Vittorio Taviani recensisce Cinema, arte figurativa di Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti

The review, full of conceptual issues and cultural references, that a young Vittorio Taviani dedicates to Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti’s work, Cinema, arte figurativa (Einaudi, Turin 1952), in the pages of the art and literature magazine, published in Pisa by Nistri-Lischi, La rassegna, highlights a little-explored element of the two brothers’ formative journey: the confrontation with aesthetics and reflection on art and, through these, with film theory, an early nurtured and conscious confrontation, the matrix of that self-reflexive core, of intrinsic and implicit theory, found at the bottom of many of their films. While acknowledging the caliber of the general reflection and the acuity of many observations and formal analysis of individual filmic pieces (from Chaplin, Pabst, Ejzenštejn), Taviani does not discount Ragghianti’s discourse: to the metahistorical and superstructural abstractions of a historicism of Croce extraction he opposes a vision, materialist and dialectical, of the history of artistic phenomena, and therefore of cinema, rooted in the history of men and the real forces at play in society; to the reductionist formalism of film analysis a perspective of study that instead restores its expressive and human totality. The range of cultural props of Taviani’s critical arguments with respect to the various topics covered reveals an open and articulate education on several fronts, from De Sanctis (Storia della letteratura italiana) to Gramsci (Letteratura e vita nazionale), from Croce (Estetica) to Russo (La critica letteraria contemporanea); and for the film field, from Balázs to Chiarini and Lizzani