Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Stanislao G. Pugliese
Hofstra University
Series Editor
This publishing initiative seeks to bring the latest scholarship in Italian and Italian
American history, literature, cinema, and cultural studies to a large audience of specialists,
general readers, and students. I&IAS will feature works on modern Italy (Renaissance to
the present) and Italian American culture and society by established scholars as well as
new voices in the academy. This endeavor will help to shape the evolving fields of Italian
and Italian American Studies by re-emphasizing the connection between the two. The fol-
lowing editorial board consists of esteemed senior scholars who act as advisors to the series
editor.
ALESSANDRO PORTELLI
Università di Roma “La Sapienza”
Queer Italia: Same-Sex Desire in Italian Literature and Film
edited by Gary P. Cestaro
July 2004
Italian Colonialism
edited by Ruth Ben-Ghiat and Mia Fuller
July 2005
Italy and the Mediterranean: Words, Sounds, and Images of the Post-Cold War Era
Norma Bouchard and Valerio Ferme
September 2013
Italian Women Filmmakers
and the Gendered Screen
Edited by
Maristella Cantini
ITALIAN WOMEN FILMMAKERS AND THE GENDERED SCREEN
Copyright © Maristella Cantini, 2013.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2013 978-1-137-33650-7
All rights reserved.
First published in 2013 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN®
in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world,
this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited,
registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills,
Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies
and has companies and representatives throughout the world.
Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States,
the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.
ISBN 978-1-349-46352-7 ISBN 978-1-137-33651-4 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9781137336514
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the
Library of Congress.
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
Design by Newgen Knowledge Works (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.
First edition: December 2013
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
A Massimo e Alessandro
per la loro illimitata fiducia
To Massimo and Alessandro for their unlimited trust
This page intentionally left blank
Contents
List of Figures xi
Foreword xiii
Patrizia Carrano
Preface xvii
Dacia Maraini
Acknowledgments xxiii
Introduction 1
Maristella Cantini
Part I
1 Napoli Terra d’Amore: The Eye on the Screen of Elvira Notari 15
Chiara Ricci
2 Grotesque Bodies, Fragmented Selves: Lina Wertmüller’s
Women in Love and Anarchy (1973) 33
Claudia Consolati
3 Don’t Bring a Gun to a Fistfight: Deconstructing
Hegemonic Masculinity through the Gun in Lina
Wertmüller’s Pasqualino Settebellezze 53
Lidia Hwa Soon Anchisi Hopkins and Luke Cuculis
4 Adventurous Identities: Cavani’s Thematic Imaginary 73
Gaetana Marrone
5 Healing the Daughter’s Body in Francesca
Archibugi’s Il Grande Cocomero 89
Daniela De Pau
6 Motherhood Revisited in Francesca Comencini’s Lo
Spazio Bianco 103
Claudia Karagoz
x CONTENTS
Part II
12 Skype Interview with Alina Marazzi (June 2012) 231
Cristina Gamberi
13 Interview with Marina Spada (Milan, June 2012) 237
Laura Di Bianco
14 Interview with Alice Rohrwacher (Rome, June 2012) 247
Laura Di Bianco
15 Interview with Paola Randi (Rome, June 2012) 253
Laura Di Bianco
16 Interview with Costanza Quatriglio (July 2012) 263
Giovanna Summerfield
7.1 Poesia che mi guardi, Marina Spada’s set journal, 2009 128
7.2 Poesia che mi guardi, Marina Spada’s set journal, 2009 129
7.3 Poesia che mi guardi, Marina Spada’s set journal, 2009 130
7.4 Come l’ombra, Marina Spada’s set journal, 2006 132
7.5 Come l’ombra, Marina Spada’s set journal, 2006 133
7.6 Come l’ombra, Marina Spada’s set journal, 2006 134
7.7 Il mio domani, Marina Spada’s set journal, 2011 139
7.8 Il mio domani, Marina Spada’s set journal, 2011 140
This page intentionally left blank
Foreword
Patrizia Carrano
I ’ve been convinced for quite a while now that Italian cinema doesn’t
exist anymore. Cinema understood as an industrial machine able to
consistently nourish the people’s imaginary, to tell stories about its vices
and virtues, to explore its wounds, to become dialectically engaged with
the dreams, illusions, and disillusions of a nation. That kind of cinema
able to turn out over two hundred titles a year, to present auteur films
and genre films, to go from peplum films to comedy Italian style, from
movie serials to mysteries, and, as in the case of Goffredo Lombardo’s
production company Titanus, able to finance works by great directors
with the box office receipts generated by musical comedies, low-budget
films with guaranteed profits, and the public’s most beloved singers play-
ing the roles. All of this belongs to the past. Today we produce fifty–sixty
films a year that line up a series of ready-mades tailored to some more
or less talented comic actors (from Benigni to Checco Zalone); some
light Christmas season films (farces based on two fixed themes, “sex”
and “money,” the real S$ of commercial cinema)1; some auteur films; and
numerous low-budget, debut movies, which often, by choice, don’t even
make their way into movie theaters.
This isn’t the right place to go into the causes of this defeat, or to look
a bit enviously at our French cousins, who were able to defend their cin-
ematography, their screenplay writers, and their movie theaters. Along
with cinema, a large part of film criticism is also dead. Our newspapers
allot less and less space to it, preferring to interview actors, and perhaps
directors, thus becoming a sort of extension of the press offices.
In this rather dismal panorama, it’s hard to imagine the concrete possi-
bility of working on how the presence of women filmmakers has developed
or become involved. And yet there are some. Think of Cristina Comencini,
Francesca Comencini, Wilma Labate, Roberta Torre, Francesca Archibugi,
just to mention a few names from the “second generation” of cineastes
xiv FOREWORD
glass ceiling, which prevents Italian women from walking in step with
other European women toward a still distant—extremely distant for
us—equality, the cards have been reshuffled and the panorama has
changed.
To be sure, in the woman character, who is separated, marked by
loneliness and failure, played masterfully by an intelligent, extraor-
dinarily talented actress like Angela Finocchiaro, one feels the strong
female hand of Cristina Comencini, the screenwriter and director of La
bestia nel cuore, which is based on her own novel. Similarly, Francesca
Comencini’s Lo spazio bianco, a film drawn from the eponymous novel
by Valeria Parrella, starring Margherita Buy, penetrates the depths of the
female condition in the specific case of an unwanted pregnancy, which
transforms into passionately chosen motherhood. It does so with a den-
sity that would be difficult to attribute to a man. (Perhaps an Italian
man. Because Bergman was able to offer us sensational examples in this
respect.)
But it is incontrovertible that some affinities can be found even among
women filmmakers who are as different from each other as the ones I’ve
cited. In women’s cinema, it’s difficult, if not impossible, to find female
characters that hark back to the usual stereotypes so prevalent in films for
undiscerning palates that are still made today. It’s difficult, if not impos-
sible, to come across a merely consumer idea of sexuality. Liliana Cavani
narrated the morbidity of a sadomasochistic bond, a mirror of very differ-
ent acts of abuse and cruelty in Il portiere di notte. But it’s quite clear that
her discourse, high and quite powerfully expressive, considers the bond
between the two main characters, turning on its head, if you will, the
perspective we find in La morte e la fanciulla. It’s difficult, if not impos-
sible, to find the commonplace ideas about motherhood and childhood
that characterized so much Italian cinema for so many years. (But not the
cinema of a truly great director like Vittorio de Sica, who in Sciuscià was
able to narrate like no one else the separateness of the world of children
from that of adults.)
The examples could go on and on. But to arrive at an evident conclu-
sion, all of our women directors seem driven by a strong necessity to
speak. By the need to make films in order to say something, and not
simply because filmmaking can be a job. Therefore, they all have an evi-
dent filmmaking vocation. But perhaps what appears to be a quality is
actually the concrete sign of undeniable discrimination; when will we
have a woman director who practices the craft of film directing the way
Mario Monicelli (a great filmmaker, after all) or Sergio Corbucci, who
directed a hundred and fifty films with ease? Considering the conditions
xvi FOREWORD
of Italian cinema, it’s conceivable that a similar possibility may not exist
anymore. For women, or for men either. But please, let’s not call that
equality.
Translated by Robin Pickering-Iazzi
Note
1. Translator’s note: In Italian, the words “sex” and “money” both begin with
the letter “s” (“sesso e soldi”), thus forming Carrano’s play on words and
meaning, an element lost in English translation.
Preface
Dacia Maraini
for only a few months, resigning shortly thereafter saying that she felt like
a freak, being the only woman, stared at by the avid curiosity of hundreds
of men. She later dedicated herself to teaching destitute children. One
can see, then, that in order for it to work, emancipation cannot be simply
the result of some isolated and exclusive instances, but must necessarily
involve the overall population of women.
I also recall Artemisia Gentileschi, whose father made space for her
in his studio and taught her to draw and paint. However, the impact of
public opinion has often unfortunately proved to be painful and ruthless.
Here too, Anna Banti recounts, in her homonymous novel, how Artemisia
was raped by a painter friend of her father’s, how she suffered through the
shame of a trial where she was stripped in public in order to verify her
loss of virginity, how she was subsequently denigrated, ostracized, iso-
lated, and humiliated for having wanted to be considered for her talent
as a painter. Her works, of great scenic power, display with unmistak-
able energy the resentment that triggers the gestures and actions of her
heroines.
All this seems to be part of a remote past, say the more recent voices:
today women excel in every field, and bookstores are full of their books,
art galleries of their paintings, and cinema abounds with their films.
Some people are even amazed and claim that today women rule the
world! What about Hillary Clinton, Angela Merkel, and others . . . as if
two swallows make a spring! For each woman who manages to make it
and fit into the machinery of power, there are thousands who are margin-
alized and isolated. And besides, one must not confuse popular success
with prestige. Many women write, publish, and sell, just to take literature
as an example, but few enjoy the kind of recognition from which their
male colleagues of equal talent derive benefit. Few women are welcomed
in artistic institutions as protagonists. Few women are chosen as models
to be followed by future generations. Few women achieve the degree of
critical reputation that renders an author an example for the young to
imitate.
It is true that today we have some excellent film directors who are
women; but I have never come across their names whenever rankings
are announced, for example, of “The best films of the twentieth century,”
or “The most popular films of all time,” and so on. Women directors
appear, are applauded, and then quickly disappear. And this is the prob-
lem: talented women have enormous difficulty in becoming part of film
history; they have enormous difficulty in becoming part of the symbolic
system. Even the most respected, the most highly acclaimed, disappear
from the collective unconscious once their creative cycle is over, almost
xx PREFACE
T he idea for this book began to develop a long time ago. After much
consideration, I discussed the project with cinema scholars and sev-
eral colleagues who work primarily on Italian film studies. The response
produced by our conversations was unmistakably similar: “Are you sure
you have enough material for a book? Besides Wertmüller and Cavani,
who else is there to fill up a book of essays about women filmmakers?”
These questions left me with the urge to respond. Despite the fact that
those I consulted were knowledgeable and possessed considerable exper-
tise, they were unaware of the wealth of material available to explore.
Clearly, a widespread lack of visibility of women filmmakers exists, even
to experts in the field. Thus, development of such a volume of essays
became all the more necessary in order to promote the criticism I hope
it will encourage.
As a matter of fact, a profusion of material about Italian cinema does
exist. Specifically, topics such as Neorealism, women’s representation,
postwar cinema, fascism, new millennium cinema, and new contempo-
rary trends are all profusely explored and discussed by Italian film schol-
ars both in English and in Italian. In contrast, there seems to be an absence
of any serious, committed critique focusing on women filmmakers.
Feminist film criticism in Italy lacks energy and visibility, and the topic
of women directors’ authorship is, indeed, still marginalized. This dearth
of critical examination exists despite the proliferation of associations and
groups that intend to promote women’s art, literature, and cinema, such
as Associazione Ipazia, Laboratorio Immagine, Associazione Maude, and
2 MARISTELLA CANTINI
Associazione Ada, and the many festivals that promote women’s cultural
production in various fields. A persistent halo of isolation and silence
affects especially Italian cinema authored by women when it comes to aca-
demic debate, histories of Italian cinema, and film criticism collections.
No collections of essays, very few monographic works, and up until a few
years ago, very few online articles and critical contributions exist. In terms
of academic critique then, a deep void engulfs women filmmakers and
affects their work and professional distinctness.
As the editor of this project, my intention is to bring visibility to Italian
women directors, not as a niche topic, but as a central theme of Italian
cinema. Cinema authored by women has been ignored, if not “surgically
removed,” by traditional mainstream criticism. I would like, therefore,
to redress the established practice of critical analysis and invite a fresh,
transparent debate about the work of Italian women directors. This book
aims to reposition the idea of Italian cinema, which, today, remains a syn-
onym for male-authored cinema, and intentionally challenges the exist-
ing body of work written by well-known critics that unmistakably favors
the work of male directors over that of their female counterparts.
I will mention one seminal academic work—Italian Cinema from
Neorealism to the Present by Peter Bondanella—that has served as an
important guide for me in recent years. As well as being adopted as a text-
book in several courses of Italian cinema, including those that I had the
pleasure to attend, it has been a guide in terms of critical discourse. A
vast amount of feminist criticism by scholars ranging from Laura Mulvey,
Annette Kuhn, Ann Kaplan, and Jeanine Basinger, to Angela McRobbie
and Janet McCabe, and pro-postfeminist theorists such as Stephanie
Genz, Hilary Radner, and Yvonne Tasker, to name but a few, inspired
me to examine Italian film studies critical texts from a different angle. In
the introduction to Feminism and Film (2000), Kaplan explains that “film
is an important object—as literature was before it—that with feminist per-
spective may help to change entrenched male stances towards women, and
feminist film study may even change attitudes towards women” (2).
While Bondanella’s book is indeed an accurate work of refined criti-
cism, it focuses exclusively on male directors’ work, and most importantly,
it is written from a male point of view. The more-than-five-hundred-page
book concisely presents Liliana Cavani and Lina Wertmüller among an
interminable list of male filmmakers, who are deeply explored. There is
no mention of any other female director. The first part of the book, more-
over, offers an initial overview of silent cinema, and yet includes no trace
of Elvira Notari’s work.1 The Italian filmmaker directed a surprising
number of movies and documentaries, and enjoyed a full life dedicated
to filmmaking, which has only recently been critically reevaluated by
women scholars and writers such as Giuliana Bruno and Chiara Ricci.
INTRODUCTION 3
Notes
1. While I have only mentioned this book, which I consider a great but partial
analysis, I can also add another classic by Gian Piero Brunetta, The History
of Italian Cinema. A Guide to Italian Film from its Origins to the Twenty-
First Century, translated by Jeremy Parzen (Princeton; Oxford: Princeton
University Press, 2003). The publications of the last ten years also follow
the same patterns, redefining and reinforcing the exclusion of women.
Some of these works, to mitigate the bias, may include a sporadic chapter on
one woman director but the essential core of such studies unavoidably focuses
on male cinema. Occasionally, some texts cite or acknowledge women direc-
tors’ names without undertaking any real analysis of their works. See, for
instance, Il Cinema Italiano del Terzo Millennio edited by Franco Montini
and published in 2002. In this book only Nina Di Majo is included of seven
directors interviewed. It is crucial to note that there are no comprehensive his-
tories of Italian cinema written by women as of yet. Scholars such as Marcia
Landy, Marga Cottino-Jones, Flavia Brizio-Skov, and many other female film
scholars, did not attempt to write absolute histories of Italian cinema, but
instead focused their attention on quite distinctive parts or aspects of it, and
women’s issues are steadily at the center of the debate in the works of these
INTRODUCTION 9
7. Patrizia Carrano used this term in an exchange of emails with the editor.
8. In her book Mujeres detrás de la Cámara. Entrevistas con Cineastas Españolas
1990–2004 (Madrid: Ocho y Medio, 2005), María Camí-Vela writes that in
Spain, during the last decade, the number of women filmmakers reached 20
percent of the total directors. She also lists a number of components for this
professional inferiority: a lack of self-confidence due to a long-term condi-
tion of exclusion from an active role in this field, as well as a time frame:
men start much earlier than women to direct movies. Women, moreover,
manifest the need to tell their own stories instead of interpreting others’, as
Iciar Bollain confirms in her interview (51–65). Please note that statistics can
be approximate and confusing, even for Spain. Both Caballero-Wangüemert
and Camí-Vela are not really clear about actual numbers.
9. This is a common feature in women filmmakers worldwide, and I believe it
is linked to their personal and professional paths.
10. Please note that the title of this book has been a fortuitous rework of several
possible titles, between the editor and the editorial board of Palgrave. I liked
the outcome: it is very close to the book of George Melnyk and Brenda Austin
Smith, The Gendered Screen:Canadian Women Filmmakers (Waterloo, ON:
Wilfried University Press, 2010). This is one of the first books that inspired
my work.
Bibliography
Basinger, Janine. How Hollywood Spoke to Women. New York: Alfred A. Knoff,
1993.
Bellumori, Cinzia, a cura di. “Le Donne del Cinema Contro Questo Cinema.” In
Bianco e Nero, 1–2 (1972): 2–112. Roma: Società Gestioni Editoriali.
Blaetz, Robin, ed. Women’s Experimental Cinema. Critical Frameworks. Durham;
London: Duke University Press, 2007.
Bondanella, Peter. Italian Cinema. From Neorealism to the Present. New York;
London: Continuum, 2001.
Brunetta, Gian Piero. The History of Italian Cinema. A Guide to Italian Film
from its Origins to the Twenty-First Century. Princeton; Oxford: Princeton
University Press, 2003.
Bruno, Giuliana, and Maria Nadotti. Off Screen: Women and Film in Italy.
London; New York: 1988.
Caballero-Wangüemert, Maria. Mujeres de Cine. 360º Alrededor de la Cámara.
Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 2011.
Camí-Vela, Maria. Mujeres detras de la Cámara: Entrevistas con Cineastas
Españolas 1990–2004. Madrid: Ocho y Medio, 2005.
Callahan, Vicky, ed. Reclaiming the Archive: Feminism and Film History. Detroit,
MI: Wayne State University Press, 2010.
Carrano, Patrizia. Malafemmina. Rimini; Firenze: Guaraldi Editore, 1977.
INTRODUCTION 11
Cottino-Jones, Marga. Women, Desire, and Power in Italian Cinema. New York;
Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
Foster, Audrey, Gwndolyn Katrien Jacobs, and Amy L. Unterburger. Women
Filmmakers & Their Films. Detroit: St. James Press, 1998.
Hurd, Mary G. Women Directors and Their Films. Westport, CT; London:
Praeger, 2007.
Isola, Simone, ed. Cinegomorra. Luci e Ombre sul Nuovo Cinema Italiano. Roma:
Sovera Edizioni, 2010.
Jermy, Deborah, and Sean Redmond. The Cinema of Kathryn Bigelow. Hollywood
Transgressor. London; New York: Wallflower Press, 2003.
Kaplan, E. Ann. http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/onlinessays/jc12–13folder/
britfemtheory.html.
———. Feminism and Film. Oxford, UK; New York: Oxford University Press,
2000.
Koenig Quart, Barbara. Women Directors. The Emergence of a New Cinema. New
York; Westport, CT; London: Praeger, 1988.
Landy, Marcia. Stardom Italian Style: Screen Performance and Personality in
Italian Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008.
Levitin, Jacqueline, Judith Plessis, and Valerie Raoul. Women Filmmakers.
Refocusing. New York; London: Routledge, 2003.
McRobbie, Angela. The Aftermath of Feminism. Gender, Culture and Social
Change. London, UK: Sage Publications, 2009.
Melnyk, George, and Brenda Austin-Smith. The Gendered Screen: Canadian
Women Filmmakers. Waterloo, ON: Wilfried University Press, 2010.
Montini, Franco, ed. Il Cinema Italiano del Terzo Millennio. I Protagonosti della
Rinascita. Torino: Lindau, 2011.
Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” In Visual and Other
Pleasures, edited by Laura Mulvey, 14–27. Basingstoke, UK; New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.
O’ Healy, Aine. “Italian Feminism and Women’s Filmmaking: Inter-
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Zagarrio, Vito. La Meglio Gioventù. Nuovo Cinema Italiano. Venezia: Marsilio,
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———. Il Cinema della Transizione: Scenari Italiani degli anni Novanta. Venezia:
Marsilio, 2000.
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Zajczyk, Francesca. La Resistibile Ascesa delle Donne in Italia. Milano: Il
Saggiatore, 2007.
Wang, Lingzhen. Chinese Women Cinema: Transnational Contexts. New York:
Columbia University Press, 2011.
Part I
1
Chiara Ricci
I won’t say another word about the beauties of the city and its situation,
which have been described and praised often. As they say here, “Vedi
Napoli e poi muori!—See Naples and die!” One can’t blame the Neapolitan
for never wanting to leave his city, nor its poets singing its praises in loft
hyperboles: it would be wonderful even if a few more Vesuviuses were to
rise in the neighbourhood.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe1
Introduction
viewpoints: men are interested in the women they see on screen (they
really desire them) while women seem to be more interested in the story,
the plot, and in the deeper emotional aspect of the film.
Obviously, this new “habit” was both criticized and appreciated. There
were the moralists who could not tolerate the cinema: most of them were
fervent Catholics and exponents of the higher middle class. They were of
the (mistaken) opinion that a woman goes to the cinema with the inten-
tion of arousing desire in the male audience and to receive pleasure, both
physical and visual, by being excited by the dark of the movie theater.
So the woman who frequented the movies was considered a sinful object
of desire and declared an adulterer. But there were people who noticed
in this habit a positive implication: most of them were democratic intel-
lectuals and neither sexist nor demure. They believed that being able to
go to the cinema was a victory for feminism, and that it could become
a precious source of learning and discovery, above all, for those women
who had not had the benefit of an education; sadly, such women formed
the majority during this period. The woman who went to the cinema
played—more or less consciously—two roles: she was desired by the male
look, which crossed the border going into voyeurism; but she was a sub-
ject who wanted to please (in the wider meaning of the word), to learn, to
understand, and—easily—to be free from the questioning aspect of the
same look (Alovisio 2008: 275–276).
But the success of this innovation and of its ability to make both mind
and fantasy travel, thereby moving them away from thoughts of daily
difficulties and problems, without any physical or material movement,
immediately became a subject for study. The record for even this belongs
to a woman: in 1898, Anna Gentile Vertua wrote and published a text
titled Cinematografo7 (Mazzei 2008: 260).
The myth of the cinema had to reach a town like Naples, which derived its
name from a mythological tale. Naples was named after a mermaid called
Partenope who killed herself because Ulysses refused her love. Then the
mermaid’s body was moved to the Tyrrhenian Coast and was picked up
by the inhabitants of the place who, in a tribute to her, called their town
Partenope.
And it is on the trail of this magical and mythical atmosphere that the
cinema came to Naples on April 4, 18968: this is when the first cinemato-
graphic projection was conducted (Bruno 1995: 49).
Soon afterward, several movie theaters came up. At the beginning they
were considered the same as café-chantant shows in which play actors,
18 CHIARA RICCI
Elvira Notari
The family comprised Nicola Notari, Elvira Coda, who became a Notari
on marriage, and their children Eduardo, Dora, and Maria.
The family company began its activity in 1909 but it did not have
its own studio. So the Notaris began to shoot their scenes on the sets of
“Vesuvio Film,” whose owner was Gennaro Righelli16 (Bruno 1995: 348).
Until the film company closed in 1930, all the family members (with
the exception of Maria who did not take part in this cinematographic
project) collaborated actively to make their business competitive on the
national and international markets. Nicola was the cameraman, set pho-
tographer, art director, and editor; Elvira was the director, screenwriter,
and editor; Eduardo, alias Gennariello, was one of the protagonists in
most of Elvira’s films; Dora, even if her name never appeared on the
screen, helped her parents during the painting of the frames and while
editing and the company name, which was Film Dora in 1909, then
Films Dora, and, since 1915, Dora Film, was definitely a tribute to her
(Bruno 1995: 95).
This adventure began when Nicola came back from the war and had to
find a well-paid job. He was a good painter and so he began painting. He
hoped to sell at least one of his works, but fate had other plans for him. He
decided to start painting photographs in many laboratories in his town.
He had so much work that he needed the help of his sister Olga, and then
Elvira after their wedding on August 25, 1902 (94).
It is but a short step from photography to cinema. Soon the Troncone
brothers17 and Menotti Cattaneo18 decided to give Nicola the chance to
paint for their films.
Elvira and Nicola thus became familiar with the world of cinema and
decided to found their own film company in Naples, in Via Roma 9119
(Bruno 1995: 348). Here the patriarchal mold was totally replaced by a
matriarchal one under the supervision of Elvira Notari without creat-
ing any problems at home. Their relationship remained clean, honest,
and true.
The Production
Films Dora began producing shorts between 1906 and 1911 and called
them Augurali and Arrivederci (Troianelli 1989: 83; Bruno 1995: 99–100).
These shorts opened and closed the shows but, unfortunately, all of them
are lost.
In the first case we are talking about a sort of a wish that the cinema-
owner gave to his public in order to make them happy and satisfied by the
20 CHIARA RICCI
show and to emphasize that they were an important instrument, for Films
Dora, to publicize its work. In the second case, instead, we have shorts
showed at the end of the film and they had to say goodbye to the public
before they left the movie theater and also invite them to the next show.
Dora Films, between 1902 and 1912, produced and realized documen-
taries too but they are lost.
Elvira used shorts from real life and Nicola worked as cameraman:
what was most important was portraying reality and truth the way it
appeared to the naked eye and this was the trademark of the entire Notari
range of work.
Eduardo (son of Elvira and Nicola) had this to say about the way the
Notaris worked:
In 1923–1924 the success the company enjoyed was not the same as that
in the beginning. This was due to the fact that the public’s tastes change
as they follow the social-cultural transformations of their time. Studies—
starting at the beginning of the twentieth century—about sound were
ongoing and and was soon to replace the silent movie. As if it was not
enough, Dora Film’s decline was linked to an historical event: the rise of
fascism and its censorship’s activities used as arms for the propaganda to
obtain the community’s consent.
Censorship interferes heavily in Fantasia ‘e surdato because “it is not
good that”—as the original text says—the public takes part in a fratricide.
In fact, it is not a good idea to show a similar crime because it is not useful
to the myth of family so dear to Mussolini.
There is another case of censorship in ‘A Santanotte, which has at
least two scenes that are cut: watching the film we can note that the
plot’s continuity fails. And both instances are scenes of violence. And
it is in cases like these that we can admire the mastery of Elvira Notari
who, despite the impositions coming from above, is able to create and to
give to her public a product absolutely perfect in its form.
Fascism marks the beginning of a crusade against regionalism and,
above all, the dialects. Mussolini is in favor of an Italy united by the Italian
language, which is understandable by everyone. But in this way he aims to
suppress the individuality, the peculiarity, the beauty, and the oneness of
folklore and popular traditions, reducing the land to a regimentation.
Then, in 1928, an amendment forbidding cinema to show and talk
about themes such as madness, rape, homicide, suicide, the underworld,
and betrayal was passed, as it was assumed that this gave a bad image of
Italy to the world (Turconi 1987: 370). In the same year the veto to the
distribution of Neapolitan films became official. This was the first step
toward the transformation of the cinema to the “stronger arm”24 just like
NAPOLI TERRA D’AMORE 23
Mussolini said in one of his speeches.25 He wanted to use this medium for
himself and for his political and private image.
The last film produced by Dora Film was Trionfo cristiano (1930).
It was inspired and dedicated to the life and memory of San Pellegrino
but, unfortunately, it was a failure. So Elvira decided to retire to Cava de’
Tirreni (near Salerno) where she died in 1946.
We have to talk about another very important aspect: the collateral and
international activity of Dora Film called the Dora Film of America,
which had its head office in Seventh Avenue, New York. In fact, Elvira
has another great and genial intuition: to create a market for the Italian
communities that had moved to America and polarized between Little
Italy and Brooklyn.
Between the end of the nineteenth century and the 1920s many peo-
ple from South Italy were compelled to emigrate, above all to America,
in search of luck, money, and work. Men left their families and their
land and their families joined them only when they had a safe job and
a real home. They left their countries dreaming about the “American
dream” and believing in a better way of life. But these separations were
painful: just boys, teenagers were forced to become men, heads of their
families. So there were men who were far away from their wives, girls,
mothers, and sons. They had to grow roots in another, unknown land
whose history, language, and fertility they knew nothing about.
The Dora Film of America wanted to be near these people who were
so lonely and so far from their Italy. So the company began to screen in
the United States the films already distributed in Italy after changing
their titles and subtitles: from Neapolitan Italian to English, just like ‘E
Piccerella—The Little Girl’s Wrong, Maria ‘a pazza ovvero il Miracolo della
Madonna di Pompei—Mary the Crazy Woman, ‘N galera ovvero Sotto ‘o
carcere ‘e San Francesco—Beneath the Prison, Pupatella—Waltzer’s Dream,
Sangue è dovere—Blood and Duty, Core ‘e frate—Brother’s Heart, ‘A leg-
ge—The Feast and the Law (Bruno 1995: 379–380). Then the company
wanted to produce films exclusively for the Italian American public: Italy
in America, The Adventures of the Famous Italian Detective Joe Petrosino,
Scugnizza (The Orphan of Naples), In the Days of the Covered Wagons,
New York Underworld after the Dark or When Lights Are Low, Saved from
the Harem, The Life of St. Patrick, Passion Plays or The life of Christ, The
Yellow Hand, Devil Rum, The Converted Jewess, The Persecuted Race
(Progrom), From Piave to Trieste, Le geste del brigante Musolino, Wolves of
New York (Troianelli 1989: 107).
24 CHIARA RICCI
The film was realized in Italy and then reached New York by sea along
with the singers who accompanied the shows.
Elvira kept in touch with America exclusively by letters; she never vis-
ited the United States. She lived the “new world” through the reactions
caused by her films, by her collaborators, reading newspapers, reviews,
letters, telegrams sent by colleagues, friends, critics, and journalists. But
she enjoyed great success among her people. They admired and appreci-
ated her because she offered them the possibility of remembering the
sound, the streets, the alleys, and the sea. Besides there was the music,
the songs, and the dialect that revived their memories of Naples and
Italy.
These are the most important themes in the Notari movies: Naples, jeal-
ousy, love, maternity, brotherhood, suicide, madness, honor, homicide,
homeland, dishonor, work, family, marriage, vanity, femininity, war, jus-
tice, revenge, betray, pride, friendship, and music.
Elvira Notari, in fact, wanted to start from the truth to create in the
public and spectators a sort of sympathy, faithfulness, and identifica-
tion with the protagonists on the screen. These themes, thanks to their
naturalness and spontaneity, make extremely easy and almost involun-
tary this act of (self)acknowledgment and projection toward the screen
(Bruno 1995: 173–174).
