For a Film on the River Po

On April 25th of 1939 – designated also as the year XVII, the seventeenth year of the Italian Fascist regime – Michelangelo Antonioni, film critic, publishes in the magazine Cinema an article accompanied by photographic illustrations: ‘For a Film on the River Po.’ Though he had previously written for the local Corriere Padano published in his native Ferrara, Antonioni's article in the prestigious Roman film magazine with national circulation can be seen to constitute a first statement of intentions regarding filmmaking. While it has lent itself to association with early writings on Neorealism, the article binds its regionalist-documentary pretext with a modernist imperative. Modernist movements and styles, such as the Second Futurism, Art Deco, Abstraction, and Rationalism, persisted and circulated under Fascism. Neorealism sought to avoid these tainted modernisms, turning to realist narrative fiction in its attention to the regional, the quotidian, and the marginal. Yet already sensing the realist fallacies and sentimental pitfalls of what was emerging in the late 1930s as a Neorealist agenda not sufficiently distinct, perhaps, from that other Fascist cultural force – heroic, mythologizing, reactionary regionalism – Antonioni can be seen at this early moment to search for a distinct mode of articulating his own Neorealist bent in modernist terms. This process I shall gloss by reference to Italy's ‘aerial’ culture in the 1930s, and to Antonioni's chief editor in Cinema, Vittorio Mussolini – the Duce's son, military pilot, and promoter of Italian film. The article in this way exhibits tensions that the humanist tenets of Neorealism will, by and large, seek to subdue in the immediate post-war period, situating Antonioni in an oblique relation to the aspirations of his colleagues; it betrays the ambivalence of a formative moment – historically emblematic – when diverse, indeed contradictory, trends in late- Fascist Italian culture converged.

While apparently focused on limited subject matter – on specific problems of documentary filmmaking and the cinematic rendering of the particular regional landscape – ‘For a Film on the River Po’ raises questions on the ways in which location shooting complicates the relation of documentary to fiction filmmaking. It evokes even larger questions on the relation of profilmic actuality to rhetoric and poetic functions, the relation of landscape and history, of the consciousness of place and the national imagination.