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Women in Italian Cinema: From the Age of Silent Cinema to the Third Millennium1

Bernadette Luciano and Susanna Scarparo

Partially motivated by the unexpected success at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival of two innovative films by Italian women directors, Miele (Honey, Valeria Golino) and Viaggio sola (A Five Star Life, Maria Sole Tognazzi), a cross‐generational forum, Sorelle del cinema (“Cinematic Sisters”), was held on June 21, 2013, at Rome’s Cinema Farnese Persol. The organizers—journalists and critics Cristiana Paternò, Paola Casella, and Angela Prudenzi—invited the directors Lina Wertmüller, Liliana Cavani, Cristina Comencini, Roberta Torre, Marina Spada, Costanza Quatriglio, and Laura Bispuri to share their experiences in the Italian film industry. The initial premise of the forum was to trace a female genealogy across several generations of Italian women filmmakers and to explore the notion of a female gaze in cinema.

Not surprisingly, however, the women, in talking about their personal experiences, ended up enumerating the challenges posed by the Italian film industry, which presents obstacles to all but a very few filmmakers with connections to secure funding and distribution. In most cases, the filmmakers’ observations revealed a gendered narrative that extends beyond the cinema industry and reflects a more general sense of political disempowerment. The most outspoken of the women, veteran filmmaker Liliana Cavani, spoke of the unsettling statistics she discovered serving on the European Film Festival selection panel: of the 136 Italian films submitted, only 10 were by women filmmakers. While statistics revealing the limited production and visibility of women’s film reflect a global reality, Cavani contends that, without a higher percentage of works by women, Italy cannot boast a cultura al femminile.2 Cavani’s appeal is for drastic political change, and she calls upon women in the film industry and in the wider social context to work together to transform Italian culture into a culture that creates space for women’s stories.

Our chapter traces the trajectory of women in Italian cinema, primarily as directors, and also signals other roles they have played that have contributed to the representation of women on screen. We consider how, in many cases, Italian women filmmakers have positioned themselves in the industry in ways that are arguably feminist, but that they might not describe as such. Although our study does not assume any essential differences between men and women, it highlights women filmmakers’ gendered experience in the industry and their relationship to society, to history, and to their own subjectivity. Since the early days of cinema, the history of women in cinema has been an invisible history. Women filmmakers have also been the victims of film studies that “tend to ignore or omit women’s films—not consciously, but because the theory that informs the discipline is still largely only concerned with male filmmakers” (Martin 2003, 29).

Women’s contributions to Italian cinema, when acknowledged, are presented in much the same way in which women writers have traditionally been represented in histories of Italian literature, as the authors of minor or minority works. The history of Italian cinema is primarily about fathers and sons, and, with occasional exceptions, women filmmakers are discussed either as a marginal group or as isolated cases. Women in film have also been hindered by their own difficulty in identifying themselves as subjects and in defining and projecting a female aesthetic that targets female spectatorship. We maintain that the complexity of this issue is linked to a problematic relationship to the prevailing models of femininity that have defined Italian cinema and that continue to influence the Italian media.

In our recent book (Luciano and Scarparo 2013), we argued that contemporary women filmmakers, although not overtly feminist, are making films that increasingly foreground a desire to engage, create, and conceive of female subjectivity on screen. In the first study in English about women and film in Italy (Bruno and Nadotti 1988), published in 1988, one of the contributors to the volume (Melchiori 1988, 25) asked the basic question that has been at the center of critical discussions about women filmmakers for the past 30 years: what happens when women take up the camera and face the problematic position of being both objects and subjects of the cinematic gaze? Since then, scholars working in this area have produced new understandings of ways in which representational categories such as “women”—as subjects and/or objects—can be deconstructed.

Recently, feminist film scholars have extended their deconstruction of representational categories to inquire into race, ethnic identities, and class in relation to gender.3 Nonetheless, the question of subjects and objects remains problematic in cinema, since aesthetics traditionally belongs to men, whereas women tend to function, in Geetha Ramanathan’s (2006, 10) words, as figures “to be fetishised” rather than as creators. Ramanathan notes, “command over the aesthetic scene has seldom been possible for women, the male artist being exemplary of the creative principle. In film this situation has been exacerbated by the pleasure of the visual lying in the female.” Often, women directors struggle with positioning themselves as subjects and grapple with the construction and representation of female characters in the very medium that, as Ramanathan points out, identifies “both its pleasure and its supplement from the female. Indeed, the medium that bases its art on producing the perfect female fetish.” In this respect and without setting out to engage with the “destruction of pleasure” that Mulvey has called for (1989, 22), a woman director is a transgressor of established dichotomies between subjectivity and objectivity, pleasure and desire.

From the Silent Era to Fascism

While women have been involved in directing, producing, writing, and acting since cinema’s early days, Monica Dall’Asta (2008a, 10) draws attention to the struggles they have faced along the way. She explains lack of recognition and acknowledgement in the days of silent film as a result of “the misogynist climate in which [women] found themselves working…”

Elvira Notari (1875–1946) was Italy’s first female director. Her films were primarily shot on location and sought to capture the street life of Naples, foregrounding the figure of the Neapolitan child (played by her son). Giuliana Bruno (1993, 186), in her groundbreaking monograph on Notari’s extraordinary career, describes Notari’s character of the urban child “as the epitome of the ethics and aesthetics of Neapolitan underclass youth,” a figure later adapted by Pasolini, who in early films such as Accattone (1961), Mamma Roma (1962), Il Vangelo secondo Matteo (The Gospel According to St. Matthew, 1964), and Uccellacci e uccellini (The Hawks and the Sparrows, 1966), proposed images of the child as a savior figure. Notari’s focus on the child and the life of the underclasses prefigured similar concerns typical of neorealist cinema. Of Notari’s 60 features and over 100 documentaries, only three have survived: À Santanotte (1921), È piccerella (1922) and `E scugnizzè (1917), also known as Mandolinata a mare.

