Reframing Italy

Susanna Scarparo, Bernadette Luciano

Description

In recent years, Italian cinema has experienced a quiet revolution: the proliferation of films by women. But their thought-provoking work has not yet received the attention it deserves. Reframing Italy fills this gap. The book introduces readers to films and documentaries by recognized women directors such as Cristina Comencini, Wilma Labate, Alina Marazzi, Antonietta De Lillo, Marina Spada, and Francesca Comencini, as well as to filmmakers whose work has so far been undeservedly ignored. Through a thematically based analysis supported by case studies, Luciano and Scarparo argue that Italian women filmmakers, while not overtly feminist, are producing work that increasingly foregrounds female subjectivity from a variety of social, political, and cultural positions. This book, with its accompanying video interviews, explores the filmmakers' challenging relationship with a highly patriarchal cinema industry. The incisive readings of individual films demonstrate how women's rich cinematic production reframes the aesthetic of their cinematic fathers, re-positions relationships between mothers and daughters, functions as a space for remembering women's (hi)stories, and highlights pressing social issues such as immigration and workplace discrimination. This original and timely study makes an invaluable contribution to film studies and to the study of gender and culture in the early twenty-first century.
Acknowledgments

Chapter One: Introduction

Chapter Two: The “Girls” Are Watching Us: Reconsidering the Neorealist Child Protagonist

Chapter Three: Reconfiguring the Mother–Daughter Relationship

Chapter Four: Reinventing Our Mothers: Gendering History and Memory

Chapter Five: Migration and Transnational Mobility

Chapter Six: Women at Work: Negotiating the Contemporary Workplace

Conclusion: Framing the Film Industry

Appendix: A Conversation with Contemporary Italian Women Filmmakers: Online Supplementary Material

Notes

Works Cited

Filmography

Index

Sujets

• Literary Criticism
• Italian
• European

Informations

• Publié par: Purdue University Press
• Date de parution: 15 novembre 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781612492964
• Langue: English

