Fughe in città. Paesaggi comici del primo cinema italiano: il «caso» Torino

This essay examines the relationship between landscape and early silent cinema produced in Turin, focusing on short comedies, a genre particularly intertwined with the city’s public space. Drawing on approximately 150 titles preserved in national and international archives the essay investigates how early film comedy contributed both to documenting and reimagining the city of Turin in the 1908-1914 period. The analysis is structured in two parts. The first addresses the notion of "hard city", tracing how these films recorded fragments of the city’s material reality: studios, workers’ boroughs, new bourgeois neighborhoods, riverbanks, public parks, and expanding peripheral areas. The second part focuses on the "soft city", exploring the subjective and often dysfunctional experiences of space offered by the comic anti-heroes. Through erratic movements, improvised tactics and surreal disruptions of order, these figures produce alternative ways of inhabiting and perceiving the modern metropolis. The study highlights how Turin’s early film comedies do not merely represent the city but actively reshape its spatial dynamics, offering unique insights into the intersections of cinema, urban modernity and popular imagination.