Story of a cinema-goer: Seventy years of film viewing in the city of Udine as seen through ephemera

This article is based on the collection of seven scrapbooks assembled by a cinema-goer of the city of Udine: Walter Faglioni, a cinephile and an amateur filmmaker. From 1926 to 1999, every day he took note of every film screened or broadcasted, which he watched, filling a total of 36 diaries. Using these records as a temporal guideline, he organized all the ephemera materials and clippings which he gathered into six scrapbooks, ordered by decades. These scrapbooks provide us with an exceptionally sophisticated and multi-faceted encyclopedic perspective on his own film viewing experience and habits: on the one hand, they are a valuable, rich and detailed source of information for the microhistory of the film circulation in the city of Udine and the impact of TV culture on local film consumption; on the other hand, they shed light on the historical and critical impulse toward film knowledge that characterizes a given cinephile culture; lastly, they patently manifest the peculiar historical value and the multilayered complexity of ephemeral media as personal archives, proving a nuanced source for the history of cinema-going.