Bigger than Marble. Cinema and the archiviability of experience in italian culture between 1898 and 1913

11th January 1912. On the occasion of Queen Margherita's birthday, while in Libya the war against Turkey and the local population breaks out, in Rome at the Moderno Cinema, with the help of the manager Filoteo Alberini, a representative of the Bersaglieri Museum is awarded the copies of two newsreels on patriotic-military topics. The hope is that these newsreels will be kept in the museum ab aeternum. Today, the two films (which have recently been recovered and restored thanks to a research study carried out by the University of Rome Tor Vergata working closely with Ufficio Storico dello Stato Maggiore dell’Esercito-Historical Office of the Army General Staff – and with the Cineteca Nazionale- National Film Archive ) are important traces of that dream according to which the present would be filed following cinema footage. On a more theoretical level, this concept had already been envisaged in 1898 by Boleslas Matuszewski (whose Une nouvelle source de l’Histoire, had been very much praised by the Italian military cirlces). This filing dream has too often been confused with the first phase of the historical process aimed at creating film archives, which is instead dictated by more aesthetical reasons and has come about in different circles and in more recent years. The introduction of the two patriotic films in the museum is perfectly in line with the fast repositioning of cinema in a cultural context as the perfect symbolic representation of reality. This process took place between the last few months of 1911 and the beginning of 1912 thanks to the sense of belonging given by the war in Libya . In fact the colonial experience divided the main opposition movements that were active in the country at the time. However, at the same time, it saw the various cultural currents of the dominant elites sharing, even though only temporarily, the same view. Among the many different schools of thought was one that originated from Positivism and was tightly connected to the scientific world and to a part of the military entourage. Another current had its roots in the late Romantic or Romantic-massonic thought and was strongly linked to the liberal world of politics, to the crown, to the high ranks of the army and to part of the journalistic circles. A further school of thought stemmed from Pragmatism and New- Idealism, tightly connected instead to a great part of the emerging artistic, philosophical and literary environments, among which we find the Futurist artists. The inclusion of the two films in the museum must be therefore interpreted in two ways. On the one hand, this must be seen as the gradual decrease of opposition towards accepting cinema as a self representation of society (the new medium was then to blame for depicting reality in a way that did not reflect people's