CinemaItalia

On 11 November 1895, Filoteo Alberini patented the Kinetografo Alberini to shoot, print and project moving pictures. Unfortunately, the demonstration of the Lumières' Cinématographe to a paying audience in Paris just over a month later deprived him of his place in cinema history. However, Italy has still played a significant role in the development of the seventh art - a phrase that was coined in the early 20th century by theorist Ricciotto Canudo, who was among the first to recognise that film's potential far exceeded the mere recording of reality and novelty.

The Italian film industry has enjoyed three major periods of international influence, thanks to its silent superspectacles, postwar neo-realism and new wave renaissance of the early 1960s. In between times, it has assimilated the technological advances and dramatic styles of foreign competitors - most notably Hollywood - and used them to shape such local trends as the "white telephoness" entertainments of the 1930s, calligraphism, peplum, giallo, the "spaghetti" Western and an enviable diversity of comedies.

It has also remained uniquely Italian owing to a law passed by Mussolini in the mid-1930s, which stipulated that no film could be commercially screened unless it had been dubbed into the mother tongue. A growing number of co-productions in the 1960s and 70s meant that Italian cinema began to lose some of its national character, with local stars being overlooked in favour of Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider for Bernardo Bertolucci's L'ultimo tango a Parigi (Last Tango in Paris) (1973), Robert De Niro and Gérard Depardieu for the same director's 1900 (Novecento) (1976) and Dirk Bogarde and Charlotte Rampling for Liliana Cavana's Le portiere di notte (The Night Porter) (1974).

But the growing dependence of the new generation of film-makers on tele-funding has meant that Italian cinema is once again acquiring a distinctive voice that is increasingly being heard abroad.

David Parkinson