Guido Fink and American Film Studies

The Early Years (1952-1953)

Abstract

This essay focuses on the early years in the career of scholar and film critic Guido Fink (1935-), one of the most influential intellectuals in his generation and a passionate pioneer in the field of American culture and cinema. By concentrating on Fink’s juvenile articles, which he published in the early 1950s in the local journal La nuova scintilla and in the national newspaper L’Unità, the essay aims to highlight the extraordinary elements of innovation and insight they contain. Fink was in fact experimenting with interdisciplinarity, matching theory with historical and cultural reflection, and analyzing cinema in its interconnections with literature, theater, and society at a time when nobody else did. All this would later not only become characteristic of his personal methodology of research, but also prove essential to the development of film studies and cultural studies in the international arena.