Marcia Landy (2000, 5) comments on Notari’s interest in taboo subjects such as “madness, suicide, maternity, seduction, sexuality, marginality, and self‐immolation”—subjects that, as Landy argues, “touch chords of femininity and its discontents” and attracted the attention of the censors. Indeed, given her full involvement in all aspects of filmmaking, including the running of her own production company, Dora Film, Notari expressed a female‐centric perspective that has long been forgotten. According to Bruno (1993, 5):

A voice sensitive to women’s condition, Notari articulated a female address to the narrative. She wrote, directed, and participated in all aspects of pre‐ and postproduction and also trained the actors; her son Edoardo, acting since childhood, grew up on his mother’s screen; her husband, Nicola, was the cameraman. Dora’s city films were exported to America and exhibited in New York City, providing an imaginary return voyage for Italian immigrant audiences. Some of them, in turn, went so far as to sponsor financially some of Notari’s works, until its suppression by Fascism and film industry changes.

The case of Francesca Bertini (1892–1985) exemplifies how women’s contributions, particularly as directors or codirectors, have often been invisible. While Bertini enjoyed public acclaim as a diva, the major part she played in directing her films was never acknowledged (Dall’Asta 2008d, 63). Late in her career, Bertini (1969, 4) explained her extensive involvement and her commitment to all areas of filmmaking:

The years certainly go by, but I’m still creating. I experience the same passion that I felt in the golden years, from 1910 to 1921, when I had the courage, the enthusiasm, to spend long hours in the theatre or in my Roman studio, adjusting the storylines of my films, working on the script, arranging the set, managing the shoots, editing the scenes shot. I was equipped with faith but also with scissors and pins, because I edited with my own hands.

Dall’Asta (2008d, 63) argues that in her day, Bertini, given her extensive involvement in artistic and technical aspects from pre‐ to postproduction, was probably the most powerful woman in the Italian film industry, more powerful than the majority of men in the sector. These claims are borne out by Assunta Spina’s (1915) director (Bertini has come to be acknowledged as codirector) Gustavo Serena, who in an interview with Vittorio Martinelli (1992, 56), recounts that Bertini was

so happy about playing the role of Assunta Spina, she had become a volcano of ideas, of initiatives, of suggestions. Speaking in perfect Neapolitan dialect, she organized, she commanded, she rearranged the extras, the point of view, the camera angle; and if she wasn’t convinced by a scene, she expected it to be redone according to her views.

Bertini strongly believed that the history of Italian cinema, which had sidelined her and never acknowledged her contribution to the birth of neorealism, ought to be rewritten in its entirety (Dall’Asta 2008d, 70). Her call for a different history has largely remained unanswered. As recently as 2009, Gian Piero Brunetta, Italy’s most respected film historian, made no mention of Bertini’s extensive contributions, nor of those of Elvira Notari (Brunetta 2009).

Screen grab from the film Assunta Spina, displaying Francesca Bertini.

Figure 25.1 Francesca Bertini, star and recently credited director of Assunta Spina (Bertini with Gustavo Serena, 1915). Screen grab.

Bertini was not the only diva involved in other areas of the film industry. Eleonora Duse, the great theater actress, for example, wrote the screenplay for the 1916 film adapted from Grazia Deledda’s novel Cenere. Other women who tried their hand at directing included the actresses Diana Karenne, Giulia Rizzotto, Elettra Raggio, Bianca Virginia Camagni, Daisy Sylvan, Diana D’Amore, Fabienne Fabreges, Elvira Giallanella, and soprano Gemma Bellincioni. Women also participated in numerous other artistic and technical roles.4 The films proposed by these female artists often portrayed diverse female characters, ranging from conventional representations to innovative protofeminist figures. Unfortunately, the majority of these films have gone missing.

Women’s appearance on the cinematic scene can be attributed at least in part to the early women’s movements, which won a significant battle in 1919 when the law that granted a husband control of his wife’s property and wealth was changed. Legal changes of the period also allowed women access to public employment and, as a result, women’s activity in the public sphere and in the film industry in particular continued to grow (Dall’Asta 2008b, 317). This foray, however, was short‐lived. With the emergence of Fascism, the spaces that women had created for themselves in the film industry slowly disappeared (Dall’Asta 2008b, 318–19). Women’s role was relegated to that of actress—and in roles much less transgressive than the enigmatic, elusive, and threatening form of femininity associated with the diva (Landy 2000, 267). The roles of women in the cinema of the Fascist years, as in society at large, primarily reinforced the new woman of Italian Fascism who “was to embody the ideal of female self‐sacrifice, whether in her role as the supreme wife and mother or as sexual objects for the ‘New Man,’ aggrandizing male virility” (Pickering‐Iazzi 1993, xi). As Landy (1986, 116) suggests, however, some films such as Vittorio De Sica’s Maddalena zero in condotta (Maddalena, Zero in Conduct, 1940), when read against the grain, are subversive in exposing “the strategies necessary to keep women in their place.”

The Post–World War II Period

In the wake of Fascism and with the emergence of a postwar cinematic tradition that was aligned with the project of creating a new and alternative Italy, there was little space for a women‐centered cinematic gaze. As Laura Ruberto (2007, 249) suggests, pervasive misperceptions lead to the belief that, “men, boys and masculinity generally become that on which a country depends for rebuilding itself after war.” Femininity, on the contrary, “is synonymous with uncertainty, with that which is disruptive to the world of the masculine protagonist and to the social order” (Landy 2000, 262).

