«Il festival rinascerà», Paola Masino inviata alla Manifestazione d’Arte Cinematografica di Venezia del 1946

The essay presents and analyses the film criticism articles written by Paola Masino for the new edition of the Venice Film Festival after the Second World War. The articles, which appeared in the Gazzetta d’Italia between August 31 and September 19, 1946, were not later collected or republished. These are rare materials, never studied before, found among the documents of the Fondo Paola Masino kept at the Archivio del Novecento, Sapienza University of Rome. Other significant and useful information to understand Masino’s critical perspective on cinema emerges from the letters sent from Venice to family members. The analysis of the articles highlights in Paola Masino a lively intellectual curiosity and great precision in aesthetic judgments, in addition to a peculiar sensitivity to chromatic values, and an ethical attention to the political perspective of film directors and to the recent tragedies of war and partisan resistance in Italy. Among the most interesting data emerged from these articles, there are some theoretical reflections on aesthetic principles valid not only for cinema, but for all the arts, including the narrative and the literary work of the same Paola Masino.