Making Cinema Matter, in Bologna. Civic and Educational Goals at the Origins of the Cineteca di Bologna (1962-1968)

Between the early 1960s and the late 1960s, Bologna underwent significant social and spatial transformations that paralleled broader patterns of post-war urban restructuring in Italy. This essay examines the emergence of the Cineteca di Bologna within this dynamic context, arguing that its origins reveal how cinema and its public institutions became deeply entangled with shifting urban imaginaries and civic identities. Drawing on archival sources and municipal records, the analysis reconstructs the activities of the Commissione consultiva per le attività cinematografiche, the advisory body that laid the foundations for the Cineteca and whose work was rooted in the political and intellectual culture of Bologna’s left-wing administration. The essay shows how the Commission conceived cinema as both an educational tool and a civic infrastructure capable of shaping forms of spectatorship attuned to the rapidly changing city. Initiatives such as the creation of a specialised film library, the development of an art cinema circuit, and early attempts to form a municipal film archive all sought to cultivate informed publics and to legitimise cinema as a medium central to urban cultural life. In parallel, these efforts generated new visual and conceptual maps of the city, situating cinema at the intersection of memory, space, and citizenship. By tracing the negotiations between ideological ambitions and institutional constraints, the essay highlights how Bologna’s ciné-cultural institutions participated in broader debates about cultural autonomy, democratic participation, and the social value of film. It argues that these early formations of film culture not only responded to the transformations of the urban environment but also contributed to making them intelligible—producing cultural frameworks through which the city’s reconstruction, mobility patterns, and emerging identities could be seen, debated, and historicised. In doing so, the essay positions the Cineteca’s origins within a wider history of moving images as agents in the remaking of post-war Italian cities.