Summary
Project is dedicated to an analysis of the Italian Cinema in light of new sources from the Vatican Archives on the Pontificate of Pius XII (1939-1958), analyzing the strategies of Communication between Silence and Public Rhetoric from the World War to the Cold War.
Description
The project intends to investigate the relationship between the Holy See and the mass media during the years of Pius XII's pontificate (1939-1958), focusing on Italy, the nerve center of the Church's universal strategies, and cinema, the major player on the media scene of that period. To date, among the exceptional documentary productions dedicated to this pontificate, the theme of the media has not received the attention it deserves, yet its centrality is indisputable. In 1992 S. Lanaro had already observed how Pacelli had cultivated "a recurring, manifold, intense, almost obsessive attention to the mass media" (1992: 109). The relative disinterest of historians appears even more cumbersome if we note that the issue of "silence" regarding the Holocaust - a topicintrinsically linked to communication strategies - was the real (and often only) source of debate around this Pope. The recent opening of the new collections of the Vatican Archives on Pius XII provides the occasion to undertake an investigation that, beginning with the Italian context, extends to a wide range in order to discuss anew the pontificate from a media perspective. In order to understand the role the cinema in the governmental practices of the papacy, a specific methodology has been defined: on the one hand, searching for the papers in the Vatican and Italian archives in order to discover the documentation that will allow us to reconstruct the policies of Pius XII's pontificate towards the cinema, understood both as an object of magisterial attention and as a subject capable of changing the socio-cultural references; on the other hand, a census of cinematic production on the Pope and the Holy See aimed at analyzing, against the background of the question of silence, the effect of cinema on the redefinition of the processes of representation and self-representation of the papacy. The strong point of the project is the research infrastructure that it intends to create, which aims to attract a wide audience, not just specialists. In terms of documentation and scientific elaboration, the results of the project, will be permanently hosted on the web portal dedicated to the archives of Catholic cinema and culture that the research group intends to develop, as a result of collaboration between academic, cultural and technological fields.
Objectives
The final objective of the project is to understand the role the cinema played cinema in the governmental practices of the papacy, problematizing both the circumscribed political theme of the question of silence and the more general socio-cultural theme of the processes of modernization that affected the Church and society in those years, redefined by the great transformations caused by the World War and by the Cold War.
UNINETTUNO Role
Uninettuno is partner of the project and its researcher Gianluca Della Maggiore is associated investigator.