Luca Peretti is a British Academy Postdoctoral at the University of Warwick. He co-edited volumes on terrorism and cinema (Postmedia books), Pier Pasolini Pasolini (Bloomsbury Academics), and on Italian cinema and Algeria (AAMOD, 2022) and published the monograph Un dio nero un diavolo bianco. Storia di un film tra Algeria, Eni, e Sartre (Marsilio, 2023). His work has appeared (or will appear soon) in, among others, Film History, Senses of Cinema, Annali d’Italianistica, The Italianist: Film Issue, Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies, Historical Materialism, Comunicazioni Sociali, Quest. Issues in Contemporary Jewish History. He the editor-in-chief of Cinema e Storia, and part of the editorial board of L’Avventura. He wrote and co-produced the film Mister Wonderland (dir. Valerio Ciriaci, 2019) and collaborates with newspapers and magazines.

Research
My research project investigates cultural exchanges between Italy and the Global South at the peak of the anticolonial era (late 1950s-early 1970s). It focuses on cultural forms and media practices, such as cinema (primarily), photography, exhibitions, television, and conferences. At the time, Italy was the centre of anticolonial and antiimperialist practices and discourses: from large international meetings that took place in Rome and elsewhere, to the presence in the country of militants of decolonizing counties (Algeria, Angola etc.), and the making of films or writing of books on the subject. In my project I study these cultural objects and explore how they were simultaneously part of “Italian culture” and of transnational and global networks that went much beyond Italy.

On this subject, I am currently finishing a book on the cultural exchanges and the collaborative works between Italians and Algerians in the 1960s, including Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers (1966) and working on a book on anticolonial Italian cinema.

Publications

Books

• Beyond The Battle of Algiers. Fiction, non-fiction, and militant cinema between Algeria and Italy in the 1960s, in progress
• Un dio nero un diavolo bianco. Storia di un film non fatto tra Algeria, Eni e Sartre, Venice, Marsilio, 2023
• Con le mani libere. Il cinema italiano e la liberazione dell’Algeria, Annale AAMOD 22, Rome, Effigi edizioni, 2022 (co-edited with Paola Scarnati)
• Pier Paolo Pasolini, Framed and Unframed: A Thinker for the Twenty-First Century, London and New York, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2018 (paperback: 2020) (co-edited with Karen T. Raizen)
• Immagini di piombo. Cinema, storia e terrorismi in Europa, Milan, Postmediabooks, 2014 (co-edited with Vanessa Roghi)

Book Chapters

• “Elio Germano: Not Just an Actor”, in Italian Contemporary Screen Performers. Training, Production, Prestige, edited by Luca Barra, Cristina Formenti, Mariapaola Pierini and Francesco Pitassio, Palgrave MacMillan (forthcoming)
• “’There exists no life more daring and adventuresome than that of an oil drigger’. ENI’s geologists-filmmakers in Iran”, in Films that work, edited by Vinzenz Hediger, Yvonne Zimmermann, and Florian Hoof, Amsterdam University Press (forthcoming)*
• “I confini negli USA: evoluzioni, emergenze e margini”, in Sui confini d’Europa. Storie di frontiere e di resistenze, edited by Gabriele Proglio, Il Manifesto libri, 2023
• “Prima di Pontecorvo e Lorenzini: solidarietà militante e nascita del cinema algerino”, in Con le mani libere. Il cinema italiano e la liberazione dell’Algeria, Annale AAMOD 22, edited by Luca Peretti and Paola Scarnati, Rome, Effigi edizioni, 2022, pp. 99-111
• “La prima grande produzione cinematografica algerina”, Les Mains libres dal 1964 al 2022” in Con le mani libere. Il cinema italiano e la liberazione dell’Algeria, Annale AAMOD 22, edited by Luca Peretti and Paola Scarnati, Rome, Effigi edizioni, 2022, pp. 227-237
• “Scambi, memorie, incontri: Zineb Sedira al padiglione francese alla Biennale d’Arte 2022, in Con le mani libere. Il cinema italiano e la liberazione dell’Algeria, Annale AAMOD 22, edited by Luca Peretti and Paola Scarnati, Rome, Effigi edizioni, 2022, pp. 265-271
• “Portella della Ginestra e il cinema, film fatti e non fatti”, in La strage di Portella della Ginestra tra storia e memoria, edited by Tommaso Baris and Manoela Patti, Istituto Poligrafico Europeo, 2022, pp. 211-232
• “Italians the world over. The glorification of Italian labor abroad”, in Italian Industrial Literature and Film: Perspectives on the Representation of Postwar Labor, edited by Carlo Baghetti, Jim Carter, and Lorenzo Marmo, Peter Lang Press, 2021, pp. 449-458
• “Propaganda Live, la TV come comunità intermedia”, in Luca Barra and Fabio Guarnaccia (ed.), SuperTele. Come guardare la televisione, Minimum Fax, 2021 pp. 160-172 (with Damiano Garofalo)
• “Al cinema col PCI. La critica cinematografica sulla stampa non specializzata (1945-1956)”, in Michele Guerra and Sara Martin (ed.), Culture del film. Il cinema e il pensiero critico italiano, Il Mulino, 2020, pp. 197-217 (with Marco Zilioli)
• “Mafia, Mobility, and Capitalism in Italy circa 1960” in Companion to the Gangster Film, edited by George S. Larke-Walsh, Hoboken [NJ], Wiley Blackwell, 2018, pp. 244-261*
• “Compromessi e difficoltà. Note a proposito di alcuni film non fatti sugli anni di piombo”, in Luca Peretti e Vanessa Roghi (ed.), Immagini di piombo. Cinema, storia e terrorismi in Europa, Milan, Postmediabooks, 2014, pp. 75-84
• “Caratteri dell’antigiudaismo a Roma nei primi dell’Ottocento in due film italiani: Il Marchese del Grillo (1981) e Nell’anno del signore”, in Giuseppe Capriotti (ed.), Antigiudiasmo, antisemitismo e memoria. Un approccio pluridisciplinare, Macerata, Eum (University of Macerata Press), 2009, pp. 93-126

