Notes and Observations on the Concept of Cinematic Culture in Gorizia
Part I: Origins and Milestones of Critical Success

07.01.2025

The cinematograph made its debut in Gorizia on the late afternoon of 8 December 1897, two years after the Lumière brothers’ first public screenings in Paris. The event took place in the inner courtyard of what was then the Hotel Centrale, overlooking today’s Corso Verdi. The arrival of this new medium was just the latest in a series of modernizing developments occurring in this Central European city at the time. Starting in 1879, Gorizia underwent significant urban and technological reorganization under the Austro-Hungarian Empire, coinciding with the advent and diffusion of electric light.

While there’s no need to dwell excessively on the importance of this event in terms of how it shaped social spaces and interactions, nor on the intrinsic relationship between light and cinema, it is worth noting how the presence of this medium spurred further changes in the city’s spatial organization. As in many other cities of the time, cinema gradually carved out its own status in Gorizia’s social sphere, becoming an unmissable communal ritual.

The first to drive this process were itinerant showmen and promoters, who stopped in the city’s main squares, especially during the well-known patron saint and St. Andrew’s fairs. These figures introduced the public to moving images, presenting spectacles such as travel views, comedies, and phantasmagorias. Their efforts accustomed the population to this new visual medium. At the same time, the cinematograph began appearing in other established venues in the city, such as prominent photography studios—most notably Anton Jerkič’s studio on the second floor of a building at Via dei Signori 7—as well as brothels, where screenings catered exclusively to adult male audiences, and even some churches, like the evangelical mission on Via Alvarez, which organized film showings for children in the early 20th century.

This medium seemed to expand across various venues without much concern for where it was presented. Its success was further cemented by the emerging institutionalization of community viewing in spaces specifically designed for cinema. This led to the creation of the city’s first dedicated movie theatres. Josip Medved, a bold local entrepreneur, was among the first to convert a building into the Cinema Centrale in 1909, a venue that retained its name and location for about seventy years. Others soon followed, investing in modest spaces that were later renovated and adorned with red curtains and Art Nouveau decor. Among the cinemas opened during this period were the Edison, the Splendor, and Lodovico Tornsig’s Pantheon, which was unfortunately destroyed in a fire likely caused by the nitrate films used at the time.

The inherent danger of flammable film stock, combined with the structural precariousness of these venues, prompted the imperial administration to intervene. On 18 September 1912, it issued a decree regulating film exhibitions throughout the Austro-Hungarian Empire. This legislation established the so-called “Kino-Polizei,” tasked with overseeing cinemas, their infrastructure, their programming, and even their audiences. A second imperial decree, issued on 24 May 1915, banned the distribution and screening of Italian films, as Italy was at war with Austria at the time. This marked the first instance of intervention aimed at altering the tastes, habits, and values of the predominantly Italian-speaking population.

By then, cinema was already a staple of daily life and consumer habits in Gorizia, ranking as the most popular form of spectacular entertainment and even finding applications in educational and corrective institutions. However, cinema had yet to acquire the cultural prestige necessary to be considered an integral cultural factor. It is not yet possible to speak of a true “cinematic culture” in Gorizia at that time, with the possible exception of Josip Medved, whose forward-thinking efforts saw cinema as a tool to bridge the city’s three linguistic communities. To this end, he printed pamphlets and programmes in Italian, Slovene, and German.

Even the avant-garde movements of the Giulian region during the 1920s and 1930s failed to establish cinema as a fully cultural element in the city. The few traces of interest in cinema beyond commercial terms seem to come from the cultural initiatives of the National Fascist Party. On the one hand, the regime supported productions by the Opera Nazionale Dopolavoro. On the other, it promoted the activities and festivals organized by the so-called “Cineguf,” young cinephile students affiliated with Fascist University Groups.

Collectively, the party’s initiatives and the avant-garde interest of Giulian dissidents represent the first points of reference for understanding how cinematic knowledge developed in Gorizia, how certain standards were established, and how various institutions were founded. In this context—not entirely detached from the idea of cinema as a cultural phenomenon—two of the main figures in Gorizia’s post-1968 cinematic culture were born. Darko Bratina was born in Gorizia on 30 March 1942, and a few months later, on 7 October, Sandro Scandolara was born. Both first experienced the relationship between culture and cinema as spectators in Gorizia’s many theatres during the 1940s and 1950s.

In the post-war years and throughout the 1950s, the citizens of Gorizia, like those across Italy, deepened their affection for cinema. Cinema was, as is well known, the primary mass medium of the era. Its success was driven in particular by the growing number of theatres and the spread of new alternative spaces adapted for film screenings. In Gorizia, cinemas of the period included the already mentioned Centrale, the Verdi, the Corso, the Moderno, and the Vittoria, complemented by outdoor summer venues like the well-known one on Via Locchi, parish cinemas, theatres in neighbouring towns, and new entities such as the Circolo del Cinema, cine-clubs, the AGI youth association on Largo Culiat, the Circolo per la Libertà della Cultura culture centre on Via Dante, and, notably, the C.U.C. university cinematographic centres and the cineforum of the “Stella Matutina” institute run by Jesuit priests.

What united these diverse experiences was a shared commitment to fostering and disseminating cinematic knowledge among the public, making these venues the pillars of Gorizia’s cinematic culture at the time. The focus shifted from merely providing the opportunity to watch films—through the well-established economic model of ticket sales—to renewing the cinematic experience through new elements, such as introductory presentations, the distribution of brochures and pamphlets, and, most crucially, the follow-up discussions. Gorizia, just like the rest of Italy, was entering what historians have termed the “era of debate” in cinematic culture. Films were no longer simply watched: cineforums and cultural clubs illuminated their nuances and meanings, encouraging audiences to go beyond passive viewing and engage actively and critically with the screenings.