But Notari did not want to create political, social, or intellectual reac-
tions among the public, nor did she want to be a model of feminism (117–
119). And it is important to underline that the majority of the population
during this time could neither read nor write. The immediacy of the images
had a fascinating and enchanting power that penetrated and fractured
the oral tradition, made up of folk songs, poems, and plays, alimented
up to that time by epidemic illiteracy. Notari wanted to create emotions,
passions, and sentiments because she started from them. Notari—even if
pushing the emotions until the excess and the improbable—wanted and
researched a reaction, an instinct, a sort of shout for the characters on the
screen. Obviously, it is an innocent position assumed by the public who
see their reflection on the screen. But it is just an ideal. The films became
a sort of documentary showing the Neapolitan world and it was perceived
as fierce criticism by the locals.
Above all, she talked about the family that was tightly linked to moth-
erhood and brotherhood. The absence of only one of these themes is suf-
ficient to create a sort of imbalance in the family on the screen. There
NAPOLI TERRA D’AMORE 25
Il suo interesse principale verte sulle donne che cercano di sfuggire alla
loro condizione di origine. Anche per lei, pertanto, il cinema rappresenta
26 CHIARA RICCI
The women always lead the action and the story and they are able to moti-
vate the men. The women are the real active element of the narration, they
bewitch much more than the “normal” women who dedicate themselves
to the men they love without hesitations.
Elvira places in the foreground the femininity and the ability to be
a female and she underlines this aspect in every woman she portrays
on the screen. Only the old women and the mothers who fight for the
safety of their children, who have lost their beauty and their youth
are so innocent and so pure. But Elvira does not judge her women.
She seems to understand them but she leaves the public free to create
its own idea without influencing them. The women can make errors
but in the end they have the chance to redeem themselves. They can
change their lives and choose what is better to do for themselves with-
out destabilizing the credibility, the narration, and the balance of the
film.
Another main theme is divine justice on earth. In fact, in Notari’s
films we can watch policemen, jails, jailers. The innocents can go to
prison, the guilty ones can pass as victims but soon this order is reestab-
lished, too. This way Elvira Notari wants to get a look on the surround-
ing reality, the same she lives and she knows. But her justice is never used
as a political medium and she does her best to stay away from this sort of
trap. Elvira did not want any problems with the censorship.
But there is the madness, too. It can be caused by a suffering love
or by a loss experienced by the beloved woman. Every woman has
her madness, which leads and pushes their feelings to excess and
self-destruction thereby making them lose their contact with reality.
They are led by instinct, irrationality, impulse for the birth of violence:
crimes, homicides, suicides, zumpate, 26 rapes, wars, blows leading
to the death and to the end of the drama. Death, often, is the only
way a woman (or a man) has to atone for her sins, to save herself from
the people’s judgment and from the difficulties that are so hard to
NAPOLI TERRA D’AMORE 27
bear. Men are often frailer than women because they are so violent.
They go around the streets with a knife in the pocket and they are
often part of a gang that gives them courage. They have no nuances.
They act like babies and they want to have just what they desire. It does
not matter what they have to do or who they have to hurt. Men do not
know the true meaning of the term “redemption,” and for this reason
they prefer to pay for their faults and sins by going to the prison, killing
themselves, or going mad.
But there is a curious fact to underline—among these themes there is a
great absence: the superstition so important to the Neapolitans who have
created a sort of philosophy about it. In Notari films there are no warding
off ill-luck objects, people do not play lottery or bingo. Maybe it is because
people do not have the money to play or maybe because this aspect of
Naples does not interest Elvira.
Besides Notari shows feasts, traditions, classic Neapolitan songs that
are accompanied with live music in the films and they are the same films’
plot, too. And this is an important aspect in for Notari cinema (Troianelli
1989: 91–94). The music is very important and in Naples there is a festival
that is the source of inspiration for Elvira Notari.27 In fact, often films take
life from a song keeping the same title, too. Eduardo Notari has this to say:
So Notari gives space, voice, and body to her population, which she
loves very much. It is part of her culture and it is her own source of
inspiration. There is a complete identity between Naples, Notari, and
her way of shooting: there is a total osmosis. Maybe all of this is due to
the fact that the same Notari feels herself as part of the people; she goes
28 CHIARA RICCI
on the streets with them and she has a deep respect and consideration
for them. They know every movement, every mood, every change, and
may seem strange for others who are not from Naples. Elvira Notari
portrays her town exactly as it appears with its values and faults.
What Elvira Notari wants as a filmmaker is to only do her best and
she wants the same from her actors and actresses. But she is very coop-
erative. On the set there is always calm. Everyone seems to be among
friends, everybody knows everybody, and working together is a great
experience. Elvira likes to laugh and enjoy herself. So remembers her
son Eduardo:
Lei non ha mai litigato con mio padre per una scena o per un taglio di
un’inquadratura. Si capivano e si accordavano solo guardandosi negli
occhi. Alla fine del film, l’ultimo giorno delle riprese, mia madre faceva
da mangiare per tutta la troupe. Dal falegname al primo attore si sede-
vano tutti a tavola e si brindava al successo del film. Mia madre era una
grande regista, ma era anche un’ottima cuoca e diceva sempre che pure
cucinare era un’arte. Arte effimera per eccellenza, però di grande sod-
disfazione, poiché a tavola non si può bluffare e se i commensali sono
come gli spettatori e il piatto che hai preparato è lo spettacolo, il successo
lo leggi sulla faccia di chi mangia e sai subito se l’hai ottenuto o no. (Masi
and Mario 1988)
(She has never quarreled with my father for a scene or for the cut of a
framing. They understood each other and they agreed just with a glance.
At the end of the shooting, the last working day, my mother cooked for
the entire troupe. From the carpenter to the leading man they sat at the
table together and toasted to the success of the film. My mother was a
great filmmaker but she was a very good cook too and always said that
cooking was an art. The ephemeral art for excellence but it gives great
satisfaction because to the table is hard to bluff. And if the fellow diners
are just like the spectators and the dish you cooked is the show you can
read the success on the face of who is eating and you know immediately
if you have it or not.)
It is with these words that I want to close my essay dedicated to the figure
of Elvira Notari—one of the most important Italian women of the twen-
tieth century, yet one of the most forgotten. She was a woman who was
able to contain in herself so many rules: woman, filmmaker, wife, mother,
businesswoman, and she has never betrayed her ideas and her convictions
as a woman and an intellectual.
Notari was a pioneering woman born in the nineteenth century
but today, in 2013, she is a modern and revolutionary woman. She
is part of Italian cinema’s history. She is a very strong figure and an
important example to follow today. I am proud to give her words,
NAPOLI TERRA D’AMORE 29
another life, light, and memory today: at the beginning of the twenty-
first century.
Director’s Biography
Elvira Notari (1875–1946) was the first Italian female filmmaker. She
wrote and directed over sixty feature films and about a hundred docu-
mentaries. She married Nicola Notari and together they founded Dora
Film. She directed the films, while he worked as a cameraman. Their son
“Gennariello” worked as an actor in many of the films. The feature films
were often based on Neapolitan forms of drama, such as the “sceneggiata,”
and shot on the streets of Naples with nonprofessional actors. She was
friends with Salvatore Di Giacomo, Carolina Invernizio, Libero Bovio,
E. A. Mario, and she admired Matilde Serao, but the writer did not like
Elvira Notari or her opera.
Notes
1. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) was a German writer. From 1786
to 1788 he visited Italy and then wrote Italian Journey, which was edited in
1816.
2. Elvira Coda (who later became Elvira Notari on marriage), the first Italian
woman filmmaker, was born in Salerno on February 10, 1875, and died in
Cava de’ Tirreni (near Salerno) on December 17, 1946. Before deciding to
dedicate herself to cinema, she attended what was the equivalent of today’s
teachers’ training college and, probably, for a while, did some teaching.
The iron discipline that she displayed on the sets possibly comes from this
experience.
3. Elvira Notari’s films show reality and the common people. These form the
main focus of her study.
4. Georg Simmel (1858–1918) was a philosopher and is considered the father of
modern sociology.
5. A term used for men who had nothing to do but go around the Galleria talk-
ing and watching movies.
6. In 1953 Federico Fellini directed I vitelloni. This term was used for men who
did not want to work or handle responsibilities (e.g., having a family or nur-
turing others).
7. It was edited on January 24, 1898.
8. Some Lumière brothers’ films were shown on that day.
9. Italian singers from the beginning of the twentieth century famous for their
beauty, unperturbed looks, and exotic names, e.g., Lucy Charmante and Cleo
de Merode.
10. She was an Italian writer admired by Italian women (1851–1916).
30 CHIARA RICCI
Bibliography
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Milano: Il Castoro, 2005.
———. “La spettatrice muta. Il pubblico cinematografico femminile nell’Italia
del primo Novecento.” In Dall’Asta, Non solo dive, 269–287.
Annunziata, Gina. “Matilde Serao e il cinematografo.” In Dall’Asta, Non solo
dive, 249–255.
Aprà, Adriano, and A. Gili Jean. Naples et le cinéma. Milano: Fabbri Editori,
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e il Novecento. Castrocaro: Vespignani Castrocaro T, 2006.
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———. Cinema muto italiano. II. Industria e organizzazione dello spettacolo
1905–1909. Bari: Editori Laterza, 1981.
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———. Archivio del cinema italiano. Il cinema muto 1905–1931. vol 1. Roma:
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———. Il cinema muto. Roma: Anica, 1991b.
Bernardini, Aldo, and Vittorio Martinelli. Il cinema muto italiano. I film dei
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Bondanella, Peter. Italian Cinema: From the Silent Era to the Present. New York:
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Brunetta, Gian Piero. Il cinema muto italiano. Bari: Editori Laterza, 2008.
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———. Rovine con vista. Alla ricerca del cinema perduto di Elvira Notari. Milano:
La Tartaruga Edizioni, 1995.
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muto italiano 1907–1920. Venezia: Marsilio Editori, 1980.
Carro, Enzo. L’eredità di Partenope. Napoli: Edizioni Simeoli, 2002.
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Sperimentale di Cinematografia, 1958.
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Cineteca di Bologna, 2008.
De Luca, Giulio. Napoli: una vicenda. Napoli: Guida, 1974.
De Simone, Roberto. Disordinata storia della canzone napoletana. Ischia:
Valentino Editore, 1996.
Foglia, Paolo, Ernesto Mazzetti, and Nicola Tranfaglia. Napoli ciak. Le origini del
cinema a Napoli. Bologna: Colonnese Editore, 1995.
Franco, Mario. Cinema popolare napoletano. Napoli: Cineteca Altro, 1976.
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32 CHIARA RICCI
Claudia Consolati
L ina Wertmüller’s now classic 1970s films might seem the quintes-
sential incarnation of feminist Claire Johnston’s call for a women’s
political countercinema operating within the codes of the tradition-
ally patriarchal entertainment film.1 The Italian filmmaker has in fact
repeatedly proclaimed her lifelong love affair with popular cinema. “My
greatest desire is to make popular cinema,” Wertmüller states in a 1976
interview with Paul McIsaac and Gina Blumenfeld,2 while a year later,
in a conversation with Gideon Bachmann, she specifies, “I have made
a decision for popular work because I have chosen a form that should
reach as far as possible.”3 Simultaneously, her films of the time—Love
and Anarchy, Swept Away, and Seven Beauties in particular—deal with
issues dear to feminism, such as women’s social roles, and rights and
gender power relations.
Set in a Roman brothel during the fascist dictatorship, Love and
Anarchy (1973) seems to be committed to denouncing the oppressed con-
dition of women under patriarchy. The house of pleasure is a metaphor
for women’s sexual, social, and political subjugation and marginalization
while fascism functions as an allegory of patriarchy’s coercive power.4
Still, one is left to wonder whether representing women’s oppression is
sufficient to denounce its tyrannies. Johnston would say that true revo-
lutionary attempts cannot limit themselves to representation. They must
34 CLAUDIA CONSOLATI
you look like a hungry man in front of a restaurant!). She will reinforce
the point a little later by confirming that Tonino has “due occhi da gat-
tino affamato” (two eyes like those of a hungry kitten).
Foreshadowing Tonino’s night encounter with a lonely kitten upon
returning from the countryside, the affectionate, endearing appellation
“gattino” comments on the type of masculinity that Giannini’s charac-
ter embodies and that Love and Anarchy endorses, a masculinity that
is essentially antiheroic and “feminine.” Throughout most of the film,
in fact, Tonino is presented as sensitive, humane, emotional, altruistic,
reserved, and genuinely unsophisticated. As such, he stands in sharp
opposition to the hypermasculine, macho type incarnated by Spatoletti, a
figure that Wertmüller represents in a highly satirical manner.
The fact that Wertmüller’s sympathies go for the kind-hearted, timid,
impromptu anarchist Tonino as opposed to the self-absorbed, arrogant,
pompous fascist Spatoletti speaks not only of the filmmaker’s politi-
cal preferences but also of her views on masculinity. Besides Love and
Anarchy’s unforgiving depiction of Spatoletti, Wertmüller’s criticism
of machismo is made manifest through such characters as Mimì and
Pasqualino (both played by Giannini) in The Seduction of Mimì and
Seven Beauties, whose overconfidence in their sex appeal turns them into
pathetic rather than attractive figures. Compared to the triad Spatoletti-
Mimì-Pasqualino, the humble and reserved Tonino is ultimately a more
seductive and virile type of man, as attested by the fact that Love and
Anarchy’s female characters are more attracted to him than to his male
counterpart.10 Yet, even though Tonino embodies a soft, emotional,
endearing, “feminine” kind of masculinity, one must not forget that he
is still the one in charge of the pleasure dynamics inside the brothel.
Such pleasure dynamics are prompted, as noted earlier, by the enticing
power of his gaze, which directs and controls desire within the Via dei
Fiori establishment. Similar to Tonino, the maison’s male customers also
regulate the voyeuristic mechanism of desire turning women into erotic
objects of contemplation.
A crucial sequence that stresses the importance of desire in connec-
tion to male visual pleasure is the one depicting the Via dei Fiori pros-
titutes showcasing themselves for their clients at the beginning of the
workday. The sequence is Wertmüller’s own reinterpretation of two simi-
lar moments in Fellini’s Roma (1972), and it is particularly relevant from a
feminist viewpoint. As Rodica Diaconescu-Blumenfeld (1999) has pointed
out, the scene represents an accurate mise-en-abyme of the phallogocen-
tric dynamics of cinema, which constitute men as subjects of desire and
bearers of the look and women as their objects.11 The critic’s claim relies
on Mulvey’s view of traditional narrative film as a patriarchal apparatus
GROTESQUE BODIES, FRAGMENTED SELVES 37
these power dynamics, the scene also confirms the main aporia
inscribed in classical film: while women are apparently portrayed as
active and men as passive, the mechanism of desire keeps women in a
passive position bestowing agency exclusively to men. Borrowing from
structuralism and Roland Barthes in particular, Johnston affirms that
cinema’s ideological structure establishes a detachment between sig-
nifier and signified with respect to women’s roles, a rupture that Lina
Wertmüller’s Love and Anarchy reproduces.15 The film, in fact, limits
women to the position of myths in a Barthesian sense. In Mythologies,
Barthes describes myth as a sign that the dominant ideology has de-
prived of its denotative signification bestowing upon it a different
connotative one.16 In the traditional narrative film and in Love and
Anarchy, at least during the showcase sequence, the signifier “woman”
comes to signify “passive performer” and “object of desire,” a connota-
tive meaning that is presented as a natural given and that, as such, cor-
roborates the “ideology of sexism” at the heart of classical cinema.17
While voyeurism is only initially present during the prostitutes’ show-
case, since immediate material gratification follows the initial visual stim-
ulation, the other key aspect of cinematic pleasure as described by Mulvey,
namely fetishism, is maintained throughout. According to Freud, fetish-
ism is man’s answer to the threat of castration posed by women because
of their lack of the penis. It resolves into the attribution of phallic qualities
to parts of the female body to make up for the absence of the male sexual
organ and appease man’s anxieties.18 The fact that, in the sequence in
question, the female body appears in bits and pieces—legs running down
a staircase, sequences of breasts enveloped in decadent pearl necklaces,
fleshy buttocks multiplied by mirror reflections—confirms that mascu-
line fetishistic desires and fears lie behind Love and Anarchy’s cinematic
form.19 Feminist analyses of fetishism in art, such as Nancy Vickers’s
study of Petrarch’s treatment of Laura in the Canzoniere, have shown how
the male author’s scattering of the female body in the text is a response
to the presumed threat of castration posed by the latter.20 It comes as no
surprise that Wertmüller resorts to a similar strategy as she has always
refused to be identified as a woman filmmaker.21 Indeed, her use of voy-
eurism and fetishism is symptomatic of her unwillingness to question
male-oriented and ideologically charged filmic techniques.
The fetishization and fragmentation of the woman’s body in Love and
Anarchy is all the more unsettling considering that the issue of physical
wholeness is connected to the overarching, key question of moral integ-
rity, an integrity that is ultimately available to the male but not to the
female characters. With the sole exception of Salomé, who orchestrates
Mussolini’s murder plan, takes advantage of Spatoletti’s obtuseness,
GROTESQUE BODIES, FRAGMENTED SELVES 39
and is extremely conscious of her mission but only has indirect political
agency, the film’s women do not demonstrate any awareness of the con-
temporary political situation and do not display the need to affirm their
human dignity against an oppressive system. Their noninterventionist
attitude is exemplified by Tripolina’s reaction upon hearing of Tonino’s
most likely fatal murder plan. Unable to grasp the political and moral rea-
sons behind his decision, an utterly distressed Tripolina asks, “E perché?
Per la politica? Ma che ce ne fotte a noi? Perché?” (Why? For politics? But
what does it matter to us? Why?), her words a manifesto of noninterfer-
ence between the private and the public spheres.22
Tripolina will again stand up for her apolitical ideas during her final
altercation with Salomé over whether to awaken Tonino on the day of
Mussolini’s assassination. A strenuous defender of the anarchist cause
throughout the entire film, Salomé ultimately gives in and, because of the
love that she also feels toward Tonino, decides to embrace Tripolina’s pac-
ifist pleas. On the one hand, Salomé’s final capitulation, as well as the ani-
mated, tragic, and fierce nature of her confrontation with Tripolina, prove
that Love and Anarchy’s female protagonists are indeed, in Wertmüller’s
own words, “very strong women . . . [who] instinctively rebel against mili-
tarism and the patriarchal order” trying to find in human affection an
alternative to violence and political struggles.23 Yet, on the other hand,
one must remember that their interference has dire consequences for
Tonino, who is not given the possibility to prove his dignity as an indi-
vidual and passes on to history only as an unidentified madman.
Contrary to Love and Anarchy’s female characters, Tonino becomes
progressively aware of his political, ethical, and human responsibili-
ties; he becomes aware that killing Mussolini is a political but also, most
importantly, a moral imperative. In this respect, it is significant that,
at a physical level, and contrarily to what happens for the female body,
fragmentation is never inflicted upon the film’s male protagonist. Even
when horribly disfigured and beaten up, Tonino remains unquestion-
ably whole, the only exception being the frequent extreme close-ups of
his eyes, which, however, contribute to reinforcing his own sense of self
rather than displacing or negating it.
The numerous reproductions of female classical statues that occupy
the interior of the brothel further comment on the issue of women’s frag-
mentation. Apparently mere decorative props, these figures carry instead
a deep ideological significance. Several of them are mutilated and have
missing limbs. Therefore, they function as objective correlatives of the
disintegration and fragmentation of women operated by men, a fragmen-
tation that the mise-en-scène represents, and possibly denounces, but that
Wertmüller endorses through framing, editing, and camera movements.
40 CLAUDIA CONSOLATI
Several of these mutilated statues appear, along with the isolated and
fragmented breasts, legs, and buttocks, in the showcase sequence, in
particular behind Carmela, the woman responsible for orchestrating the
proceedings of the workday.24 Furthermore, it is relevant that some of
the sculptures that populate the brothel are acephalous, such as the little
bronze in Salomé’s boudoir, a detail referencing women’s lack of identity
in the patriarchal order.
The recurrent presence of maimed and acephalous reproductions
of classical female statues is significant in yet another respect since
it relates to Love and Anarchy’s employment of the grotesque to deny
agency to the film’s female characters. During the prostitutes’ show-
case, the camera lingers on a medium shot of one of the whores who,
making herself available to the male clients, is positioned next to
the lower part of a statue’s body, whose genitals appear, surprisingly,
chastely covered by what looks like a fig leaf or drapes. A similar ironic
juxtaposition is introduced when Salomé first enters the scene. The
camera zooms in to focus on her face and upper body leaning over a
faux classical sculpture of a woman whose head is modestly bent down-
ward and whose knee covers her intimate parts. By contrast, Salomé’s
posture indicates sexual availability and transgression. She wears little
besides her lingerie and her upwardly thrust leg overtly alludes to the
erotic pleasures to come.
The statues’ timid postures and the prostitutes’ oversexualized per-
formances correspond to two radically opposed models of beauty and
womanhood—the virgin and the whore. The clash between these two ste-
reotypical representations of femininity is an expression of Wertmüller’s
love for strident, expressionistic, and grotesque contrasts, an aesthetic
trademark of her 1970s production. The filmmaker’s flamboyant, exag-
gerated style is influenced by Fellini, and by the commedia all’italiana,
the commedia dell’arte, and puppet theater. As her stylistic signature, it is
essential to delineate its implications with respect to Love and Anarchy’s
treatment of womanhood.
Grotesque women abound in Wertmüller’s films and their significance
is ultimately ambivalent. On the one hand, considering Fellini’s influ-
ence on the filmmaker, the female grotesque can be seen as the expression
of typically male anxieties toward the female body, where disfiguration
becomes an antidote to women’s threat of castration.25 On the other, how-
ever, these deformed female characters could be regarded as subversive
of the mainstream, patriarchal order and of its limiting and objectify-
ing ideas of femininity. An advocate of the second faction, Diaconescu-
Blumenfeld sees Wertmüller’s grotesque women as bearers of alternative
paradigms that subvert phallogocentric standards of feminine beauty. In
GROTESQUE BODIES, FRAGMENTED SELVES 41
Love and Anarchy denies women access to the subject position also
through the use of mirrors. The mise-en-scène frequently includes
reflecting surfaces, which figure as one of the brothel’s main ornamen-
tal features. Tonino gains awareness of his mission by repeatedly look-
ing at himself in the mirror. After the night out with Spatoletti following
their countryside escapade, Tonino retreats into his hotel room, grabs
the gun that he thinks he will use to assassinate Mussolini, and points
it at his own specular reflection. The camera’s dramatic zooming in on
his reflected face signifies that the mirror is the locus where Tonino
discovers his own identity and enters the symbolic order of political
action. Similarly, when he talks to Salomé in her room after depositing
the dying commendatore in the Fori Imperiali, Tonino sits in front of
her boudoir’s mirror and, as he becomes aware of his political mission,
looks at his specular image and painfully admits, “Però farla questa
roba qua io la devo fare, anche se nun son proprio un anarchico . . . Ma
me lo son giurato, che quella vita lì come un servo, giorno dopo giorno,
e poi crepare come un cane, non la posso fare più” (But I have to do this
thing, even though I am not a real anarchist . . . I swore it to myself that
I could not carry on anymore with that slave life, day after day, to then
die like a dog).
Contrary to Tonino, however, and despite being surrounded by reflect-
ing surfaces, the Via dei Fiori prostitutes are not allowed to look at their
own reflections. In the showcase sequence, reflecting surfaces surround
the whores, who are often positioned where several mirrors connect.
While the spectators—as well as the male customers—get a multifaceted
perspective of their breasts and generous behinds, the women cannot see
their own specular images to unveil the masquerade mechanisms that
patriarchy has imposed upon them. Despite being constantly surrounded
by mirrors, Love and Anarchy’s female characters barely notice them,
their prohibition being what Doane has called a “taboo in seeing.”40 The
mirror is the locus where one’s identity takes shape, but identity is pre-
cisely what the prostitutes cannot possess. This ban carries deep ideo-
logical and gender implications, as the woman who looks at herself in
the mirror represents a threat to the established order because she might
realize the inauthenticity of the images and masks that patriarchy forces
her to assume.
Since they cannot reflect in the mirrors that decorate the brothel’s
walls, the women in Wertmüller’s film are far from fulfilling what de
Lauretis auspicates, that is, the journey through the mirror to demystify
the constructions of patriarchal ideology.41 Exploring de Lauretis’s ideas
further, Federica Giovannelli addresses the same necessity for women
to go beyond their specular images to access a subject position:
46 CLAUDIA CONSOLATI
Notes
rather than destructive, and aimed at moving beyond the critique and
rejection of patriarchal stereotypes of women typical of the second-wave
feminists of the 1960s and 1970s. For a chronology of the feminist move-
ment, see Shohini Chaudhuri, Feminist Film Theorists: Laura Mulvey, Kaja
Silverman, Teresa de Lauretis, Barbara Creed (New York: Routledge, 2006).
Teresa de Lauretis in particular is a key figure of third-wave feminist film
theory. Beyond de Lauretis, third-wave theorists such as Kaplan will be
particularly important when discussing motherhood and silence in Love
and Anarchy.
8. A thorough analysis of Wertmüller’s debt to the commedia dell’arte, the
opera buffa, and the Italian puppet theater can be found in William R.
Magretta and Joan Magretta, “Lina Wertmüller and the Tradition of Italian
Carnivalesque Comedy,” Genre 12.1 (1979): 25–43. Bondanella considers
Wertmüller’s 1970s production as representative of the same genre (Italian
Cinema, 193–200). See also Grace Russo Bullaro, “‘What’s an Anarchist?’:
Exploring the Boundaries of the Personal and Political in Wertmüller’s Love
and Anarchy,” Forum Italicum 35.2 (Fall 2001): 457–472, and her introduc-
tion to Man in Disorder, xi–xxiv.
9. All translations from Love and Anarchy’s dialogue are mine since both the
English screenplay and the subtitles are not always faithful to the Italian of
the film.
10. Millicent Marcus, “Wertmüller’s Love and Anarchy: The High Price of
Commitment,” in Italian Film in the Light of Neorealism (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press), 329.
11. Diaconescu-Blumenfeld, “Regista di Clausura,” 400.
12. Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16.3 (1975): 9.
13. Teresa de Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1984), 20.
14. Luce Irigaray, “This Sex Which Is Not One,” in Katie Conboy, Nadia Medina,
and Sarah Stanbury eds., Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and
Feminist Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 250; empha-
sis mine.
15. Johnston, “Women’s Cinema as Counter-Cinema,” 25.
16. Roland Barthes, Mythologies (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1957).
17. Johnston, “Women’s Cinema as Counter-Cinema,” 25. It is significant that,
in her studies, Mulvey explicitly addresses the issue of female performance.
In classical Hollywood cinema, women—from Marlene Dietrich to Greta
Garbo to Rita Heyworth—are often cast as performers. Such a role has sym-
bolic relevance as it metacinematically represents the gender power dynam-
ics implied in cinema, according to which the spectators identify with the
male characters beholding the female performer on stage. Similar mecha-
nisms are present also in Love and Anarchy: the prostitutes are ultimately
performers who wear masks and act out a role for the enjoyment of the male
onlookers.
18. Sigmund Freud, “Fetishism,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 9 (1928):
161–166.
GROTESQUE BODIES, FRAGMENTED SELVES 49
39. Mary Ann Doane, “Film and the Masquerade: Theorizing the Female
Spectator,” in Conboy et al., Writing on the Body, 185.
40. Ibid., 187.
41. In Alice Doesn’t (see introduction, 2–11), de Lauretis takes the journey of
Alice in Wonderland’s protagonist as a metaphor for women’s entrance into
a representational world defying the naturalizing and coercive practices of
patriarchal ideology: “The Looking-Glass world which the brave and sen-
sible Alice enters, refusing to be caught up in her own reflection . . ., is not
a place of symmetrical reversal, of anti-matter, or a mirror-image inversion
of the one she comes from. It is the world of discourse and of asymmetry,
whose arbitrary rules work to displace the subject, Alice, from any possibil-
ity of naturalistic identification” (2). See also de Lauretis’s “Fellini’s 9 ½,” in
Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1987), 95–106.
42. Federica Giovannelli, “. . . Imparando a demolire la casa paterna, gli stru-
menti di sempre dismessi,” in Giulia Fanara and Federica Giovannelli, eds.,
Eretiche ed erotiche: le donne, le idee, il cinema (Napoli: Liguori, 2004), 17.
The translation from the Italian is mine.
Bibliography
Vickers, Nancy. “Diana Described: Scattered Body and Scattered Rhyme.” Critical
Inquiry 8.2 (1981): 265–279.
Wertmüller, Lina. The Screenplays of Lina Wertmüller. Translated by Steven
Wagner. New York: Quadrangle, c1977.
Filmography
I basilischi (1963)
Il giornalino di Gian Burrasca (1965) (TV)
Questa volta parliamo di uomini (1965)
Rita la zanzara (1966)
Non stuzzicate la zanzara (1967)
Il mio corpo per un poker (1968)
Mimì metallurgico ferito nell’onore (1972)
Film d’amore e d’anarchia, ovvero stamattina alle 10 in via dei Fiori nella nota
casa di tolleranza . . . (1973)
Tutto a posto e niente in ordine (1974)
Travolti da un insolito destino nell’azzurro mare d’agosto (1974)
Pasqualino Settebellezze (1976)
La fine del mondo nel nostro solito letto in una notte piena di pioggia (1978)
Fatto di sangue tra due uomini politici per causa di una vedova—si sospettano
moventi politici (1978)
Una domenica sera di novembre (1981) (TV)
Scherzo del destino in agguato dietro l’angolo come un brigante di strada (1983)
Sotto . . . sotto . . . strapazzato da anomala passione (1984)
Un complicato intrigo di donne, vicoli e delitti (1985)
Notte d’estate con profile greco, occhi a mandorla e odore di basilico (1986)
Imago urbis (1987)
12 registi per 12 città (1989)
Il decimo clandestino (1989) (TV)
In una notte di chiaro di luna (1989)
Sabato, domenica e lunedì (1990)
Io speriamo che me la cavo (1992)
Vivaldi (1992)
L’anima russa (1993)
Ninfa plebea (1996)
Metalmeccanico e parrucchiera in un turbine di sesso e politica (1996)
Ferdinando e Carolina (1999)
Francesca e Nunziata (2001) (TV)
Peperoni ripieni e pesci in faccia (2004)
Mannaggia alla miseria (2010) (TV)
3
see, the gun fails to transfer its symbolic power to Pasqualino, leaving
him comically emasculated. Prior to its failure, the protagonist’s depen-
dence on the gun is illustrated in the first flashback scene in which
Pasqualino’s eldest sister Concettina is performing in a cabaret show.14
While Concettina is being heckled and humiliated by a slanderous
male audience, Pasqualino strolls into the club, bathed in a red light
that implicitly marks him as threatening and violent and is intended to
foreshadow his actions to come. As soon as Pasqualino accosts his sister
backstage, he violently chastises her for disgracing the family’s honor.
