Cinema dal petrolio. L’Eni e il documentario d’impresa

Since the 1950s, in harmony with other large Italian companies, Eni has become a producer of industrial films. At the end of the decade, Enrico Mattei feels the need to turn these “tecnofilms” - in which technical, educational and informative aspects dominate - into important films for the general public. To change the international imaginaries, linked to an Italy seen essentially as an agricultural country, great authors are needed and Mattei turns to the famous documentarist Joris Ivens. The events of his L’Italia non è un paese povero - never broadcast in full for the censorship of the RAI; the subsequent films by Gilbert Bovay, shot in Africa and in the Near East and marked by the climate of “decolonization”; a prestigious film such as Le vie del petrolio by Bernardo Bertolucci shine today as evidence of a glorious season of corporate cinema. Works in which the human aspect, the lives of the protagonists, the relationships between our culture and those of the producing countries are observed problematically. Films that, beyond industrial aspects, today constitute a corpus of enormous cinematographic and socio-cultural interest.