Cinema's fascination with its miraculous expolits, ranging over space and time, can be traced to the very first films produced. As studies of early cinema and of the genre system (especially the musical genre) reveal, films are inevitably intertextual and, in many cases, even self-reflexive: They comment and reflect on themselves as well as on other cinematic texts. In some instances, this labor appears to be effaced, and the film seems to be offering a version of unmediated “reality”; but even here there are indications of the text's awareness of its status as text in its invocation of theater, photography, opera, and literature and its preoccupation with the antinomy between realism and illusionism. The Italian cinema offers us a fertile range of films that are revealing about the character and properties not only of Italian cinema but about cinema generally – histories of its resources and also of its limitations, its relations to the other arts, its hope for and despair of its role as an agent of change, and its conceptions and expectations of audiences. In short, among the various burdens that the films impose on themselves is their operating as essays on the cinematic apparatus.

One of the important figures in Italian literature and theater, Luigi Pirandello, was himself involved in filmmaking, and his novel Si gira (Shoot) – among other novels, plays, and essays on theater and film that he wrote – is a reflection on the cinematic medium.