Like many other organizations at the time, the Italian national oil company (ENI) sponsored dozens of films in the 1950s and 1960s. Many of them were filmed outside of Italy, where the company represented Italian interests and became a sort of unofficial minister of foreign affairs. While non-theatrical films, and especially industrial ones, make up the majority of films produced at the time, their role in Italian film history has yet to be recognized. In my talk I discuss the importance of this form of filmmaking, its multiple purposes (promotional, propagandistic, scientific, etc.) and how these films spoke to different audiences; I then explain why the films of this specific state-owned company are so significant; and I conclude by looking at La via del petrolio (The Oil Route, Bernardo Bertolucci, 1967), which recounts the journey of oil from an extraction site in Iran to a refinery in Germany. Across the Middle East and the Mediterranean, from the communities of Italians abroad to the familiar Italian landscape, Bertolucci’s film employs common Orientalist tropes while simultaneously highlighting the relationships between an anticolonial former colonial power (Italy) and recently decolonized countries.
Luca Peretti is a Visiting Assistant Professor at The Ohio State University. He researches and teaches Italian media, film history, non-fiction cinema, Jewish Italian culture, and Italian cultural history. He co-edited a volume on terrorism and cinema (in Italian) and one on Pier Paolo Pasolini (Bloomsbury Academics). His work has appeared in, among others, Senses of Cinema, The Italianist: Film Issue, Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies, Historical Materialism, Comunicazioni Sociali, Quest. Issues in Contemporary Jewish History. He is on the editorial board of Zapruder World and Cinema e Storia, and he also frequently collaborates with newspapers and magazines.
