Scenographies of Surveillance. The British Intelligence at Cinecittà, 1944-45

The mind-spinning history that Steimatsky has uncovered in her research on the movie studio’s vicissitudes through the 1940s reveals, in fact, several different roles: these might seem foreign to the studio’s original purpose, yet the capacities and practices of filmmaking did not dissolve when the war invaded Cinecittà in the form of occupying armies, prisoners of war, and displaced persons. This presentation focuses on the British intelligence center set up in Cinecittà after the liberation of Rome, to hold, interrogate, and secretly surveille top-brass Nazi and Fascist prisoners. Steimatsky’s methodology, inspired by Rancière’s notion of the scene as historiographic dispositif, recognizes the site and spaces of the movie studio, and its imprint upon the strange events that transpired therein. Working closely with surveillance transcripts, she unravels their scenographic coordinates and devices, dissecting principles of scripting, staging, role-playing, props, flashbacks, and montage, to open up – through the lens of cinema – new perspectives on the scene of surveillance.

Noa Steimatsky is the author of Italian Locations: Reinhabiting the Past in Postwar Cinema (University of Minnesota Press, 2008) and the award-winning The Face on Film (Oxford University Press, 2017). She was recipient of the Fulbright Award, the Getty Research Grant, the Rome Prize, the ACLS Fellowship, the NEH Fellowship, and the Guggenheim Fellowship. Steimatsky was faculty member at Yale University and the University of Chicago. Her work on 1940s Cinecittà inspired a documentary film, and is currently being expanded into a book.

Scientific organization: Carlo Ugolotti