`L'esperienza del passato': Situating Crisis in Italian Film History

This article addresses the recurrent use of the term "crisis" in studies, histories and criticism of Italian film. The first section attempts to question the teleological conception of crisis by problematizing the ‘sense of an ending’ that this bears. The second section links the periodization of Italian cinema with the second semantic model, then observing the major tensions which arise in the critical tendency to favour historical paradigms, illustrating how this prefaces an essentially regressive approach. The final section theoretically challenges and inverts the binaries of crisis and vitality or normality, in order to deconstruct the historical framework of film criticism and pave the way for alternative possibilities.