ABSTRACT
Although it ends with the hundredth anniversary of the first film-show in Italy, this book is not aimed at celebrating the centenary of film. The cinema, as it developed and then declined, was a very specific variety of performing art, distinct from those which preceded or followed it. Its fate depended upon the existence of picture theatres where people would gather at scheduled times to watch and hear, in darkness, recorded shows, of a limited duration, mostly fictional, and played by well-known actors. There have been and there will be many other kinds of moving pictures but all those which can be seen individually, at home, or which are transmitted all day long no longer belong to the category of cinema. Films are the most characteristic cultural production of the twentieth century, especially of its first two thirds. It is not by chance that a volume published at the end of the century is in a position to deal with the complete history of the medium, for its birth to its old age.
