Yesterday, today and tomorrow: anthology films as a way out of the crisis

There was a time when Italian cinema was full of a very particular kind of film: the anthology film, or film a episodi. The term is intuitive: rather than a single story running the length of the screening, it is several stories - episodes, precisely - held together by a shared theme, authors or actors, or by a framing device that contains the various tales.
It was a kind of filmmaking that suited how cinemas worked at the time: you walked in with the film already under way, since it was shown on a loop, and left when the cycle had come round again. Over the years it improperly became a genre of its own, made the fortune of Italian cinema, and then disappeared.

But what if we looked back at that time for answers to get Italian cinema out of its current crisis?

The anthology film first appeared in Italy in 1952, with Alessandro Blasetti’s Altri tempi – Zibaldone n. 1: eight chapters drawn from nineteenth-century Italian stories. It was a success, partly thanks to its stars - Aldo Fabrizi, Vittorio De Sica, Gina Lollobrigida, the postwar Italian star system. From then on anthology films boomed and reached great international heights, like the three episodes of Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, which won Vittorio De Sica the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film in 1963; unforgettable is the scene in which Sophia Loren undresses in front of Marcello Mastroianni.

But it was not only comedy. Looking at the work of Pier Paolo Pasolini, anthology films were an important part of his output as an auteur. The Decameron (1971), The Canterbury Tales (1972) and Arabian Nights (1974) are three classics of Italian cinema Pasolini left us. And even as a co-director he left an indelible mark on the history of the seventh art. For example, the episode La Ricotta, starring Orson Welles, in the 1963 film Ro.Go.Pa.G. - a title made from the initials of its four directors: Rossellini, Godard, Pasolini, Gregoretti. Or the episode What Are the Clouds? in Capriccio all’italiana (1968), with Totò’s last appearance on screen, set to Domenico Modugno’s song.

Great directors and great actors for small stories - but no less important for that. This is the strength that made the anthology film flourish in Italy. And while some episodes had literary sources, there was also a successful strand of anthology films in the commedia all’italiana. One above all: Viva Italia! (I nuovi mostri, 1977), a satire with Vittorio Gassman, Alberto Sordi and Ugo Tognazzi at their best; it is the sequel to Dino Risi’s film, and this time he was joined in directing by Mario Monicelli and Ettore Scola.

What the two strands, literary and comic/satirical, had in common is that the episodes were often written and shot by different authors and directors. The key word was collaboration. Producers relied on the names on the poster to ensure a film’s success, perhaps thanks to a single episode. Meanwhile they made the most of the gaps directors and actors had between films, asking for a smaller commitment but still getting high-quality authorial work.

The collaborative spirit peaked with the collectivisation of authors. Take Signore e Signori, Buonanotte (Goodnight, Ladies and Gentlemen, 1976). In this anthology film, eleven directors and screenwriters came together as the “Cooperativa 15 maggio” and created a scathing comedy, with a lucid satire that still hits like lightning today. The great names behind the camera - including Scola and Monicelli, as well as Nanni Loy, Luigi Comencini, the duo Age & Scarpelli and Leo Benvenuti - were joined on screen by the stars of the day: Mastroianni, Gassman, Tognazzi, Nino Manfredi, Paolo Villaggio.

The narrative frame is a new public television channel (ideally the future Rai 3, which would only go on air three years later), showing a series of programmes including a news bulletin presented by Paolo T. Fiume (Mastroianni). Eleven episodes sailing between the grotesque and the paradoxical, firing at will on the Church, the State, the army, politics and television itself. So we get a report on a Turin industrialist kidnapped by a terrorist group that demands the ransom from his real family: the workers in his factories; an English lesson that turns out to be a showdown between two CIA agents; a round table with the former administrators of the city of Naples that ends with them physically carving up a scale model of the city, actually made of nougat; and “the Misfortune-meter”, a quiz show won by whoever is struck by the most misfortunes.

Over time anthology films disappeared. From the 1980s they declined sharply and became thematically poorer, a sign of the times. In the ’90s only a handful were made, with one last surprising flourish: Dear Diary, which won Nanni Moretti Best Director at Cannes in 1994. Recently the format has shown a few flashes of a comeback internationally: Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch (2021) and Yorgos Lanthimos’s Kinds of Kindness (2024). But they lack the artistic and communal drive that made the early anthology films unique.

Italian cinema is undoubtedly going through a deep crisis, due above all to a lack of funding and a certain wariness on the part of audiences. To break the isolation the seventh art finds itself in, we should revolutionise how we think about it: not focus on artistic caudillismo, waiting for the single saviour-auteur who will magically refill the cinemas’ coffers. Not wait for the box-office hit beloved by critics whose winning formula we can copy and export to the world. But spread artistic production across many episodes, so as to increase the number of voices in the industry and above all encourage cooperation between different authors and directors. To start again from the community, the group, mutual help and support. To start again from anthology films.

During the Years of Lead and the great social crises, the anthology film was also a way of building community within the film world. Great auteurs worked together; the actors who made Italian cinema famous performed side by side. Together they went through difficult years of great change, looking at the present with a critical eye but also with great trust in each other. It would not be a bad thing to revive that communal spirit in a system that needs everyone to overcome the problems besetting it. Because from those years and that way of working comes a lesson never to forget: the group is stronger than the individual. Even when it comes to films.