Italian Cinema Group

HRC Visiting Speaker's Events Series:

Professor Luca Caminati (Concordia University)

25-26 February 2026

Italian Cinema Group - Film and TV Studies (SCAPVC) - Italian Studies (SMLC)

These events are sponsored by the Humanities Research Centre (HRC) at the University of Warwick

Organising team: Dr Ilaria Puliti, Jacopo Francesco Mascoli

Wednesday 25th February

Methods Reading Group (FTV PhD Students only)

14.30 – 15.45 | FAB6.01

Roundtable on methodological approaches to travel and exploration films. Participants: Luca Caminati, Tiago de Luca, Karl Schoonover

FTV Research Seminar

16.30 – 18.00 | FAB cinema (FAB 0.21)

18.00 – 19.00 | Drinks reception, FTV Academic Studio

Professor Luca Caminati, Concordia University

Abstract: This talk examines the cultural phenomenon of Sandokan (1976), the Italian television miniseries that became a symbol of 1970s popular media. By situating the program within the broader context of the “subversive seventies,” I explore how Sandokan mediated tensions between entertainment, politics, and desire. Drawing on Lyotard’s concept of libidinal economy, my analysis examines how the series generated affective investments that exceeded its immediate narrative, shaping new forms of identification and resistance. Italian television emerges not only as a site of mass consumption but also as a contested arena in which popular culture intersected with ideological struggles, colonial imaginaries, and the shifting dynamics of postwar society. Ultimately, I argue that Sandokan embodied a paradoxical cultural thickness: simultaneously a commercial product and a vehicle for subversive fantasies that destabilized traditional boundaries of national identity and collective desire.

Luca Caminati is Professor of Film and Moving Image Studies at Concordia University, Montreal. He is co-editor, with James Cahill, of Cinema of Exploration: Essays on an Adventurous Film Practice (2021), and the author of Traveling Auteurs: The Geopolitics of Postwar Italian Cinema (2024). He is currently working on two new projects: a co-authored study with Luca Peretti titled “The Italian Anticolonial Film Archive: Global Counterculture (1955–1975),” and a volume on Italian television and the “movement of ’77.”

Thursday 26th February

The Italian Anticolonial Film Archive: Global Counterculture (1955–1975)

11.30 – 13.00 | TRC (FAB4.76)

Presentation of the forthcoming book co-authored by Luca Caminati and Luca Peretti

Speakers: Professor Luca Caminati and Dr Luca Peretti (University of Cambridge)

The Italian Anticolonial Film Archive: Global Counterculture (1955–1975) examines Italy’s central role as a crossroads of anticolonial and Third-Worldist cinematic cultures during the long 1960s. Situating Italian film production within global networks of solidarity linking Europe, the Global South, and South–South movements, the book maps a “cine-geography of liberation” that encompasses militant fiction and documentary films, festivals, magazines, institutions, and archival practices. Spanning from the Bandung Conference of 1955 to the end of the Vietnam War and European colonialism in 1975, the study analyzes how Italian filmmakers, producers, and activists engaged with liberation struggles in Algeria, Vietnam, Palestine, and the former Portuguese colonies, as well as how these struggles were mediated and reimagined within Italy itself. Combining close film analysis with extensive archival research, the book moves beyond canonical narratives of neorealism and art cinema to recover forgotten or marginalized works and circuits of production, exhibition, and reception. By foregrounding Italy’s distinctive geopolitical position and its alternative models of internationalism, the volume offers a postcolonial and decolonial re-reading of postwar Italian visual culture and reactivates these cinematic practices as historical precedents and critical resources for contemporary global solidarity movements.

Luca Peretti is Assistant Professor in Modern and Contemporary Italian Literature and Culture at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of St. John’s College. He wrote Un dio nero un diavolo bianco. Storia di un film non fatto tra Algeria, Eni, Solinas e Sartre (Marsilio, 2023) and co-edited volumes on terrorism and cinema, Pier Pasolini Pasolini, Italian cinema and Algeria, and Italian cinema and the former Portuguese colonies. His work has appeared in, among others, Film History, Senses of Cinema, The Italianist, Interventions, Annali d’Italianistica, Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies, L’Avventura.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------