During this explosive tirade Pasqualino makes a provocative admis-
sion: he declares that he is “not the biggest nor the strongest man” but
that “they respect me because I carry this [gun].” Pasqualino reveals
the weapon, carried snugly by his waist. While narcissistically watching
himself in the mirror and admiring his ability to evoke fear in his sister,
Pasqualino thrusts his hips forward to properly expose the gun, dra-
matically enunciating its presence. His overly expressive body language
combined with his explanation for carrying a gun effectively establish
a link between Pasqualino’s interpretation of masculinity and the sym-
bolic power attributed by the gun. This link is further confirmed in the
flashback scene discussed earlier in which Pasqualino is seen prepar-
ing himself for his day on the town. In the midst of his grooming rou-
tine, Pasqualino inspects his pistol, showing it off for those watching,
before positioning it in his waistband, a physical location that draws an
associative connection between the phallus and the gun. At its sight,
Pasqualino’s mother voices her disdain for the gun and the trouble it
can cause; yet Pasqualino simply replies that the gun is his source of
respect.15 Once again, Pasqualino expects the gun to evoke fear and
reverence. In these two scenes, the gun apparently functions in its sym-
bolic role, allowing its possessor to become intimidating and aggres-
sive, controlling and dominant. However, the respect that he expects to
command when he confronts a man, as we shall now see, is humorously
absent.
The symbolic value of the gun is first brought into question when
Pasqualino attempts to sanitize his family’s sullied honor. Arriving at
the brothel in which Concettina now works, with the cocky air of a man
who means business, Pasqualino physically assaults her in order to dis-
play and assert his dominance over her. He then demands to be told the
whereabouts of the pimp “18 karat Totonno” who is responsible for her
new occupation. Upon locating the man, Pasqualino immediately locks
eyes with his portly adversary in what is clearly a parody of the classic
Western duel scene, complete with Spanish guitars and camera shots
that oscillate between the two men. The Western, of course, is a filmic
DON’T BRING A GUN TO A FISTFIGHT 61
parodies the formulation “It’s a girl” and in so doing exposes “girl” not as
essentialist, prelinguistic, but as an identity that is the effect of discursive
practices. Parody denaturalizes gender, it reveals that gender is not an
original but in fact a copy, but more importantly that that which is being
copied is also not an original, but instead is a copy itself: “The notion of
gender parody defended here does not assume that there is an original
which such parodic identities imitate. Indeed, the parody is of the very
notion of an original [. . .] gender parody reveals that the original iden-
tity after which gender fashions itself is an imitation without an origin”
(Butler 1990: 138).
The fact that one can utter the statement “It’s a lesbian” in such a
context is because “lesbian,” as a linguistic sign, can be taken out of an
“obvious” context and repositioned into a new one; in other words, it is
expropriable. This notion of expropriability of the linguistic sign comes
from Derrida’s reading of Austin’s concept of infelicities (Salih 2002:
90–92). For Austin, performative language requires appropriate context
and authorial intention, otherwise the action cannot have any effect—
someone who is not an ordained minister cannot officiate a marriage, for
example. When linguistic signs are misappropriated, Austin calls these
misappropriations “infelicities.” Derrida picks up on Austin’s notion of
“infelicities” to expose the permanent condition of expropriability of all
linguistic signs—what he calls “the essential iterability of a sign” (Derrida
quoted in Salih 2002: 91). Linguistic signs are not ontologically deter-
mined, they are not inherently bound to a referent, and therefore they
are unstable, mutable. Thus, clarifies Salih, for Derrida linguistic signs
are permanently susceptible to being misappropriated, taken out of their
intended context and relocated to a new one, cited in unexpected ways.
This is what Derrida calls “citational grafting” (Salih 2002: 91). The insta-
bility of the linguistic sign is meaningful as a subversive approach for
deconstructing oppressive normativity, for re-citation offers the possibil-
ity of citing in unforeseen ways. Drag is an example of an enactment of the
re-citation of a sign, where the gender that is performed is not inherently
tied to the body that is performing. The citationality of a sign is thus both
promising (it offers the possibility of subversive practices that undermine
normative constructs by exposing that which is understood as natural to
be in fact a citation of a norm that is discursively produced) and problem-
atic (if all linguistic signs are citational then it’s not subversive; and there
is the risk that some signs impose and perpetuate oppressive norms).
In certain circumstances, therefore, denaturalizations of the norm can
actually reinforce hegemony. Cinematic and theatrical performances of
drag such as the ones in Victor Victoria and Some Like It Hot exagger-
ate the comical effects of transgender to the point of strengthening the
66 HOPKINS AND CUCULIS
distinction between the “original” and copy: a man in drag looks silly
precisely because it is so “unnatural” and relief is attained only when the
performance in drag is abandoned in favor of a happy return to norma-
tive gender roles and heterosexuality, thereby affirming the understand-
ing that gender is natural. In these instances, the performance in drag
does not make a contextual leap, there is not a re-citation that exposes the
failure of the sign, but rather one that masks it. Butler, thus, emphasizes
the importance of distinguishing subversive citations from those that
support an essentialist conceptualization of gender.
While it is necessary to be cautious about the unsubversive effects of
performances in drag, it is possible to reframe the kinds of citations that
maintain oppressive norms so that even those that are not disruptive may
be considered disruptive. If Dustin Hoffman’s performance in Tootsie
is so excessively ridiculous as to reinforce the disjunction between his
masculine identity and his performance in drag (he cannot comfortably
imitate, cite femininity), then could the same not be said if we consider
the incongruence between masculinity as an act and its relationship to
the supposedly “natural” hegemonic masculinity? In other words, it is
possible to draw a parallel between the citation of the “norm” and the
ridiculousness of the performance in drag by the likes of Hoffman and
Williams on the one hand, and the citation of hegemonic masculinity
with the ridiculousness of the performance of masculinity by Pasqualino
on the other. In addition to the fact that Pasqualino’s frame of gender ref-
erence is forcefully inscribed by a fascist rhetoric of virility that requires
him “to adhere to an aggressively male-oriented ‘compulsory system,’”
(Ravetto 1998: 274), the gun plays a central role in determining both his
intention to adhere to a standard of masculinity as well as his failure to
meet this very standard. Pasqualino constantly refers to the respect that
his gun will bring him, which suggests that, armed with a gun, Pasqualino
is under the illusion that he can effectively cite, mimic masculinity, as
he too understands the firearm to be symbolically charged. However,
it is precisely the gun that denies him any respect and therefore denies
him the possibility to live out his macho fantasy. If Pasqualino’s mas-
culinity cannot comfortably inhabit hegemonic masculinity (it is such
a buffoonish comedy), then the fallacy of hegemonic masculinity as the
original becomes exposed. What Wertmüller’s film does by ridiculing
Pasqualino’s awkward attempts at machismo is to position him outside
or beyond a rhetoric of virility. It is no coincidence that Wertmüller has
Pasqualino mimic the Duce himself in order to argue for an insanity plea,
a parodic gesture that implicitly caricatures Mussolini; this gesture is also
particularly meaningful, for his act can be identified as a performance
in the sense previously discussed: Pasqualino’s performance is a parodic
DON’T BRING A GUN TO A FISTFIGHT 67
Notes
17. This scene has also been discussed by other critics. See, e.g., Giacomo Striuli’s
article “Mise-en-scene and Narrative Strategies.”
18. The seduction scene has been much analyzed by scholars who have published
on Pasqualino Settebellezze. See, e.g., the works by Ralph Berets, Rodica
Diaconescu-Blumenfeld, Peter Bondanella, Josetta Déléas, Ernest Ferlita,
and John R. May, E. Ann Kaplan, Eli Pfefferkorn, A. J. Prats, Kriss Ravetto,
and Giacomo Striuli.
19. See also Kriss Ravetto’s article “Cinema, Spectacle, and the Unmaking of
Sadomasochistic Aesthetics,” for a discussion on this scene.
Bibliography
Gori, Gigliola. “Model of Masculinity: Mussolini, the ‘New Italian’ of the Fascist
Era.” The International Journal of the History of Sport 16.4 (1999): 27–61.
Kaplan, E. Ann. “Lina Wertmüller’s Sexual Politics.” The Marxist Perspectives
(1978): 94–104.
Magretta, William R., and Joan Magretta. “Lina Wertmüller and the Tradition
of Italian Carnivalesque Comedy: Caricatural Characters, Parodic Situations,
the Absence of Mimesis, and the Use of Lazzi.” Genre 12 (1979): 25–43.
Marcus, Millicent. Italian Film in the Shadow of Auschwitz. Toronto: University
of Toronto Press, 2007.
Mariani, Umberto. “The ‘Anti-Feminism’ of Lina Wertmüller.” Annual of Foreign
Films and Literature 2 (1996): 103–114.
Masucci, Tiziana. I chiari di Lina. Cantalupo in Sabina: Edizioni Sabinae, 2009.
Pfefferkorn, Eli. “Betterlheim, Wertmüller, and the Morality of Survival.” Post
Script 1.2 (1982): 15–26.
Prats, A. J. The Autonomous Image: Cinematic Narration and Humanism.
Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1981.
Ravetto, Kriss. The Unmaking of Fascist Aesthetics. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2001.
———. “Cinema, Spectacle, and the Unmaking of Sadomasochistic Aesthetics.”
Annali d’Italianistica 16p. (1998): 261–281.
Salih, Sara. Judith Butler. New York : Routledge, 2002.
Spackman, Barbara. Fascist Virilities: Rhetoric, Ideology, and Social Fantasy in
Italy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996.
Striuli, Giacomo. “Mise-en-scène and Narrative Strategies in the Tavianis and
Wertmüller.” Italica 84.2–3 (2003): 495–508.
Stroud, Angela. “Good Guys With Guns: Hegemonic Masculinity and Concealed
Handguns.” Gender & Society 26.2 (2012): 216–238.
Tutt, Ralph. “Seven Beauties and the Beast: Bettelheim, Wertmüller, and the Uses
of Enchantment.” Literature Film Quarterly 17.3 (1989): 193–201.
Vitti, Antonio. “The Critics ‘Swept Away’ by Wertmüller’s Sexual Politics.” Nemla
Italian Studies 13–14 (1989): 121–131.
Wertmüller, Lina. The Screenplays of Lina Wertmüller. Translated by Steven
Wagner. New York : Quadrangle/New York Times Book Co., 1977.
———. Arcangela Felice Assunta Job Wertmüller von Elgg Español von Brauchich,
cioè Lina Wertmüller. Milano: Frassinelli, 2006.
———. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CjfC6mx4CYk&feature=relmf
u (2006).
4
Adventurous Identities
Cavani’s Thematic Imaginary
Gaetana Marrone
Assisi was aired in two parts in May 1966 and was acclaimed as the most
controversial program of the year. Cavani divests the figure of Francesco
of all legendary attributes, and portrays him as a normal individual
who has performed a revolutionary social role. An archetypal story of
class, family, and generational conflict, this film gives striking evidence
of Cavani’s stylistic techniques and also serves as an ideal transition
from the documentary films to Galileo (1968), I cannibali (The Cannibals,
1969), L’ospite (The Guest, 1971), and Milarepa (1973). These early films
feature as their protagonist an idealist who transgresses the boundaries of
conventional society in a quest for self-realization.
In representing a classical subject that has inspired such different art-
ists as Giulio Antamoro, Roberto Rossellini, Michael Curtis, and Franco
Zeffirelli, Cavani chose to portray Francesco not as the joyful, saintly,
somewhat mad character of legends. Instead, she cast actor Lou Castel in
the leading role. As she explained, Castel is:
the spectacular formality of the civil action brought against him by his
father, Pietro Bernardone. The trial throws the human system of justice
into confusion. Francesco’s laughter in the face of the formal juridical
ritual attests to the collapse of social hierarchy. The rebel-son forces upon
the established structures a radical redefinition of power. The whole epi-
sode is shot in exaggerated theatrical style. Francesco’s nakedness, which
makes him into a public spectacle, also signifies his second birth. The
trial sequence locates Francesco’s symbolic and real divestiture within a
complex historical tradition; it identifies his nakedness as a revolution-
ary act, and as a primary, visual image of emancipation from structural
and economic bondage. The transfiguration of Francesco leads to a new
mode of practicing faith. Naked again, except for a crude smock, he fol-
lows an itinerary that leads him to the revival of abandoned churches,
most prominently San Damiano and La Portiuncola—each destined to
play a critical role in his life. Stylistically, there is an essential purity in
the composition of the rustic imagery, which acts as an equivalent to
Francesco’s search for an existentially concrete, radically simplified life.
A pictorial flatness qualifies the geometry of Cavani’s shot-compositions,
while the power of the image is displaced onto the emotive contours of
the face. The scene depicting Francesco holding a torch in front of the
Christ of San Damiano is an example. This scene, constructed through
flashbacks, emphasizes the initiatory meaning of the protagonist’s jour-
ney. Francesco brings the light toward the painting as if to restore life
to the crumbled church, providing a very poetic image of reillumination
and renewal.4
Francesco operates within a fundamentally concrete model of life;
he engages in action with solid, physical consistency. In him there is no
fracture between deed and word. His is a character, says Cavani, posed
midway between those of Gandhi and the young people who feel “un
desiderio istintivo di amore, di fiducia, di valori ideali” (an instinctive
desire for love, trust, ideal values) (Cavani 1967: 3). Yet Francesco is
both alike and unlike such idealists; his simple stripped humanity, while
exemplary, is experienced at the limits of nature and ordinary experience.
Francesco’s main acts are the denial of power and subsequent banishment
from the community, and the search for a new identity at the extreme
margins of conventional reality. His transgressive action is set against a
structure of order in which the paternal figure stands as his societal and
cultural antithesis. Indeed, Francesco’s quest unfolds as a polemical antith-
esis between the temporal power in which his father and the doctors of
the Church are invested and his subjective experience. Cavani concen-
trates on the symbolic and spatial area of cultural transitions, liminal
states that induce an ambiguous and indeterminate state of consciousness,
76 GAETANA MARRONE
debates and questioning itself, but only with the force of its authority,
power, and connivance).8
The film structures the tragic adventure of this character around
each dramatic step in which he confronts authority: the anatomical
amphitheater in Padua (1592), the proceedings of the Holy Office and
the Inquisition’s official admonition (1616), the burning of the heretic’s
body, carnival and judicial rites, and the spectacular staging of the abju-
ration (1633). Galileo’s search for truth and knowledge (the eye, the light,
the circle, which symbolize his findings) is counteracted by the darkness
and blind dogmatism of obscurantist structures. Cavani’s style validates
the instrument of Galileo’s cultural revisionism: Galileo at the telescope
(with its small disks of various diameters) is the key image for her. She
manipulates the lens and the camera angle to magnify or reduce objects,
and, in so doing, visualizes the dialogic nature of the telescopic lenses.
The film’s final zoom into the skeleton head of the pope exposes the
emptiness and decay of the papacy’s repressive mechanisms. The impor-
tance of Galileo’s experience, according to Cavani, rests on his dispute
with a (sociomoral) cultural system “che è cristallizzato nel passato e che,
favorendo l’immobilismo scientifico, non solo previene la libertà della sci-
enza, ma è anche la causa diretta del ristagno sociale” (that is crystallized
in the past and by favoring scientific immobility, not only prevented sci-
ence from being free, but was also the direct cause of social stagnation).9
The Galileo affair mediated issues concerning physics, astronomy, and
cosmology, but their immense scope also addressed broader epistemolog-
ical inquiries. This scandalous case helped to determine the separation of
science and philosophy and the departure from authority as a criterion
of scientific knowledge. When the new science of Galileo began to make
its impact, the illusion of a geocentric universe (as God had originally
designed it) became a historical relic. Screenwriter Italo Moscati describes
Cavani’s film as a rare occasion “per meditare sui giorni che corrono” (to
ponder on contemporary issues) (Moscati 1968: 594).
In I cannibali (freely adapted from Sophocles’s Antigone), Cavani
perceives the collapse of traditional assumptions about the stability of
political authority at a time when the militant groups of the 1968 genera-
tion were still organizing themselves. Cavani targets living history and the
way in which the formula of revolution is applied to young rebels. The
film’s narrative takes shape in a series of social transgressions and physi-
cal divestitures. The film opens with a horrendous sight of decomposing
corpses amassed upon the wet streets of a modern city (downtown Milan).
The bodies of the rebels who conspired against a totalitarian regime are left
on display to serve as a deterrent to future conspiracies. Careless citizens
step by and around the bodies. The daring Antigone will defy the order
ADVENTUROUS IDENTITIES 79
as she searches for her dead brother’s body. Only a mysterious stranger,
a modern Tiresias, will assist her. They are both denounced by the citizens,
and eventually arrested and interrogated. Antigone is subjected to torture
and public execution; the stranger is assassinated. But their defiance will
ignite new rebels to reenact their exemplary gesture.
I cannibali portrays human life in terms of unrelieved bondage: a
nightmare of social tyranny, which translates the ironic ambiguities of
unidealized existence. It denounces the stasis of the human mind and
the collective surrendering to the order of the Father. At times, it evokes
the hallucinatory atmosphere of the Anni di Piombo (Years of Lead), a
catastrophe brought about by the collapse of the student movement and
of the revolutionary ideals of May 1968. Antigone’s rebellion is not a thing
of the past but threateningly foretells the future. Cavani begins to search
for a language of universal symbols in order to avoid the revolutionary
speeches that had become a cliché by 1969:
È noto che appena due mesi dopo gli avvenimenti di maggio, gli slogan, i
manifesti e il vocabolario rivoluzionario si erano consumati, esauriti [. . .]
I cannibali non è la cronaca di una rivoluzione (il linguaggio sarebbe stato
altro), ma l’analisi spettrale di una realtà che trascende i singoli episodi che
caratterizzano la contestazione. (Clouzot 1974: 37)
(As everyone knows, two months following the events of May 1968,
all slogans, posters, and catch phrases were sold out and overused by the
establishment. [. . .] I cannibali is not the chronicle of a revolution (I would
have used an entirely different language), but the spectral analysis of real-
ity beyond the various episodes that characterize the demonstrations.)
Eastern tradition, not to Mao Tse-tung: to the ancient language he does not
understand; to a religion that is a way of life, a philosophy.)
notion of “concrete brotherhood” as not only still relevant for the modern
world, but important for its future.
As the filmmaker of life’s adventurous journeys, Cavani searches out
new spiritual and social experiences, even when she captures the world of
everyday life. Her work, she has said, “è come un viaggio aperto con cui
cerco di rispondere, secondo la mia esperienza, a delle domande antiche;
ma poi chiedo altre domande, e il viaggio continua” (is like an open jour-
ney with which I try to answer, from experience, some ancient questions;
but then I ask more questions and the search continues).14 Currently,
Cavani is continuing her journey with another Francesco script. It is an
idea that moves beyond the contemporary moment into the future.
Notes
6. On Franciscan madness and the scandal of the Cross, see Michel Foucault,
Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), 170–173.
7. I am quoting from the director’s film treatment of Galileo (Archival
Collection).
8. Cited from the film treatment (Archival Collection).
9. Ibid.
10. See Kaja Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis
and Cinema (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press,
1988), 219–220. For Silverman, Antigone is the only one of Cavani’s female
characters who could be said to be “politically engaged.”
11. As she will later address in Dove siete? Io sono qui (Where are you? I’m Here,
1993), a film that recounts the love story of two young deaf people, a homage
to silence.
12. Le clarisse was produced by Lotar and Ciao Ragazzi. It was shown at the
sixty-ninth Venice Film Festival, where it was awarded the Francesco
Pasinetti special prize.
13. Personal interview, February 18, 2013.
14. Cited from an interview with an unindentified journalist, “Quattro domande
a Liliana Cavani regista,” Se Vuoi 5 (1967): 13.
Bibliography
Filmography
Shorts
Incontro di Notte (Night Encounter; 1961)
La Battaglia (The Battle; 1962)
Documentaries
La vita militare (The Military Life; 1961)
Gente di teatro (Theater People; 1961)
Storia del terzo Reaich (History of the Third Reich; 1961–1962)
Età di Stalin (The Age of Stalin; 1962)
L’uomo della burocrazia (The Bureaucrat; 1963)
Assalto al consumatore (Assault on the Consumer; 1963)
La casa in Italia (Housing in Italy; 1964)
Gesù mio fratello (My Brother Jesus; 1964)
Il giorno della pace (Day of Peace; 1965)
La donna nella resistenza (Women of the Resistance; 1965)
Philippe Pétain: processo a Vichy (Trial at Vichy; 1965)
Le clarisse (The St. Clare Nuns; 2012)
Feature Films
Francesco di Assisi (Francis of Assisi; 1966)
Galileo (1968)
I cannibali (The Cannibals; 1969)
L’ospite (The Guest; 1971)
Milarepa (1973)
Il portiere di notte (The Night Porter; 1974)
Al di là del bene e del male (Beyond Good and Evil; 1977)
88 GAETANA MARRONE
Operas
and dedicated mother. In reality, we learn later that her concern is only illu-
sory, not real, because she is emotionally absent when alone with Pippi. For
example, when one day Pippi is late arriving home from school, although
worried, Cinzia fails to recognize the truth when her daughter tells her she
is unwell having smoked drugs. Being unconsciously unable to take care
of her child, Cinzia neither investigates further nor pays her attention. She
simply tells Pippi she loves her and turns up the volume of the TV again.
The little girl, ignored, goes to her room and has an epileptic fit.
The causes for Cinzia’s syndrome, a dissatisfied woman who believes
that her life consists of “always peeling potatoes,” clearly emerge during a
session of family therapy, when she recalls her painful child birth and the
lack of physical resemblance the baby had to her, since she was born dark-
haired like her father. With these words, the viewer deduces her deep
estrangement toward Pippi and her association of motherhood with pain.
Pippi is indeed an unwanted child, fruit of an unplanned pregnancy at
the beginning of a rebound relationship and represents in Cinzia’s mind,
a mistake. Instead, Cinzia loved her highly cultured cousin, who left her
for an educated woman who lacked her physical beauty. Heartbroken,
she persuaded herself to marry a man who had become rich through
illegal activities in order to provide a family for the child. The director
here seems to suggest that education is a prerequisite for love, because
ignorance permits other feelings to be mistaken for love. Cinzia then
became trapped in a mendacious life, since money could not secure her
happiness and her child was unable to repair her loveless relationship
with her husband. In summary, she became the victim of a “failed abor-
tion,” a psychological state usually reached when a mother forces herself
into a subconsciously undesired maternity. When this occurs, a woman
develops the feeling that the fetus is a vampire and, after a fierce “uter-
ine war,” establishes with the baby a dynamic of destroy/be destroyed
which, in order to overcome, she transforms into an excess of care (Bal
Filoramo 2007: 50–51). Subjugating herself to the patriarchal belief that
women are selfless nurturers by nature, Cinzia naively gives up the own-
ership of her life, so her syndrome becomes her unconscious desperate
cry for help against the role of women prescribed by society, and with
which she identifies, thus obscuring a covert desire of infanticide. Diana
Russell (Russell and Harmes 2001: 91) states that introducing women to
social life with the belief that it is their duty to spend the majority of their
life and energy staying at home raising children, instead of pursuing a
remunerated job as men do, constitutes one of the five foundations of
“gynocide” that is a “systemic violence aiming to exterminate women
as a gender.” Furthermore, Ann Oakley notes that in a patriarchal soci-
ety maternity is a “colonized place,” and a context in which women can
become the worst enemies for other women (Romito 2008b: 17) and, I
94 DANIELA DE PAU
Director’s Biography
Notes
1. Lagarde y de los Rios used the term “feminicidio” in her translation of the
Russell and Radford book, titled “Feminicidio. La política del asesinato de
las mujeres.” Coedición CEIICH-UNAM/Comisión Especial para Conocer y
dar Seguimiento a las Investigaciones Relacio, 2006.
HEALING THE DAUGHTER’S BODY 99
2. The second paradigm refers to instances when the woman is considered the
property of the enemies, as in the cases of ethnic rapes, and the third when
the woman is considered belonging to an antagonist social group.
3. In the film Archibugi depicts three models of mothers, Arturo’s ex-
wife, Cinzia, and Marinella’s mother, to indicate the multiplicities of
sentiments and subjectivities in relation to different experiences of
motherhood.
4. Law 154 refers to the measures against violence in family relations. http://
www.salute.gov.it/imgs/C_17_normativa_1558_allegato.pdf and Law 285
refers to the promotion of rights and opportunities for children and adoles-
cents. http://www.camera.it/parlam/leggi/97285l.htm
5. It is relevant to note that Arturo is forgiven for his deed by his friend-priest
and not by his wife, who decides to divorce him. Arturo’s wife, a woman
who leaves him and conceives her desired child with another man, is played
by Archibugi. Her personal presence reinforces the film’s message regard-
ing the freedom to procreate or not for women, and the specific rejection
of men’s impositions on the matter. The director then implies that Arturo’s
behavior is to be condemned not because he “committed a sin” against the
teachings of the Catholic Church, but because he violated women’s repro-
ductive rights.
Bibliography
Filmography
Motherhood Revisited in
Francesca Comencini’s Lo
Spazio Bianco
Claudia Karagoz
the magistrate, both based on real individuals and events, appear didactic
and unnecessary to the narrative economy of the film. They thus render
the film less convincing and weaken its political agenda.
More problematically, Lo spazio bianco erases Maria’s Neapolitan
working-class and family background. In Parrella’s novel, the protago-
nist pointedly reconstructs her childhood: her socioeconomic milieu, her
family dynamics, and her relationship with Naples. To these factors she
attributes many of her choices as an adult. In the film, Maria is not from
Naples, and we know nothing about her social and family origins—except
that her parents are dead. Although she is somewhat sympathetic to her
students’ difficult circumstances, the struggles of the city and its poor are
foreign to her. Furthermore, Maria blames Naples for the present disorder
of her life. In the sequence in which she reveals to her friend Fabrizio that
she is pregnant, for example, she attributes the disruption caused by her
unexpected pregnancy to her move to Naples. The film thus draws from
stereotypical perspectives of the city as infected by chaos and decay, yet it
leaves Naples and its people largely unrepresented.
Comencini’s problematic elision of Maria’s working-class identity and
of her efforts to erase it—key components of the protagonist’s journey in
the novel—goes also hand in hand with the implications of Buy being cast
in the lead role. Lo spazio bianco is original, among other reasons, for the
very fact that it has a middle-aged female lead. However, the film simulta-
neously reproduces a model of femininity often seen in Italian cinema: an
educated, heterosexual, middle-class, white woman dealing with an acute
romantic or other personal crisis. The casting of Buy as Maria reinforces
the film’s echoing of this model. As Roy Menarini (2010) has pointed out,
Buy is omnipresent in contemporary bourgeois “middle auteur cinema”
(cinema medio autoriale). Following Vincenzo Buccherni, he describes
this cinema as follows: “This kind of film can be identified based on: its
‘beautiful style’ (photography, music, actors); its insistence on the middle
class; its dealing with problems related to personal aspirations and self-re-
alization; its reliance on forms of transgression that are soon normalized
in the name of a reprogramming of the (neo) bourgeoisie in the dismay-
ing landscape of contemporary Italy” (Questo tipo di film si riconosce
dal ‘bello stile’ [fotografia, musica, attori], dall’insistenza sul ceto medio,
dall’implicazione di problemi che hanno a che fare con le aspirazioni e la
realizzazione personale, dal ricorso a forme di trasgressione presto nor-
malizzate, in nome di una riprogrammazione della (neo) borghesia nel
desolante panorama dell’Italia contemporanea) (43). If Menarini’s pes-
simism seems excessive, some of his observations aptly describe Lo spazio
bianco, which indeed features high-quality photography, music, and act-
ing, and foregrounds a bourgeois woman’s journey of self-redefinition.
108 CLAUDIA KARAGOZ
Menarini also notes how the repeated casting of certain actors in middle
auteur cinema contributes to the lack of originality of these films: “the
iconographic and psychological uniformation of a group of films [. . .]
is also determined by the faces, the bodies, the gestures, the texture of
the voices and of the dictions, in addition to the settings, the spaces, or
the stories” (l’omologazione iconografica e psicologica di un gruppo di
film [. . .] viene definita anche dai volti, dai corpi, dai gesti, dalla grana
delle voci e delle dizioni, oltre che dagli ambienti, dagli spazi o dai rac-
conti) (46). According to Menarini, however, the character Buy plays in
Lo spazio bianco—which he describes as one of her best performances—
departs from the role of the “nevrotic, insecure, and intolerant woman”
(donna nevrotica, insicura e insofferente) often reserved for her in Italian
cinema. I would argue instead that in Comencini’s film, irrespective of
other innovative aspects of it, both Buy’s performance and certain aspects
of her character remain stereotypical. Maria in the film is generic both
in the sense that, as a character, she fits most parameters of the middle
auteur genre, and because we do not know much about her.18 Nothing is
said about her geographical, social, and familial background. What we do
know identifies her as a nondescript petite-bourgeoise: Maria is a single,
heterosexual teacher who, although not originally from Naples, resides
there and spends her afternoons watching art movies.
Similarly, we know little about the three female minor characters of
the film—Mina and Rosa, two of the mothers Maria eventually befriends
at the hospital, and Luisa, one of her students—except that they are
working-class Neapolitans struggling to make ends meet. Their every-
day struggles are only hinted at. When addressed, they remain second-
ary to Maria’s all-encompassing predicament. The brief sequence in which
Maria visits Luisa after she stops attending evening classes is the film’s
most extensive reference to the problems faced by underprivileged women
in Naples. In this incursion in the foreign territory of the lower classes,
however, Maria remains a detached observer, absorbed in her own cri-
sis. This is exemplified in the shot in which, standing on Luisa’s balcony,
Maria once again contemplates the cityscape—this time Luisa’s degraded
neighborhood, shown against the backdrop of the Vesuvius. Moreover, her
encounter with Luisa quickly turns into an occasion to vent her pain and
confusion. This sequence is relevant to the film’s narrative mainly because
in it Maria voices her doubts about wanting Irene to survive. The film’s
protagonist and this barely sketched, small group of women hardly repre-
sent the richness and diversity of women’s lives in contemporary Italy.
