“Il volto e l’anima del Terzo Mondo”: Catholic Allegiances and Marxist Ideologies in the Film Cultural Policies of the Istituto Columbianum (1958–1965)
摘要
The essay investigates the Italian engagement with Third Worldism in the 1960s as a dynamic force that transformed the practices, languages, and institutions of film culture. Through a historical study of the Istituto Columbianum in Genoa that combines archival research, discourse analysis, and oral history, the essay situates this institution at the crossroads of diverse ideological tensions, transforming ideas of cinema and a web of informal ties, analyzing how it used film programming as a tool for sociological enquiry into foreign national cultures and as an instrument for cultural diplomacy. Thus, the essay reveals the Istituto as a deeply contested and yet pivotal institution that embodied Italy’s contradictory position between Europe and the Global South, while its curatorial practices prefigured later forms of critical, transnational film culture. By revealing that solidarity itself was the product of friction rather than harmony, the essay reinterprets Italian Third Worldism as a field of negotiation between divergent universalist projects and as a site for reimagining cinema’s political vocation amid the tensions of the Cold War.