Cinema thus became, in every sense, a cultural phenomenon—a tool for consciously generating knowledge. This was well understood at the time by the Jesuit priests of the aforementioned “Stella Matutina”. Under the visionary guidance of their new director, Father Sergio Katunarich, who arrived in Gorizia in the late 1950s, the institute became a pioneer of initiatives often organized in collaboration with other secular entities in the city. Notable examples include the retrospectives and series on cinematic genres and industrial cinema of the 1960s, organized with the youth of Gorizia’s C.U.C.

In the cineforum hall, and earlier in the centre’s library, Sandro Scandolara began formulating his early thoughts on cinema, gradually emerging as a key figure in debates and thematic explorations, sometimes co-authoring pieces with his cinephile friends Giorgio Cavallo and Darko Bratina, both frequent visitors to the centre in Via Nizza. With Bratina, in particular, Scandolara shared sociological readings applied to film and cinematic theory, a result of their university studies at the young Faculty of Sociology at the University of Trento in the 1960s. Their academic experience allowed both men to contribute their knowledge to Gorizia’s cinematic culture, turning cinema into a language of democracy and dialogue.

On these semantic properties of cinema and its ability to unite people, Scandolara and Bratina built the foundation of their cultural endeavours. They worked to strengthen identity ties between the Italian- and Slovene-speaking populations while enriching the cinematic landscape of 1970s and 1980s Gorizia. Their references were the histories of cinema written by the era’s most important Italian and international authors—Pietro Bianchi, especially, for Bratina—and the theoretical and methodological insights of intellectuals such as Rudolf Arnheim, from an aesthetic perspective, and Edgar Morin, from a sociological one.

For Scandolara, this meant contributing as a critic and collaborator for numerous magazines, especially the monthly Cineforum, and as a leader of debates at “Stella Matutina” and other cultural circles. For Bratina, similarly, his contributions included serving on the board of the Italian Federation of Cineforums (1965–1972), writing for several film journals including Cineforum, and, eventually, founding the Kinoatelje film club in 1977. Their shared critical success, in its various facets, gradually shaped Gorizia’s cinematic cultural context and left a lasting influence.

The cineforum debate, so infamous and yet so central, continued to provide Bratina and Scandolara with significant opportunities to foster connections and interactions between the city’s diverse linguistic communities. Bratina, in particular, was keenly aware of this, founding a cineforum in Trento during his university years and later taking charge of a similar initiative in Turin during a brief stay in the Piedmontese capital. In a contribution published in the Cineforum magazine in December 1966 (No. 60), he offered specific reflections on the methodology and potential of the cineforum as a medium. For Bratina, “the cineforum is an elusive formula, defying any strict definition,” manifesting as “a type of activity that is as much social as it is cultural.” Furthermore, he described it as “an opportunity for human storytelling, an exchange of ideas and opinions, a moment to evaluate various value systems and their orientation—a free forum”. These observations reflect his sociological training in Trento, his passionate study of Edgar Morin’s writings, and, above all, his deep interest in dialogue as a means of connection.

His social and cultural evaluations were equally shared by his friend Scandolara. Together, they developed them into an ambitious project at the dawn of the 1980s: the first curated retrospective on the history of Slovene cinema, hosted at the newly established Kulturni Dom in Gorizia. For both men, the event represented a concrete opportunity to build a bridge between the two cultures. For Scandolara, an Italian cinephile, Slovene cinema was above all a passion, a chance to study and facilitate encounters between Eastern and Western cinematic traditions. For Bratina, a Slovene cinephile, Slovene cinema was an element of identity and an invaluable opportunity to explore his cultural roots.

With these premises, the 1981 retrospective outlined a series of themes and reflections that the Bratina-Scandolara duo addressed with absolute philological and scientific rigour. The linguistic element, in particular, took on a primary and crucial role in their work. In the event catalogue, Scandolara recalled that Slovene cultural consciousness at the time “was explicitly characterized in terms of national awakening and was [precisely] based on language,” understood here as both a cinematic and identity-defining element. Language, along with literature, enabled Slovene cinema to emerge and achieve self-determination over time, distinguishing itself from the broader and less precise definition of “Yugoslav cinema”.

Bratina and Scandolara revisited these themes in a four-part television series dedicated to Slovene cinema, aired on the regional RAI 3 channel two years after the 1981 retrospective. Each episode, lasting 30 minutes, addressed shared concerns, focusing particularly on: 1) national identity and dialogue with others; 2) the turning points and contradictions in the country’s socialist development; 3) the relationship between the past and its reinterpretation in the present; 4) and the ambiguities in Slovene cinema’s historical engagement.

The television medium allowed them to reach a broader audience, offering viewers in the region the chance to discover a national cinema largely unknown to many, perhaps due to a lack of intellectual and cultural interest, including from institutions. This issue was highlighted by Lorenzo Codelli of Cappella Underground during the second episode of the series.

That same program featured other prominent figures in Slovene cinema, such as Bojan Štih, director of Viba Film, and Silvan Furlan, editor-in-chief of the specialized magazine Ekran, published in Ljubljana. Today, we will watch a brief excerpt from the first episode of that series. For those of us who occasionally look back with historical nostalgia at the achievements of Gorizia’s cinematic culture from that era, this is an opportunity to admire the dialogue and civic engagement of cinephile citizens like Bratina and Scandolara, and to relive shared cinematic passions that continue to resonate in cultural conferences and events like this one.

Author: Steven Stergar