«Ferrania», a magazine published from 1947 to 1967 by the homonymous industry – the most important in Italy – manufacturing photographic and motion picture material, presents several articles devoted to the socalled ‘amateur’ cinema, characterized by the use of films downsized to 8 and 16mm. Among the different contributions, those of Guido Bezzola, Leonardo Autera, Enzo Monachesi and Alfredo Ornano do stand out as they share a few dominant themes ranging from the need to supply technical information in order that the professional quality of film strips may be improved, to critical observation on the ability of certain amateur film-makers to create innovative products from the artistic and the cultural viewpoint. Asystematic analysis of this magazine shows that both the Fifties and the Sixties were a season marked by a large spread of the amateur cinema to different ‘genre’ levels: domestic (o home), experimental, narrative and documentary. Particularly in the Sixties, everybody look up to French (Nouvelle Vague) and American (New American Cinema) experiences as possible models to take for low-cost professional productions. In the total heterogeneity of the products envisaged by definitions such as ‘amateur cinema’and ‘downsized’, «Ferrania»’s constant care consists in the fact of eliciting, somehow, an improvement of the amateur film-maker’s technical abilities, who must aim at reaching the utmost professionalism even though he is supposed to make a film strip on his son’s christening.

Between 1907 and 1923 the Milan publishing house Hoepli, specialised in practical handbooks since the second half of the nineteenth century, published three manuals devoted to cinema. Through the analysis of these texts the article seeks to assess the historical evolution that led to the fully-fledged institutionalisation of cinema, in other words to its recognition as an independent medium capable of producing films considered as works of art in their own right. The first two handbooks, Il cinematografo e i suo accessori. Lanterna magica e apparecchi affini. Vocabolario delle proiezioni (1907) [Cinema and its accessories. The magic lantern and related apparatuses. Dictionary of projections] by Guglielmo Re and Le proiezioni fisse e cinematografiche (1911) [Fixed and cinematographic projections] by Luigi Sassi, presented motion pictures as still closely dependent on photography and regarded the cinematographic medium as having a primarily didactic function. In contrast, the text by Vittorio Mariani, Guida pratica della cinematografia [Practical guide of cinematography] (1916 and second revised and expanded edition 1923) was devoted exclusively to cinema, by now considered as a new industry that was well organised into the different stages of production, with precise professional figures and its own specific language. This series of characteristics, reiterated in the second edition of the manual together with an acknowledgement of the relations between cinema and art, demonstrate that by the middle of the first decade of the twentieth century the new medium had now become fully institutionalised in Italy.