Rino Lupo before Portugal, Russia and Poland: A biography for poetics under construction

Abstract

In recent years, the figure of the Italian filmmaker Rino Lupo (1884–1936) has taken on alternative developments that not only keep attention on his cinematographic work, but also expand to the birth of a new poetic centred on his numerous travels. The essence of Rino Lupo’s transnational and pro-European cinema is linked to an idea of the ‘search for beauty’ through ‘the discovery of the new’. In Poland, Rino Lupo worked on some of the most important concepts that were developed in the following years in Portugal and Spain. In particular, in this article I explore his period in Russia and Poland (1916–21), when Lupo began to expand his cinematographic activity beyond directing movies to creating a journal and a film school, the first in Warsaw.