Just like its characters, the film’s portrayal of Naples is devitalized and
lacks individuality. According to Comencini, Naples is not the center of
the film; rather, it is one of its characters. Comencini also considered
MOTHERHOOD REVISITED 109
setting Lo spazio bianco in a different Italian city since she believed that
its story could have happened anywhere, and Buy is not Neapolitan.19
Comencini’s reluctance to set the film in Naples might account for her
approach to representing the city: she universalizes the story, its pro-
tagonist, and its setting by subtracting specificity and vitality to all. But
Maria’s story, as originally conceived by Parrella, is deeply rooted in its
specific Neapolitan setting. Deprived of its anamnesis, it loses some of its
meaning. The portrait of Naples emerging from the film is ingratiating
yet monochrome. Comencini’s reconstruction of the city’s topography is
diligent, and the film is rife with stunning views of Naples and its gulf.
Some of the city’s architectural gems—its elegant Piazza del Plebiscito,
for example—are also featured prominently in the film. But only twice do
we catch glimpses of Naples’s degraded outskirts, and its ancient inner-
city “belly” is never displayed.20 Far from being portrayed as “a sort of
welcoming and vital maternal uterus, where anything can happen” (una
sorta di utero materno accogliente e vitale, dove tutto può succedere),21
Naples is muted, just like its sounds in some of the film’s sequences. Only
partially represented, the city is seen from a distance, as if to ward off
contamination. Similarly, Maria is often portrayed gazing upon Irene’s
helpless body, uncertain whether she truly wishes her daughter to live.
Both Naples and Irene are perceived as agents of disruption from which
Maria distances herself in order to preserve her solipsistic existence.22
The city is also represented in the film by the predominantly Neapolitan
cast of stage actors, who support Buy’s performance with solid acting
and touches of improvisation and humor.23 Their performances, how-
ever, appear overstated at times—particularly in some of the exchanges
between Maria and Fabrizio, and in the scenes with Mina. Hints of stagi-
ness and napoletanità pepper their acting. In the sequence in which Mina
arrives at the hospital’s garden pushing a baby carriage, for example, her
posture and gait are exaggerated, as are her gestures when she extracts
the “frittata di maccheroni” from the carriage instead of an infant—itself
a comical coup de théâtre. Indeed, Mina is performing a role within a
role: she is reproducing the pretty, middle-class mother of the photograph
advertising the carriage about which she and Maria had commented when
shopping together at a children’s store. The comical skills of this group of
actors serve well Comencini’s goal to show how laughter and vitality are
integral parts of women’s lives (Interview Feltrinelli). But the occasional
artificiality of their performances further suggests the film’s reliance on
stereotypical images of Naples and its people. From another perspective,
however, the staginess of some of the acting is one of the devices signal-
ing the film’s self-consciousness. Lo spazio bianco includes a number of
self-reflective elements: its characters, especially Maria, are often framed
110 CLAUDIA KARAGOZ
from her time and place, and both interrupt and support the continuity
of the narrative by filling the gaps in Maria’s story. From this perspective,
they are also one of the incarnations of the trope of the white space in
the film. Two more literal versions of the white space—the blank space
Maria suggests her student Gaetano insert into his composition, and, at
the end, an actual white space, which, following a dissolve, occupies the
entire frame—frame this sequence.
The film’s sanitized portrait of Naples, a city plagued by conspicuous social
problems, which certainly affect women, produces a devitalized image of it.25
It echoes the nonspecificity of Maria’s characterization, and her detachment
from her surroundings. Both portrayals hinder the political goals of the film.
In the statement Comencini read before accepting the prize the Movimento
per la vita awarded Lo spazio bianco, she stressed her strong commitment to
women’s rights. A film with a more forceful political message, however, would
not have received an award from an ultraconservative prolife organization.
Staging Spaces
The white space of the title takes on multiple meanings and forms in the
film. In all cases it embodies an apparent rupture in sense and continuity
that nevertheless carries meaning and connects past and present. Most
directly, it refers to the blank space Gaetano, prompted by Maria, inserts
into his composition during his final exam to continue writing his essay.
It also signifies the physical space of the ICU, and the limbo Maria expe-
riences in it. Both white spaces, as Gaetano puts it, bring about a new
present for the characters. White spaces are also inserted into the film lit-
erally: they constitute the background for the opening and closing titles,
and occupy the entire frame twice, preceding the sequences of Irene’s two
births. These spaces thus frame the film and return, as frames, to mark
important temporal transitions. The first white frame inserted into the
film functions as an ellipsis, filling the extended temporal gap between
the sequence in which Maria announces to Fabrizio that she is pregnant,
and the scene in which she first sees Irene in the ICU’s incubator. The
second white frame bridges, instead, two contiguous yet diametrically
opposed presents—the before and after of Irene’s second birth. The trope
of time is thus also central in Lo spazio bianco, and deeply connected
to that of the white space: the physical white space of the ICU coincides
with the time of Maria’s wait—the interior landscape of uncertainty.
Maria’s relationship with both space and time is problematic: she chooses
to distance herself from others and is incapable of waiting. After Irene’s
premature birth, however, she has no choice but to remain confined, in
close contact with others, within the time-space dimension of impotence.
112 CLAUDIA KARAGOZ
Reluctantly, Maria accepts to share this space with the other mothers at
the hospital.
In addition to the various white spaces, other elements of the film sig-
nify alienation and rupture: the frequent occurrence of images of dis-
tancing and fragmentation, and the use of flashbacks and slow motion.
This rendering of time and space primarily translates Maria’s remoteness
from those who surround her: her effort to self-determine has distanced
her from others. At the very beginning of the film, for example, we see
her dancing alone, slightly apart from the other dancers in the room,
who appear to move, as a group, in slow motion. Maria’s movements are
thus in step with the tempo of the music, but disjoined from those of the
other dancers: her place and pace set her apart from others. Lighting also
emphasizes Maria’s isolation—she literally occupies the spotlight, while
the other dancers remain in semidarkness. Maria thus appears to be on
stage, performing her self-sufficiency in front of an indifferent audience.
The sequence closes with a brief conversation between Maria and her for-
mer partner Francesco, whom she clearly still trusts and respects. When
Francesco shows Maria a photograph of his six-month-old daughter, she
makes a remark on the furniture in the background, but does not com-
ment on the child, suggesting a lack of interest in children and moth-
ering. This exchange may also imply that Maria’s unwillingness to have
a child with Francesco was the cause of their break-up. Motherhood is
thus presented early in the film as a source of disruption and conflict in
the protagonist’s life. Moreover, when, while observing the photograph,
Maria notices the pieces of furniture that she chose at the time they were
living together, Francesco remarks that she had chosen everything—even
to leave him. This sequence thus also announces the centrality of the
themes of choice and autonomy in the film.
The trope of the stage is also connected to the film’s representation
of space. The theatricality of the opening scene is not an isolated occur-
rence: other sequences include impromptu, actual, or imagined perfor-
mances—singing, playing, and dancing—especially by Maria and other
women, and film images or shots of television and cinema screens and
audiences. As discussed, the acting of the supporting cast is occasionally
theatrical and conveys, with other devices, the film’s self-consciousness.
A particularly interesting performance is staged in the sequence in which
Maria, in a daydream, imagines the other mothers dancing together in
the ICU. In the aerial shot that opens the sequence, we see the women, all
wearing green hospital gowns, leave their cubicles to join the others at the
center of the room. The structures that support the cubicles’ curtains sub-
divide the cinematic frame into smaller frames—an image of fragmenta-
tion signifying the isolation in which each woman experiences her wait.
MOTHERHOOD REVISITED 113
Director’s Biography
Notes
23. Interview with Margherita Buy, Maria Laura Bidorini, Biennale di Venezia.
http://biennaleart.tv/event.php?id=26.
24. When direct sound is present, it is barely audible. This occurs, e.g., in the
sequence at the open-air market in which Maria, who is venting her latest
frustration to Fabrizio, ignores all that surrounds her.
25. Notably, e.g., in recent years uncollected garbage has accumulated in the
streets of some districts of Naples for weeks.
26. Luisa Muraro, “The Passion of Feminine Difference Beyond Equality,” in
Graziella Parati and Rebecca West, eds., Italian Feminist Theory and Practice.
Equality and Sexual Difference (Madison, Teaneck: Farleigh Dickinson
University Press, 2002), 80.
Bibliography
Addison, Heather, Mary Kate Goodwin-Kelly, and Elaine Roth, eds. Motherhood
Misconceived. Representing the Maternal in U.S. Films. Albany: State University
of New York Press, 2009.
Bieberstein, Rada. “Francesca Comencini: Looking at Italy between the Local
and the Global.” Rivista di studi italiani XXIX.1 (2011): 394–415. http://www.
rivistadistudiitaliani.it/rivista.php?annonum=2011e1.
Casella, Paola. Cinema: femminile, plurale. Mogli, madri, amanti protagoniste del
terzo millennio. Genova: Le Mani, 2010.
Cavarero, Adriana. “Inclining the Subject. Ethics, Alterity and Natality.” In
Theory after “Theory,” edited by Jane Elliott and Derek Attridge, 194–204.
London and New York: Routledge, 2010.
Galetto, Manuela, et al. “Feminist Activism and Practice: Asserting Autonomy
and Resisting Precarity.” In Resisting the Tide. Cultures of Opposition under
Berlusconi (2001–2006), edited by Daniele Albertazzi, Clodagh Brook,
Charlotte Ross, and Nina Rothenberg, 190–203. New York and London:
Continuum, 2009.
Menarini, Roy. Il cinema dopo il cinema 2. Dieci idee sul cinema italiano 2001–
2010. Genova: Le Mani, 2010.
Muraro, Luisa. “The Passion of Feminine Difference beyond Equality.” In
Italian Feminist Theory and Practice. Equality and Sexual Difference, edited
by Graziella Parati and Rebecca West, 77–87. Madison, Teaneck: Farleigh
Dickinson University Press, 2002.
O’Healy, Áine. “Revisiting the Belly of Naples: the Body and the City in the Films
of Mario Martone.” Screen 40:3 (Autumn 1999): 239–256.
Parrella, Valeria. Lo spazio bianco. Torino: Einaudi, 2008.
Re, Lucia. “Diotima’s Dilemmas: Authorship, Authority, Authoritarianism.” In
Parati and West, Italian Feminist Theory and Practice, 50–74.
Filmography
Pianoforte (1984)
La lumière du lac (1988)
MOTHERHOOD REVISITED 119
Laura Di Bianco
function, with the city itself also shaping that very narrative. I argue
that in all of Spada’s films female characters are shown perpetually
crossing and observing the city from above. The act of female street-
walking, typically associated with prostitution, is reconfigured as an
act of appropriation of a public space, which contests confinement
to a domestic space imposed by a patriarchal society, thus signifying an
act of female self-liberation, as well as an act of self-introspection and
search for identity. Like Lidia from Antonioni’s La notte, these modern
flanêuses are certainly not women “of or in the crowd,”3 like the Parisian
flâneur described by Baudelaire, but solitary strollers of deserted cities,
which epitomize the inner void and immobility of the contemporary
female subject. Reflecting on Spada’s mise-en-scène and her shooting
journals, which reveal her numerous cultural references, I will analyze
the different declinations of female flânerie as a critical trope and visual
strategy for constructing cinematic space.
Spada’s treatment of place is reminiscent of Antonioni’s, a cinematic
model she quotes extensively in her films. Analyzing the function of
locations in L’Avventura (1960), L’eclisse (1962), and Deserto rosso (1964),
David Forgacs writes: “Antonioni’s way of dealing with physical locations
was essentially to expand their importance relative to the role they had in
conventional narrative films and even in some cases to reverse the prior-
ity operating in those films whereby people were assumed to be more
important than places” (2000: 103). Similarly, in Spada’s cinema, build-
ings, empty streets, and piazzas do not need to contain characters to be
framed by the camera.
Early in her autobiographical essay “La mia città” (My city), Spada intro-
duces herself by saying: “Sono nata a Milano, vivo da sempre nello stesso
quartiere di periferia e anch’io come Alda Merini, lascerei Milano solo per
il paradiso.”4 Hence, before defining herself as a filmmaker, Spada states her
sense of belonging, not just to the city, but to the outskirts of it, and reveals
the main recurrent themes of her films: Milan, women, and poetry.
Forza cani and Poesia che mi guardi: Poems on the City’s Walls
Tetra, who are looking for a place to host a rave party, and Franco,
who is involved in some illegal business with Albanian immigrants,
has been injured in a fight. At work, Nebbia meets Monica, a trou-
bled, single mother, who cannot manage to keep a stable job to support
her son.
The encounters Nebbia has in the new town interrupt his solitude and
trigger a series of reactions from this group of outsiders. Tetra falls in love
with Nebbia and Nico abandons his rave project and attempts to recon-
nect with his family. Franco recovers from his injury and tries to establish
a friendship with the rest of the group, while continuing his illicit traf-
ficking. When Monica’s son is about to be sent into foster care, Nebbia
decides to help her. He steals a large amount of money from Franco to
allow Monica to escape Milan and go to Germany where she can start a
new life with her child. When Franco finds out about the theft, he con-
fronts Nebbia and they both accidentally get involved in a car chase with
the police, during which the poet is shot dead.
As in all of Spada’s scripts, the death of one character becomes a neces-
sary sacrifice that opens a series of possibilities for those immobilized in
an existential condition of waiting. In Come l’ombra, Olga’s death liber-
ates Claudia; in Il mio domani, Monica starts a new life after her father’s
death. The viewer suspects changes in the lives of characters following
the death of Nebbia in Forza cani, though the film ends before resolution
or closure is achieved.
Contrary to Come l’ombra and Il mio domani, both of which are
set in dazzling light and sweltering summer, Forza cani is a very dark
film, shot mostly at night, in a cold, rainy city photographed in red-
dish tones. In Spada’s works, Milan is not recognizable as Milan (Poesia
che mi guardi is the exception). Rather, it represents, in Spada’s words,
the “topos of the western city,”8 and is deprived of any distinctive trait.
Indeed, in Forza cani, Milan does not appear much on screen. Rather, it
is described verbally or otherwise evoked by the characters. For instance,
before the viewer can understand where the story is set, Franco says:
“La conosco bene io Milano, meglio di chi ci è nato. Si credono chi sa
chi. Sta diventando una città di merda. La nebbia mi piace quando c’è,
ma il freddo no.”9 Franco describes a hostile city according to the ste-
reotype of the cold, foggy city in the north, populated by unfriendly
people. With his southern accent, Franco is representative of the inter-
nal wave of immigration Milan has received since the 1960s, and he is
now the spokesman of Italians who feel threatened by foreign immigra-
tion. This monologue and the presence of various minor immigrant
characters in Forza cani become the germ for Spada’s subsequent film,
Come l’ombra, where the filmmaker reflects on the issue of immigration
in Italy.
WOMEN IN THE DESERTED CITY 125
throughout the city, walking or driving, in search of the places where the
poet lived and found her inspiration. Along this journey, Maria meets the
H5N1, a group of young street poets from Pavia, to whom she introduces
Pozzi’s work, and they start exploring Milan and retracing Pozzi’s itin-
eraries in the city while discussing the value of Pozzi’s poetry together.
“Antonia non abita più qui da settanta anni” (Antonia has not lived here
for 70 years) is heard in voiceover while the screen shows the elegant
Liberty building in which Pozzi lived with her family. By opening with
such a statement, Spada establishes the city as the primary source of her
discourse.
Therefore, Pozzi’s story is articulated through the places that she vis-
ited or lived, creating, in effect, a portrait of Milan in an arc of time span-
ning from the 1930s to today. Similar to Claudia and Olga from Come
l’ombra and Monica from Il mio domani, Maria engages in a form of
flânerie; as we shall see later in this chapter, for these female characters,
walking signifies an inner journey of the self, but also a path to connect
with other women’s art, and, at the same time, a journey into the city to
observe its transformation over time.
Contrary to Come l’ombra and Il mio domani, where Milan is either
characterized by supermodern architecture or by the gray anonymity of
a periphery deprived of any recognizable traits, in Poesia, Milan regains
its historical dimension and the distinctiveness of an Italian city. As one
can observe from Spada’s shooting journals (see figures 7.1–7.3), which
reveal in fascinating ways the genesis of each of her films, the filmmak-
ing process requires that Spada retrace a photographic map of the city
from Piazzale del Duomo with Vittorio Emanuele II’s gallery (though
the cathedral is left offscreen), to Piazza Scala with the theater, then Via
Pomposa and Via Mompiani. As the narration unfolds, it creates a trajec-
tory from the center to the peripheral Piazzale Corvetto, where the poet
spent much time and is now buried.
Thus, Poesia is not merely a portrait of Pozzi, but also an autobio-
graphical film in which the filmmaker reflects on her love for poetry, on
the meaning of her own art, and on her role as an artist. In the final scene
of Poesia, Pozzi’s face, with her verses written next to it, appears on the
walls of a streetcar moving throughout Milan. It is a reparative finale for
all the years that her work was neglected, and a statement on the intent of
the film. The very fact of making a documentary film on a modern poet
not consecrated in the canon of Italian literature is inherently an act of
“making the invisible visible” and even more so if we consider Poesia to
be part of the feminist project of reinscribing women in art history as well
as in film history.
128 LAURA DI BIANCO
Figure 7.1 Poesia che mi guardi, Marina Spada’s set journal, 2009. Courtesy of
Marina Spada.
“Domani”
Se chiudo gli occhi a pensare quale sarà il mio domani,
vedo una larga strada che sale dal cuore di una città sconosciuta
verso alberi alti d’un antico giardino.12
—Antonia Pozzi, 1931
Figure 7.2 Poesia che mi guardi, Marina Spada’s set journal, 2009. Courtesy of
Marina Spada.
Figure 7.3 Poesia che mi guardi, Marina Spada’s set journal, 2009. Courtesy of
Marina Spada.
included in the “Giornata degli autori” (The Day of the Authors) at the
International Venice Film Festival in 2006, Come l’ombra was welcomed
by Italian critics, who recognized Spada as one of the most interesting
filmmakers to emerge in recent years. Significantly, she was the only
Italian female filmmaker included in this competition.
Set in a desert-like summer in Milan, the film narrates an encounter
between Claudia and Olga, a young Ukrainian woman who has recently
arrived in Italy. Claudia is a single, independent young woman living a
WOMEN IN THE DESERTED CITY 131
repetitive life. She works in a travel agency and attends a Russian language
school, where she becomes attracted to her professor, Boris. When they
are about to begin a relationship, Boris asks her to host his “cousin” from
the Ukraine while he is on a business trip. Reluctantly, Claudia accepts
under the condition that it will be for just one week. Despite Claudia’s ini-
tial diffidence, the two women become friends. One night, just as they are
starting to feel close, Olga fails to return home. To find her, Claudia jour-
neys throughout Milan, only to be interrupted by a call from the police
announcing Olga’s death.
Looking again at the shooting journals (see figures 7.4–7.6), it is
apparent that Spada’s cinematic vision has many cultural references:
from global auteur filmmaking, to photography, painting, and poetry.
As one can see from the excerpt included in this chapter, next to images
of paintings and photographs, are annotated shot numbers. Every take
is modeled on different art forms: a preexisting image, coming out of
an iconographic study of specific visual models. Spada’s filmmaking is
inspired by Jean-Luc Godard as well as by painters such as Mark Rothko,
Mario Sironi, and the contemporary Italian photographer Gabriele
Basilico. As previously mentioned, Spada’s imagery is heavily indebted
to Antonioni, not only for its attention to women’s subjectivity as inter-
preters of modern alienation, but also in terms of frame composition and
camera movements.
The opening scene of Come l’ombra establishes the formal characteris-
tics of a substantial part of the film. It is a direct quotation of Antonioni’s
La notte, a film Spada also quotes in Il mio domani. In La notte, Antonioni
shows the Milan of the 1960s, when wild property speculation was tak-
ing place as a result of the country’s economic growth. While the camera
accompanies an elevator’s downward movement, it shows the image of the
city reflected in the windows of the Torre Branca. In La notte, as in Italian
cinema in general, Milan is the symbol of the “economic miracle” and,
thus, the elect place to represent upper-class alienation. In Come l’ombra,
where Antonioni’s elevator returns, Claudia, the protagonist, looks at
the city from inside the tower; the landscape seems to be the same, and,
as shown later in the movie, Milan is still the place of alienation for the
female protagonists.
The image of the woman appropriating urban space by contemplating
the city from above, or by strolling its streets, represents Spada’s poetic
matrix and the major visual leitmotif of all of her films. The woman in
the act of looking through a window, as well as that of one exercising a
mobile gaze, are clearly self-referential, in so far as they replicate the act
of auteur filmmaking. To use de Certau’s figure, Claudia, as Spada’s alter
ego, represents “the voyeur-god” experiencing the “all-seeing power,” like
132 LAURA DI BIANCO
Figure 7.4 Come l’ombra, Marina Spada’s set journal, 2006. Courtesy of Marina
Spada.
the filmmaker who engages in a discourse on the city, and thus states, at
the beginning of her film, her authorship.
While in Forza cani the aerial view of the city was left offscreen,
the urban landscape in Come l’ombra—which is Claudia’s POV shot—is
framed by the window in an extreme long shot. It follows her over the
shoulders, close-up, alla’ Antonioni. Immediately after, as the camera
WOMEN IN THE DESERTED CITY 133
Figure 7.5 Come l’ombra, Marina Spada’s set journal, 2006. Courtesy of Marina
Spada.
pans in a circle, a series of aerial pictures of the city are shown, heralding
the meaningful presence of the urban landscape in the film. In Come
l’ombra, as in Il mio domani, the image of Milan reflects the stamp of
Basilico, who, for many years, has engaged in an artistic dialogue with
the filmmaker, thus representing a major reference point for her mise-
en-scène.
134 LAURA DI BIANCO
Figure 7.6 Come l’ombra, Marina Spada’s set journal, 2006. Courtesy of Marina
Spada.
female subjectivity in the urban space. As with Come l’ombra, her fourth
film is also—to use Roland Barthes words—“a tissue of citations.”19 In
fact, the father-daughter relationship at the center of the film is remi-
niscent of Antonioni’s Il grido (1957), which is also set in the Po Valley
(see figures 7.7 and 7.8). Monica’s strolls in the city recall again those
of Lidia from La notte, and the Milanese location of the Fidia build-
ing is a direct quotation of Cronaca di un amore (Story of a Love Affair,
1950). Thus, Antonioni’s cinema, beyond being a mere reference point
for the mise-en-scène, merges into the fictional matter, underpinning
the narration.
Figure 7.7 Il mio domani, Marina Spada’s set journal, 2011. Courtesy of Marina
Spada.
140 LAURA DI BIANCO
Figure 7.8 Il mio domani, Marina Spada’s set journal, 2011. Courtesy of Marina
Spada.
When he dies, the story reveals that Monica has a profound resentment
toward her mother, who, when Monica was a child, abandoned her family
for an amorous adventure in Greece. A few years later, when the rela-
tionship ended, she returned to her home village with another daughter.
Neither Monica nor her father were able to forgive her. After his death,
Monica enters a profound state of crisis that eventually leads to a trans-
formation of her life. The relationship with her stepsister, long conflicted,
falls apart, impeding Monica’s contact with her nephew, a fragile adoles-
cent who Monica loves dearly. Her lover Vittorio leaves her to go to Paris,
and she realizes that the firm she works for is manipulating her. She per-
ceives her job as dishonest after realizing that the motivational speeches
she gives employees are deceptively intended to make them accept the fact
that they are being fired. In reaction, she decides to make a tabula rasa.
Parallel to these events, Monica attends a photography class where she is
learning to compose her self-portrait. Symbolically, in the end, she places
herself in a new picture by starting a new life elsewhere, repeating her
mother’s journey to Greece.
As in Come l’ombra, in Il mio domani, the death of someone is also
a necessary sacrifice that mobilizes the central character, forcing her to
exit from a condition of stasis. In both films, the path of reshaping the
self leads the protagonist away from the city in so far as displacement
and relocation in a new landscape become essential conditions for the
regeneration of the self. While in Come l’ombra the barren landscape seen
along the road in the final scene replaces the alienating urban cityscape
that occupies the screen for almost the entire film, Il mio domani is str-
uctured on a continuous alternation of two different landscapes, that of
Milan, where Monica lives, and that of the country, where she goes to visit
her father.
In Il mio domani, female subjectivity is articulated through the coun-
try/city dichotomy; however, neither of these two poles is connoted as
positive or negative. In her book Space, Place, and Gender (1994), the
feminist geographer Doreen Massey explores the idea that spaces and
places are defined in terms of social relationships, and therefore are not
only gendered, but constitute the construction of gender itself. Discussing
the equation nature/woman as well as home/woman, Massey argues:
“Woman stands as metaphor for nature [. . .], for what has been lost (left
behind), and that place called home is frequently personified by, and par-
takes of the same characteristics as those assigned to, Woman/Mother/
Lover” (10). Massey rejects the common idea, codified by patriarchal
society, that women are more at ease in nature (as opposed to the city), as
well as in domestic space, conceived as “the” female space where they can
fulfill the social role of mothers and wives.
142 LAURA DI BIANCO
As she tells her students, in ancient China, emptiness was written with an
ideogram called MU. This ideogram represented the concept of emptiness
not as the threatening nonexistent space, but, on the contrary, as a real
space that can be inhabited. In several sequences, while Monica struggles
to create that empty space in order to embrace that change, she continues
discussing the importance of conceiving emptiness as an opportunity to
change.
However, empty space is not represented positively in the film; on
the contrary, it generates a sense of anxiety and profound loneliness.
In moments of crisis, as Lidia from La notte, and all of Spada’s female
protagonists, Monica wanders throughout empty streets and piazzas.
The character is shot in long takes from high angles, showing the all-
glass buildings, which emphasize the modernity of Milan’s architecture,
though also depicting a city deprived of the confusion, of the crowd, of
the urban life that one would expect. The phantasmagoria, the spectacle
of the modern city that was the object of observation of the flâneur of the
nineteenth century, is completely lost.
However, in Il mio domani, Spada establishes a correspondence between
the construction of a city and the formation of a woman’s identity. During
her peregrinations, Monica lingers to observe several construction sites,
which, in real life, are due to the Expo that will take place in 2015. Despite
the absence of human life as would be seen outdoors, the city seems to
be undergoing a major process of remodeling and development. Hence,
Spada continues a work of documentation of the city’s transformations
begun in Poesia che mi guardi, as well as an investigation on female sub-
jectivity, suggesting that female flânerie is an act of introspection and
identity formation.
Nevertheless, upon a closer analysis of the film script, and when con-
sidering in which moments the character strolls the city, flânerie can be
interpreted as act of rebellion too. In “The Woman in the Street,” Rachel
Bowlby observes that “the woman in the street is somehow out of place, at
least out of her place” (1992: 9; emphasis mine). Bowlby interprets female
walking as an act of breaking gender roles that require women to be con-
fined to the private space. In Spada’s film, walking can also be considered
a crossing of borders. Monica’s walking, in fact, is “about motions for
change” (2). It is about quitting places, like her house or her job, which she
needs to leave behind in order to reposition herself in a new landscape.
As seen through this analysis of her opus, Spada’s stories are born
from places rather than characters whose lives, in fact, originate and
are shaped by the different places that figure in her films. The figure
of the flâneuse, as well as that of the woman contemplating the urban
landscape from the city heights, is, therefore, Spada’s poetical matrix.
144 LAURA DI BIANCO
Notes
1. “I was born in Milan and have always lived in the same suburban neighbor-
hood and I too, like Alda Merini, would only leave Milan for heaven. [. . .]
I’ve always wanted to make movies, affirming life within fiction against the
ravages of time. I shoot films to gain a sense of the world, to better under-
stand the present.” Translation in Il mio domani. Un film di Marina Spada.
Fotografie di Gabriele Basilico + Toni Thorimbert, ed. by Giovanna Calvenzi
(Milan: Kairos, Costrasto, 2011), 9.
2. Elizabeth Wilson, The Sphinx in the City: Urban Life, The Control of Disorder,
and Women (Berkeley, Los Angeles, Oxford: University of California Press,
1992), 7.
3. See Keith Tester, The Flâneur (New York and London: Routledge, 1994), 3.
4. “I was born in Milan and have always lived in the same suburban neigh-
borhood and I too, like Alda Merini, would only leave Milan for heaven,”
in Calvenzi, Il mio domani, 9.
WOMEN IN THE DESERTED CITY 145
5. “Poets work at night/ when time does not press on them/ when the crowd’s
noise is hushed/ and the hour’s lynching is over. Poets work in the dark/ like
night hawks or nightingales/ whose song is so sweet/ and fear they are offend-
ing God. But poets, in their silence/ make a higher noise/ than a golden dome
of stars.” The Second Hump, Vol. I (May 2010–April 2011). See: http://thesec-
ondhump.blogspot.com/2011/05/poems-by-alda-merini.html (last accessed
on March 31, 2013).
6. “An important step toward the democratization of film in Italy” (author’s
translation).
7. “The day rumbles/ Empty, just empty/ Nothing resounds/ In the night
only darkness” (author’s translation). The verses were composed by the
scriptwriters.
8. In a Q&A that followed the screening of Il mio domani at Lincoln Center in
June 2012, Spada also declared: “There is a lot of talk about globalization, but
there’s also a kind of globalization of architecture, a dialogue that is taking
place among solids to the extent that some cities could be anywhere in the
world.”
9. I know Milan well, better than the people born here. Who do they think they
are? It is becoming a crappy city. I like when it’s foggy, I don’t like when it’s
cold though (author’s translation).
10. Graziella Bernabò, Per troppa vita che ho nel sangue. Antonia Pozzi e la sua
poesia (Milan: Vienepierre, 2004).
11. “A film about death.” See Spada’s conversation with the author in the appen-
dix. Milan, June 2012.
12. “If I close my eyes to think of how my tomorrow will be, I see a long road that
rises from the hearth of an unknown city toward the tall trees of an ancient
garden” (translation in the DVD of the film by Kairos Film, 2011).
13. Barbara Maio, in the book Invisibili, highlights the phenomenon of the
“autrici interrotte.” In fact, a conspicuous number of filmmakers in Italy,
after struggling to debut, did not get over their “opera prima,” or had to
wait many years before getting the chance to produce a second movie. For
example, after Autunno (1999) and Inverno (2002), Nina Di Majo had to wait
eight years before making Matrimonio e altri disastri, while Anna Negri,
who made In principio erano le mutande in 1999, had to wait almost ten years
before making her next film, Riprendimi, in 2008.
