The crafts of art in international cinema

Year 2018

The research concerns the relationship between the creative act of high craftsmanship and cinema. Specifically, the focus is on the representation of art professions in contemporary European cinema. Fiction films with a contemporary setting of European production distributed in the new millennium have been considered to understand how the activity of high craftsmanship is perceived and staged today, in the present, in a highly developed production system dominated by the industrial and post-industrial model. The European origin constraint has been chosen to elaborate the link between countries historically devoted to high craftsmanship at a creative and productive level, such as Italy or France, and the use of the cinematographic medium in these countries. The choice made it possible to establish a comparison between European films and Hollywood productions, on the one hand, and, on the other, those produced in other parts of the world. The idea of restricting the field to fictional narrative cinema is dictated by the desire to look at the impact of high craftsmanship on popular imagination - and this is only possible by making comparisons with continuous distribution in theatres and throughout the home video supply chain. Fiction films also offer the opportunity to investigate how the idea of artisan work is perceived by non-experts in the sector (thus outside a documentary system in which the knowledge of those working in the sector is directly questioned) and is consequently reworked for narrative purposes for a wide audience.