Neorealism defined a place for women on the screen rather than behind the camera, producing its own star personae, distant from the glamorous images of both the diva of the silent era and the Hollywood star who had come to colonize Italian cinema. In this context, post–World War II female icons such as Anna Magnani, and later Gina Lollobrigida, Silvana Mangano, and Sophia Loren, were configured as youthful embodiments of a new national landscape—harbingers of renewal, plenitude, and hope for a changing national identity (Landy 1986, 279).

In the two decades following the end of Italy’s economic miracle, screen stars such as Claudia Cardinale, Monica Vitti, Stefania Sandrelli, and Mariangela Melato embodied, in their range of roles, the conflict between old and new sociocultural attitudes in a highly fractured national landscape. Interestingly, both Monica Vitti and Stefania Sandrelli, after long careers as actresses, decided to move into screenwriting and directing, where they attempted to challenge the functions available to Italian actresses. In an interview in 1972 for a special issue of the journal Bianco e Nero dedicated to the experiences of women in the Italian cinema, Vitti (1972, 105) observed that the roles available for female characters were limited by male directors and screenwriters who could not contemplate alternative roles for women:

It’s incredible how there are so few directors and screenwriters who seriously consider what a woman thinks, what moves her. … How many times have screenwriters said to me: “But my dear Monica, how can I write stories for you? You are a woman and what does a woman do? She doesn’t go to war, she doesn’t have a profession? What can I have you do? I can only write you a love story: that you have children, you suffer, he leaves, you despair.” Those are the only functions they give me. I’ve tried many times to say: “Why don’t you turn this character around completely and you’ll have a woman[?]” “Oh no, impossible.”

In the 1980s, Vitti went on to write scripts for three films, Flirt (1983), Francesca è mia (1986), and Scandalo segreto (Secret Scandal, 1989), a film that she also directed. Marga Cottino‐Jones (1996, 249) has called Scandalo segreto “a brilliant example of Italian feminist cinema.” The film’s story is built around a character, Margherita, played by Vitti herself, who receives a video camera as a birthday present. The entire film is told through the lens of that video camera, which Margherita uses to record her life. In the unexpected ending of the film, when she discovers that the male director who gave her the camera was controlling it and intended to use the footage for his own film, Margherita throws the camera away, refusing to be once more the object of the male gaze. Vitti, in her final film, which expresses the limitations imposed on women in a male‐dominated film industry, prepares us for a future generation of filmmakers who, when gifted a movie camera, will finally be able to tell their own stories, as we see with the young protagonist of Cristina Comencini’s film, Il più bel giorno della mia vita (The Best Day of My Life, 2002) (Figure 25.2).

Screen grab from the film Il più bel giorno della mia vita (The Best Day of My Life), displaying Chiara (Maria Luisa De Crescenzo) holding a camera, filming two women while they are sitting and talking.

Figure 25.2 Chiara, representing the future generation of women filmmakers, in possession of the camera in Il più bel giorno della mia vita (The Best Day of My Life, Cristina Comencini, 2002). Screen grab.

Stefania Sandrelli also came to directing, after more than 30 years as an actress, with the film Christine Cristina, which premiered at the 2009 Rome Film Festival. Indeed, it was because of Sandrelli’s iconic status as diva, “legitimizing” her entry into directing, that the film attracted the attention of journalists and reviewers. Sandrelli asserted that she wanted to be a director because she wanted to see, rather than be seen (Mammì 2010, 78). Christine Cristina focuses on the late medieval Italian and French writer and intellectual Christine de Pisan and allows Sandrelli to challenge her position within the film industry by reclaiming the camera and honoring a woman who claimed the right to be an author at a time when such a role was almost exclusively the domain of men.

Women carved out yet another space for themselves in postwar cinema beyond the role of the actress. Most notably, Suso Cecchi d’Amico distinguished herself as a screenwriter and is considered one of the most influential voices in Italian cinema from the 1940s onward, writing for the cinema across many genres, from neorealism to comedy to melodrama. She worked with a number of most renowned directors in Italian cinema including Federico Fellini, De Sica, and Michelangelo Antonioni and as a key collaborator of Luchino Visconti. D’Amico’s contribution to the representation of women on the Italian screen, not only in traditional roles but also in roles that challenged traditional configurations of women and relationships between women, is not quantifiable but is reflected in the fact that films from Luchino Visconti’s Bellissima (1951) to Mario Monicelli’s Speriamo che sia femmina (Let’s Hope It’s a Girl, 1986) featured women as protagonists rather than on the margins of the narrative. While ignored in major canonical studies of Italian cinema, D’Amico set the stage for future generations of Italian women screenwriters who would assume an increasingly prominent position in Italian cinema from the 1950s onward: Iaia Filastri (1950s and 1960s) and Luciana Corda (1970s and 1980s). In contemporary Italy, the collaboration between Daniela Ceselli and Marco Bellocchio, Doriana Leondeff and Silvio Soldini and Carlo Mazzacurati, Francesca Manieri and Giuseppe Piccioni, Heidrun Schleef and Nanni Moretti, and Federica Pontremoli and Nanni Moretti have resulted in films that self‐consciously attempt to bring a female perspective to contemporary cinematic narratives across a range of genres.5

After decades of absence from the directorial stage, the 1960s and 1970s saw the emergence of women directors such as Lina Wertmüller, Liliana Cavani, Sofia Scandurra, Dacia Maraini, Giovanna Gagliardo, and the Feminist Film Collective. Wertmüller and Cavani remain the two names most associated internationally with Italian women filmmakers, though not surprisingly, perhaps, both filmmakers resisted the appellation “woman filmmaker” for many years.