14. “The city was semi-deserted and an extraordinary energetic wind had
cleaned the horizon. It was an exceptionally bright day, one of those rare
days in which the Milanese people are surprised ‘they can see the moun-
tains so well that it seems as if they can touch them with their hands.’ The
wind, going along with some literary tradition, stirred up the dust, shook
the streets, cleaned the still spaces, conveying plasticity to the buildings. It
restored the streets’ perspective with a sort of atmospheric maquillage that
allowed light to clearly and sharply project the buildings’ shadows” (author’s
translation).
15. In the last two decades, a significant number of Italian films dealt with
themes like the struggle for integration, intolerance, racism, violence, and
146 LAURA DI BIANCO
Bibliography
Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author.” In Image, Music, Text. Translated by
Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977.
Bowlby, Rachel. Still Crazy after All These Years. Women, Writing and
Psycoanalysis. New York and London: Routledge, 1992.
Calvenzi, Giovanna, ed. Il mio domani. Un film di Marina Spada. Fotografie di
Gabriele Basilico + Toni Thorimbert. Milan: Kairos, Costrasto, 2011.
Certau, Michel de. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1984.
Forgacs, David. “Antonioni: Space, Place, Sexuality.” In Spaces in European
Cinema, ed. Myrto Konstantarakos. Exeter, England; Portland, OR: Intellect,
2000.
Lissoni, Andrea, ed. Basilico, Grabriele. Architetture, città, visioni. Riflessioni
sulla fotografia. Milan: Bruno Mondadori, 2007.
Massey, Doreen B. Space, Place, and Gender. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1994.
O’Healy, Aine. “Border Traffic: Reimagining the Voyage to Italy.” In Trasnational
Feminism in Film and Media, ed. Katarzyna Marciniak and Anikó Irme. New
York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
WOMEN IN THE DESERTED CITY 147
Wilson, Elizabeth. The Sphinx in the City. Urban Life, The Control of Disorder,
and Women. Berkeley, Los Angeles, Oxford: University of California Press,
1992.
Wolff, Janet. “The Invisible Flaneuse: Women and the Literature of Modernity.”
In Feminine Sentences. Essays on Women & Culture. Berkley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1990.
8
Introduction
Alina Marazzi occupies a very special place in the history of Italian women
filmmakers for her experimental style and feminist approach.1 By using
found footage and home movies Alina Marazzi questions the Western rep-
resentation of the “Woman” and re-visions real women’s complex interior
landscapes. She pays particular attention to motherhood (either realized
or unfulfilled) as a problematic condition of identity and investigates the
crucial role of the mother-daughter relationship. Marazzi’s trilogy Un’ora
sola ti vorrei (2002), Vogliamo anche le rose (2007), and Tutto parla di te
(2012) explores the sense of displacement, failure, and inadequacy women
face whether they choose to perform traditional social roles or to reject
the socially validated idea of happiness. Marazzi’s work also reflects on
the difficulties for women in struggling for freedom and self-fulfillment
in an oppressive society.
The women Marazzi represents are always caught in the conflict
between the narrow limits of traditional feminine roles and their personal
perspectives: they are subjects “in opposition.” This conflict is personal—
for it reveals the subject’s radical “otherness” and uniqueness—and at the
same time political, because it is related to women’s inability to cope with
being wives and mothers and with their sexuality. Marazzi conveys this
personal and political conflict by intermingling two contrasting forces
(Bergonzoni 2011: 248). On the one hand, found footage and visual archi-
val material epitomize the collective and official register centered on
political and social events. On the other hand, women’s stories, thoughts,
and feelings are conveyed through their diaries in a continuous tension
with the film’s images. This inner rift generates a form of female dis-
placement, which is represented in Marazzi’s works by a complex—and
continuous—short-circuit between words and images.
Archival images, both official and private, have contributed in the past
to shaping the dominant image of femininity. In Marazzi, this representa-
tion of “woman as fiction” is revealed by showing the socially constructed
nature of found footage, which is historicized or used against the grain
through the editing, thus intensifying “the dialectical collision between
the inherent perspective of the original and its radical re-use that remains
a characteristic of the compilation documentary” (Bruzzi 2006: 27). The
result is that the questions of gender and femininity are always deeply
represented as influenced by historical forces and not as “purely textual/
visual representation” (de Lauretis 1987: 24). However, Marazzi intends
neither to reconstruct historical truths nor to propose an historical
interpretation of Italian second wave feminism. Rather, Marazzi adopts
a feminist point of view by privileging female personal perspectives,
ENVISIONING OUR MOTHER’S FACE 151
as she herself notes: “I wanted to tell the story from a subjective point of
view because that has so much to do with feminism. I wanted to make a
subjective film. [. . .] What feminism did for the first time is to give value
to personal experiences of women, and men [. . .] it made the personal
become political” (Bale 2010). The private register is in fact constituted
by real stories recorded in the diaries and letters of real women, which
structure the narrative plot of the documentaries.
In the last 30 years feminist scholarship has shown that diaries are
a gendered genre that uncovers women’s history, lives, and narratives
(Bunckers and Huff 1996; Schiwy 1996; Blodgett 1989; Gannett 1992;
Nussbaum 1989; Tarozzi 2006). According to Adrienne Rich (1979), the
journal is a “profoundly female, and feminist, genre” due to its fundamental
relation with the home, the hearth, the family, the sexual, the emotional—
in other words, with the private sphere, which has historically been asso-
ciated with women (217). Yet Marazzi’s use of women’s personal diaries
does not mean that she confines women to the intimate and emotional
sphere. Women’s diaries in fact reveal how their lives, their bodies, and
sexuality have deep political implications, for they display critical aware-
ness about the asymmetrical power relation between the sexes.
What also emerges as a feminist strategy in Marazzi’s work is the use
of a female first-person narrator combined with female voice-over. In
Marazzi’s documentaries the female “I” controls the narrative: female
authorship creates a protagonist who is both female and autonomous
(Frye 1986: 47). The female voice gives meaning and purpose to the sto-
ryline and shares with the audience her perspective on the events. The
female voice-over (a rare occasion in cinema, as Kaja Silverman [1988: 50]
has noted) reinforces her position of superior knowledge and inverts the
usual sound/image hierarchy.
Marazzi’s documentaries create a new syntax, a new language, which
is based on the interplay between women’s thoughts, feelings, and voices
on the one hand and the images the viewer sees on the other: found foot-
age is edited either to support and illustrate or to be in contrast and col-
lide with female stories. The director’s aim is precisely to conflate these
two narratives as her films seek to draw out the buried and unofficial
story of Italian recent past. She proposes an interpretation of historical
events through the lives of women who have struggled to assert their
rights to divorce and abortion, as well as to define their roles in a chang-
ing society.
This short circuit between images and the women’s voices is pos-
sible through a complex editing montage, which plays a crucial role in
Marazzi’s poetics. The editing reminds one of Soviet cinema and echoes
political and independent American documentary filmmaking from the
152 CRISTINA GAMBERI
The Context
of 8-mm and 16-mm material, dating back to the 1920s).4 Only a few
clips are excerpted from archive footage provided by the “Fondo Privato
Giorgio Magister” (1958–1962).
Un’ora sola ti vorrei was critically acclaimed: among others, it won the
prize for best documentary at the 2002 Torino Film Festival and at the
2003 Newport International Film Festival, and in the same year received
special mentions by the jury at the Locarno Film Festival and at the inter-
national It’s All True Festival in São Paulo in 2003.5 Un’ora sola ti vor-
rei was brought to the attention of critics and audiences for using family
movies, uniquely in Italian cinema.6 According to the film critic Antonio
Costa (2007: 85), in Un’ora sola ti vorrei Alina Marazzi explores “new
horizons in terms of experimental style and language,” in her innovative
use of found footage, and in the documentary’s main thematic issues.
Despite its unprecedented success, at first the documentary was not
meant to be public, as it simply arose from Marazzi’s private need to
reconcile herself with the loss of her mother, who committed suicide
in 1972 when Alina was only seven. “For most of my life,” the director
notes, “my mother’s name has been ignored, avoided, hidden. Her face
also. [. . .] My mother, whom I had known very little and forgotten for the
most” (Marazzi 2002). Un’ora sola ti vorrei is in fact Alina Marazzi’s quest
for her mother, Liseli, who suffered from depression and spent many
years of her adult life in psychiatric clinics. Un’ora sola ti vorrei is indeed
a strikingly touching biographical movie that resonates most intimately
in its combination of poetic intensity and critical analysis.
A home movie sequence shot in saturated colors opens the documen-
tary. Liseli, a blond and beautiful young woman, is portrayed lying on
the grass during a mountain holiday. She looks enigmatically into the
camera. Then the camera films her husband, Antonio Marazzi, and two
young children eating (one is the director herself, who does not otherwise
appear in the movie except for a few short scenes like this one when she is
still a little girl). The voices of Liseli and Antonio, separately recorded on a
45-rpm record, are edited as the acoustic track of the scene. In the 45-rpm
record Liseli and Antonio ironically mock the authoritarian parental tone
adults use to scold their kids and spur their children to eat. The disc ends
with Antonio talking with Liseli about her coming back by train from
Switzerland and inviting his wife to sing a Swiss song. However, Liseli
strikes up an Italian song, Un’ora sola ti vorrei (which gives the title to the
documentary), until her voice is interrupted by a scratch; then the same
song starts up again, in a professional recording from the 1930s.
After the prologue and film titles begins the documentary proper,
which radically breaks with the conventions and forms of the traditional
objective documentary style. Liseli is reading a letter to her daughter
Alina to tell the story of the former’s mother, her engagement with her
ENVISIONING OUR MOTHER’S FACE 155
father, and the birth of their children, Liseli included. This “impossible
letter,” read by the director herself as a female first-person narrator
voice-over, deliberately violates conventional realist codes and unsettles
the biographical register of the movie. The letter in fact states from the
very beginning its fictive nature, immediately unveiling Liseli’s death
as an inescapable fact: her story has already been written. The mood of
the film, with its autobiographical and confessional tone, is immediately
established as nostalgic by the posthumous narrator, which reveals how
she has been scarred by a major trauma (Silverman 1988: 52).
Mia cara Alina, quella voce che hai appena sentito [. . .] è la mia voce, la
mia voce di trent’anni fa [. . .]. In tutto [in] questo tempo nessuno ti ha mai
parlato di me, di come ero, di come ho vissuto, di come me ne sono andata.
Voglio raccontarti la mia storia, adesso che è passato così tanto tempo da
quando sono morta.
(My beloved Alina, the voice you have just heard [. . .] is my voice, my
voice of thirty years ago [. . .]. In all these years nobody has told you about
me, about my life, about my death. Now, many years after my death, I want
to tell you my story.)
The complex interplay between the director’s (real) voice and her moth-
er’s voice, which is the director’s voice doubling as her mother’s (fictional)
voice through a female extradiegetic first-person narrator, represents one
of the crucial feminist features of the movie. By disembodying the female
voice, Marazzi is able to subvert the notion of women represented primar-
ily as body and passive erotic objects for the male gaze. The female voice-
over with its transcendental and omniscient vision speaks with utmost
authority, for it is situated in a framing space outside the diegesis. Liseli’s
first-person narration also represents the reappropriation of her own voice
and eventually leads her to become the protagonist of her own story: the
movie thus becomes her counter-herstory. Moreover, the director’s choice
to read her mother’s diaries and letters symbolizes the process of identifica-
tion between daughter and mother that lies at the core of the movie, which
allows the director to reappropriate the lost and forgotten mother. The rep-
resentation of these two women, mirroring each other through their voices
and gazes, contributes to establishing a female genealogy based upon the
mother-daughter relationship structured as a double.7
The presence of the daughter-director is also immediately clear in the
opening of the second part of the documentary when Liseli’s request,
“Please, do not read this diary,” is consciously transgressed by Marazzi,
who unfolds her mother’s story by filming the pages from her diaries and
her photographs. We discover that beyond her apparently idyllic child-
hood in a wealthy Milanese family, the young Liseli asks serious questions
about life, relationships, and love. The story narrates the life of the teenage
156 CRISTINA GAMBERI
Liseli, who finds her own mother first a perfect and then an unattainable
role model. Then comes Liseli’s marriage, represented as a romantic ful-
fillment of love. In the meantime Liseli’s emotional difficulties increase
and a loss of confidence begins to creep in: a sense of inadequacy to fulfill
her family’s expectations. This discrepancy between Liseli’s inner feel-
ings and her world is conveyed by juxtaposing her words with apparently
common, spontaneous images from everyday life. For example, a beauti-
ful scene portrays Liseli washing and delicately touching her daughter
Alina, while her commentary has a completely different tone: “I found
out that I am not able to do all the things that I was supposed to have
learnt in the last few years and this thought obsesses me.”
The depression, described in a succession and accumulation of medi-
cal reports from psychiatric hospitals accompanied by the sounds of break-
ing glass, takes the audience into the last and third part of Liseli’s life with
a crescendo of inexorable intensity, like a journey into the infernal circles.8
Liseli’s diary entries are commented on by the images that attempt to visually
represent Liseli’s interior landscapes during her illness. Continuity, analogy,
and metonymy connect us to Liseli’s confinement in Swiss mental hospitals.
Movie fragments of psychiatric records symbolize Liseli’s institutionalization.
Diary pages are filmed to support her reflections on her own illness. Images of
trees evoke the garden of the hospital where Liseli often takes a walk.
While preserving the archive’s origins and its original meaning, the
creative cutting allows Marazzi to resignify home movies from their
original meaning thereby imposing a fresh interpretative framework.
The presence of the director’s gaze is revealed through the recurring
close-ups of Liseli’s enigmatic face, which confers a lyrical nuance to the
documentary—what Pier Paolo Pasolini would have called “cinema of
poetry,” where the cinematic structure comes close to the poetic prose of
modernist fiction (Bergonzoni 2011: 251). By employing free association
of images and correspondences between Liseli and her mother, Marazzi
reelaborates her family’s visual memory and reconstructs the evocative
and nostalgic power of her mother’s face. Un’ora sola ti vorrei corresponds,
in the words of Marazzi (2002),
However, the documentary achieves its most lyric moments in the tragic
contrast between words and images, reproducing through oxymoron that
ENVISIONING OUR MOTHER’S FACE 157
a special meaning for me; others recall the atmosphere of the epoch. Moreover,
there are many sounds, noises, whisperings, which we added to reproduce
the sound of the opening of an old trunk from which come out words, pieces
of sheet, pictures, videos, sounds, children’s voices [. . .] I thought that every-
thing was relevant and connected with the ways we were gathering these
materials of memory.)
and life as a unified whole, since she is aware of how the memory of her
mother can be composed only through images created by others (especially
by Alina’s grandfather). Tragically entrapped between her public appear-
ance and inner feelings, between appearing the “Woman” and being “a
woman,” Liseli cannot find a sense of authenticity: indeed, while talking to
her therapist, Liseli says that everything in her past was like a “pose.”
The word “pose,” in the sense of posing in front of the camera, is also
revealing about Marazzi’s reflection on the role of classical cinema in rep-
resenting women as the passive object of the male gaze (Mulvey 1975).
Marazzi is inviting us to reflect on the feminist discourse of representation
of women: refusing to pose means in fact to refuse to visually represent
women as a mere spectacle, but it also means to unveil a woman’s subjectiv-
ity and assume her own perspective. In this sense, it is possible to read the
documentary not simply as a biography, but more broadly as a reflection
about the power of cinema in relation to women’s social conditions.
This work also reveals how in the private and public spheres of home
movies, spontaneity and fictional real life and representation are intertwined.
According to Luisella Farinotti (2006: 500), Ulrico Hoepli’s home movies,
by celebrating familial bonds through recording the most important family
rites (weddings, christenings, holidays and trips, etc.), are not only keep-
ers of personal and private memories, but also create a collective mise-en-
scène of memory, where social, cultural, and aesthetics codes are inscribed.
Ilaria Fraioli, the editor of the documentary, echoes this argument when
she describes Ulrico Hoepli as an “authoritarian cameraman.” His sense of
mise-en-scène and style clearly emerges from his amateur home movies
and mirrors specific aesthetic values going far beyond their apparently
private nature (Marazzi and Fraioli 2003: 94). Not only is Ulrico Hoepli’s
amateur status and his apparently naïveté as cameraman questioned, but
the nature of home movie and archival material is also problematized.
Beyond their apparent aim to document “the trivial, the personal and the
inconsequential,” home movies are shown as neither innocent nor artless
records (Bruzzi 2006: 18). Through her documentary Marazzi exhibits how
the original document is not a stable, pure, or authentic record of reality.
On the contrary, through her critical eye as a filmmaker and the collision
between images and sounds the document is presented as not fixed, but
infinitely accessible, open, and mutable (Bruzzi 2006).
The movie looks back at the end of the 1960s and the 1970s, exploring
what was behind the social revolution, when the feminist movement
questioned male supremacy and called for a deep change in gender rela-
tions. The Second Wave of Italian feminism became a popular mobiliza-
tion that fought with remarkable strength and radicalism for women’s
rights, carrying out epic battles for divorce (1971) and abortion (1978),
and united women across the social and political spectrum. By the end
of that decade, however, feminism was in decline and at the beginning of
the 1980s the movement gradually disappeared from the public scene and
took different directions. Marazzi’s film addresses the crucial role those
struggles played in achieving equal rights, suggesting that no victory can
be taken for granted forever.
Like in Un’ora sola ti vorrei, Vogliamo anche le rose centers on women’s
subjective experiences through the diaries of three anonymous women
discovered at the Italian National Archive of Diaries.9 Narrated in vaguely
ENVISIONING OUR MOTHER’S FACE 161
chronological order, the stories of Anita, Teresa, and Valentina show that
despite some differences the protagonists share the same feelings: they
no longer feel part of a society based on the patriarchal family and ques-
tion the power of husbands and the supremacy of males. Every story is
composed of excerpts from a diary—read as a voice-over by a profes-
sional actress—and is visually supported with a woman’s face taken from
archival material or experimental movies, to help the audience to visu-
ally identify the narrator. Selected in collaboration with the writer Silvia
Ballestra, the three diaries are characteristic of the 1970s for the emotional
and political turmoil they express. However, the use of the present tense
throughout the narration shortens the temporal gap that separates those
women from the present. We discover that their questions and desires,
their fears and troubled relationships, their conflicts and contradictions
are not so different from those of women today.
The same editor who worked on Un’ora sola ti vorrei, Ilaria Fraioli,
helped Marazzi to edit the vertical montage of the images, an archive of
thirty hours of moving images, interviews, talk shows, and commercial
videos, all collected at the Italian National Television (RAI) archives—
and clips from home movies and experimental films from private collec-
tions. The editing plays a key role and it structures the documentary on
two different levels, in a continuous dialogue between public and private:
on the one hand the visual and official apparatus, on the other hand the
personal narrative register that stresses the uniqueness of the three pro-
tagonists. The archival material from RAI plays the role of representing
the “official” image of femininity, while Italian experimental movies rep-
resent the need for social change that runs through Italian society at that
time. By undoing the coherence of the images’ mimetic qualities, Marazzi
on one hand created a very hybrid and kaleidoscopic work, where the
filmed fragments “are folded and forced by the tireless work of editing
into attractions and distractions, until creating a new narration and a
new meaning” (Bonifazio 2007; Zonta 2008: 83). On the other hand, she
also constructed a polyphonic text of women’s voices, which underlines
the primary importance of multiplicity in the work of women filmmakers
(Carson et al. 1994).
In Vogliamo anche le rose, unlike in her previous documentary, Marazzi
adopts an ironic and parodic approach. “A darkly humorous undercurrent
runs throughout, emerging at times from the dramatic irony implicit in
our modern viewpoint, at others from the simple ridiculing of misogyny
through editing, animation and the non-diegetic soundtrack. And yet
this humor coincides with some very poignant scenes” (Holdaway 2012).
As with other women artists, feminist parody represents one of the
keys to understanding the film. Marazzi uses parody to penetrate the
162 CRISTINA GAMBERI
(Fear of turning 19, fear of going to college. I rebel against the idea
of the white dress, of relatives, of marriage, of the legal contract, of the
church ceremony. How can we live outside of the social conventions?)
I lay down and I felt that icy instrument that disproportionately enlarged
my vagina. The lady had prepared two syringes and I felt the needles pen-
etrate the uterus. Not long after torpor arrived and I became incapable of
any reaction. But I felt lots of pain everywhere. My body didn’t respond to
me, I was all rigid and cold. [. . .] My feet, my legs, my knees, my thighs, I
couldn’t feel them anymore, the cold had become unbearable, my blood
had frozen. I was a total block of frozen pain. (Marazzi 2008)
But she also demonstrates her self-determination and her desire for free-
dom when she eventually claims, “For the first time I felt within me the
force of a thousand lions. Fear in me had vanished, and in its place there
was a new consciousness: I had the right to freedom. A kind of freedom
reached not through lies [. . .] but through courage and dignity. The next
phase had begun” (Marazzi 2008).
164 CRISTINA GAMBERI
For writers, and at this moment for women writers in particular, there is the
challenge and promise of a whole new psychic geography to be explored.
But there is also a difficult and dangerous walking on the ice, as we try to
find language and images for the consciousness we are just coming into,
and with little in the past to support us. (19)
Using the same imagery, both Rich’s and Marazzi’s texts indicate that
the solitary and uncertain journey of a woman can turn into the starting
point for raising the collective consciousness. Teresa’s narration meta-
phorically positions itself as the link among the private sphere, Anita’s
diary, and the feminist activism represented by the final diary.
This third diary, entitled Diary of Sex and Politics, was written in 1978
by Valentina, a woman active in the feminist Roman collective “Il Governo
Vecchio.” Her reflections focus particularly on the Women’s Liberation
Movement, and how strengths and weaknesses among women affect her
life and her political vision. Her diary also shows the end of the first era of
feminism after the referendum for making abortion legal in 1978. Her per-
sonal and political quest for female role models and feminist genealogies
reflects the uncertainty many feminists felt in this period of transition.
associate themselves with powerful men. And there are also the truly
emancipated, who go from one man to the next, but with somehow stable
features.)
it is Masini’s wife who links the three women’s lives and the historical
period in which they lived, as “there is something profoundly modern in
her way of moving and looking” (Grosso 2008: 42–43).
Although the movie does not celebrate the past, at the end of it one
senses a vague nostalgia for something that has been lost. These materi-
als rewrite a story of the recent past, in the light of an uncertain future.
Marazzi’s concern for the present is evident in the final few minutes: the
film ends with a list of laws that have affected gender rights in the period
covered by the film until the present day, which also includes a number of
attempts to retract antecedent laws, demonstrating that many fundamen-
tal legal issues remain unresolved.
Critical Nostalgia
Despite some differences, both documentaries not only share the same
stylistic choice of combining archival footage with female voice-over, but
also look back at the same historical period: the end of the 1960s and
the 1970s. As the historical setting of both documentaries indicates, what
emerges as a crucial feature in Marazzi’s work is nostalgia, understood
as a longing for a place (the lost home) but also a “yearning for a differ-
ent time—the time of our childhood, the slower rhythms of our dreams”
(Boym 2001).
Particularly relevant in Marazzi’s nostalgic approach to the past is
the importance attributed to the mother(s), either real or symbolic. Both
movies represent an ideal quest for the mother’s face(s) and voice(s).
This nostalgic driving force, in fact, makes Un’ora sola ti vorrei a work
of mourning, which recomposes the fragments of Liseli’s life into a
cathartic ensemble. Marazzi (2002) said that in Un’ora sola ti vorrei she
wanted “to convey the strong feeling of nostalgia that I felt when first
watching those images. [. . .] Nostalgia as a necessary feeling for over-
coming a loss. Nostalgia as an essential condition for living.” Not sur-
prisingly, the practice of found footage has been popular with those
directors who “deal with, amongst other things, experiences of aban-
donment, mourning and death” and for whom family movies are inti-
mately linked with nostalgia (Danks 2002). But this movie also retraces
a familiar female genealogy from grandmother to granddaughter in a
continuous chain defined by Marazzi as “rispecchiamento” (mirror-
ing). The form of critical nostalgia that drives Marazzi is evident when
she states how mirroring oneself in one’s mother’s face helps not only
to reclaim one’s own past, but also to discover one’s real and symbolic
origins. “Ho preso [. . .] in mano la mia vicenda, e nel raccontare quella
ENVISIONING OUR MOTHER’S FACE 167
di mia madre ‘mi’ sono raccontata la storia delle mie origini, per cui è
come se nel film ci fosse un doppio livello: biografico e autobiogra-
fico” [I took my life in my hands, and by narrating my mother’s story,
I told myself the story of my origins, therefore it is as if the movie has two
levels the biographical, and the autobiographical] (Marazzi and Fraioli
2003: 92).
Marazzi’s documentary is thus conceived at the same time as biog-
raphy (of the mother/s) and as autobiography (of herself). Similarly,
Vogliamo anche le rose, while imagining three women’s lives as counter
role models, is tracing a journey toward past symbolic mothers to under-
stand the present.
For these reasons, Marazzi’s works do not simply linger in regressive
stances or melancholic attitudes. On the contrary, she offers a critical tool
to interrogate the articulation of the past into the present. Both documenta-
ries share a critical nostalgic approach, which is not sterile, but generative.
It is not reactionary, but progressive. Marazzi does not sentimentally cel-
ebrate the past, but recognizes in it a potential critique for the present, and
invokes a positively evaluated past world in response to a deficient present
world. Her perspective on nostalgia is more as “historical emotion,” rather
than an individual condition, which is very much a symptom of our mod-
ern time and at the very core of the modern condition (Boym 2001).
This sentiment of loss and female displacement that runs throughout
contemporary cultural and political Italian society turns to the past to find
and create new sources of female identity, agency, and empowerment by
establishing a strong female and feminist genealogy that is now perceived
as missing. The director, by addressing the mother-daughter relationship
and by stressing the fictive nature of her own act of reappropriation, is not
only recovering the figure of the mother(s), but is focusing on the present
to reflect on the crucial role of daughters. These women from the past
stand as possible models for having refused to conform to the roles that
society has assigned them (Brandoni and Quercia 2009). In other words,
Marazzi shows us that searching for our mother’s voices is not only a form
of feminist historical inquiry, but it is also a feminist empowerment for
interpellating the positions that patriarchy has assigned to daughters.
Notes
The author would like to thank Monika Otter and an anonymous reader for their
helpful comments on an early version of this chapter.
1. Alina Marazzi, born in 1964, lives and works in Milan, Italy. She has
worked as assistant director for feature films and video art projects. As a
168 CRISTINA GAMBERI
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9
Fabiana Cecchini
Franco Battiato, Paolo Conte, and Luciano Ligabue are also considered
as case studies of musicians who have turned to directing films. Altho-
ugh Zagarrio maintains that it is difficult to draw a map of this big
new wave of filmmakers, scholars have attempted to find the common
ground on which these new directors operate, pointing out the impor-
tance of certain external aspects of the films that are crucial to their suc-
cess, with the following factors considered to be the most significant:
● the use of digital technology such as DVDs, blogs, chats, and social
networks to communicate ideas; websites announcing the films or
narrating the making of the films, webcams and digital cameras
facilitating the uploading of clips onto the web;
● the fundamental role of local festivals or cultural events for the pro-
jection of the film to make the experience of watching the movie a
more collective experience while attempting to gather a wider con-
sensus and audience, and in many cases, prior to the film’s theater
distribution;
● publication of the DVD accompanied by a booklet explaining the
making of the movie and all the intellectual references in it with
a double objective: on the one hand to strengthen the relationship
between literature and cinema; on the other, to support the circula-
tion of the film so that it will be available for purchase everywhere,
for instance, in DVD stores, bookshops, newsstands, and so on. The
film can therefore be targeted at all art-lovers and not just moviego-
ers. The idea is to whet the audience’s interest on a larger scale.2
If critics agree that technology has helped the film industry to become
stronger and more accessible both to the public and to authors, scholars
noted the lack of harsh social criticism from the point of view of content
and storyline due to the powerful censorship and budget cuts imposed
by Berlusconi’s government. However they all agree on the existence of a
socially and politically committed intellectual filmmaker who is still able
to describe contemporary Italy and Italians despite the “«sistema perfetto
di repressione» in cui ogni cineasta è diventato «poliziotto di se stesso,»
autocensurandosi e autoreprimendosi” (“«perfect system of repression»
in which filmmakers make «policemen of themselves,» self-censoring
and self-restraining.”3 In this new landscape the documentary emerges
as a privileged form of narration with respect to the fiction film, a tool
capable of committed cinematic investigation and communication. This
applies in the case of both private or public stories, and when the direc-
tor is engaged in social critique or in an intimate account of his/her life
ALINA MARAZZI’S WOMEN 175
Since Marazzi’s investigation involves the female sphere, her films raise
questions concerning gender, gender roles, and female identity, becom-
ing a mirror showcasing issues to which every woman can relate. They
178 FABIANA CECCHINI
● The use of the diary as the fictional ploy to construct the narration—
although Per sempre favored the more traditional “documentario-
ritratto” structure in which Alina interviews the nuns face-to-face.
● The common theme of women who cannot “aderire a dei modelli,
sia che siano modelli che vengono dall’esterno, che so, dalla famiglia,
dalla società, dalle convenzioni, come nel caso di Un’ora sola ti vor-
rei, sia che se li scelgano loro stesse come le monache di clausura
in Per sempre” (conform to convention, whether they are externally
established conventions like the family, society, accepted standards
as in Un’ora sola ti vorrei, or where it is the women themselves who
choose what they want like the enclosed order nuns; Brandoni and
Quercia 2009).
● Consequently, the theme of the woman who rebels against social
conventions and makes the final decision after a difficult and tor-
mented psychological battle—Liseli’s story in Un’ora sola ti vorrei,
Valeria in Per sempre, and all three women in Vogliamo anche le
Rose;
● The use of found footage, archival material, home videos in Un’ora
sola ti vorrei and Vogliamo anche le Rose—in Per sempre Alina inter-
acts with the characters through interviews.
● The autobiographical value that Marazzi aimed to confer to her
films, as a woman and an author, in order to activate a process of
personal discovery and social commitment.15
180 FABIANA CECCHINI
Mia cara Alina, quella voce che hai appena sentito, quella voce che scherza
e ride e che fa finta di sgridare te e Martino, è la mia voce, la mia voce di
trent’anni fa. L’avevamo incisa su un disco con papà per farvi uno scherzo,
ti ricordi? In tutto questo tempo nessuno ti ha mai parlato di me di chi ero,
di come ho vissuto di come me ne sono andata. Voglio raccontarti la mia
storia adesso che è passato così tanto tempo da quando sono morta
(My dear Alina, the voice you have just heard, that voice that jokes and
laughs and pretends to scold Martino and yourself, is my voice, my voice
from thirty years ago. Your father and I recorded it to play a joke on you,
do you remember? In all this time, no one has ever talked to you about me,
to tell you who I was, how I lived and how I died. Now that so much time
has elapsed since I died, I want to tell you my story.)20
ALINA MARAZZI’S WOMEN 183
Sarei una selvaggia, vorrei che lui mi facesse da mangiare tanto sarei gelosa
della nostra vita privata. Ma un uomo non può sottomettersi, così l’unica è
proporgli di essere la sua amante, così lui non si lega con una selvaggia. E
quando la vita selvaggia lo diverte, viene ogni tanto.
