Ricerc@Sapienza

One of the themes at the heart of the collective debate in the years following the war was the question of responsibility. In Italy a publicly accepted version of past events was soon pieced together. This showed the desire within society and the political parties to remove Fascism as a significant component of the national identity. Cinema was to become one of the points of reference in the fabrication of this public narration. On the screen among 1945 and mid-Fifties a clear picture emerges of a fundamentally guilt-free Italy.

This article proposes to analyse the forms of circulation of Italian cinema abroad through a survey
of its critical reception in the main international reviews in France and the United States. In
particular, we have pursued the mapping, the cataloguing and the digitization of articles from
the journals Cahiers du cinéma and Positif for France and Film Comment for the USA, covering
the decade 2007-2017, in order to build a digital database. Thus, we have collected a selection