Wertmüller has been a prolific director whose films have examined the power struggles between men and women of different classes or political orientation and the relationship of women to history and societal institutions, from the Church to the brothel.6 Often resorting to the satiric or the grotesque, Wertmüller creates characters who tend to be stereotypes, typifying specific cultural or political attitudes that allow Wertmüller to assert her disaffection with Italian history and politics. One of her most famous films, Pasqualino Settebellezze (Seven Beauties, 1975), features a scene in which the protagonist, Pasqualino, a prisoner in a Nazi camp, sets out to seduce the female officer in what he hopes to be a life‐saving strategy. In what can also be viewed as a parody of Fascist virility, typical gender positions are reversed as the “seducer” Pasqualino assumes the role of the victim, while the female protagonist assumes the role of empowered captor, as she is portrayed grotesquely through extreme close‐ups that abstract her image and augment her threatening nature. This scene is an example of how Wertmüller’s cinema “defiantly challenges the complacency of conventional attitudes and aesthetic categories” (Magretta and Magretta 1979, 43). Her use of grotesque female bodies has been interpreted as a key component of her “feminism of despair” (Diaconescu‐Blumenfeld 1999, 399).

By representing grotesque female bodies, Wertmüller negates the representation of women as objects of desire. Nonetheless, despite her clear engagement with women’s issues, Wertmüller was seen as operating outside the arena of feminist politics. This was largely because, in the 1970s, many assumed that feminist filmmaking required experimenting with film language rather than working within its conventions.7 Wertmüller did, however, enter the annals of film history in 1976 when she became the first woman ever to be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Director.

Despite her nonconformist cinematic style and frequent attacks from the mainstream public, Liliana Cavani has also achieved national and international critical acclaim. Her best‐known film remains Il portiere di notte (The Night Porter, 1974), which exemplifies her propensity for controversial characters and themes.8 As Gaetana Marrone (2000) argues, Cavani’s “graphic use of sexuality, and her forceful (a)political stance,” have contributed to her rarely being understood (xiii). Marrone describes Cavani’s cinema as a “complex cinema of ‘ideas’” (xiv) marked by its transgression of ideological and commercial codes (xv).

Upon its release, Il portiere di notte generated uproar, as the film divided audiences for its ostensibly offensive focus on sexual transgression in relation to the Holocaust, whose narrative accounts do not generally feature explicit references to eroticism and sexuality (Scherr 2000). In Cavani’s film, flashbacks are used to show Max, a former Nazi officer, tormenting Lucia, a concentration camp survivor. When the two meet again 13 years later at a Viennese hotel where Max works as a night porter, they resume their sadomasochistic relationship, retreating to his apartment and suffering from starvation. Eventually, they are killed by Max’s Nazi friends. The story of Max and Lucia’s relationship is set against other examples of transgressive sexual practices, with scenes depicting the rape of a male camp inmate and others of an older female collaborator’s predilection for young men. Ultimately, however, Lucia’s sexualized body remains the focus of most of the film, making the spectator uncomfortably aware of the camera’s depiction of the female body as a site of power struggle between men and women. As de Lauretis (1976–1977, 35) argues:

It is not Lucia’s experience (her victimization, initiation, and subsequent unbreakable bondage to her oppressor–Father–lover) that serves as a metaphor for the infamy perpetrated by the Nazis on humankind, but Nazism and the atrocities committed in the camps that are the allegorical framework chosen by Cavani to investigate the dialectics of the male–female relationship in our contemporary, post‐Nazi, society.

Whereas Wertmüller and Cavani did not explicitly set out to make films that aligned with feminism and the women’s liberation movement of the late 1960s and 1970s, Sofia Scandurra’s Io sono mia (I Belong to Me, 1978) deliberately sets out to engage with both. Made by an all‐women crew, the film is based on Dacia Maraini’s feminist novel Donna in guerra (Woman at War, 1975). It recounts the story of the sexual and political awakening of Vannina, a young woman married to the selfish Giacinto. During a summer holiday, Vannina meets the feminist Suna and has a sexual relationship with a local teenage boy. Her discovery of feminism and sexual gratification empowers her to assert herself against her husband, aborting their child and leaving the marriage.

In a recent interview with the film critic Morando Morandini (2011), Scandurra acknowledged the difficulties faced by women filmmakers of her time. Prior to directing Io sono mia, Scandurra had worked as assistant director, a role in which she felt that as a woman she had to constantly prove herself. As a result, and given the dearth of women filmmakers at that time, the film was intended as a political act that could serve as a precedent for other women directors. In hindsight, Scandurra feels that the film’s overtly political agenda, didacticism, and stereotyped characterization of Giacinto as the oppressive husband, weakened it. Commenting on Scandurra’s film, Maraini reflected on the difficulties faced by women wishing to work in the film industry, but insisted that women needed to continue to make films in order to create a new cinematic language that would allow them to express their stories and inner feelings (Cavallaro 2007, 207).9 As Annabella Miscuglio (1988, 154) points out, however, the desire to create a cinematic language that would be specific to women is “rich in [both] ambiguity and danger of self‐segregation.” Hence, many women filmmakers in the 1970s, in Italy as in other countries, focused mainly on the critique of images of women and of the sexist ideology that created them (155). This critique further developed “through a variety of concerns, research projects and experiments, reflecting the richness of the theoretical formulations” of the women’s liberation movement (155).

