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The poetics of reuse: Festivals, archives and cinematic recycling in Italian documentary

ABSTRACT In this essay I propose some reflections on documentaries based on archival footage and suggest a possible Italian specificity. Starting from a series of recent works and ending with an account of my own experience with the documentary Appunti romani/Roman Notes (2004), I explore how the cinematic recycling of the past has progressively exceeded the confines of film archives (or of the traditional historical film) and has contributed to the affirmation of a new wave of Italian documentary. My thesis is twofold: that through diverse aesthetic experiences, found-footage film has emerged today as a fertile site of experimentation for Italian non-fiction cinema; and that this ‘genre’ is fundamental for the difficult process of rethinking national history. Finally, it is all the more relevant that the predominance of words has been replaced with a new faith in and attention to images.