Nardelli, Matilde ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4582-1024 (2025) A cinema of research: Bruno Munari and Monte Olimpino. In: Italian Experimental Cinema and Moving-Image Art. Experimental Film and Artists’ Moving Image. Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 267-277. ISBN 9783031778964

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Abstract

Bruno Munari (1907–2008), industrial and graphic designer, kinetic artist and children’s book author, who produced such tongue-in-cheek objects as ‘useless machines’ and ‘illegible books’, was also actively involved in filmmaking during the 1960s. Yet, Munari himself would object to describing his cinema as ‘experimental’ or ‘avant-garde’; Munari, instead, insisted on calling his cinema a ‘cinema of research’. And in 1962, together with Marcello Piccardo and his family, he set up a studio for the production of just such work. Operative for about 10 years, Munari and Piccardo’s studio in Monte Olimpino, in Northern Italy, constitutes a fascinating and largely neglected venture in film production, one in which the aesthetics, politics and economics of the avant-garde and industrial film, the community film and the TV commercial are strangely, and prolifically, interwoven. The work produced at the studio has fascinating links with better-known experimental films of the period – links which are even more fascinating in a body of work produced in rather different conditions (such as corporate sponsorship from firms including Olivetti and Fiat) and for different purposes (from education to advertising).

Item Type:	Book Chapter or Section
Subjects:	Film and television > Screen studies
Depositing User:	Matilde Nardelli
Date Deposited:	28 Jul 2025 14:53
Last Modified:	28 Jul 2025 14:53
URI:	https://repository.uwl.ac.uk/id/eprint/13922

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