Virgilio Tosi
# Virgilio Tosi

Virgilio Tosi (29 November 1925 – 15 April 2023) was an Italian documentary filmmaker and historian of early film.

## Early life

Virgilio Tosi was born in Milan on 29 November 1925. On 10 June 1940, the day Italy entered World War II, Tosi started working as an 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 (Ente Teatrale Italiano), which had been created to run theatres and theatrical companies and was established in Rome.

Meanwhile, he had engaged himself not dropping 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 a 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 an 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 members 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 (Federazione Italiana dei Circoli del Cinema), where he occupied executive positions between 1949 and 1952. Meanwhile, he started working as a scriptwriter for fiction films, and his professional apprenticeship in this area greatly increased through cooperation with Cesare Zavattini.

## Mature career

Tosi started directing documentaries and subsequently decided to pursue this activity, specializing in scientific documentaries, 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 programs.

Among his activities, he worked as a 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 (Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche), the National Film School (Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia) and RAI.

He pursued historical research on the scientific origins of cinematography, and realized experimental research to study the perception of the language of moving images through the recording of eye movements.

## Later career

From 1976 Tosi taught at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia and held seminars and conferences in many universities and film schools in Italy and abroad (United Kingdom, France, Mexico and other European and Latin-American countries). Since 1988 he also taught at the Documentary School “Zelig” in Bolzano. His main teaching subjects were “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 wrote "La rubrica di Virgilio" for the Italian documentary portal ildocumentario.it.

At the 31st Pordenone Silent Film Festival he was awarded, in 2012, the International Prize "Jean Mitry" for "those who distinguish themselves in their storiographic research efforts" (video presentation on YouTube by Paolo Cherchi Usai).

Tosi died in Rome on 15 April 2023, at the age of 97.

