Guido Fink, Professor of English literature at the University of Florence, was for many years editor of the prestigious Italian film journal Cinema & Cinema. He has written on a wide range of topics in cinema, theater, and American and English literature, and is an important contributor to the cultural programming of RAI. Among his most intriguing recent projects was the film retrospective he organized for the 1993 Venice Film Festival entitled "Dies Irae: I Film del 1943," for which he gathered what would have been shown at the 1943 Venice Film Festival which was never held since Italy had just entered the war. In Roberto Rossellini's Paisa (1946), naive monks from the hills of Romagna devoutly pray for the conversion of the Jewish American captain-a sort of "Jew from Another Planet." This came after the long prudent silence of Fascist cinema, to which several Italian Jews did, in fact, contribute, mostly under assumed names. Paisa, and the conversions of the young Jewish female protagonists of Gillo Pontecorvo's Kapo (1959) and Giuliano Montaldo's Gli Occhiali d'Oro (1987), all suggest a periodical reenacting, if widely diversified, of what may well be the unconscious attitude of Italian cinema towards a somewhat embarrassing minority. Within this framework, Professor Fink will address other issues, from the curious phenomenon of Fascist or at least right-wing directors variously apologizing for the Holocaust (Alessandrini's L'Ebreo Errante, 1946) or advocating the cause of Zionist settlers in not-yet-Israel (Duilio Coletti's Il Grido della Terra, 1947); to the political and financial negotiations leading to the production or the shelving of major cinematic projects meant to address the plight of the Italian Jews under Fascist rule. A notable example of the former is Carlo Lizzani's L'Oro di Roma (1961); of the latter, Vasco Pratolini's 1953 project for a film to be titled I Fidanzati, under the direction of Franco Zeffirelli supervised by Luchino Visconti. The lecture will be illustrated by excerpts from several films, some never shown in this country.