(I would like to be wild, and for him to cook for me since I am so jealous
of our private life. But a man cannot submit himself to a woman’s will, so the
only thing to do is for me to offer myself as his lover, so he won’t marry a wild
girl. And when the wild life amuses him he will come to me, sometimes.)
While these entries from Liseli’s diary are read, images and clips por-
traying her in conversation with friends, trying on different kinds of
women’s hats are shown along with footage from her wedding to streng
then the contrast between the false bourgeois world she inhabited and
the real emotions she was facing and fighting. The fictional letter concei-
ved by Marazzi the author concludes: “Avevo sempre vissuto nel bene-
ssere, in una specie d’illusione di serenità, dove i problemi non esistevano,
ma già allora, era come se sapessi che non avrei mai trovato il mio posto
nel mondo” (I was from an affluent family, living in a world where every-
thing seemed to run smoothly, without problems, but I already seemed to
have been aware that I would never find my place in the world).
The notion of feeling “Fuori dal mondo” (Out of this world; 1999), to
quote a film by Piccioni, with whom Marazzi worked as assistant director,
is the thematic link between Un’ora sola ti vorrei and Per sempre: the isola-
tion of the enclosed order nuns, the reasons behind their refusal to live in
society, and what had pushed them to choose this type of existence are the
themes explored in the documentary. Out of the three major films, this
is the one that received less critical attention, perhaps because as Raffaele
Meale noted, “è un film imperfetto, tanto insicuro sull’universale, quanto
Un’ora sola ti vorrei era apparso sicuro sul personale” (it is an imperfect
film, as unsure at a universal level as Un’ora sola ti vorrei was sure at a per-
sonal level; Meale 2005).22 However this may be because it has the most
traditional format of the three. By adopting the face-to-face interview
technique, Marazzi’s voice as the “voice of God” (Nichols, 2010) narrat-
ing the story, the film is thematically very close to Piccioni’s Fuori dal
mondo and therefore loses any sense of innovation, originality, or poetic
connotation compared to the previous film. However, even if Per sempre
can be considered as a transitional phase between the personal and uni-
versal levels pointed out by Meale, I believe that some noteworthy com-
mon features emerge: I agree with Veroica Maffizzoli who thinks of the
documentary as a “diario” (diary) of Marazzi’s encounter with the nuns
(Maffizzoli 2005). She therefore used the literary narrative device, this
time her own, to structure the documentary, shifting between the nuns’
views on the female situation to a more collective consideration of the
ALINA MARAZZI’S WOMEN 185
female sphere, and back again to herself as a woman and artist: “essere
donna, mi ha aiutato molto a entrare in sintonia con loro, probabil-
mente un uomo avrebbe fatto più fatica” (I found it easier to connect
with the nuns since I was a woman, a man would probably have found
it more difficult; Goisis 2006, “Per Sempre”). Finally, the autobiographi-
cal act takes form, in a process in which the “questione privata” (pri-
vate matter) of Un’ora sola ti vorrei “non è più una questione privata”
(is not a private matter anymore), since the themes disclosed in Liseli’s
diaries are now explored in the context of a female community (Meale
2005). Moreover, if we follow Goisis’s interpretation of both titles, the
link between the two films is even stronger: “the notion ‘for ever’ also
introduces another time dimension: ‘one more hour’ is not enough, as
the desire is to remain with one’s mother [. . .] ‘for ever’” (Sabbadini 2007;
34).23 This way, the time dimension represented by the single hour that
Marazzi wants to spend with her mother is, in the title of the first film,
expanded into the eternity, in the title of the second.
Per sempre therefore becomes the second chapter of Marazzi’s “docu-
diary,” a second step toward completion of the hypothetical trilogy of her
life narrative, Marazzi’s bildungsroman.
In Le Rose, the book accompanying the DVD of Vogliamo anche le
Rose, the director says that she first had to understand the reasons behind
the choices made by enclosed nuns when filming Per sempre before tack-
ling the issues behind the sexual liberation of the 1970s (Marazzi 2008a:
12). However the documentary techniques, story-telling, advertising, and
messages reflect what had been done as well with Un’ora sola ti vorrei.
The same audiomediality, that is, DVD+book package, website (www.
vogliamoanchelerose.it), the combination of cinema and literature, use
of the diary as the literary form of narration are again the strategies
adopted to reach the audience on a larger scale and from several angles.
This time, though, the personal investigation becomes a social and politi-
cal commitment: Vogliamo anche le rose recounts the history of Italian
feminism, and in particular the battles waged by women at the end of the
1960s and throughout the 1970s to set off the sexual revolution that took
Italian culture from the grip of patriarchal control and to lay the laws
on and allow divorce (1970) and abortion (1978). In the online synopsis
Marazzi states that her intentions were
Notes
1. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are mine. Vito Zagarrio, “Certi
bambini . . . i nuovi cineasti italiani,” in La Meglio Gioventù. Nuovo Cinema
Italiano 2000–2006 (Venezia: Marsilio Editori, 2006), 11–22. “Arriva adesso
quella che chiamiamo, con un omaggio al fortunato titolo di Marco Tullio
Giordana, «la meglio gioventù»: un’atipica «generazione» (altra parola, ahimè,
abusata), «vergine» rispetto ai pregiudizi ideologici di quelle precedenti, che
188 FABIANA CECCHINI
9. Roberto Pietro Goisis, “Quest for a Lost Mother: Alina Marrazzi’s Un’ora
sola ti vorrei,” in Andrea Sabbadini, ed., Projected Shadows. Psychoanalytic
Reflections on the Representation of Loss in European Cinema (New York:
Routledge, 2007), 21–34.
10. See also “Libreria delle donne di Milano (Milan Women’s Bookshop),” in
Paola Bono and Sandra Kemp, eds., Italian Feminist Thought: A Reader
(Cambridge, MA: B. Blackwell, 1991), 109–138. This edition collects some of
the most influential writings of the feminist groups that formulated theories
on the “pratica del partire da sé” and “affidamento,” between the end of the
1970s and the 1980s.
11. Silvia Ballestra is the author of many successful books such as: Il disastro
degli Antò (1992), La Giovinezza della Signorina N.N. (1998), Nina (2001),
Tutto su mia nonna (2005), Contro le donne nei secoli dei secoli (2006), and
Piove sul nostro amore. Una storia di donne, medici, aborti, predicatori e
apprendisti stregoni (2008). Il disastro degli Antò was adapted in La Guerra
degli Antò (1999), a film by Riccardo Milani. As a journalist, Ballestra writes
for the national newspapers L’Unità, Il Corriere della Sera, and Io Donna.
Her personal website http://www.silviaballestra.it/ gives more information
on her biography and work (accessed on July 17, 2012).
12. L’America me l’immaginavo (1991) recounts the experiences of immigrants
on the Sicilian island of Marettimo; Il declino di Milano (1992) is a portrait of
the “moral capital” at the beginning of the “Tangentopoli” political scandal
concerning money laundering and extortion; Mediterraneo, il mare industri-
alizzato (1993) documents the pollution of the environment and the job mar-
ket in Italy; Ragazzi dentro (1997) is about the world as seen by young boys
in Italian juvenile detention centers; Il sogno tradito (1999) is about street
children who talk about the political and social situation in Romania ten
years after the fall of the dictator Ceausescu (Roberto Pietro Goisis, “Un’ora
sola ti vorrei: intervista con Alina Marazzi,” Psychomedia. Salute Mentale e
Comunicazione [2007]. http://www.psychomedia.it/cine@forum/interviste/
marazzi.htm).
13. In her text, Gamberi is quoting from Dario Zonta. “Chi è cosa . . . Vogliamo
anche le rose e il cinema underground italiano,” Le Rose (DVD+book)
(Milano: Feltrinelli Editore, 2008a), 83.
14. I have to note that the translation of the German term bildung poses many
literary and conceptual problems that I cannot go into here for lack of space,
but I recommend the following studies for further discussion on the topic:
McWilliams, “The Coming of Age,” 5–40; Summerfield and Downward,
New Perspectives on the European Bildungsroman. Here, I adopt the transla-
tion and theory of the scholar Tobias Boes, who prefers “to render Bildung
with the more neutral term ‘development,’ in order to highlight the intimate
connection between personal and historical change” (“Modernist Studies
and the Bildungsroman,” 241).
15. See the interview by Brandoni and Quercia’s “Donne che non aderiscono
ai modelli,” Schermaglie. Cinema e inoltre, March 5, 2009, http://scher-
maglie.it/primopiano/1032/alina-marazzi-donne-che-non- aderiscono-
190 FABIANA CECCHINI
Bibliography
———. “Quest for a Lost Mother: AlinaMarazzi’s Un’ora sola tivorrei.” In Projected
Shadows. Psychoanalytic Reflections on the Representation of Loss in European
Cinema, edited by Andrea Sabbadini, 21–34. New York: Routledge, 2007.
———. “Un’ora sola . . . ma di magia.” In La mente altrove. Cinema e sofferenza
mentale, edited by MassimoDe Mari, Elisabetta Marchiori, and Luigi Pavan,
200–215. Milano: Franco Angeli, 2006.
———. “Un’ora sola ti vorrei: Intervista con Alina Marazzi.” Psychomedia. Salute
Mentale e Comunicazione. http://www.psychomedia.it/cine@forum/interv-
iste/marazzi.htm (accessed July 16, 2012).
Maffizzoli, Veronica. “Per Sempre, di AlinaMarazzi.Perseguire un sì [Mercoledì
16 Novembre 2005].”NonSoloCinema, anno II, n. 4 (2005). http://www.nonso-
locinema.com (accessed March 29, 2012).
Marazzi, Alina. “Baby Blues.” November–December 2011. http://alinamarazzi.
wordpress.com/ (accessed on July 20, 2012).
———. Le Rose (DVD+book). Milano: Feltrinelli Editore, 2008a.
———. “Tuttoparla di te/Baby Blues.” Milano: Mir Cinematografica, 2013. http://
www.mircinema.com/scheda-film.php?id=16 (accessed on April 2013).
———. Un’ora sola ti vorrei (DVD+book). Milano: Rizzoli Editore, 2006.
———. “Vogliamo anche le Rose.” Milano: Mir Cinematografica, 2008b. http://
www.vogliamoanchelerose.it/ (accessed on July 20, 2012).
McWilliams, Ellen. “The Coming of Age of the Bildungsroman.”In Margaret
Atwood and the Female Bildungsroman, 5–40. Surrey, UK: Ashgate Publishing
Ltd., 2009.
Meale, Raffaele. “Per sempre.Non è più una questione privata.”Sabato 13 Agosto
2005. http://www.cinemavvenire.it/locarno/non-e-piu-una-questione-privata/
per-sempre (accessedMarch 29, 2012).
Melandri, Lea. “L’ora d’amore di Alina e Liseli.” Liberazione, November 30, 2006.
Merlo, Francesco. “Stupratore in libertà, giudice sotto accusa” La Repubblica,
August 24, 2006.
Nichols, Bill. Introduction to Documentary. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University
Press, 2010.
Sabbadini, Andrea, ed. Projected Shadows. Psychoanalytic Reflections on the
Representation of Loss in European Cinema, 21–34. New York: Routledge,
2007.
Scarparo, Susanna. “Feminist Intellectuals as Public Figures in Contemporary
Italy.” Australian Feminist Studies 19.44 (July 2004): 201–212.
Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson, eds. Reading Autobiography. A Guide for
Interpreting Life Narratives. Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press,
2001; second edition, 2010.
Smith, Zadie. “Notes on Visconti’s Bellissima.” In Changing My Mind: Occasional
Essays, 168–182. New York: Penguin Press, 2009.
Summerfield, Giovanna, and Lisa Downward. New Perspectives on the European
Bildungsroman. London, GBR: Continuum International Publishing, 2010.
Zagarrio, Vito. La Meglio Gioventù. Nuovo Cinema Italiano 2000–2006. Venezia:
Marsilio Editori, 2006.
ALINA MARAZZI’S WOMEN 193
Filmography
as a mere means of survival for the lesbian couple, or a means for women
to enjoy more freedom, but rather as a significant challenge to heterosex-
ual society. If we adopt Homi Bhabha’s (1994) notion of “mimicry,” which
was originally used in a postcolonial context to describe the relationship
between colonizer and colonized, we find a similar strategy playing here
in the context of gender relations: within patriarchal society, the subal-
tern lesbian woman imitates the man, acting as a man does and therefore
inserting herself into the practices of power. In this way, she becomes “a
subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite” (86).
The imperfect image that the “woman-become-man” transmits to
patriarchal society defies those very values that demand the transforma-
tion in the first place. There still remains a residue, a gap between the
copied image of man and the one thought as the original, so that the dif-
ferences do not affect the copy, but rather undermine the original. The
latter, indeed, receives a similar image of himself, which however does
not fully conform to the ideal self-image he previously had. The whole
structure, built on certainties, precise dichotomies, absolute rules, and
defined roles subsequently cracks. Angela, once she becomes Angelo, is
precisely this crack, the rift in the wall of the patriarchal structure from
which to contemplate the possibility of a different way to live and inter-
pret genders. In the vestments of both Angela and Angelo, the protagonist
is a disturbing figure for the rigid setting of the society of the time: some-
one who does not conform to the rules either as a woman or as a man.
Therefore, the hybrid figure of Angela/o becomes a symbol of disruption
within this kind of society, questioning not only the assigned gender roles
but also the very idea of the existence of two genders.
However, in reality, we are actually dealing with a double disruption,
since there is a double subalternity that breaks the meshes of the domi-
nant pattern: one that affirms the protagonist as a woman, and one that
affirms the protagonist as a lesbian. Angela’s transformation suggests
that a woman cannot be the subject of desire, but only its object. Indeed,
she is not given the option of making decisions about her private life—it is
a right that Angela can earn only by transforming into Angelo. If Angela
does not want to renounce her role as a subject of desire, the change of
the last letter of her name restores the order that was thought to be natu-
ral, and which is described by Butler (1990: 126) as a total cultural and
social construction: “the category of sex and the naturalized institution
of heterosexuality are constructs, socially instituted and socially regu-
lated fantasies or ‘fetishes,’ not natural categories, but political ones.”
She further explains that, through repetition of the same practices, the
matrix of heterosexuality and gender hierarchy is established and rein-
forced to seem like a natural order. Within this matrix, there is continuity
198 ANITA VIRGA
among sex, gender, sexual practice, and desire, so that assigning a sex to
a person means automatically associating certain practices and behav-
iors with him/her: a man is a male human being who loves women;
a woman is a female human being who is loved by a man. A woman must
be a man in order to love—that is what happens to Angela.
Nevertheless, she is Angelo purely socially, with no actual biologi-
cal transformation to speak of, a subject master of her/himself with full
decision-making; this change, however arbitrary it may seem, does not
just put into question the authority of Angela/o within the film, but
rather the authority of any Angelo beyond the boundaries of cinema.
If it takes so little to transform the fortunes of a subject—changing the
“a” to an “o”—it is clear that the subject’s position in society does not so
much depend on the intrinsic qualities of the subject itself, but rather
on purely conventional rules. In many senses, therefore, Angela/o rep-
resents a disruption within patriarchal society: the way she chooses to
realize the romance with Sara is not at all to bend to the rules of society,
which requires heterosexual love and marriage, and men in control; on
the contrary, entering as a woman into this male realm, she openly shows
how these laws have no basis except in convention and tradition. Gender
changing is not a tribute to the masculine and heterosexual society, but
a way to question it, revealing its fallibility.
A side story to the main plot seems to add a note to the challenge rep-
resented by the lesbian couple in regard to society. After Angela’s trans-
formation, her father dies in a nonheroic way: caught “in flagrante” with
his sister-in-law (Angela’s aunt), he backs away and accidentally falls into
a well. His lover, seeing no means of escape from the scandal, follows
him, throwing herself voluntarily into the well. After this tragedy, the
mother reveals with contempt the secret affair in which her husband
and sister had been engaged. Furthermore, Angela’s aunt was supposed
to live as a nun because of an “incident” that occurred years ago with the
parish priest, and which had resulted in an unwanted pregnancy and a
subsequent abortion. As a result of this double death, Angela takes full
possession of the place previously occupied by her father, both in the
home and in the workplace. Apart from this, however, the digression
on the family relationship between the father and the aunt, never devel-
oped earlier in the film, seems to be an almost insignificant detail to
the story. It would be better, therefore, to seek its meaning not so much
in the chain of the plot events, but rather within the context of gender
relations. In these terms, we see that those same rules to which Angela
is forced to adhere are transgressed by the same person (in this case,
the father) who represents their bulwark. The monogamous heterosex-
ual society imposes laws established on the dichotomy of male/female
THE GENDER DISRUPTION OF MASCULINE SOCIETY 199
Her father’s death marks the final step of Angela/o from a subordinate
position to a position of command, that is, from daughter to son and,
finally, from son to master. However, before reaching that position,
Angela/o, along with Sara, is forced to endure different moments in which
the masculine society seeks to reaffirm its supremacy, and to punish
“deviation” by displaying control and violence over the female body. The
ultimate goal is to reestablish that continuity among sex, gender, sexual
practice, and desire described by Butler, or which Adrienne Rich (1980)
calls “compulsory heterosexuality.”4
Rich, elaborating on Kathleen Gough’s list5 of characteristics of male
power in archaic and contemporary societies, provides an explanation
of the forms used by men to enforce heterosexuality on women. In these
terms, we find some specific moments of the film in which the female
body is subjected to male violence as described by Rich/Gough. One of
the primary examples is that of the confinement of the woman through
different means, listed by Rich (1980: 638) as “rape as terrorism, keeping
women off the streets; [. . .] ‘feminine’ dress codes; [. . .] sexual harass-
ment on the streets; horizontal segregation of women in employment;
prescriptions for ‘full-time’ mothering; enforced economic dependence
of wives.” Male characters in the film employ many of these methods in
order to prevent or counteract Angela’s love for Sara, and, above all, to
restrict their freedom as women. Rich also mentions the denial of wom-
en’s sexuality, especially lesbianism, by means of punishment, including
death: one of the consequences is forcing sexuality upon them, particu-
larly through rape and arranged marriage. In this way, a woman is turned
into an object, good to be used “in male transactions—[use of women as
‘gift’; bride price; pimping, arranged marriage]” (639; emphasis in the
200 ANITA VIRGA
The method of confinement remains the most evident in the film; in-
deed, a turning point of the plot is the imprisonment of Angela: her
father keeps her off the streets in order to make her change her mind
about Sara. In this case, violence comes in the form of exclusion and
concealment of the female body from society. The “lesson” inherent in
this punishment is clear: Angela can exist only as a heterosexual woman.
There is no conceivable alternative. The lesbian body physically suffers
the same cultural erasing perpetrated throughout history—the “Great
Silence,” in Rich’s words. The confinement of Angela also has another
meaning: she must implicitly serve a double penance, as she is not only a
lesbian but also a woman: “My father wanted a baby boy because having a
girl is a shame. It’s even worse than death,” Angela states at the beginning
of the movie. As a woman, she cannot be of financial help to her family.
The only way she can be helpful to the family is through marriage.
Here is another point from Rich’s list. Angela’s father wants her to change
her mind in part because he has already promised her in marriage to one
of his most faithful workers and helpers. She is the prize for the good
work of the man, and through this gift her father not only ensures greater
loyalty from his assistant but a future successor in his business as well.
As a woman, Angela cannot be a subject of desire, and as a lesbian she
cannot exist.
After varied unsuccessful attempts by her father to change her mind,
Angela’s mother has the intuition to “change” her daughter’s sex in order
to save her. This is another form of violence that Angela has to suffer:
the obligation to become something else in order to be herself. The dis-
guise of masculinity, here, is functional to the set-up of the lie that is
taking place: the alleged inexistence of the woman, and especially the
lesbian woman. However, as previously mentioned, in this disguise, and
THE GENDER DISRUPTION OF MASCULINE SOCIETY 201
parallel between the acts of Angela and those of Tommaso, both united
by significations of violence.
A reference to Foucault can be useful here, in order to better frame the
stages of control to which Angela and Sara are subjected—in particular,
the theory of sex as a set of disciplines and strategies implemented within
the biopolitics emerged at the end of the eighteenth century, and the idea
of power and authoritarian control expressed in Discipline and Punish
(1977). In the latter book, Foucault defines a society with a pervasive con-
trol aimed at the creation of productive individuals’ compliance with the
law. The Panopticon described by Foucault is the symbol of this control
perpetrated through vision—or the constant fear of being watched and
consequently punished because of behaviors outside the law. This kind of
control is what we have observed to be exerted over Angela. The control
of sexuality, discussed by Foucault in The History of Sexuality: The Will
to Knowledge (1978),8 is a particular and specific stage of this pervasive
monitoring imposed by law in order to maintain “order”—believed to be
the one, natural right for human beings. Angela’s father has an almost
unlimited power over her, aimed at taming her, disciplining her, and
making her conform to the standard idea of society, an idea based on
the workforce, in which the human being is intended to be productive:
man through work, woman through marriage. A lesbian woman is not
included in this system and, as such, should be punished in order to be
regulated and reinserted, at the end, into this productive process. The
prison as an apparatus for transforming individuals is therefore the form
of segregation that Angela’s father imposes on her. The death penalty is
the ultimate punishment for a person who cannot be changed, and it is
the end that would have awaited her had her mother not intervened.
The doctor within the military institution assumes the role of a sub-
stitute for the father-master and, ultimately, represents the law and the
control exercised by patriarchal society. His behavior has the character-
istics of an attempt to discipline through the construction of a discourse
about sex and sexuality in which the exposure of the body is involved.
“Power spoke of sexuality and to sexuality; the latter was not a mark or
a symbol, it was an object and a target” (Foucault 1978, 147; emphases in
the original). Object and target—we can add—of the male gaze, through
which power is exercised.
Within this regulatory scheme, the lesbian woman can only be a devi-
ant; in Criminal Woman, for example, Cesare Lombroso, writing at the
end of nineteenth century, reduced the lesbian woman to a form of ata-
vistic and biological-based sexual deviation (see Mary Gibson 2002). As
such, society—in the person of the father and of all the other male char-
acters who stand for him—implements all kind of strategies to force the
204 ANITA VIRGA
An Important Film
The very same name of the protagonist, “Angela,” which in Pilati’s origi-
nal text was the simpler “Pina,” expresses an angelic vision of a lesbian
relationship between two women: once again, wanting to reevaluate the
female figure, it ends up putting the woman on a golden pedestal.
The review goes on to mention the character of the baroness:
È bella anche la Baronessa (Lucrezia Lante della Rovere) che, bontà sua,
è l’unica voce “dal continente” ed esprime sia la decadenza (non per niente
è nobile . . .) della sua bisessualità un po’ torbida che il desiderio sessuale
tout court, quello “diabolico” che non interessa un copione tutto incen-
trato sull’amore unico.
THE GENDER DISRUPTION OF MASCULINE SOCIETY 205
Indeed, the baroness in the film represents the other common perspec-
tive on lesbian relationships: the one that sees them as murky, dark,
erotic, and perversely attractive precisely because they are prohibited.
Also, the beautiful Sicilian landscapes contribute to the idea of an idyllic
love, pure, linked to the beauty of the protagonists—and if sometimes
the countryside appears to be wilder, it is a likely reference to the rebel-
lious nature of Angela. The latter never doubts her same-sex love, while
Sara, at least in the beginning, offers some resistance to this idea: her
main concern is not an inner acceptance of this love—something that
she has no difficulty doing—but rather the thought that “these are things
that you do not do.”
Finally, Gianna Nannini’s soundtrack speaks of a heterosexual love
that one can infer from a few words that in Italian are forced to be gender-
marked and cannot therefore remain ambiguous (as they would be in
English): “mi accorgo che sei sveglio,” “sogno che sei un urlo di bambino
intrappolato” (“I realize that you’re awake,” “I dream that you are a cry
of a trapped baby”). The soundtrack might be seen as a small detail, but
it ultimately appears out of place compared to the theme of the film and
seems to prove that it is impossible to completely remove oneself from a
heterosexual framework.
Apart from these missteps, the film remains a significant work be-
cause, as mentioned at the beginning, it can be considered almost one
of a kind—and certainly a sign of an opening, even in Italy, toward an
underdeveloped theme in Italian cinema. The long and extreme sex
scenes between the two women might seem a further tribute to male
voyeuristic taste and the cinema of the spectacular, but they actually rep-
resent the rupture of a major taboo that accepts only heterosexual kisses
and sexual acts on screen. The presence of these scenes can help change
the public’s imaginary as well as symbolic function of women in films
and society, while at the same time challenging the hegemonic existence
of heterosexual sex presented under the dominant sign of masculinity.
Through the personal stories of Angela and Sara, the film shows a wide
range of devices that the homosexual woman was/is forced to endure.
However, all these strategies aimed at the denial of homosexuality reveal, on
the contrary, the existence of an indelible “other,” a subaltern, who continu-
ally returns—one could say under various forms, even when this “other”
206 ANITA VIRGA
Director’s Biography
Donatella Maiorca was born in Messina in 1957. Her film directing debut
was in 1998 with Viol@, a film based on the theme of virtual sex. Her sec-
ond film, Purple Sea, which garnered some positive reviews, came out in
2009. In the time between the two works, she worked for RAI as a director
for various TV series.
Notes
1. Please note that the film is referred to as The Sea Purple in IMDb and by
the British Film Institute. Here I use the title as it appears on the original
DVD.
2. There are only two other recent films with a lesbian subject worthy of men-
tion: Benzina (2001) by Monica Lisa Strambini, and Riparo (2007) by Marco
Simon Puccioni. In the former, the protagonists take the tone of “diabolical”
and “perverse” lesbians, who act out of the social rules both in their private
life following their “unnatural” love, and in their social behavior, killing the
mother of one of them and hiding her body in the car. The lesbian relationship
here does not seem to be an issue; it is not a moment of meditation on society
and gender topics, but only the pretext for this incredible and dark story. Most
significantly, however, the second film, in which the lesbian theme is part of a
broader reflection on the discourse of exclusion and diversity, is intertwined
with the issue of migration.
THE GENDER DISRUPTION OF MASCULINE SOCIETY 207
3. In these details, the plot follows the common pattern of lesbian movies:
within the couple there is always a more rebellious and resolute person, iden-
tified with the “masculine” part, the one who will perform the male role, and
a more conformist, fragile person, who will act as the “female” of the two.
4. In her essay “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” Rich
shows “the enforcement of heterosexuality for women as a means of assur-
ing male right of physical, economic, and emotional access” (“Compulsory
Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” Signs 5.4, Women: Sex and
Sexuality [summer 1980]). She shows how heterosexuality is presented
to women everyday starting from their childhood as the only possibility
for their sexuality, where the lesbian possibility is removed from history.
Indeed, she speaks against the term “lesbianism,” for it carries a clinical
meaning, instead suggesting the use of the term “lesbian existence” to indi-
cate the historical presence of lesbian and “lesbian continuum” to “include
a range—through each woman’s life and throughout history—of a woman-
identified experience” (648).
5. Kathleen Gough (1925–1990) was a British anthropologist whose work is
focused especially on South Asia and South-East Asia. Rich elaborates on
Gough’s essay “The Origin of the Family,” in Rayna R. Reiter, ed., Toward
an Anthropology of Women, where the anthropologist discusses the family
organization within archaic society. In particular, what draws the attention
of Rich is the part devoted to the position of women in hunting societies.
Gough argues that in such societies, women were not particularly subjected
to men as they played a key role in providing food. According to the scholar,
submission increases with the rising of surplus wealth, which causes social
stratification and allows some men—thanks to the monopoly over weapons
and freedom from child care—to acquire power over other men and over
women.
6. Also, as Judith Butler reminds us, “In imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals
the imitative structure of gender itself—as well as its contingency” (Gender
Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity [New York: Routledge,
1990], 137).
7. However, it is worth noting that, as Monique Wittig (1986) highlights in her
essay “The Mark of Gender” (The Poetics of Gender [1986]: 63–73) my adop-
tion of the slash is not entirely correct, and denounces the limitations of the
language in which we express ourselves and that, therefore, also forge our cog-
nitive categories. The choice of an “a” or an “o,” in fact, forces even the sexual
identity in a binary option: “a” as feminine, “o” as masculine. Their coexistence
separated by a slash would indicate a third way, however, not well defined:
a middle way between the feminine and the masculine? Not being either one
or the other? Being both? However, even this third way is linked to the dichot-
omy of the first two options. We should, instead, be able to find ways to express
the multiplicity that excludes the simple dichotomy of male/female.
8. In The History of Sexuality: The Will to Knowledge (New York: Pantheon,
1978), Foucault claims that the increase in the modern age of rules to control
and repress sex, making it taboo, does not show much concern to a sudden
208 ANITA VIRGA
removal of sex from society, but rather on the contrary, its proliferation, the
will to talk and make it a discourse, to base it as “secret truth” within which
to find any explanation on our individuality. For this reason, sex becomes a
main concern in the seventeenth century, and a tool of control of the popula-
tion—not something removed from everyday life.
Bibliography
Filmography
Viol@. Dir. Donatella Maiorca. Perf. Stefania Rocca. Medusa, 2002. DVD
Purple Sea. Dir. Donatella Maiorca. Perf. Valeria Solarino, Isabella Ragonese.
Strand Releasing, 2011. DVD
11
Ilaria Borrelli
Cinema and Postfeminism
Maristella Cantini
Introduction
Ilaria Borrelli was born in Naples, Italy, in 1968. She is a writer, actress,
scriptwriter, director, and producer. She has performed in movies, plays,
and in French and Italian TV series. Between 1999 and 2007, Borrelli pub-
lished four novels, Scosse, Luccattmì, Domani si Gira, and Tanto Rumore
per Tullia, for which she received critical acclaim and several prestigious
literary prizes. After discovering Borrelli’s novels, I became interested in
her movies.
In this chapter, I will focus on Borrelli’s three feature films: Mariti in
Affitto (2004), Come le Formiche (2007), and Talking to the Trees (2012).
