In 1934, Giuseppe Terragni, the father of Italian architectural Rationalism,
planned and directed the renovation work of the city of Como. Retracing
this utopian project – definitively withdrawn after some years and never
completed – the article points out the singular relationship between the
Terragni Studio and the young comrades of the University Fascist Film Club
of Como: the ‘Cineguf’. The Cineguf were a complex network of film clubs
spread all over the country; they were fostered and equipped by the National
Fascist Party in order to create a new generation of filmmakers for the new
fascist cinema. In these groups the avant-garde culture of the cine-clubs
and the official aesthetic debates about a genuine realism found an original
and controversial solution. The focus here is on the short film realised by the
Cineguf which was commissioned by the Terragni Studio and financed by
the Urban Office of the Municipality: Renovation of the Quarter ‘La Cortesella’.
I proceed by taking into account different degrees of conceptualisation of
the ‘trace’, presenting a reflection on the complexity of the historiographical
operation, including the ways in which the historical traces of these filmmakers’
experience of modernity are identifiable in the text.
