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This dissertation discusses the films that the national oil company of Italy, ENI, produced and sponsored abroad, largely in Third World countries, in the 1950s and 1960s. At the time industrial and sponsored films were among those most widely produced and screened around the world; however, their role in media history has only recently been rediscovered and given academic consideration. ENI was one of the companies that were protagonists of Italian neocapitalism of 1950s and 1960s, a period of Italian history marked by the economic boom, changes in consumption and culture at large, by sacrifices on the part of the workers and the rise of state-owned corporations. ENI discovered natural gas in Italy and subsequently expanded its activities abroad, signing new types of contracts favorable to development in recently decolonized countries. My central hypothesis is that these films, as with many other industrial films, not only represent and describe the business strategy of the company, but are also part of this strategy and accompany the development of it. I propose that in these films we can trace a tension between a clear Eurocentrism, as "an implicit positioning rather than a conscious political stance" (as scholars Ella Shohat and Robert Stamp put it), and an explicit will to be politically anticolonialist. I define the style, and more importantly the ideological mode, in which these films are made as neocapitalist realism.
In these films, three elements are fundamental and yet remain largely hidden or invisible: colonialism, Italians abroad, and oil. In the first chapter I outline ENI's role in Italian history, looking in particular at the films it sponsored. At the end of the chapter, I analyze the first major film that it sponsored, Joris Ivens' Italy is Not a Poor Country, which recounts the journey of the company from the north to the south of Italy. From the 1960s on ENI also started making films in numerous foreign countries – largely but not solely in the Mediterranean basin, Africa, and the Middle East. In chapter two I discuss these films – which follow a formulaic structure – and the role they play in creating and promoting a corporate image and identity: importantly, they also represent Italy's attempt (through the work of its most important state-owned agency) to engage and promote an anticolonial approach to the relationship with recently decolonized countries. Despite this attempt, these films always remained Eurocentric. From chapter 3 to chapter 6 I analyze four case studies, which have in common a sort of lack of control on the part of the company, or the ability of the directors to put forth his own agenda. In chapter 3 I look at a series of amateur films made by geologists and geophysicists in Iran at the end of the 1950s, and in chapter 4 I look at an unmade film on Algeria that was to be produced by ENI at the beginning of the 1960s. In chapter 5, I analyze a single film, Gilbert Bovay's Oduroh, the most explicitly anticolonial film the company produced. The corpus of over 80 short films made by ENI employees working in Persia highlights the tension between amateur style and interests and corporate filmmaking: many of these films just show daily activities, while others are clearly made to illustrate where and how ENI could drill and extract oil in the region. A different project altogether is that of a big-budget anticolonialist film (supposedly) written by Jean-Paul Sartre, Franco Solinas, Sergio Spina, and Riccardo Aragno, and where ENI was involved in the first part of its production. Oduroh is a peculiar film with a strong Third Worldist agenda, which from a stylistic point of view recalls contemporary essay films. In the last chapter, I see Bernardo Bertolucci's The Oil Route (1967) as a catalogue of a number of themes discussed throughout the dissertation, but also as a final example of the great season of industrial cinema in Italy.