I will seek to argue that this director’s body of work is innovative and is
representative of the postfeminist paradigm in Italy.1 Furthermore, I will
examine this paradigm and attempt to contextualize it in terms of social
and cultural responses and explore how, or if, this paradigm differs from
Anglo-American parameters.
210 MARISTELLA CANTINI
Novels
Postfeminism
culture, it has often been associated with female characters like the Spice
Girls and Helen Fielding’s chick heroine Bridget Jones, who has been
embraced/criticized as the poster child of postfeminism. In academic writ-
ings, it sits alongside other “post” discourses—including postmodernism
and postcolonialism—[. . .] Likewise, in social and political investigations,
postfeminism has been read as indicative of a “post-traditional” era charac-
terized by dramatic changes in basic social relationships, role stereotyping
and conceptions of agency. (3)
the island for the day while the “inside” world is represented by Maria
Scocozza (Maria Grazia Cucinotta), a lonely woman who works on the
port as a shoemaker. She has two young children and is in desperate
financial need; her work doesn’t provide enough income for her family.
Her husband, Vincenzo (Pierfrancesco Favino), went to America to sell
his sculptures and never returned. The reproachful behavior of Procida’s
women, who, in a chorus of gossip, blame Maria for her husband dis-
appearing, and the pressure from “Don Peppino,” the caricature of the
local Mafioso, put all the stereotypes in place: the provincialism of Italian
life, and the restrictive traditional limitations on women’s options and
expectations.
The mise-en-scène resembles the stage of commedia dell’arte, which
exhibits fixed typologies of characters, and where the roles for women
were often those of triggering the action rather than dynamically tak-
ing action. Don Peppino’s insistence with his repugnant proposals causes
Maria to flee, with her children, to New York in search of her husband.
The shift of setting is spatial, visual, and auditory, moving from warm
and sunny pastel colors to metallic blue and gray, to vertical buildings and
from human voices to extreme noise, quite different from Procida’s cone-
shaped microcosm. If the small island looked like a “moving canvas”14
with its sunny colors and perfect Mediterranean lighting, the American
metropolis is a big urban maze where stereotypes, violence, and human
interactions are no less complicated than in the little world of the island.
In both places, Maria struggles to affirm her own identity. In Procida, the
oppressive social rules are determined by the male-managed economy;
in New York, Maria meets poverty, displacement, and a total absence of
social connections. Maria’s sense of personal pride and of social accept-
ability is entirely uprooted. The Italian American family running the res-
taurant where Vincenzo is supposed to be working shows the other side of
Italians, albeit a stereotypical view. The separation from a strong cultural
framework opens the door to limitless possibilities of how to live, but in
doing so diminishes any sense of values and integrity. Borrelli repeatedly
mocks stereotypes such as the arrogant, immigrated Italian, his “mam-
mone” son, who is inept and spoiled, neglectful of Italians but also unable
to identify with Americans. The restaurant owner’s wife, furthermore, is
shown as insensitive and unable to contain her husband’s hubris, deny-
ing Maria’s family water and food. The proverbial generosity of Italians is
debunked. Their cultural identity lost. In New York, Maria immediately
perceives that everything she had learned in life may not find a corre-
sponding social meaning in the new country. Gender oppression and lack
of financial resources back in Procida find their match in the “Big Apple”
where everything is bigger, including poverty and discrimination. Maria
220 MARISTELLA CANTINI
will be able to change her life only when she changes her perspective
toward Vincenzo and the male universe. She will be able to accomplish a
radical change with the contribution of another woman, Charlene Taylor
(Brooke Shields), the American wife of her husband, who is also pregnant
with his baby. While the comedy unfolds with hilarious and sometimes
grotesque sequences, the story develops a double heroine. Charlene is
Maria’s alter ego, who symbolically complements and develops her per-
sona. The two stars, Maria Grazia Cucinotta and Brooke Shields, repre-
sent, respectively, Italian and American icons. Both women have similar
physical frames and similar features: their long curly hair and similar
height are details that make the protagonist’s double quite plain to the
viewer. In addition, they will end up completing each other. The flex-
ibility of Charlene’s work, made possible by Maria’s skills, will make a
profitable joint venture for both women. When the two women first meet
they are fierce antagonists, until they realize that fighting for a man is not
worthwhile. Maria’s skills as a shoemaker and Charlene’s integration in
the job market as a TV-sales agent could be combined and, if it is not pos-
sible to pursue the American dream, maybe it is possible to compromise
with a more modest Italian American dream. In fact, Charlene and Maria
decide to “prioritize themselves,” put Vincenzo aside, and raise their chil-
dren together. Charlene loses interest in Vincenzo and entertains her-
self with Raul (Diego Serrano), a sweet, handsome, and generous man,
reliable with children and sexy, while Maria opts for “renting” Vincenzo,
who is now working for the agency Rent-a-Husband, only when she needs
help around the house or, eventually, sex.
The postfeminist paradigm here is clearly in motion: the subaltern
male characters, female friendship, and the collaborative effort of the two
women to gain independence and control of their lives.
Borrelli’s second feature film, Come le Formiche (2007), is the story
of two sisters living together in the family’s Umbrian winery. Again the
surrounding picturesque space, apparently endless, gives an immedi-
ate and subtle impression of a restricted environment. The “moving
canvas” imagery resurfaces in the scene where Ruggero (Fred Murray
Abraham), the patriarch, paints a typical Italian country landscape
outside the beautiful country house, fringed with cypresses and blue
hills displayed right in front of his eyes. The mediocrity of the painting
that we see from a close-up behind Ruggero hints at the male charac-
ter. Childish and self-centered, he has transformed beauty and richness
into something banal, just like painting a masterpiece with no artistic
sensibility. Stereotypes are in play. The perfect Italian setting, with sup-
posedly genuine family bonds, is immediately undermined by the male
characters’ mediocrity and their subtle attempts to manipulate women
ILARIA BORRELLI 221
for their own benefit. The leading character, Sveva (played by Galatea
Ranzi), is dealing with conflicting familial relationships: a hostile con-
nection with her sister, her hard-to-please father, and her inept French
husband Nicolas (Philippe Caroit), who tries to manipulate the entire
family to induce them to sell the winery. Like in the previous movie, we
glimpse Sveva’s double in her sister Desideria (Patrizia Pellegrino) who,
at first sight, appears to be the complete opposite to her sister in terms
of her characteristics. Sveva is strong-willed and hardworking. Her
dream is to produce a great wine and save the property, which is at risk
due to its debts. She has purpose and determination. Desideria, unlike
her sister, relies on her physical appearance to secure men’s approval,
and is frustrated for she easily gives up on her dreams and she finally
admits her desire to have a baby. Adina, Sveva’s eleven-year-old daugh-
ter, plays a mirroring role for the adults in general, and for the two sis-
ters in particular. Adina is smart and sensitive. Curiously, she has the
habit of observing ant life15 and she is fascinated by the similarity of
those insects’ interactions with human behavior. Adina uses a small
digital camera to film the ants’ busy crawling. Adults in her family have
a very busy life too, and like the ants, they can be mean to each other
and move fast and chaotically. So she films them too: they tell lies, they
fight, they work frenetically, and they engage in extramarital relations.
The male characters, in particular Nicolas, Fabrizio, Desideria’s hus-
band (Enrico Lo Verso), and Ruggero, their father, don’t really have any
positive impact on the business or on their family’s economic situation.
Nicolas is pathetically naïve and a clear burden to his wife. Fabrizio is
in love with Sveva, while Nicolas tries to seduce Desideria and convince
her to sign over the family homestead. A momentary swapping of hus-
bands gives the two sisters a reason to talk about themselves and finally
collaborate to save the winery. Their reciprocal love and friendship are
more important than the men in their lives. The two sisters’ reconcilia-
tion brings new opportunities and new perspectives.
Meanwhile, Adina operates as spectator, commentator, and director
of the family movie. Adina’s candid approach to life enables her to film
reality using the ants’ incessant work as an analogy for human life; when
she acquires familiarity with their routine, she is also able to notice inex-
plicable idiosyncrasies, even ferocity, resembling human behaviors. As
Adina’s film begins, secret, illegitimate kisses, brutal fights, confusing
confessions, and pathetic lies are clearly unwound, and the entire family
is exposed to the plain truth. As in Hans Christian Andersen’s famous
fairytale The Emperor’s New Clothes, only when the little boy cries aloud
that the emperor is parading naked is the excited crowd able to finally see
reality and the absurdity of it.
222 MARISTELLA CANTINI
In her movie Il più bel Giorno della mia Vita (2002), Cristina Comencini
used this same cinematic device. Comencini’s story revolves around a
young girl, Chiara, who is going to celebrate her first communion. The
film covers the events preceding the actual celebration, during which
Chiara needs to attend Sunday school and learn about the gospel and the
Bible. Observing her relatives’ lives, Chiara is puzzled by the contradic-
tions she notes observing adults’ behavior. In her family, nothing actu-
ally follows the religious codes they pretend to ascribe to: lies, adultery,
gay sex and other debunked commandments. The day of her communion,
Chiara receives a digital camera, and she starts to film her family reunion
in an attempt to capture and then process what she sees. The idea of the
young girl operating the camera in Comencini’s and Borrelli’s films seems
to have a similar purpose: to grasp the plain truth from another angle. A
camera in a young girl’s hands implies a representation of reality free from
manipulation.16
Mariti in affitto and Come le Formiche contain all the basic features of
postfeminist Chick Flicks, the women’s films that Karen Hollinger (1988)
defines as female friendship movies and explains that
female friendship films not only dramatize their female characters’ shap-
ing or reshaping of their sense of self, but [. . .] they reach out to their audi-
ence to implicate them in the female quest for self-development. As such,
they set out to form not only the self-images of their female characters but
also the sense of identity of their female viewers as well. (244)
is maternal and mature. Like in the previous movie, the child is weaving
the plot. The girl’s deep connection with nature, her love for her brother
and her friends, and her deep human compassion situate her character
at the center of the narrative. Like Adina does with her camera in Come
le Formiche, Srey is able to show Mia her real self and, therefore, her way
out of an empty existence spent between addiction and numbness. Mia,
on the other hand, decides to risk her own life for the rebirth of a child,
as only a mother could do. The catharsis and the empowerment for these
two women can be seen on two levels: the mother/daughter relationship
is expanded to a women’s supportive friendship. The end of the movie is
the start of a new life for the protagonists: Xavier is stabbed to death by
Daa’s little sister, who was also in the brothel. The girls are freed after
Sanan, the violent procurer, is shot to death by a police officer who, in the
end, decided to support Mia’s venture, and Srey and her little brother are
reunited with their father.
As mentioned previously, Borrelli stretches the margins of the Chick
Flick genre, filming stories of solidarity and liberation. The contextualiza-
tion of the genre in Italy and in Europe more widely is crucial, especially
if we intend “women’s film” to be those movies written, directed, or pro-
duced (or all three) by women with the intent and purpose of empowering
the female character, indicating a possible path to self-affirmation and
independence that, by extension, is transmitted to the female spectator.
Borrelli’s postfeminist cinema does not portray women as pink-clad
super-shoppers with big plans and a Chihuahua in their handbag—no
woman director in Italy does. The yappy, smart, young Harvard grad-
uate portrayed in Legally Blonde, the early representative movie of the
Chick Flicks genre, is not a figure who is socially recognizable in Italy,
where women graduate late, are often underemployed even with excel-
lent qualifications, and need to work hard to occupy key positions from
which they can easily be marginalized or even dismissed through age-
related discrimination, or for family choices (Valentini, Zazjick, Davi). It
is rare and always very hard for many women with no special privileges
to have the opportunity to find a job that pays enough to allow them to
be independent and secure. Ilaria Borrelli knows the scenario all too well.
Her work is centered on women who can fight back through winning vis-
ibility, voice, and power.
Director’s Biography
Notes
1. The first writer and critic to talk about Borrelli’s comedy as “postfeminist”
was Patrizia Carrano. See Sette (October 2003). http://www.mymovies.it/
dizionario/critica.asp?id=12339 (last accessed on February 26, 2013).
2. The “commedia brillante” is a form of comedy also known as “commedia
all’italiana,” quite popular in Italy during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. Here,
tragic elements are essential to the comical outcome of the text.
3. The term is used with or without a hyphen. In my use of the term there are no
significant implications and the hyphen is a mere graphic sign. Some scholars
specify this detail, noting that the hyphen is a distinctive mark to highlight the
temporary idea of a time shift indicated in the prefix “post.” Genz asserts that
the prefix was the actual focus of critical examination.
Please note that in this study, I also use the term “postfeminism” as a
synonym of “neo-feminism.” Hilary Radner (2011: 2) writes about this con-
vertible definition: “I will argue that this other unnamed movement, which
I will dub, for want of a better term ‘neo-feminism,’ has been the primary
influence in developing what is now casually referred as ‘post-feminist’
culture.”
4. Rosalind Gill uses the term “sensibility” referring to postfeminism, avoiding
the term “movement,” which she considers more suitable for second-wave
feminism, and not appropriate for postfeminism, in her article “Postfeminist
Media Culture: Elements of a Sensibility,” European Journal of Media Cultural
Studies 10 (2007): 147–166.
5. Skype interview with the filmmaker, recorded on Audacity and tape, June 5,
2012.
6. This expression is inspired by the study on Jane Campion, Cinema, Nation,
Identity, edited by Hilary Radner, Alistair Fox, and Irène Bessière (Detroit:
Wayne State University Press, 2009), 6.
7. I allude to the endless different trends in second-wave feminism. Kellie Bean
lists them quite exhaustively in her study: from radical feminism, Marxist fem-
inism, lesbian-feminism to ecofeminism, prolife feminism, cyber-feminism,
and many more. She also states that prefix feminisms are markers of “private”
not “social” ambitions (Post-Backlash Feminism. Women and the Media since
Reagan-Bush. Jefferson, NC; London: McFarland &Co., 2007], 4–5; 178). I
find this observation to be another point of contact between postfeminism
and second-wave feminism. See also Shelley Bugdeon, “The Contradictions
of Successful Femininity: Third-wave Feminism, Postfeminism and ‘New’
226 MARISTELLA CANTINI
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Bean, Kelly. Post-Backlash Feminism. Women and the Media since Reagan-Bush.
Jefferson, NC; London: McFarland &Co., 2007.
Benini, Stefania. “Televised Bodies: Berluscono and the Body of Italian Women.”
Journal of Italian Cinema & Media Studies 1.1 (2013): 87–102.
Brown, Helen Gurley. Sex and the Single Girl. New York: Barnes & Noble, 2004.
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Borrelli, Ilaria. Domani si Gira. Cava de’Tirreni, Salerno: Avagliano Editore,
2003.
———. Luccatmí. Cava de’Tirreni, Salerno: Avagliano Editore, 2002.
———. Scosse. Lago Patria, Napoli: Vittorio Pironti Editore, 1999.
———. Tanto Rumore per Tullia. Sperling & Kupfer, 2005.
Brunsdon, Charlotte. Films for Women. London: British Film Institute, 1986.
Budgeon, Shelley. “The Contradictions of Successful Femininity: Third-wave
Feminism, Postfeminism and ‘New’ Femininities.” In New Femininities.
Postfeminism, Neoliberalism and Subjectivity, edited by Rosalind Gill
and Christina Scharff, 279–292. Basingstoke, UK; New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2011.
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2002.
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Escludono dal Potere. Milano: Rizzoli, 2007.
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nytimes.com/2006/03/19/books/review/19donadio.html?pagewanted=all&_
r=0 (accessed October 20, 2012).
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Work Is Done. New York: Times Books, 2010.
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Genz, Stephanie, and Benjamin A. Brabon. Postfeminism. Cultural Texts and
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228 MARISTELLA CANTINI
Cristina Gamberi: I would like to start from the beginning. What is your
artistic background and when did you start making documentaries?
Alina Marazzi: In the 1980s, after secondary school, I decided to go to
London to study cinema since I have always been interested in visual arts
and photography. During my stay in London and thanks to my university
education, I had the chance to watch many experimental movies, many
films from different parts of the world and I had the opportunity to get to
know the great tradition of British documentary. Starting from there, it
was natural to use documentary when I came back to Italy.
CG: You have used archival material in your documentaries. Where did
this interest in found footage come from?
AM: I can’t say much about my attraction to archival material . . . When I
think about it, looking back to my work, I realize that my interest in archi-
val material was already present in my first documentary (Mediterraneo,
Il mare industrializzato, 1993, 52’). Thanks to the foundation I received as
a young director, I used Super 8mm films, found footage, family photos,
and letters to narrate migration stories in a small fishing village in Sicily.
The documentary tells the story of fishermen, but it is narrated from the
women’s perspective: I was already interested in the female point of view.
The idea of telling one’s life story by using and interpolating different
languages and materials has always been in my vision, in my poetics. And
this use of different languages found expression in the most important
232 CRISTINA GAMBERI
and foundational moment that was Un’ora sola ti vorrei. When I came
back to Milan, the city where I was born, I started to make documentaries
mainly focusing on social and cultural themes, working for Rai,1 for the
Italian-Swiss Television and also directing a documentary about deten-
tion homes for Raidue (Ragazzi Dentro, 1997, 2 × 45’).
CG: Many women directors in the past have used found footage in their
work. Why is there a particular preference for these kinds of material? When
you made Un’ora sola ti vorrei, were you aware of women’s tradition and
female genealogy of found footage and compilation documentaries?
AM: When I made Un’ora sola ti vorrei (2002) I used found footage to
tell the specific story of my mother and not for merely aesthetic reasons.
Un’Ora sola ti vorrei represents one of the first examples in Italy—or
maybe it is the first—where private archival material is made the most of.
From 2000 there has been an increasing interest in found footage: on the
one hand family found footage has been used as a source of life story tell-
ing; on the other it has been used as a primary source for historical stud-
ies. Drawing on private and informal material has now become a trend.
In the past there were many women directors who used found footage,
but also men directors.
I think that today many young women directors use documentary,
with or without found footage, first because there is a growing interest
for intermingling different languages and for narrating a story where
past and present are connected. Second, the choice to use documentary
is related to production processes. This means that normally it is much
easier to control and manage a movie, which is usually self-produced,
with a very small crew. Finally, there are also reasons linked to the direc-
tor’s intention. In other words, the documentary has become a stylistic
form able to give importance to the gaze of the author, where the direc-
tor’s vision and subjectivity can be expressed. Whatever form women’s
directors choose, cinéma vérité, fiction, or compilation documentary, the
female attitude seems to fit better with the documentary. The capacity to
create a strong relation with their subject and at the same time express
their position in this relation, I think is something where women’s direc-
tors are the best.
CG: Can you tell me more about Un’ora sola ti vorrei (For one more hour
with you)?
AM: I made it ten years ago and after so many interviews, it is diffi-
cult to talk about this movie . . . Un’ora sola ti vorrei arises from a very
personal and long journey, which took many years. Before editing the
home movies my maternal grandfather shot, I had already watched these
SKYPE INTERVIEW WITH ALINA MARAZZI 233
as you do for a documentary, but in the end I wrote a script that is close to
fiction. The movie will be entitled Tutto parla di te (Everything talks
about you) starring Charlotte Rampling as the main character. The film
unfolds the story of two women of different ages: Pauline (Charlotte
Rampling) and Emma (Elena Radonicich). Pauline is a middle-aged
woman who holds a secret: she has dedicated her entire life to studying
animal behavior while trying to avoid human relations and escaping inti-
macy. Emma, on the contrary, is an elusive and vanishing young dancer
and new mother in the middle of a crisis.
Talking about maternity and motherhood is still a taboo. It is still a
difficult issue that women are ashamed to talk about. In particular, they
are ashamed to talk about this choice of their lives, which is irrevers-
ible and which does not allow you to undo it. Many women, and many
people around them, are not ready for this moment. It is not easy to con-
fess that you are not feeling happy and that you feel aggressive toward
your own child.
CG: When did you start to consider yourself a “director”?
AM: I don’t feel I’m a “director.” I’ve made some documentaries, but
wouldn’t define myself as a “director”!
Notes
1. RAI is the Italian state-owned public service broadcaster and the biggest
television company in Italy. Raidue is one of the three main television
channels.
2. Sonia Gessner is one of Liseli Hoepli’s best friends.
13
Marina Spada was born in Milan, where she still lives. She graduated with
a music history degree from the University of Milan and the Dramatic Arts
School of Piccolo Teatro. She started her career in filmmaking during the
1970s, collaborating with RAI Television, and in 1984 she worked as an
assistant to Roberto Benigni and Massimo Troisi on the film Non ci resta
che piangere (Nothing Left to Do but Cry). During the 1980s she directed
many commercials and documentary films. Since 1993, she has been
teaching film production and direction at the School of Cinema of Milan,
while writing and directing many video portraits of Italian artists such as
Pietro Lingeri, Fernanda Pivano, Arnaldo Pomodoro, Francesco Leonetti,
Gabriele Basilico, and Mimmo Jodice. In 2000, she self-produced her first
feature film, Forza cani (Come on Dogs!). In 2006, her second film, Come
l’ombra As the Shadow also partially self-produced, was distributed by
Kairos Film and presented at the Venice Film Festival and other inter-
national festivals, winning numerous awards. In 2009 Spada shot Poesia
che mi guardi (Poetry You See Me), a documentary about the Italian poet
Antonia Pozzi. Her fourth movie, Il mio domani (My Tomorrow), was
released in 2011. It was well received at both the International Film Festival
of Rome and Lincoln Center’s Italian Film Festival “Open Roads” in
New York City.
Laura: Marina, you had been working in the film industry for 15 years
before directing your first feature film, Forza cani. What was your profes-
sional path to becoming a director?
238 LAURA DI BIANCO
L: If I’m not wrong, when you shot Forza cani, the film project Poesia
che mi guardi didn’t yet exist. However it seems to me that those two
films engage in a dialogue with each other. Both films have this recurrent
theme of poems appearing on the city walls.
M: Well, all of my films are in a dialogue with each other about the sub-
ject of the city.
It’s true that I’d shot Forza cani in 2000, and I began working on the
Poesia project in 2005, after shooting Come l’ombra. But now that you
make me think about it, in Come l’ombra there is this act of posting fly-
ers on the walls of the city. The protagonist of Forza cani, Nebbia, is an
urban poet. He posts verses around the city. When I was working on the
script to Poesia, I was looking for a contemporary context in which to
frame Antonia Pozzi’s history. In Pavia, I found these anonymous poets,
university students, one from the medical school, another two from the
faculty of philosophy and literature.
L: How did your interest in Pozzi begin?
M: During Come l’ombra’s success, I found myself touring the world
with the film while I was still teaching at the film school. When I
stopped, I immediately wanted to shoot another film, and it had to be
a low-budget project, so therefore it had to be shot in Milan. I discov-
ered Pozzi’s work through my therapist. As I mentioned, I had been in
psychotherapy for ten years to work on my female identity, because like
many other women, I grew up thinking that all the heroes are male.
I identified women as passive. At some point, my therapist began to
give me cultural references. She introduced me to Maria Zambrano,
a philosopher, and other intellectuals including Pozzi. I went around
the world to promote Come l’ombra, bringing Pozzi’s poems with me.
In December 2005, I went to the Women’s Bookstore in Milan and I got
all her books. Then I was contacted by her official biographer, Graziella
Barnabò, who wrote a wonderful book on Pozzi. She asked me if I wanted
to make a documentary, because in 2008 there was an important confer-
ence for the seventieth anniversary of her death.
L: You directed many portraits of artists, such as Arnaldo Pomodoro,
Gabriele Basilico, and Mimmo Jodice, all of whom are photographers.
How did you conceive Pozzi’s portrait, since her work as an artist deals
with words rather than images?
M: Pozzi’s portrait came after a series of video portraits I’d done, the
first of which was Fernanda Pivano in 1994. I shot Poesia in 2008 and
edited it in 2009. It was the first portrait of a nonliving artist. Actually,
I made a film about Pietro Lingeri, who was an architect; in that case,
240 LAURA DI BIANCO
I just showed his work. With Pozzi, I did not want to make a film
about death, but a film about the necessity of poetry. It was very hard,
three years of delirium, because I did not have a reference point. The
other problem was how to “frame” the poems, how to show them on
the screen. I chose to work on the poems’ subtext. For example, think
about the scene where the voice-over says, “This is my fake baby.” What
images could I show in that case? Children maybe? Pozzi did photo-
graph many children, but it would have been the most trivial solu-
tion. Then I asked myself, What could this verse have meant to her?
She talks often in her poetry about growing flowers. I think that, truly,
she is opposing nature’s generative power with her own inability to give
birth. So I thought of showing the X-ray plate of a woman’s pelvis, to sig-
nify a woman’s empty womb.
L: In this documentary film, like in all of your films, the city functions as
a real character in the narration. What is Milan’s role in Pozzi’s story?
M: I showed the city’s changes over time. The locations you see in Poesia
are the same as those in Il mio domani. At the beginning of Poesia, we
hear Maria, my alter ego, saying, “Antonia hasn’t lived here for 70 years.”
I wanted to show the transformation of the city, so I contrasted the cur-
rent city with that of the 1930s. All buildings from the 1930s are framed
from a low angle to exclude the road surface and the traces of modernity.
Then there is a discourse on gaze in the film. My eyes were seeking her
gaze. Anyway, all the buildings I shot were already there in Pozzi’s time,
in every city district she used to visit.
L: Let’s talk about Come l’ombra now, which was very well received by
critics. It was selected by Fabio Ferzetti at the Venice Film Festival, under
“Giornate degli autori” (The Day of the Auteurs). As you said, it was
the only Italian film, and more importantly, the only one directed by a
woman in this category. How did the project start? You mentioned that
Daniele wrote the script and then asked you to direct it.
M: It was my birthday, in 2003. Daniele was on working his first script.
Before the shooting, I spent one year with Ukrainian women and six
months in school learning Russian. I worked on the dialogue. I included
Gabriele Basilico’s representations of the city wherever the script simply
said: “Images of the city.”
L: How does the collaboration with Basilico work?
M: I’m glad you’re asking me this question so I can clarify something.
Basilico did not work on my film as a cinematographer. He worked with
me to elaborate the imagery of the city. Gabriele, like me, turned his gaze
INTERVIEW WITH MARINA SPADA 241
M: I think it is the main role. It’s not by chance that I worked with Gabriele
Basilico. The city I represent is not that of the historical center, it’s that of
the so-called middle architecture where common people live.
L: Thus Claudia’s loneliness is the same loneliness that many women
experience in the city.
M: To promote the film I traveled a lot, from South America to Hamburg.
The cities’ outskirts are all similar. It’s like cities communicate with each
other through solids. So certain types of landscapes are familiar to every-
one. In many countries many women have come to thank me, saying,
“This film is about me, but I did not know I was living a life like this.” I
imagined Claudia as one of the thousands of girls who every day spew out
from the subway, carrying their bags of organic food and yogurt, going
to work thinking that their lives will change tomorrow, that something is
going to happen and life will change.
L: At the end, Claudia leaves for the Ukraine with Olga’s suitcase, and
in a way it’s like she appriopriates Olga’s identity. It’s quite an open end-
ing for Claudia. I’m thinking of Olga’s final shot, which is a very intense
moment in the film.
M: I wanted Olga to look into the camera, to address the viewers. It’s as
though she’s saying, “Look at me! You cannot pretend not to see me any-
more. Now you must see me, now something awful is going to happen to
me. And probably you have had many people like me around, but never
even noticed them.” The woman who introduced me to the Ukrainian
community disappeared. I looked for her to tell her that the film was
being presented in Venice, but she was gone, and I’ve never found her.
L: What about Anna Akhmatova’s verses? Poetry seems to play an impor-
tant role in your films.
M: Poetry is part of my imagery. I was 13 when my brother’s friend gave
me Allen Ginsberg’s Hydrogen Jukebox. I love Sylvia Plath, Ann Sexton,
Antonia Pozzi. “Forza cani” is the title of a poem by Nanni Balestrini,
as we said. Come l’ombra is taken from a triplet in Akhmatova’s poem
“To the Many.” I have always been fascinated by the the idea that
Akhmatova and Pasternak were the only writers to debut before the
revolution, and they chose to stay in Russia, to continue describing what
was happening, when they could have chosen to emigrate safely to Paris.
So the presence of Akhmatova in my film relates to the Eastern world.
I belong to that generation that looked at Communist Russia as a model,
and then suffered when Stalin’s misdeeds were uncovered, just like it was
painful to discover Mao Tse-tung’s crimes.
244 LAURA DI BIANCO
L: Let’s talk about your last film. How did Il mio domani begin?
M: Francesco Panphili—the producer of Kairos Films—and I decided to
make another movie together. Il mio domani is a film about modernity. I
try to make films about the present, and so far—after all we do not know
whether I will make other films—women have been the protagonists, the
spokespersons of the crisis of modernity, or even better, postmodernity.
L: Can you tell me something about the character of Monica? How does
her character evolve in the story?
M: Monica is a modern character. I wanted to represent the crisis through
a woman. Monica, unlike the other Monica from Forza cani, who had a
humble job, is a vocational counselor, a common figure in Europe now.
She is a woman who has to work through her anger toward her mother,
who abandoned her. And somehow this theme belongs to everyone.
Monica has an identity problem, and for that reason she goes to Greece,
to experience what her mother did. That’s why there is that speech about
Athena, the goddess born from her father’s head, who knows she is not
invincible—quite the contrary: she accepts her limitations.
L: Like in Come l’ombra, in Il mio domani women are represented within
the city as lonely, and the city itself is deserted. Is that how you see Milan?
Is that really Milan, or merely a place of the soul?
M: Yes, it is a place of the soul above all; indeed the protagonists see it
that way. It is always the protagonist’s gaze describing the city.
Monica strolls around the city to contain her emotions, to understand
what to do. For instance, in that scene in which she drops everything, she
starts by walking, then she goes to the office and finds out her lover is
leaving her to go to Paris without telling her.
L: Il mio domani is articulated through the opposition between the city
and the country. What do these places represent for Monica?
M: It is not a real opposition. They are only different landscapes, but they
are both Monica’s soul-places. The countryside is certainly not a joyful
place. Monica is able to abandon it only when she begins to make peace
with her mother.
L: Returning to the topic of the city, I think the poetic core of your work
is this image of the woman wandering through the city, an image that
reminds us of Lydia in Antonioni’s La notte, which you quoted in Come
l’ombra. Incidentally, it’s also a recurring image in many films directed by
women, as a kind of leitmotif of female filmmaking.
M: That image comes from my relationship with the city. I walk around
the city a lot. I try to keep my territory under control, because it’s the
INTERVIEW WITH MARINA SPADA 245
depository of my identity. I walk through the same places over and over
again so as not to feel alienated. I try to understand how the city evolves.
