Virgilio Tosi


Virgilio Tosi is an Italian documentary filmmaker and historian of early film.

Early life

On June 10, 1940, the day Italy entered World War II, Tosi started working as apprentice invoice-clerk at the Milan seat of a German firm dealing in steel products, while pursuing his studies in his spare time.

Early career

At the end of 1942 Tosi was noticed at an international youth meeting on theatre, and offered a position in the newly instituted Italian Theatrical Institute, which had been created to run theatres and theatrical companies and was established in Rome.
Meanwhile, he had engaged himself not to drop out of his studies, and passed his final secondary school exams in classical studies as an external student in 1943, in adventurous circumstances owing to Italy’s division in the war.
At the end of World War II, having left the Italian Theatrical Institute, Tosi started working as theatre and cinema critic while studying philosophy at university. In 1946 he was among the promoters of the Theatre Association “Il Diogene”, where he worked as executive secretary; other members of the managing board were Mario Apollonio, Paolo Grassi and Giorgio Strehler.
The following year, he participated in the creation of the Piccolo Teatro della Città di Milano. The town’s City Council designated him, along with Grassi, Strehler and Apollonio, as member of the first managing committee of the theatre, responsible for the technical and artistic management.
Tosi became increasingly interested in cinema. He was a founding member of the Cineteca Italiana in Milan and participated in the Filmclubs movement of the period; in 1947, he was among the promoters of the founding of the Italian Film Societies Federation, where he occupied executive positions between 1949 and 1952. Meanwhile, he started working as scriptwriter for fiction films, his professional apprenticeship in this area greatly increased by the cooperation with Cesare Zavattini.

Mature career

Tosi started directing documentaries and subsequently decided to pursue this activity, specialising in scientific documentary, continuing to work as cinema critic and essay-writer all the while. In the 1960s, he started cooperating with RAI, the Italian national public television network, for a number of television programmes.
Among his activities, he has worked as consultant for UNESCO, the Istituto Luce, Rome’s National Gallery of Modern Arts, was president of the International Scientific Film Association and of the Italian Scientific Film Association, and research director in the field of audiovisuals for the National Research Council, the National Film School and RAI.
He has pursued and is still pursuing historical research on the scientific origins of cinematography, and has realised experimental research to study the perception of the language of moving images through the recording of eye movements.

Later career

From 1976 Tosi has taught at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia and held seminars and conferences in many universities and film schools in Italy and abroad. Since 1988 he has also taught at the Documentary School “Zelig” in Bolzano. His main teaching subjects are “History and Critic of Documentary Film” and “Scientific Documentary Techniques”.
Between 2002 and 2004 he taught, as a temporary professor, the course of Documentary Film at Rome University “La Sapienza”. Since 2012 he writes "La rubrica di Virgilio" for the Italian documentary portal "ildocumentario.it" .
At the 31st Pordenone Silent Film Festival he has been awarded, in 2012, the International Price "Jean Mitry" for "those who distinguish themselves in their storiographic research efforts" ( by Paolo Cherchi Usai.

Television programs - Selected titles