To hear Luciano Emmer’s voice again today as he introduces his caroselli or interviews the great masters of advertising is quite extraordinary. For Emmer is the person who, more than any other, experienced and understands the phenomenon. This is clearly evident in Carosello, che passione!, a documentary in two parts each lasting fifty minutes on the beginning and the end of this celebrated programme, which he shot and edited for Rai and which was broadcast on the same channel on the 26th January and the 2nd February 1977, at 8.40 pm. It is therefore appropriate that he should be the person to ‘end it’, with a film-memory, shot in black-and-white just as Tv was moving to colour. Carosello vanished at the end of 1976 leaving an empty gap identified in the Sacis bulletins simply as “Space F”. In short, a gap in place of that regular, happy rendezvous which for twenty years had nurtured thousands and thousands of Italian youngsters. There is not even a hint of nostalgia in Emmer’s narration of the programme’s long history; rather, it is delivered in an almost scientific fashion. The first part is dedicated to the Roaring Years, the second to Who Killed It?. Emmer clearly feels that he is someone who helped to give birth to and nourish the programme in the late-Fifties and early-Sixties, but who also, while not wanting to kill it off, nevertheless tried to keep pace with the changes in television and advertising in late-1977 and early-1978. These were difficult years, characterised by dramatic changes on many levels. Emmer could not close himself in a sweet nostalgia for the gold old times of the caroselli, but nor could he abandon, without comment, a programme that he had followed for twenty years and that he knew inside out – just as he knew the people in show business, industry and advertising that comprised this world. Even if his beautiful voice, lacking any hint of tears, is the same as the one used for his great documentaries, you can nonetheless hear the passion that he dedicated both to Carosello and to this documentary which celebrates and brings it to conclusion. Seen again today, it is a moving and powerful documentary, full of sensational interviews and long-lost extracts.

Marco Giusti