I compose my shots in places where I’ve already positioned myself, where
I’ve actually found myself. More than simply wandering, these women
attempt to find themselves.
L: You mentioned before that Georgette, the producer, said she could tell
Come l’ombra was a movie shot by a woman. Do you think there is a femi-
nine way of using the camera?
M: In my opinion, there is a specific way for each of us; the gaze deals
with your imagination. When Georgette told me that I had a female look,
I did not get offended. A few years before I would have been. Because fem-
ininity in this country is identified with something passive, and some-
thing diminishing, but after the analysis, I did not take it in the wrong
way. I know my gaze is different from yours because we experience life
differently. Obviously this has to do with the fact that I am a woman!
L: Do you think there is a kind of ostracism against women in the cre-
ative departments of filmmaking? Do we expect women to do a certain
type of movie?
M: Of course! How many women have tried to jump and failed to do
so? My case is a miracle because I’m an outsider, I live in Milan, not in
Rome, I come from another story. I had to self-produce my first movies.
There is definitely a form of ostracism against debuting filmmakers in
this country. Not that it would be easier in other countries. And then,
surely women are expected to direct comedies, comedies about women.
For my part, I do not know if I’ll continue to make other films given the
situation in this country. And if I do get the chance, I don’t know if my
next film will be about woman, or about the lack of a woman. In any case,
women are expected to do films about women.
14
O f all the young filmmakers to debut in Italy during the first decade of
the new millennium, Alice Rohrwacher is one of the most sophisti-
cated and interesting auteurs to come to the attention of film critics and
audiences. After earning her degree in philosophy and practicing paint-
ing and photography, she began directing documentary films. Thanks to
the support of the newly born film production company Tempesta, she
wrote and directed her first feature, Corpo celeste (Heavenly Body).
Although inspired by a scene from Anna Maria Ortese’s novel of the
same name, Rohrwacher’s film is not an adaptation or freely inspired ver-
sion of the book but an original work, albeit one that pays homage to
Ortese’s work.
After a long production process that lasted four years, the film was
released in Italy in 2011. It won the “Nastro d’Argento” as the best opera
prima and was nominated for the David of Donatello prize. Corpo celeste
was presented at Cannes, the Sundance Film Festival, and “Open Roads”
at Lincoln Center in New York City, in addition to many other interna-
tional film festivals.
Rohrwacher’s film is the coming of age story of Marta, a 13-year-old
protagonist (played by Yile Vianelo), who moves back to Reggio Calabria
in Italy from Switzerland, where her family lived for ten years. To help
her integrate into the new community, her mother (Anita Caprioli) signs
her up for catechism lessons in preparation for her confirmation. Thus,
Marta starts attending the local church, which is populated by bored
adolescents and other tragic characters, such as Santa, the fanatical
248 LAURA DI BIANCO
what extent have you reinvented that reality? Here I am referring to those
funny scenes in which the kids take the tests on the Gospel, or when they
sing songs like “Mi Sintonizzo su Dio” (“I tune myself to God”).
A: My starting point was the community that lives in the south of Italy.
From there I came to discuss the church. I began to attend catechism les-
sons. Believe it or not, it’s all true. I mean, through my eyes, it’s all true.
During catechism lessons children actually do quizzes on the Gospel. Yes!
The quiz exists; you can download it from the Internet. There is much
more, but I didn’t want to get deeper into it, because reality is often too
unbelievable. At one point the teacher asked a question, “Who constitutes
the church?” The choices were: “the Pope, the priests, the immigrants,
God’s people, or plants.” While I was shooting that scene, I said: “No one
is ever going to believe it! Everyone will think that it is pure invention.”
L: Your film has the same title as Anna Maria Ortese’s novel. What is the
relation between your film and the literary text?
A: I picked this title for its totemic value. In fact, I am a huge admirer of
Ortese’s work and her Corpo celeste in particular was a fundamental ref-
erence point for me. I liked the idea that it was a good omen for the film.
At the beginning of her work, Anna Maria Ortese narrates her discovery
of how the earth is suspended in space, as rightfully as the stars and all
the other planets that we admire from afar. There is no need to go very
far away, because we can feel the same amazement by looking at our own
planet. We are used to this planet; we have been delivered to this planet.
That’s it! That was the good wish I wanted to dedicate to Marta: that the
heavenly world is already here!
L: Tell me about the scene in which Maria is in the abandoned church
and caresses the crucifix, indulging in observing it and removing the
dust. That scene is quite intense, and uncomfortable in its own way. What
is its function in the film?
A: That scene is the reason the film’s title is Corpo celeste, the heavenly
body that everyone talks about, the one that is always far away, unreach-
able. When the catechism teacher reads the texts, she always says: “You
have to think that the body of Jesus is not like yours; it is instead a heavenly
body, perfect, distant.” It is quite the opposite; we can touch it. The idea is
that the heavenly body is the planet. I wanted to shoot a scene in which
Marta finally touches something, a body. Because by the end, Marta never
touches anything. I wanted it to be a sensual scene, let’s say. That sensuality
came out a little as I was shooting. After all, when a body touches another
body, it’s always sensual in that it engages the senses, not that it’s erotic.
L: Now here’s a question that lies outside your work, concerning more
generally women’s cinematic production in Italian cinema. In your
INTERVIEW WITH ALICE ROHRWACHER 251
L: As I told you, this interview will be part of a book titled Italian Women
Filmmakers and the Gendered Screen. In your opinion, is there a way to
see and represent women, a specific language, or a way to represent female
subjectivity in Italian cinema that is different from the one so far offered
by their male counterparts? If your answer is yes, how is the female gaze
characterized?
A: The female gaze does exist; it is multifaceted and highly variegated.
The female gaze doesn’t belong only to women, just as the male gaze
doesn’t belong only to men. However, I think that the women’s gaze on
places is particular. Women have a different perception of places, houses,
horizons. If I think of movies directed by women, I can see that space
itself is always an important character that determines the development
of the story. In my case, the city was the first character. I knew from the
beginning that I wanted to work in that city, with the people I met there.
L: You represented an aspect of Reggio that is not very well-known on the
screen: the less attractive side of the city, the dumping grounds.
A: I represented it in a certain way. I believe that it is worse to repre-
sent a stereotype of the south than it is to represent a contradiction of
that. Also, the urban space outside the city is extremely important. The
water—Reggio is a city rich with flowing water. I wanted to represent the
city I came to know, the city I was living in. Also, I was a little moti-
vated by rage, because I think those same 800 meters of seafront are
not enough to make a beautiful city. Everyone uses those few kilome-
ters of sea to show that Reggio Calabria is a beautiful city. “Beautiful” is
probably not even the right word. The neat side of the city has become
a cop-out to avoid seeing the rest. My idea was to produce a narrative
about the city that could include its defects, to shoot a “flawed film,”
so to speak, without representing something that is already known, or
something that would satisfy our preconceived notions of the south.
I arrived in Reggio when I was in my twenties. I know many of the marvel-
ous things of the city and the region. Because I love these beautiful things,
and I respect them, I don’t want to show them. I show only what I hope can
be changed; I show what I hope people can see, anything that can open a
debate. There was a lot of talking around the representation of the church.
Even that dispute, in my opinion, was positive because many people real-
ized that Corpo celeste also represented a hope for change. To me, it is very
important to work on what is considered “inappropriate,” to shoot movies
that raise questions. By showing that side of Reggio Calabria, I wanted
to push toward changing things, not just showing things. Corpo celeste
was born in Reggio Calabria, originated by watching a space. Above all, I
wanted to offer a narrative about a body in a space.
15
Paola Randi is an emerging filmmaker; she was born in Milan and lives
in Rome. After experimenting with art forms such as painting, theater,
and music, she started her career in filmmaking, self-producing numer-
ous short films. In 2011, her first feature, Into Paradiso, was shown in
many international film festivals throughout Europe and North and
South America, including the Venice Film Festival, where it was pre-
sented in the category “Controcampo Italiano.” Into Paradiso has been
praised by critics and audiences alike, and its many accolades include
being one of Nanni Moretti’s “Bimbi belli” (an honor Moretti created for
debut filmmakers), as well as receiving four nominations for the David
of Donatello prize.
Into Paradiso is an exhilarating comedy, or, as the filmmaker herself
describes it, a “metropolitan Western.” The story begins with Alfonso, a
scientist, losing his job. In need of an inside favor, he visits an old acquain-
tance, Vincenzo Cacace, who is running for public office. Vincenzo, in
turn, is asked for a “kindness” (delivering a weapon) by Don Fefé a Risa,
of the Camorra, and Vincenzo decides to use Alfonso as the unwitting
courier. The scientist, completely unaware of what he is involved in, ends
up witnessing an execution in a Neapolitan alleyway. Hiding from a gang
of criminals, he takes refuge in the Sri Lankan district, which is called
Paradiso. Meanwhile, Gayan, a former cricket world champion, arrives in
Paradiso expecting it to be a land of opportunity. Disappointed, he begins
working as a caretaker to pay for his journey back to Sri Lanka. Through
a series of paradoxical and comical events, Gayan and Alfonso meet and
254 LAURA DI BIANCO
you, in the same position, with no money, many good ideas, and ambi-
tion. Now it’s your turn!” This helped me overcome the awe I felt for the
great maestros, and it made me believe that I could make it, despite being
an autodidact.
Agosti asked us to shoot a self-portrait without moving the camera,
without any editing, and with just the lights we had at home. It was one
of the most interesting things I’ve ever done. Then I made another short
movie, with Valerio Mastrandrea, who was already quite popular, and it
was presented at the Turin Film festival. So I would say at that point I’d
found the courage to engage in a filmmaking career.
L: So, for a few years you continued doing short films. How did you suc-
ceed in having your first feature film produced?
P: It happened quite soon. Doing short movies was a way to experiment,
and I also did a lot of animation.
L: What about documentary films?
P: I did my fist documentary film on commission, as part of “Il giorno
della memoria” (“The day of memory”). It involved editing about 15 hours’
worth of material shot by young students on a school trip to Auschwitz.
Watching the material, I realized that the footage itself retraced the stu-
dents’ emotional journey. They left with the spirit of someone going on
vacation, and little by little they absorbed the memories of those places. I
tried to recreate this transformation in the editing. I’m not even Jewish,
and for me it was like putting my finger on a fresh wound. I tried to do
it in the most respectful way. I didn’t do any other significant work in
documentary filmmaking. I was also involved in a very interesting proj-
ect that never found a way to be financed. It was a documentary about
working women and maternity, which is a big issue in Italy. We did a lot
of research, and found a number of stories, but the subject is probably still
taboo in our country.
L: Many women filmmakers, instead, arrive at their fictional films first
through documentary filmmaking . . .
P: No, not me. I did a lot of research before doing Into Paradiso, which
helped me in the writing process as well as in promoting the project.
L: The encounter between Alfonso and Gayan is really interesting. Indeed,
the Italians in this film do not portray themselves positively in compari-
son with the Sri Lankan community. Even though Alfonso is a positive
character with whom the viewer can identify, the other Italians are either
mafiosi or racists—I’m thinking about the character of Vincenzo, or the
Signora who hires Gayan as caretaker.
256 LAURA DI BIANCO
third floor, open a door, and find a street! It was like being in an Escher
painting. Naples is a source of constant surprises. During the location
scouting I thought that this characteristic of the city would be perfect
for what I was trying to represent—the cultural mix, a story of common
people. I wanted them to become heroes, the good part of our society.
I discovered the roofs when I was doing research. A friend was hosting
me in a room that used to be a washhouse on the roof terrace. It was in
the district of Monte di Dio, another popular neighborhood near the sea,
behind Piazza Plebiscito.
This washhouse had a view of the roofs of Naples, and I saw that they
were all linked. Up there, the loud noises of the city were just a buzz,
and I thought, “Life makes so much noise!” You know, many years ago
I went to Guatemala to visit the Mayan Pyramids in the jungle, where
George Lucas shot Star Wars. I climbed the pyramids, and I realized
that underneath there was such chaos! Monkeys, toucans, and all kinds
of animals were screaming. The only way to get some peace was to shut
your ears. In Naples, on that roof, it was the same. In the part of the city
where we shot the movie, it was like being in a Moroccan city, with that
sort of beehive of little illegal houses, one glued to another. But from
the outside, you can’t see all that life; you have to get inside, or climb on
a roof.
L: Paola, can you tell me about Maude, the cultural association of women
working in the film and media industry in Italy, of which you’re one of
the founders?
P: I dealt with what in Italian is called the “questione femminile” (the
woman question). There is a huge problem for women in the film indus-
try. Since I dealt with women entrepreneurs for so long, parallel to the
movement “Se non ora quando”1 (If not now, when?), which is a great
movement, but not specific to women working in film, a number of female
directors, screenwriters, DPs, costume designers, editors, and I created
Maude. We started with a blog on Facebook. And we try to understand
what the main problems we are dealing with are, in order to plan concrete
action.
In 2010, I was invited to give a lecture on women in Italian cinema. To
prepare myself, I start searching for data, and I couldn’t find any. I felt it
was urgent to do something about it. I soon found out how difficult it was
to get started, just to collect records. We started by analyzing the movies
released in Italy in the past three years, and then we compared that data
with films released 20 years ago. We learned that of all the directors doing
features, only 7 percent are women. That means that of every hundred
movies produced, ninety-three are directed by men and only seven are by
INTERVIEW WITH PAOLA RANDI 259
women! And there has been no improvement in the past 20 years. In 1990
the situation was the same.
I was sadly surprised by that, thinking that the film industry is
considered quite progressive compared to other industries. In the
world of business, supposedly more conservative, the main problem
is access to loans. When I worked with my mother, during the 1980s,
her organization supported a law for female entrepreneurship to solve
this problem. Nobody did such a thing for women in film.
It’s incredible that everybody trusts women to raise children, but
nobody trusts them when it comes to business. In film, the situation
for women cinematographers is even worse than for women directors.
However, there are women enrolled in photography courses at the Centro
Sperimentale, and I wonder what they do after they leave school. The
answer is rarely that they get jobs—some of them can only get work on
other women’s projects, which rarely get as much of a budget and as much
visibility as the ones directed by men. There is real discrimination in the
budgets women can obtain. Generally speaking, the budget for a woman
director is lower than the budget given to a man. I don’t think any woman
director in Italy, except for Comencini perhaps, ever got a budget like
Paolo Sorrentino’s.
Women tend to work with other women, making movies that ultimately
won’t get distribution. So, if you are a DP and you really want to start a
career in filmmaking, you’d better make a man’s movie. Talking with
other women directors, I realized that many of them get tired of waiting for
answers that never come from producers and institutions in the business,
and so they self-produce and start making documentary films. Some of
them have a real documentarian vocation, but some of them had no choice
but to start that way. Another issue is that those women directors who do
succeed in making their first feature film have a very hard time making
their second movie, or they don’t make it at all. On top of that, there’s the
issue of the kind of mindset one has adopt to work on the set. I heard some
women say things like, “You must be like a man to work on the set.” And
that’s nonsense! The real issue is that there is no organization, no specific
place a woman can go if she is harassed or discriminated against. The sex-
ist mentality is so deeply rooted that the border between a joke and sexual
harassment is very blurred. Leaving Italy, even for a short time, you under-
stand how women’s expectations for gender equality are very low here.
L: I agree. It’s outrageous what women get used to in Italy, but you only
realize it once you live in another country where the level of attention to
gender equality is higher, or where some attitudes toward women are con-
sidered offensive, disrespectful. But it’s also true that Italy has made many
steps forward in this regard. In many cities there are now centers where
260 LAURA DI BIANCO
women can receive legal and psychological assistance. In Rome there are
antiviolence centers, and the law against stalking was approved.
P: Yes, it’s true, but the situation is different in film, in my opinion.
There’s no mechanism for protection, so women think: “If I speak up I
won’t work anymore.” It’s basically the same situation we had when there
were no unions, and workers didn’t denounce abuses because there was
nobody to protect them. Today there are a number of abuses that are not
even acknowledged, the level of self-awareness is so low.
Moreover, when there is a collaborative project, say with seven film-
makers, someone decides that at least one of them has to be a woman,
mostly to be politically correct, just to satisfy that demand. And this cre-
ates a terrible side effect: not only is that one woman in competition with
six other men, but she’s also in competition with all her female colleagues,
because there’s only one spot for them out of seven! So, this system rein-
forces the competition among women and that’s surreal! But there are also
women who love cooperation, like Antonietta De Lillo, for example. She’s
now working on a great collective project, and I’m collaborating on it.
L: Is there a common aesthetic, or any common denominator, among
women directors? How would you describe the female gaze?
P: Well, first of all, we need to consider that women in film all have some
common experience, which is the struggle for equality; this should be
translated into new ideas far from male stereotypes.
L: Are you referring to the representation of women? Can you make an
example?
P: Let’s take commercials, which I have never dealt with. If a woman
directs a Coca-Cola commercial, maybe she’ll propose a new model of
femininity, as well as of masculinity. Perhaps there’ll be an opening for a
new aesthetic paradigm.
L: And that was the feminist goal, to deconstruct certain cliches, images
of women built by the male gaze for the male viewer.
P: I think we can extend this discourse to models of masculinity too.
In Into Paradiso, I tried to depict both women and men outside certain
stereotypes.
L: Yes, and I like the character of Giacinta very much, a single mother . . .
P: I was asked many times about such a “dramatic” choice. I think it’s
dramatic if we conform to the traditional Catholic idea of motherhood. I
tried to portray a mother who is still the object of desire, not a Madonna,
which is so often what mothers must become, according to the traditional
INTERVIEW WITH PAOLA RANDI 261
stereotype. On the other hand, Alfonso and Gayan are not superheroes,
nor macho guys, although they are very charming.
L: You were talking about the difficulty of doing the second movie, when
anyone’s lucky just to make a first one. What was your experience?
P: Well, I must say that seeing how things are going now, fingers crossed,
it seems like something is happening. I think some women are doing very
brave projects. For example, Alice Rohrwacher, who made an extraordi-
nary film—which is not a critique of Catholicism, but a movie about a
community that found its own sense within the parish church. Everything
is seen from the point of view of a little girl coming from the North. It’s
one of the most beautiful films I’ve seen in the last few years. She is really
what’s called an auteur. She uses a new language; she doesn’t conform to
any cliché. I know that she is now working on her second movie, and I am
looking forward to watching it.
But many of my colleagues couldn’t do a second movie.
We need producers, perhaps women producers, who are willing to
take risks, and I understand that during such a financial crisis, it’s really
difficult. But we should reflect on the fact that countries in crisis usu-
ally invest in research—but not our country, of course! Maybe Germany
would be a better example. It should be the same in film. I think crisis can
also be an opportunity for revolution. It’s time to ring out the carpet and
shake out the dust!
Note
a nonexisting industry and the total lack of a market that works by the
rules adopted by all markets; this gives us hope for the future. On this
topic I would like to add that it is this generation of “invisibles” that is
able to create a new Italian cinema. All those filmmakers who, like me,
have experienced a lack of funds and have grown in a cramped system,
without a market, without an industrial system, and without a cultural
politics that allow space to its youth, have rolled up their sleeves and have
worked hard on documentaries, experimenting, freely, with the language
of reality cinema. Thanks to new technologies, we have restored the doc-
umentary to its important role of point of reference for all the Italian
cinema. In the last ten years, the documentary has, in fact, replaced
the narration of the present of fiction film (conditioned, as mentioned
earlier, by the authors’ self-censorship), affirming itself as a terrain of
novelty and bravery, not only with its themes but also its linguistics. It
is a territory of freedom because there are no set rules as far as pro-
duction and distribution are concerned. The freedom lies in the choice
of the subjects and in the length of the films. This freedom is also the
result, unfortunately, of the independence of production means and very
low budgets. So now, as you can see, the perspective is changed: from
invisible, one becomes protagonist! Yes, our generation is giving new life
to the Italian cinema. Think of the latest film of the Taviani brothers,
Cesare deve morire (Cesar has to die), which is a documentary.
GS: Luciano and Scarparo, in an essay that appeared on Studies in
European Cinema last year, write that your work is invisible because you
seek marginalized subjects, and because as a woman director you are
yourself marginalized by critics and by historical accounts of the Italian
cinema. But, particularly with your last contributions, you have conveyed
that the invisible that interests you is the self, the self of your subjects,
your self. Is this true?
CQ: Now that’s a topic of great interest to me! Partly, what you say is true,
even though I have not been invisible to critics. Critics and scholars have
always been amongst the most attentive to the type of work that I do. It
is true, though, that there are aspects of invisibility that are innate to the
themes and techniques chosen to make films. Being a woman conditions
further the manner in which the filmmaker is perceived. Think about, for
example, the characters presented by the Italian cinema: how many women
do you see that are not wives, lovers, fiancées, or mothers of the male
protagonist? Generally, the male filmmaker has more money; the male
filmmaker gets the money for narratives that espouse the male perspec-
tive. Going back to the theme of marginality, it is true that I have always
selected difficult themes. This is part of the DNA of my cinema. I have
266 GIOVANNA SUMMERFIELD
friend who will be the mastermind behind the tearing down of the wall.
So is this a true (r)evolution or only a failed attempt?
CQ: Teresa is unaware and, in her unawareness, she is happy. While
growing up and becoming woman, she enters the cage of roles and with-
out even realizing it, she will become just like her mother, prisoner of
duties that will take away her happiness. From this point of view, Teresa’s
beauty is in her freedom of imagining a future in which her own aspira-
tions do not conflict with the slavery of her social role; it is the same lot
of Turi, destined to be a fisherman but who, in reality, wants to be a sailor
to explore faraway lands.
GS: Teresa, just like Helene (La borsa di Helene, 2000), is the manager of
a bar, a world that has always belonged and continues to belong to men.
In the film L’isola, Turi says that the delivery is not a spectacle for women,
a contradictory statement, indeed, as it is also underscored by the sur-
prised faces of Turi’s friends. According to you, what is, then, the world of
women? Where are they more “appropriate”?
CQ: The world of women is the same as the world of men. It is only that
men do not want to allow any space to women. I grew up thinking that this
was a problem of the past; I remember that at my first public interview,
on these issues, I answered that I did not comprehend who could possi-
bly still ask questions like this… Becoming a professional has opened my
eyes and has made me understand that, unfortunately, this is a valid ques-
tion today as it was yesterday: how many times, while enjoying the bliss
of success, have I heard “do not let it go to your head”? Keep in mind that
when I produced L’isola I was only 29 and I looked like a Martian with
green and blue antennae, landing from who knows where.
GS: I would like to pause a bit and reflect on the chaotic scenario of
Helene’s Palermo and Teresa’s Favignana that you leave as is, as only an
observer can do, in spite of your direct connection (and attachment) to
these realities. How do you succeed in remaining distant, and, at the
same, in connecting the spectators with these realities that are unknown
to them?
CQ: It is the method. The ability to listen. The rendering of the experi-
ence and the capacity of restitution. As I was saying earlier, to me the key-
word of my work is RESTITUTION. I am only the vehicle through which
the spectator can have this experience, an experience above all cinematic
in nature, but not only.
GS: Can you tell us about your recent documentary, Terramatta—Il
novecento italiano di Vincenzo Rabito, analfabeta siciliano (2012)? Why
did you pick this subject?
INTERVIEW WITH COSTANZA QUATRIGLIO 271
CQ: When I read the book I imagined right away a personal film that
covered the 1900s, outside of the official historiography, to embrace the
point of view of the last, poor illiterate man who had contributed to the
construction of Italy. I was fascinated by the idea of using the official his-
toriography and contrast it with a very personal use of archival films.
There are some sequences in the film in which the irreverence of Rabito
toward the Power is indeed shattering. From the start, I understood that
I was about to make a film on the story of an illiterate who conquers
writing fighting against his own challenges, a universal story that goes
beyond his Sicilian origins.
Rabito crosses, by foot, a century; enters, rightly so, History: soils
History, and together with History, he tells us the story of a life, of a man
that in his old age defines his own identity based on the urgency of story
telling. Much has been said and written on the 1900s of Vincenzo Rabito,
but very little about the journey to self-construction that Rabito under-
takes gaining, through cursing, self-awareness, awareness of his own
needs, using not only the strength of his arms and his extraordinary work
ability, but also that cynicism that will be useful to better his own condi-
tion. And all of this despite “quelli che comantano” (those in command),
but above all despite his own origins, the fact that he was born from a
widow, with brothers and sisters to feed and save from destitution.
GS: Why did you choose Roberto Nobile, a very talented actor born in
Verona (in the north of Italy), for your voice-over?
CQ: It is known that Roberto Nobile was born in Verona. But it is often
neglected by his biographers that he was raised in Ragusa, attended school
in Ragusa, and is contemporary and friend to Giovanni, the youngest son
of Vincenzo Rabito. My choice of Nobile is not dictated, though, by ques-
tions of the heart but exclusively by aesthetics. His notoriously hoarse
voice gives the film an unmatched emotion because it is the hoarseness of
an old man who looks for the meaning of his life. Moreover, Nobile reads
the book very well; he understands both its language and its narrative,
which is not an easy task. And he also knows how to render all the irony
of Rabito, both in tone and innuendo.
GS: What do you really want to pass on, more than his biography, of
Rabito, with this last work of yours?
CQ: Rabito is often studied by historians or literary critics, who, from the
height of their science, study, interpret, and judge his language, focusing
on how he himself interpreted the big collective events of the 1900s. For
myself, I sought to find a voice to give to Rabito the man, the antihero,
trying not to judge him, disappearing instead, assuming his own point of
view. There is one aspect that scholars have completely neglected and that,
272 GIOVANNA SUMMERFIELD
to me, was instead a revelation: the fact that Vincenzo Rabito’s cultural
nourishment has been the world of chivalric romance and of the opera dei
pupi. Rabito has an epic vision of himself; he compares his wretched life
to the one of Guerin Meschino, unveiling this world of chivalric adven-
tures as the nourishment of his own self and of his self-representation.
And there is more: to secure a position as roadman, he had to pass the
elementary school exam, which he claims to have passed thanks to his
readings, precisely l’opera dei pupi, the story of the Knights of France
and of Guerin Meschino. An incredible short circuit: he remembers the
tailor of The Betrothed by Alessandro Manzoni: “un uomo che sapeva
leggere, che aveva letto più d’una volta il Leggendario de’ Santi, il Guerrin
meschino e i Reali di Francia.” Vincenzo Rabito never ceases to amaze!
That is why it is important to listen and to follow Rabito without prej-
udices and without a sense of superiority, remaining astounded, with
enjoyment and happiness.
GS: What is the future of Costanza Quatriglio, after this experience?
What is the future of the Italian cinema? What is the future of the cinema
of women, more specifically, according to Costanza Quatriglio?
CQ: The future of the cinema of women is to fight to gain some space
because in cinema, like in all workplaces, today, in Italy, women have
to fight against pockets of isolation and discrimination. My future,
I hope, is to make films that I love but with more resources, and above all
that our Italian cinema finds pleasure again in telling stories that speak of
the present. As I was saying earlier, it is known to everyone that our coun-
try is experiencing a deficiency of narration. Let’s think of the wonderful
Italian cinema born out of the rubble of World War II. We do hope that
out of the present rubble of our country, victim of a political, economic,
and cultural crisis, a new awareness will be born and with this new aware-
ness, also a new cinematography able to speak to the whole world.
Contributors
Patrizia Carrano was born in Venice but lives and works in Rome. She
has written plays and screenplays for theater and TV, including for several
successful and popular TV series that gained a 34 percent audience share.
She has published 17 books, and her essays range from Malafemmina.
La Donna nel Cinema Italiano (1977) to the biography of actress Anna
Magnani, La Magnani, il Romanzo di una Vita (1981, 2004). Her nov-
els include Illuminata: la Storia di Elena Lucrezia Cornaro, Prima Donna
Laureata nel Mondo (2000), Notturno con Galoppo (1996), and Le Armi e
gli Amori (2003). She has received numerous awards and was recognized
by the “Rhegium Julii opera prima” at the Premio Milano. As a journalist
she has written for Sette, the magazine of Corriere della Sera, Elle, Amica,
and other newspapers. Her forthcoming novel is Doppi Servizi, which
narrates sixty years of Italian history through the gaze of the domestic
staff of a bourgeois family.
reader Moda, Stile e Simboli (Edizioni Farinelli, New York, 2012). She is
currently working on a book about female autobiographies.
Lidia Hwa Soon Anchisi Hopkins earned her PhD from New York
University. She is an associate professor of Italian at Gettysburg College,
where she lectures on Italian language, literature, and film. Dr. Anchisi
Hopkin’s scholarship is firmly grounded in feminist theory and examines
ways of questioning traditional conceptualizations of gender and sexuality
276 CONTRIBUTORS
Vera Golini She has been a professor of Italian studies at St. Jerome’s
University since 1975, and since 1997 has also directed the Women’s stud-
ies program at the University of Waterloo. She is currently president of the
Canadian Society for Italian Studies. She also translated Dacia Maraini’s
short stories, My Husband, published in English language in 2004.
Dacia Maraini is a 2012 Italian Nobel Prize candidate for literature. She
is an internationally recognized Italian writer and one of the most widely
translated novelists in Italy and Europe. She is the author of novels, plays,
poems, and collections of essays. She is also a journalist, a screenwriter,
a director, and an activist. She made her literary debut with the novel La
Vacanza published in 1962. Her second novel, L’Età del Malessere, won
CONTRIBUTORS 277
the International Formentor Prize in 1963 and has been translated into
12 languages. She has subsequently published 11 more novels, collections
of poetry and essays. Her other translated works include Memorie di una
Ladra (1973), Donna in Guerra (1975), Lettere a Marina (1981), Il Treno
per Helsinki (1984), Isolina (1985), and La Lunga Vita di Marianna Ucria
(1990), which has been recently translated into Arabic. Her numerous plays
have been performed worldwide. She has directed several documentaries,
such as L’Amore Coniugale (1970), Aborto: Parlano le Donne (1976), Mio
Padre, Amore Mio (1976), Giochi di Latte (1979), Lo Scialle Azzurro (1980),
and Ritratti di Donne Africane (1986). Several films have been made of
her books, and she has written screenplays for directors such as Pier Paolo
Pasolini, Marco Ferreri, Carlo Di Palma, Margarethe Von Trotta, and
Roberto Faenza.
Edizioni Sabinae, won the Giuseppe Sciacca prize. In 2010 she graduated
in “Cinema, Television and Multimedia Production” with a thesis entitled
“The Cinema in Half-light of Elvira Notari” at the University of Roma
Tre, Italy. Currently, she writes about cinema and theater for websites and
as a film critic, while continuing her research into Anna Magnani and the
history of the cinema and theater.