efforts on this specific theoretical and methodological field touches on a third matter of relevance, which also calls for urgent interventions: the preservation of the documental heritage and of the oral histories of Italian film festivals. Except for the Mostra Internazionale del Cinema di Venezia, the majority of Italian festivals does not possess enough financial resources to ensure the preservation of all documentary materials related to their histories. These materials, which include catalogues, programmes, screening notes, press releases, marketing materials (tickets, posters and flyers), competition announcements, curated monographs and conference proceedings among other, contain crucial information for both the cultural histories of international cinema, and the political and economic histories of their hosting communities. Nevertheless, these archival materials are often left in a state of neglect, thus making them hardly accessible and posing serious threats in terms of their preservation and future transmission.