As the women’s movement gained momentum in Italy, documentary and investigative films rather than fiction became the medium of choice through which many women advocated a feminist politics and attempted to raise public awareness of women’s socially and politically disadvantaged status. The preference for this mode of filmmaking was due both to its wider accessibility (Miscuglio 1988, 156) and to the fact that the invention of lightweight cameras and recording equipment in the 1960s allowed the documentary to become more observational and interactive (Rosenstone 2006, 73). As Jennifer Borda (2005, 162) points out, independent documentary filmmaking offered a number of creative advantages to emerging filmmakers. First, it allowed them to retain control of their films from conception to production. Second, they could “choose to work individually, occupying multiple positions such as cinematographer, editor, and director, or they could challenge the artistic ‘imperative’ of individual creative control by bringing other women on board as partners in cooperative productions.” On an ideological level, they viewed the documentary as a means to “give voice to those on society’s margins and bring public attention to their cause.”

In Italy, examples of feminist documentaries include the Feminist Film Collective’s La lotta non è finita (1972), Dacia Maraini’s Aborto: parlano le donne (1976) and Le ragazze di Capoverde (1976), and Isabella Bruno’s La cavia (1976). The most significant and controversial examples, however, are the observational documentaries Processo per stupro (A Trial for Rape, 1979) and AAA Offresi (1981).

Made by a collective of Italian feminist filmmakers in conjunction with the Rai state television network, Processo per stupro witnesses, for the first time in Italian documentary, a rape trial, and criticizes the manner in which such trials were conducted. The documentary about the 1978 trial of Rocco Vallone and his accomplices was broadcast on Rai2 in April 1979, attracting record ratings of 9.5 million viewers, and was shown again in October 1979, when it was watched by 4.8 million viewers (Grosso 1979, 2). In the same year, the documentary won the prestigious Premio Italia for best Italian documentary, and was shortlisted for an International Emmy award. It was broadcast in many Western European countries, as well as in Australia, Japan, and India. The documentary was instrumental in shaping public discussion about the reform of sexual violence laws. Rarely in any country have feminist films, let alone feminist documentaries, enjoyed such widespread mainstream success.

AAA Offresi was a direct follow‐up to Processo per stupro. In this documentary, the award‐winning collective used a hidden camera to show the bargaining and small talk that took place between a prostitute and her male clients. The film was censored by government intervention just hours before it was due to be broadcast and became the subject of a national scandal and a protracted court case. Although the filmmakers were eventually absolved of any wrongdoing, the documentary has been banned from public broadcast to this day, screening only in underground film circles in Italy (Heffernan 2001, 41).

The success of Processo per stupro suggests that television audiences had become increasingly interested in women’s issues. Indeed, the state television company Rai had already began to produce and broadcast programs focusing on women. A notable example was the weekly news program Si dice donna. Launched in 1977, the program, although conventional in its format, had a “quite unprecedented force” (Tilde Capomazza, the program’s editor‐in‐chief, quoted in Miscuglio 1988, 159). Capomazza (quoted in Miscuglio 1988, 159) also noted, “the words that now came out of women’s long historic silence had never previously been brought into focus, while the faces of real women (unlike the ones on television commercials) had a shattering strength.”

In the late 1970s, Rai also began to produce fiction films by women filmmakers, such as Giovanna Gagliardo’s Maternale (Mother and Daughter, 1978). The film is set in the 1960s and focuses on a day in the lives of a mother and daughter who are in competition with each other. Unfortunately, Maternale was broadcast only on television in 1980, and it never reached the cinemas. Just as women filmmakers were beginning to make more films, the Italian film industry entered a period of decline. This decline was due to a number of factors, including the crisis in financial investment brought about by the slow demise of producers who were prepared to take risks on new talent, and by the rise of private television. As Miscuglio (1988, 162) explains, film clubs were decimated by the explosion of the television empire, as changes in modes of consumption led to the increased demand for television sets and decreased interest in viewing films at cinemas.

From the 1980s to the End of the Twentieth Century

Many critics have described the 1980s as one of the darkest periods in the history of Italian cinema, blaming both the inferior aesthetic quality of its films and the economic decline in the industry (Micciché 1998, 3–4).10 A product of their times, the films of the 1980s often have been associated with the typical television offerings of the day and attacked for their banal content and lack of cinematic and cultural relevance. The public success of these films was seen as resting on their use of recognized actors or media stars rather than on the quality of the film (Brunetta 1995, 349–50).

Despite such negative assessment, the decade did see the emergence of some interesting filmmakers, including some women filmmakers. These auteurs of the so‐called “new Italian cinema” focused on the relationships between personal and social realities, between psychological and political conflict, and between sentimental and ideological instability (Brunetta 1995, 351). Women filmmakers who began their careers in the 1980s have gone on to gain significant critical attention in the decades to come. Among the most notable are Francesca Archibugi, Roberta Torre, Wilma Labate, Cristina Comencini, and Francesca Comencini.

Lino Micciché (1998, 8–9) included Francesca Archibugi among the select group of Italian filmmakers from this period who displayed “expressive authenticity and a calling for the cinema.” Archibugi has written as well as directed the majority of her films. Her cinematic career began as a child actress in the 1979 television production Affinità elettive. Archibugi’s films often feature children or adolescents as central figures and explore coming‐of‐age issues as well as tensions with a dysfunctional adult world often too self‐absorbed to respond to the needs of young people. There is a political element, direct or oblique, to all Archibugi’s works. As Àine O’Healy (1999, 122) notes in the discussion of her four “Roman” films: “they all allude in different ways to the watershed years of activism and protest in the 1960s and 1970s provoking a reflection on the effects of those years on the subsequent generation.” Her films also demonstrate “a desire to connect with the national cinematic tradition” and to “speak to a broad range of Italian audiences.” Archibugi’s political agenda is evidenced in Domani (Tomorrow, 2001), set in the aftermath of an earthquake, and in her recent Questione di cuore (A Matter of Heart, 2009). This last film, much less child‐focused than many of her earlier ones, revisits the landscape of Italian neorealism and pays direct homage to the Italian and international cinematic traditions that formed her.