Articles

• “Algerians in Rome, Italians in Algiers: before and after The Battle of Algiers”, Film History, accepted for publication, forthcoming (9790 words)
• “‘Everything is going to begin’: Pasolini, Antonioni, and Branca in the U.S. circa 1968”, The Italianist: Film Issue, special cluster on Transnational Screens, accepted for publication, forthcoming (8457 words)
• “Build to Last? Material Legacies of Italian Colonialism. A roundtable”, Interventions: International journal of postcolonial studies, special issue on Postcolonial Italy, edited by Sebastian Depretto and Markus Wurzer, accepted for publication, forthcoming in 2023 (8538 words)
• “‘Purché ne salvi lo spirito’. Tempo di uccidere, made and unmade films”, in Annali d’Italianistica 2023 – Fascism in Italian Culture: 1945-2022, pp. 269-286
• “La battaglia d’Algeri di Gillo Pontecorvo, rifiuti e ‘censure’”, special issue “Tra mito, storia e attualità: i sessant’anni della Rivoluzione algerina”, Il Ponte, 5-2022, pp. 68-76.
• “Italian screen studies alla conferenza annuale dell’American Association for Italian Studies (AAIS)”, La Valle dell’Eden. Semestrale di cinema e audiovisivi, special issue on “Italian Cinema and Media Studies Beyond Italy”, n. 37/2021, pp. 71-82*
• “Non-Theatrical Circulation Circuits of Italian Films in the American Midwest. A Case Study”, L’avventura. International Journal of Italian Film and Media, 1, 2021, pp. 23-40 (with Damiano Garofalo)*
• “Timira, romanzo meticcio e stratificato”, Forum Italicum, Volume 55, issue 1, 2021, pp. 68-84 (with Michela Bertossa, Lawrence Gianangeli, and, Enrico Zammarchi)*
• “«Ciak, azione!». Alcune note su cinema e conflitto”, Zapruder. Rivista di storia della conflittualità sociale, 52 (2020), pp. 168-175
• “Between auteurism and sponsored cinema: Joris Ivens, Bernardo Bertolucci and ENI’, Journal of Italian Cinema & Media Studies, 7:2 (2019), pp. 199–215*
• “Unfinished projects, unmade films, unfilmed objects: the difficult relationship between cinema and the Italian anni di piombo”, in The Italianist: Film Issue, 38:2 (2018), pp. 189-203*
• “Gramsci, no longer a communist”, in Historical Materialism 25.3 (2017), pp. 191-209 (Review Article)*
• “Before The Battle of Algiers: Sartre, Colonialism, Industrial Cinema, and an Unmade Film”, in Senses of Cinema, Issue 84, September 2017 (online, 5987 words)*
• “Parodie sul web. Gli effetti di Gomorra La serie sulla gente”, in Arabeschi. Rivista di studi su letteratura e visualità., n. 9/2017, online
• “The diplomatic promotion of Italian cinema in English-speaking countries”, in Comunicazioni Sociali 2016 – 3. Italian Quality Cinema: institutions, legitimation, taste, edited by Claudio Bisoni, Danielle Hipkins, and Paolo Noto, pp. 398-411 (with Paolo Noto)*
• “La nostra fratellanza nel dolore. The Jewish Community of Rome and the ‘other’ genocides” in Quest. Issues in Contemporary Jewish History. Journal of Fondazione CDEC, special issue on multidiretional memories, edited by Robert Gordon and Emilano Perra (2016, online, 9063 words)*
• “Occasioni mancate, il cinema italiano e gli anni di piombo” in Jean Gili (ed.), Storie del Bel Paese. L’Italia attraverso il cinema dal Risorgimento ad oggi (1861-2011), “Quaderni del CSCI» 2011/7, Barcelona, 2011, pp. 130-133
• “Paolo Benvenuti e Segreti di stato: un incontro tra cinema e storia”, in Storiografia, rivista annuale di storiografia, Fabrizio Serra Editore, 13, 2010, pp. 171-204

(* peer reviewed)

Book Reviews
(selected)

• The Process Genre. Cinema and the Aesthetic of Labor (Salomé Aguilera Skvirsky, Duke University Press, 2020), Imago 23, 2021
• Landscapes in Between: Environmental Change in Modern Italian Literature and Film (Monica Seger, University of Toronto Press, 2015), The Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies, Vol. 5:3, 2017
• “Audiences at the Time of the “Two Churches”: Political Audiences: A Reception History of Early Italian Television, by Damiano Garofalo”, in Senses of Cinema, Issue 79, July 2016
• L’immagine politica: Forme del contropotere tra cinema, video e fotografia (Christian Uva, Mimesis, 2015), Forum Italicum, N. 1, 2016, pp. 327-329
• Sardinia on Screen: The Construction of the Sardinian Character in Italian Cinema (Maria Bonaria Urban, Studia Imagologica, Rodopi), Modern Language Review, Volume 111, Part 3, July 2016
• “Between Poetry and Film: A Cinema of Poetry: Aesthetics of the Italian Art Film by Joseph Luzzi” in Senses of Cinema, Issue 75, June 2015
• Brutal Vision. The neorealist body in postwar Italia cinema (Karl Schoonover, University of Minnesota Press, 2012), in Screening the Past, Issue 35, December 2012

© portraiture: British School at Rome