High Concept Italian Style

La fucina delle idee nella storia e nell'immaginario del cinema italiano. Prospettive di ricerca

Abstract

Before being about visionary authors, craftsmanship and industry, Italian cinema is about ideas. Aristotle stated the primacy of plot (both in its essential structures and in its being summarisable in few words) as the fundamental condition to deliver meaning, emotions and therefore to get a feedback from the audience. By accepting this statement, as well as the studies and sources able to testify to some resisting narrative trends inside the history of Italian cinema, the essay means to explore the effectiveness of the “high concept” notion in our storytelling and film production. By disproving the thesis which refers this notion only to the aesthetic and the business of the Hollywood giant, we argue that a movie can be defined as such thanks to its deep narrative core as well as the sense of familiarity due to the people’s national imagination. Thus, it is possible to find traces of “high concept” within the storytelling tradition of Italian cinema, as well as its screenwriters’ creative workshop. The attempt is suggest how to identify them and answer some questions about Italian movies as seen in the light of “high concept”: which are those movies? Are they isolated cases? Can they be put into a canon? Did they succeed in the critics’ eyes? We also mean to encourage the drawing of a map including already trodden roads as well as new journeys for tomorrow.