Roberta Torre is most renowned for her debut feature, the highly original mafia musical, Tano da morire (1997). The film focuses on the power struggle between men and women configured in terms of the patriarchal nature of the brother–sister relationship. Torre uses parody and excess as a strategy to question the code of silence (known as omertà), where locals feign to know nothing about mafia activity. Torre’s film is significant because she tackles the traditionally male‐centered mafia movie by telling the story in the form of a musical, a genre approach that had never been attempted. Subsequent to Tano da morire, Torre directed another musical Sud side stori (South Side Story, 2000), followed by Angela (2002), once again diverging from the typical mafia movie by placing a woman at its center. Mare nero (The Dark Sea, 2006) is a dramatic thriller abundant in cinematic citations. Torre’s later films exhibit a more subdued visual style, tone, and pace, possibly as a result of the limitations imposed by different production frameworks. As Wood (2005, 133) suggests in the case of Angela, “co‐production arrangements with the BBC ensured international distribution, but a more conventional style of film‐making.” Torre’s most recent film, I baci mai dati (Lost Kisses, 2010) assumes the perspective of a 13‐year‐old girl whose life suddenly changes when she is thought to be a miracle worker. Central to the film is the girl’s relationship to the community, in particular to its women, and the film is ultimately a reflection on the mother–daughter relationship.

Wilma Labate examines underrepresented female subjects in films with a strong sociopolitical message. Her first film, Ambrogio (1992), set in the 1950s, is the story of a young girl who wants to become a captain in the Italian navy but runs up against numerous obstacles because of her gender. Her third feature film, Domenica (2001), adds to the body of work dedicated to the representation of Naples and of children in Italian realist films. The young rebellious female protagonist is a composite of images of a number of conflicting feminine positions as she struggles to survive on the streets after being raped. In her fourth film Signorina Effe (Miss F, 2007), Labate reflects on the massive 1980 strike that blocked FIAT’s activities for 35 days, and she engages with a defining event in the history of work that may well have marked the birth of “flexibility” or “precariousness” in the Italian economy. The protagonist of the film, Emma, is a young educated woman, daughter of Southern immigrants, on an upwardly mobile track as a university student and white‐collar worker at Fiat. She represents the potential for class and gender mobility among emancipated young women. The strike initially offers Emma the opportunity to rebel against traditional family expectations, but that rebellion is short‐lived. What Labate presents as the death of the workers’ movement parallels Emma renunciation of agency and by extension the defeat of feminist ideology in post‐Fordist Italy.

Daughters of famed Italian filmmaker Luigi Comencini, Cristina and Francesca Comencini, are among the most prolific contemporary Italian women filmmakers. A writer of fiction as well, Cristina began her career in cinema in scriptwriting, working alongside Suso Cecchi D’Amico. Her attention to issues of gender are evident in all her films, from her first feature film, Zoo (1988), about an 11‐year‐old girl who lives in the Rome zoo, where she meets and befriends a young Roman boy. Cristina’s films are often kaleidoscopic works that reflect on the institution of the family, its transformation, and its dysfunctionality—alongside other social issues. Among these is Matrimoni (Marriages, 1998), which reflects on the institution of marriage through intersecting stories of a number of family relationships. Il più bel giorno della mia vita (2002) looks at three generations of women in an Italian family while also exploring issues of sexuality and sexual identity through a visual style that challenges traditional representations of the female body. A focus on the dark side of family life, child molestation, as well as the exploration of sexual identity, are at the core of La bestia nel cuore (Don’t Tell, 2005), a film based on Comencini’s novel of the same title and Italy’s contender for an Oscar in 2006. Her latest film, Quando la notte (When the Night, 2011), explores the experience of mothering from a courageous perspective that refuses to romanticize maternity.

While Cristina’s films have dealt almost exclusively with the private sector and family relationships, Francesca Comencini’s films tend to be more overtly political and explore family relationships within a wider context of political events. Unlike Cristina’s films, which are situated between comedy and melodrama, Francesca’s films occupy a space between drama and documentary. The narratives of her films, in fact, frequently unfold through the reappropriation of recognizable conventions of realist cinema. Her film Mi piace lavorare (Mobbing) (I Love to Work, 2003) is the first film devoted specifically to the workplace issue of mobbing and focuses particularly on its psychological impact on women and female relationships. A casa nostra (Our Country, 2006), an ensemble film set in Milan and comprising a number of intersecting stories, provides a damning portrayal of a valueless contemporary Italy where power is equated to money and patriarchy and where women are still privately and publicly victimized. The pervasiveness of oppressive patriarchal authority is further explored in her most recent film Un giorno speciale (A Special Day, 2012), presented at the Venice Film Festival in 2012. Interrelating the intimate and the political, the film is set in Rome and is the account of the first day at work of two previously unemployed young people, representing the precarious reality of contemporary Italian youth, their dreams, limited options, and compromising decisions.

Francesca’s intimate gaze governs both her documentary film Carlo Giuliani, ragazzo (Carlo Giuliani, Boy, 2002) and her feature film Lo spazio bianco (The White Space, 2009). Carlo Giuliani ragazzo assumes a personal perspective on an overtly political and highly publicized event. Told through the memory of the young man’s mother, the film recounts the tragic death of Carlo Giuliani who was brutally killed by the police during the Genoa G8 in the year 2001. Lo spazio bianco, based on Valeria Parrella’s novel, provides an intimate account of an intense female experience, that of a woman, Irene, caught between desire and fear of motherhood, as she waits to see if her prematurely born daughter will survive. The strong emotional tension of the film is sustained by the film’s narrative pace, temporal cross‐cutting, dream sequences, and camerawork that capture the details of Irene’s activities, gestures, and feelings that make up the “white space.” It is through the multiple meanings of this space of waiting, a women’s space shared with other mothers, and a creative space for the reinvention of one’s life, that Comencini forges a deeply women‐centered film (Figure 25.3).

