Avant-garde cinema no longer exists; film theorists are false prophets; Italian cinema is dead. Carlo Montanaro is co-Artistic Director of the Asolo International Art Film Festival; he spoke with Minù Habibi Minelli about defining and programming art cinema.

Carlo Montanaro is a professor of the theory and technique of cinema, and of the politics of film conservation at Venice's Ca' Foscari University. He is also professor of theory and method of mass media at the Accademia di Belle Arti, Venice. He has a collection of 10,000 early and avant-garde films on celluloid, a private library on cinema, and is a bright shining example of the professional European cinéaste. He is the author of From Silver to the Pixel: The Story of Cinema's Technology, and a collaborator on the fifth volume of The Story of World Cinema (La Storia del Cinema Mondiale), the Encyclopedia of Cinema (Enciclopedia del Cinema), and of The History of Italian Cinema (Storia del Cinema Italiano), which is soon to be published by the Scuola Nazionale di Cinema. He also works with the Venice Biennale, MystFest di Cattolica, and Le Giornate del Cinema Muto (Silent Film Festival of Pordenone). He is an artistic director at the Asolo International Art Film Festival together with Professor Fabrizio Borin.

Minù: What is the reason or philosophy behind the Asolo festival?

Carlo: The festival is about art in the widest sense: about photography, about ballet, as well as cinema. A number of years back we had a documentary on photography that won the art documentary prize, which for some reason, surprised people. We get a wide range of films on video arts, animation, and other graphic arts.

And films on art and on artists – biographies?

Yes. Of course, there is always an element of self-mythologising going on when you interview an artist, or the filmmaker creating a mythology.

And you consider them filmmakers, and these films?

What else could they be? Michael Moore shows quite clearly that the traditional boundaries of cinema and documentary are blurring. Television is largely responsible. The form and structure of documentaries has a house style, be that of a particular director or organisations such as the BBC, which in turn is determined by time slots - 27, 50 or 54 minutes, whatever. The TV remote control has a lot to answer for: filmmakers structure documentaries to stop the viewer switching channels after a minute.

The full article is printed in Film Ireland 110.