Calligrafismo (En: caligraphism) is an Italian style of filmmaking in the first half of the 1940s.
In the 1940s the two most significant styles of the Italian movie scene were the telefoni bianchi (En: white telephones) and calligrafismo.
Calligrafismo is in a sharp contrast to telefoni bianchi-American style comedies and is rather artistic, highly formalistic, expressive in complexity and deals mainly with contemporary literary material,[1] above all the pieces of Italian realism from authors like Corrado Alvaro, Ennio Flaiano, Emilio Cecchi, Francesco Pasinetti, Vitaliano Brancati, Mario Bonfantini and Umberto Barbaro.[2]