Screen grab from the film Lo spazio bianco (The White Space), displaying eight women wearing patient gowns falling in line.

Figure 25.3 Mothers inhabiting the “white space” in Lo spazio bianco (The White Space, Francesca Comencini), 2009. Screen grab.

The Third Millennium

In the third millennium, a new generation of women filmmakers, such as Alina Marazzi, Susanna Nichiarelli, Costanza Quatriglio, and Alice Rohrwacher to name a few, have joined the ranks of women directors who came of age in the 1980s and early 1990s, such as Antonietta De Lillo, Marina Spada, and the filmmakers mentioned above. In their films, they engage with current social and cinematic preoccupations such as immigration, cultural identity, and the labor market, as well as exploring more specifically female threads—the representation of the mother–daughter relationship and the function of film as a space for remembering women’s (hi)stories. The boundaries of female relationships in Italian cinema are also beginning to expand as female sexuality, lesbian relationships, and female friendships—previously marginalized—are increasingly finding cinematic space alongside cinema’s perennial love affair with heterosexuality.11

As we discussed in Reframing Italy (2013, 9), the work of women directors in Italy also needs to be understood in terms of the filmmakers’ relationship to hegemonic cinema traditions, as Italian women filmmakers are not working in a vacuum but within an established cinematic history forged almost entirely by “great fathers.” An example of the way that women filmmakers have reworked tradition is evident in feature films by women that focus on children and adolescent protagonists. These films reconsider the child protagonist and interrogate contemporary daily life, appropriating a neorealist tradition that sidelined women and girls, and creating space for women in cinema while problematizing the position of young girls in Italian society and cinematic history. A notable example, alongside the already mentioned Mi piace lavorare (Mobbing) by Francesca Comencini and Domenica by Labate, is Costanza Quatriglio’s L’isola (The Island, 2003).12 Set on the Sicilian island of Favignana, the film focuses on 1 year in the life of the 10‐year‐old Teresa and her older brother Turi. The film’s focus is on the insularity and double otherness of both the setting, an island off an island, and the use of a 10‐year‐old girl as the guiding consciousness of the film. L’isola evokes Luchino Visconti’s La terra trema (The Earth Trembles, 1948) and Roberto Rossellini’s Stromboli (Terra di Dio) (Stromboli, 1950). Unlike its predecessors, however, Quatriglio’s film uses the perspective of a girl on the verge of adolescence to explore the rituals, landscape, and contradictory nature of the island’s boundaries.

The new generation of Italian women filmmakers is also reconsidering issues concerning the position of the daughter and her renewed desire to engage with the mother. In these films, the mother’s destiny does not necessarily prefigure the daughter’s, since the women’s movement has bestowed upon the daughter alternative social paths from which to choose. Alina Marazzi is arguably the best‐known representative of this type of cinema, particularly her acclaimed documentary Un’ora sola ti vorrei (For One More Hour With You, 2002) and her most recent feature Tutto parla di te (All About You, 2013). These films offer a new perspective on the long and fraught engagement with the mother that has prevailed in the Italian literary tradition.13 Rather than denouncing the institution of motherhood, these films courageously expose the dark side of the experience of maternity.

Italian women filmmakers have also engaged with remembering women’s history and women in history. Notable examples are Antonietta De Lillo’s historical drama Il resto di niente (The Remains of Nothing, 2004) and Alina Marazzi’s celebrated documentary about the women’s movement in the 1960s and 1970s, Vogliamo anche le rose (We Want Roses Too, 2007). Il resto di niente, based on a novel by Enzo Striano, recounts the life story of Eleonora Pimental Fonseca and her involvement in the Neapolitan revolution of 1799. Using an inauspicious episode from the past and told from the point of view of a marginalized female character, the film reclaims Fonseca as historical and cinematic subject. In so doing, De Lillo’s film underlines the personal experience of history and addresses complex historical and contemporary issues from a predominantly female point of view. Similarly, Marazzi’s film goes beyond straightforward historical reconstruction, creating instead a dialogue between public and private, between story and history, and standing at the crossroads among history, memory, and fiction and the relevant issues regarding the relationship between feminist history and auto/biographical recreations.

Participating in a growing trend to draw attention to the complexity and cultural specificity of migration experiences are Come l’ombra (As the Shadow, 2006) by Marina Spada and two comedies dealing with intercultural romance Bianco e nero (Black and White, 2008) by Cristina Comencini and Billo il grand dakhaar (2008) by Laura Muscardin. These films, while imagining an ostensibly changed multiethnic Italy, construct narratives of encounters between Italians and migrants in which the migrants disappear, die, or remain within the confines of stereotypes. While courting an audience’s sympathy for migrants, these films construct a nation of transformed landscapes, which struggles to hold on to traditional cultural and gender myths.

A notable difference in the films of the past decade that address work‐related issues is the centrality of women protagonists. Anna Negri’s Riprendimi (Good Morning, Heartache, 2008) adopts a film‐within‐a‐film strategy to look at the pressure that unreliable work and day‐to‐day existence have on the lives of struggling artists and a young mother in the film industry. More significantly, the film describes a society in which precariousness, even when it corresponds to a desired flexible occupation (working in a creative industry), has negative outcomes and results in a precariousness in life that disrupts and threatens relationships.

