The dominant feature in this heterogeneous corpus of films is the desire to compete with cinema on a European level by affirming the expressive autonomy of cinema with respect to the other arts and, at the same time, the possibility of comparing it on an equal footing with them through a style that can merge and contaminate the different artistic and expressive languages.[3]
The result is a formally complex cinema, capable of recalling numerous cultural tendencies and, at the same time, of harmonizing them in a complete expressive form through formal attention, the re-evaluation of the "artisanal" character of cinema, debased in the period of the cinema of Telefoni Bianchi. Many highly experienced technicians will collaborate on these films, including operators Massimo Terzano, Ubaldo Arata, and Carlo Montuori, and set designers Virgilio Marchi, Gino Carlo Sensani, and Antonio Valente.[1]
Unlike French poetic realism and Italian neorealism, the films of this brief trend have no realist vocation or social commitment. The main interest remains the formal care and the richness of cultural references enclosed in a cinema capable of enhancing the professionalism of each production component. Calligrafismo does not lead to innovations in the production system, but raises its quality and reveals the ambitions of a new generation of authors interested in overcoming the narrow limits of fascist culture.[4] The critics of the time branded this trend as unrealistic and superficial (specially coining the expression calligrafismo); later, starting from the 1960s, this reductive judgment was corrected.[5]
The inner conflicts of the characters and the scenographic richness are also recurrent in the first films by Alberto Lattuada (Giacomo the Idealist, 1942) and Renato Castellani (A Pistol Shot, 1942), dominated by a sense of moral and cultural decay that seemed to anticipate the end of the war. The first film by Luchino Visconti, Ossessione (1943), is completely anomalous, which, while presenting some typical elements of calligraphy (the literary origin, the references to 19th-century culture, and the accurate formal composition) radicalises the self-destructive tension of the characters and, above all, the importance of the setting, effectively paving the way for the revolution of Italian neorealism. Another important example of a calligraphic film is the film version of The Betrothed (1941), by Mario Camerini (very faithful in the staging of Manzoni's masterpiece), which due to the perceived income, became the most popular feature film between 1941 and 1942.[6]
