Guido Fink and American Film Studies: The Early Years (1952-1953)

Is interdisciplinarity of any value in Film Studies? What is the role of film in the rise of American Studies in Italy? How does Guido Fink’s pioneering penchant for interdisciplinary approaches square with his early configuration of American studies? These are just some of the challenging questions that crowded my mind on the day I discovered a corpus of early articles written by Guido Fink, one of the most prolific and eclectic scholars in American and film studies in the 1980s and 1990s. These articles were published in a national newspaper and in a local weekly magazine in 1952 and 1953. At that time, Fink was just seventeen years old but he had already shown the passion and maturity of a true cultural observer, though he was not yet a protagonist in the cultural arena. Many years would pass before he started contributing to Cinema Nuovo, directed Cinema & Cinema (from no. 30 to no. 44), and wrote extensively on many subjects, ranging from Orson Welles to Michelangelo Antonioni, from Mario Soldati to Stanley Kubrick, but he was already a nascent role model for those to come.