“A Private History of Italian Film Criticism” aims to reshape the long process of social institutionalization and cultural legitimation of film criticism referring to personal friendships, political connections, and cultural relations of the main protagonists of our critical debate. The project will take into consideration a crucial and articulated period, covering about four decades from the 1930s – that is the decade of the institutionalization of Italian film production and education – to the beginning of the 1970s – that is the moment of the crisis of traditional film criticism and the definitive presence of cinema as an academic discipline. To sketch out such a history we identify five main critics, among the different periods, who can be considered as paradigmatic of the kind of sociality we want to analyze: Aristarco, Barbaro, Casiraghi, Doletti, Pellizzari. Beside the work on these figures and their archives, we want to include in the project also the oral sources of witnesses who lived the last part of the period we take into consideration and, in some case, the whole of it.