The personal meets the political most explicitly in the satirical investigative mixed‐genre films and documentaries of Sabina Guzzanti. Viva Zapatero! (2005), based on the embargoing of her own satirical television program by Rai3, scathingly attacks political complicity in a controlled Italian media that prevents freedom of speech. Draquila—L'Italia che trema (Draquila: Italy Trembles, 2010) investigates the political mismanagement in the aftermath of the Aquila earthquake and the devastating impact that it had on the lives of the inhabitants. La trattativa (The State‐Mafia Pact, 2014), which screened out of competition at the 71st Venice Film Festival, is an account of how the Italian political machine, in order to assure its power, has negotiated with and made ongoing concessions to the mafia. Guzzanti who writes, directs, and features in her films has become a recognizable public figure. She uses filmmaking as a means to denounce abuses of power perpetrated by Italy's political elite.

Studies on women’s cinema often look at the overall context of film production in search of signs of a brighter future. In the Italian situation, the presence at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival of Miele and Viaggio sola and in 2014 of Alice Rohrwacher's Le meraviglie (The Wonders) is significant for two reasons. First, it highlights the festival’s growing openness to the representation of new stories and new roles for female subjects. Second, the recognition by a major festival such as Cannes traditionally helps a film’s distribution. It is hoped that the films will gain more widespread distribution than is usually the case for Italian films, let alone films directed by women. Furthermore, the 2013 films signal new trajectories both for Miele’s actress‐turned director, Valeria Golino, and for Viaggio sola’s prominent actress, Margherita Buy. As an actress, Golino has played a number of transgressive roles in films that question traditional representations of maternity, such as in Respiro (2002), La guerra di Mario (Mario’s War, 2005), and Giulia non esce la sera (Giulia Doesn't Date at Night, 2009). With Miele, she has directed a courageous film that proposes a new kind of nurturing female figure, one who assists terminally ill people in ending their lives. Buy’s role in Viaggio sola also represents a different role for women on the Italian screen. Buy plays a single professional woman in her 40s whose job evaluating hotel quality means a life on the road, with its independence, privilege, and solitude. Her portrayal of a new contemporary female protagonist on the Italian screen seems a partial answer to her frustration expressed in 1990, in an interview for the journal Cinema & Cinema. At that time, she complained that what was missing in Italian cinema, unlike in French cinema, were female protagonists: “Ours is a male oriented cinema, a cinema without women” (Buy 1991, 62). The films by women filmmakers of the third millennium signal changes to that status as their creators struggle to project new female subjects on screen.

Conclusion

Our journey across over 100 years of cinema has highlighted the roles women have played and are playing in growing numbers in the Italian film industry. Through a range of filmic styles, strategies, and practices women filmmakers have engaged and continue to engage in a political critique of patriarchal attitudes and institutions that resist change and that are complicit in making it difficult, even in the new millennium, for women’s films to be made and distributed. Given the many aesthetic and industry challenges that women in cinema still face, we concur with the assessment of the importance of artistic and auteur self‐reflexivity offered by Deborah Young, who has served as the artistic director for the Taormina Film Festival and the chief European film critic for The Hollywood Reporter. In discussing significant films by women directors, she identified the works of Australian filmmaker Jane Campion and French filmmaker Catherine Breillat as particularly effective “because they have thought about what it means to be a woman and what it means to be a woman artist and their films reflect that.”14

In the cases of Vitti, Sandrelli, and Golino, the reflection on their role within the film industry led them to move from acting to directing. In their panel contributions at the Sorelle di cinema forum, Costanza Quatriglio and Marina Spada reiterated sentiments they had expressed in conversations with us (Luciano and Scarparo 2013, 198, 201) about the importance for a woman director to reflect on the ways in which being a woman affects both her position in the industry and the films she makes, including creating female characters that challenge conventional configurations of women in Italian visual culture. It is no coincidence that women filmmakers often make films about characters who are constructed as others, as outsiders, mirroring the predicament of women directors who are often marginal to the industry and to a history of aesthetics that predates the advent of cinema.

Indeed, the need to change the way women are represented on screen has implications that extend beyond the film industry. In a country in which television programs are marked by their lack of respect for women and women’s rights (Zanardo 2010, 104), and in which the longest‐serving postwar prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, has been accused of engaging in sexual activities with underage prostitutes and of appointing women to ministerial positions based on their looks, it is a matter of great urgency for documentary and fiction films to imagine different roles for women, both in front of and behind the camera.

In an attempt to reach out and start a discussion with young Italian women growing up with degrading female role models, Lorella Zanardo made Il corpo delle donne and wrote the book accompanying that documentary.15 Zanardo’s documentary and book were followed by initial steps in what became a proactive movement for and by women to reclaim their dignity and to challenge their representation in the media and their treatment in society. The Se non ora quando (SNOQ—If Not Now When) movement, which included Cristina and Francesca Comencini among its organizers, began on February 13, 2011 with rallies all over Italy and around the world. More than a million women of different ages, classes, political allegiances, and religious beliefs took part. SNOQ took up the challenge of keeping women’s issues at the forefront of discussion, uncovering inequities and calling for legislative changes. SNOQ’s online presence spread to social network sites, forums, and blogs including Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, thereby expanding the spaces for debate and reflection. It was the first women’s organization in Italy to have an iPhone and iPad application.

For most women filmmakers, the opportunities to be a regular part of the film industry are still limited, and their films appear against all odds. While we do not want to downplay the fact that women's participation in the Italian film industry and the visibility of women's films are slowly increasing, we return to the fact that cinematic works, like all cultural works, are inextricably linked to the society that creates them. The marginalization and/or lack of a female aesthetic are broadly determined by the ossified views promulgated by those who have the power to make decisions within the film industry, such as producers. As long as cultural and social policies continue to reward directors, producers, writers, and cinematographers who favor traditional and often stereotypical representations of women on screen, more nuanced cinematic narratives and a female‐centered aesthetic will remain at the margins of Italian cinema.

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Notes