The Cineguf Years: Amateur Cinema and the Shaping of a Film Avant-Garde in Fascist Italy (1934–1943)

In 1934, Benito Mussolini's Fascist regime firmly intervened in the crisis of Italian cinema and the shaping of a national film culture. Among its major actions, the regime centralized all the cine-clubs, film associations, and amateur cinema organizations within the Fascist University Groups (Gufs). Their objective was to reform amateur film practice toward what we might call a committed, rationalized, and top-down-driven avant-garde. This article will examine how amateur filmmaking practices were transformed into an instrument that served the totalitarian state, as well as how a semantic shift from the notion of amateur to experimental cinema took place in relation to the actual mechanisms of cinematic distribution, exhibition, and production.