One of the consequences of postwar industrial reconstruction in Italy, (at a time when new tools were needed to carry out vocational training mass campaigns), was the development of the Italian modern “industrial” educational audiovisuals.

 In this paper we will study in particular the circumstances of the birth of a specific format of documentaries for vocational training: the so-called “work grammars” (grammatiche del lavoro), which were first developed in the mid-1950s, and are still used today, although they are referred to by other names, and have undergone the formal and structural transformations recently brought about by the digital revolution. Work grammars are, in their basic version, documentary films for vocational training, organised in a serial format in which each instalment covers a different aspect of the profession/technique being taught.

In the days of their birth, these new educational tools were “torn” between conflicting stylistic and didactic possibilities: on the one hand, the model of the previous Italian documentary film production, which was, however, deeply marked and compromised by the propaganda rhetoric of fascism (e.g. the documentaries by the State film corporation: the Istituto Luce), within which it had developed. On the other hand, various new influences from the international context, ranging from the British 'documentary film movement' to the American 'Coronet' films and the educational films by the USIS.

In this paper, we would like to attempt a clarification of how these circumstances have contributed to shaping a new educational discourse in the Italian audiovisuals for vocational training.

The research work will proceed on four levels:

1) The study of VET audiovisual policies and production in Italy, in the days when the “work grammars” were first issued.

2) The refinement of a system of formal (aesthetical, didactical, etc.) categories useful to develop a map, a reasoned inventory of the most relevant Italian VET audiovisuals in the 1950s/1960s, which is also useful for understanding the context in which the “work grammars” were launched, and to better define them.

3) The attempt to analyse the cinematic discourse of these films, through the study of the theories on educational and didactic cinema available in Italy at the time when the phenomenon of the “work grammars” was beginning.

4) The study of biografical elements of the main pioneering authors of this film genre.

Historical research on VET film policy and production; formal analysis of documentary films and of theoretical literature on documentary film and teir use in VET; biographical research on the pioneering authors of "work grammars". Sources: relevant literature, historical/biographical interviews, vision of documentary films from film archives (such as the "Archivio Nazionale del Cinema d'Impresa").

To reconstruct the main lines of the historical framework in which the "work grammars" were first produced. To propose a formal categorization of the most important early "work grammars" in Italy. To understand where the pioneering authors took their inspiration to create this new film format. To contextualize such findings in the framework of VET in Italy in a significant period of the industrial reconstruction (1955-1965).

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