In this essay, I examine few exemplary cases of post-WWII Italian corporate cinema, which are particularly interesting from an auteur or directorial standpoint: Michelangelo Antonioni’s Sette canne, un vestito (1948), Ermanno Olmi’s Costruzioni meccaniche Riva (1956), and Vittorio De Seta’s Gela 1959: pozzi a mare (1960). My analysis is twofold: I make recourse to film analysis and criticism to provide a more detailed cinematic and contextual exegesis of these three exemplary cases; but I am also interested in the cultural construction of a particular set of discourses and forms of representation that foregrounded technology as an incipient protagonist in the visual landscape of Italy, over the period of rapid economic and infrastructural modernisation from the late 1940s to the 1960s. Cinema was part of this focalisation, and bears witness to a temporal segmentation of different or divergent responses to this historical process: a more apologetic first period in the 1950s, in which these works are temporally located, and then a more reflexive, critical aftermath in the 1960s and into the 1970s. The aims of this analysis are to tease out some ideological and aesthetic tensions that could appear to point, on the one hand, to some formal and thematic continuity between pre-World War II output and that of later years; and, on the other, to the particular role played by technology in shaping a specific formalistic vocabulary in these films.