If Ettore Scola has been the « master of grotesque and regrets », the particular tone of the films of the last of the great Italian popular authors, half way between comic and tragic, situate him in the pures! tradition of this "Italian comedy", which he widely contributed to shape, first as a screenwriter and then as a director. The Campanian filmmaker, civilly and politically engaged, had a deep conscience of the role of cinema in the civic, social and political formation of Italy since the fall of Fascism. Thus, it must be noticed that a high number of his works show a dimension ofreflexivity, as to say of"reversion of the cinema on itself', or of "show in the show", as it often turns out in Federico Fellini's films. We will mostly pay attention to two of them, widely referring to cinema, its heritage and its nearly centennial history: Nous nous sommes tant aimés (1974), a tribute movie to Vittorio De Sica, which assesses the disillusions of a generation, and Splendor (1989), a moving elegy on the decline of movie theatres, at the time of the boom of commercial television.