The soon-to-be-founded Scuola di Cinema was characterized (and still is) by the adjective “sperimentale”  (experimental), a term which all the passionate young Italians who began working with substandard-gauge film in the 1920s and 30s used to describe their work. Which was often carried out instinctively, returning to the fundamentals of the pioneers by necessity, but dreaming of the great cinema they loved, even though they thought it was contaminated by industry and money. Experimentation as freedom, assisted and nevertheless conditioned by the technological limitations of a device that allowed only short shots (it was powered by a wound-clockwork mechanism), obliging one to employ highly fragmented editing.
For Mediolanum, his second documentary, Ubaldo Magnaghi, co-founder in 1930 of the Milan Cine-Club (soon to become Cineguf, with Francesco Pasinetti’s Venice club), was commissioned by Agfa, then one of Europe’s biggest film manufacturers, probably to demonstrate the quality and superiority of reversible film, which remained unique after exposure and standardized developing. In Mediolanum Magnaghi sought the abstract. He isolated strong, essential architectural features without needing to recompose them in descriptions but making a show of them in temporal, desired luminous contrast. He provoked abstraction with rapid panoramas, but above all with bold, as well as oblique, camera positions. He was more redundant than Ivens or Vigo, perhaps without knowing their work. But he was attentive above all to form, since the human figure is always present in the background. The result is a real harmonic symphony of luminous contrasts, which are also fragmented glimpses of a great city.

Carlo Montanaro