Extrait

REFRAMING ITALY
Purdue Studies in Romance Literatures
Editorial Board
Íñigo Sánchez-Llama, Series Editor
Brett Bowles
Elena Coda
Paul B. Dixon
Howard Mancing, Consulting Editor
Floyd Merrell, Consulting Editor
Susan Y. Clawson, Production Editor
Patricia Hart
Gwen Kirkpatrick
Allen G. Wood
Associate Editors
French
Jeanette Beer
Paul Benhamou
Willard Bohn
Gerard J. Brault
Thomas Broden
Mary Ann Caws
Glyn P. Norton
Allan H. Pasco
Gerald Prince
Roseann Runte
Ursula Tidd
Italian
Fiora A. Bassanese
Peter Carravetta
Benjamin Lawton
Franco Masciandaro
Anthony Julian Tamburri
Luso-Brazilian
Fred M. Clark
Marta Peixoto
Ricardo da Silveira Lobo Sternberg
Spanish and Spanish American
Maryellen Bieder
Catherine Connor
Ivy A. Corfis
Frederick A. de Armas
Edward Friedman
Charles Ganelin
David T. Gies
Roberto González Echevarría
David K. Herzberger
Emily Hicks
Djelal Kadir
Amy Kaminsky
Lucille Kerr
Howard Mancing
Floyd Merrell
Alberto Moreiras
Randolph D. Pope
Francisco Ruiz Ramón
El ż bieta Skl-odowska
Marcia Stephenson
Mario Valdés
volume 59
REFRAMING ITALY
New Trends in Italian Women’s Filmmaking
Bernadette Luciano and Susanna Scarparo
Purdue University Press West Lafayette, Indiana
Copyright © 2013 by Purdue University. All rights reserved.
The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Printed in the United States of America
Template for interior design by Anita Noble; template for cover by Heidi Branham.
Cover photo: film clip from Un’ora sola ti vorrei , dir. Alina Marazzi, Bartlebyfilm, Venerdi, 2002. Reproduced with permission of the director.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Luciano, Bernadette.
Reframing Italy : new trends in Italian women’s filmmaking / Bernadette Luciano and Susanna Scarparo.
    pages cm. — (Purdue studies in Romance literatures ; v. 59)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Includes filmography.
ISBN 978-1-55753-655-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-61249-295-7 (epdf) — ISBN 978-1-61249-296-4 (epub)
1. Women motion picture producers and directors—Italy. 2. Women in the motion picture industry—Italy. 3. Motion pictures—Italy. 4. Women in motion pictures. 5. Motion pictures and women—Italy. I. Scarparo, Susanna, 1970– II. Title.
PN1995.9.W6L73 2013
791.43'6522—dc23                                   2013021721
Contents
Acknowledgments
Chapter One
Introduction
Reframing Tradition
Reframing History
Reframing Society
Framing the Industry
Chapter Two
The “Girls” Are Watching Us: Reconsidering the Neorealist Child Protagonist
Re-appropriating Neorealism
Re-appropriating the Father–Son Relationship: Mi piace lavorare—Mobbing
Situating Girls in the Neapolitan Cinematic Landscape: Domenica
Impermeable Boundaries for an Island Girl: L’isola
Conclusion
Chapter Three
Reconfiguring the Mother–Daughter Relationship
A Mother’s Love: L’amore di Màrja
The White Space of Motherhood: Lo spazio bianco
Searching for a New Language: Il più bel giorno della mia vita
The Political Is Personal: Un’ora sola ti vorrei, Di madre in figlia , and Il terzo occhio
Chapter Four
Reinventing Our Mothers: Gendering History and Memory
Literary Mothers: Christine Cristina and Poesia che mi guardi
Gendering Politics: Il resto di niente and Cosmonauta
Reframing Feminism: Vogliamo anche le rose and Ragazze la vita trema
Conclusion
Chapter Five
Migration and Transnational Mobility
Relocations and Dislocations: La stoffa di Veronica, Sidelki , and Il mondo addosso
Mobile Encounters: L’appartamento and Come l’ombra
The Fantasy of Racial Mixing: Bianco e nero and Billo—Il Grand Dakhaar
Conclusion: Reconfiguring Home
Chapter Six
Women at Work: Negotiating the Contemporary Workplace
An Economy in Transition: Signorina Effe
The Violence of the New Economy: Mi piace lavorare—Mobbing
Framing a Precarious World: Riprendimi
Documentaries by and about Women and Work: Invisibili and Uno virgola due
Conclusion
Framing the Film Industry
Appendix
A Conversation with Contemporary Italian Women Filmmakers: Online Supplementary Material
Interviews with Selected Women Filmmakers
An Interview with Alina Marazzi
An Interview with Antonietta De Lillo
An Interview with Costanza Quatriglio
An Interview with Francesca Pirani
An Interview with Paola Sangiovanni
An Interview with Marina Spada
Credits
Notes
Works Cited
Filmography
Index
Acknowledgments
First and foremost, we thank Italian women directors, who continue to make films despite all odds. We are profoundly indebted to all of those who shared their insights and experiences with us. We are particularly grateful to Francesca Pirani, Alina Marazzi, Antonietta De Lillo, Costanza Quatriglio, Paola Sangiovanni, and Marina Spada, who agreed to discuss their work in the interviews filmed in Rome in December 2010 and to have them included as the digital file that accompanies the book.
The anonymous reviewers of the manuscript engaged carefully and thoughtfully with our work. We thank them for their incisive observations, helpful suggestions, and enthusiasm for the project. We would also like to thank the Libreria del Cinema in Rome, for the stimulating debates that contributed to this book and to their assistance in helping us with source materials. We thank the many friends and colleagues whose generosity, encouragement, and support were invaluable in the writing of the book. Klaus Neumann read the full manuscript and offered insightful comments and invaluable editorial advice, and Gwyn Fox assisted with the index. Martina Migliorini, Stefano d’Amadio, and Francesca Pirani filmed and edited the interviews in Rome. Martina Depentor and Ellen MacRae assisted with the translating and subtitling back in Auckland, and Tim Page contributed his music, countless hours to the production of the video, and assistance with the book cover.
Special thanks also to our research assistants Teresa Tufano and Monica Rogers. Teresa conducted preliminary interviews in Italy, and Monica assisted with the preparation of the manuscript. We are also grateful to everyone at Purdue University Press and PSRL for their enthusiasm and support for the project: special thanks to our editor Elena Coda, to Purdue University Press director Charles Watkinson for his assistance with the video material, and to Susan Clawson for her sharpness and intelligent copyediting.
We are grateful to our respective institutions—The Faculty of Arts and the School of European Languages and Literatures at the University of Auckland and the Faculty of Arts and the School of Languages, Cultures, and Linguistics at Monash University—for the periods of sabbatical and research leave that enabled us to conduct the interviews and research that were fundamental for the book.
Parts of Chapters 2 , 3 , 4 , and 5 were published as “Costanza Quatriglio: In Search of the Invisible,” Studies in European Cinema 8.2 (2011): 115–27; “‘I bambini si guardano’: The Documentaries of Costanza Quatriglio,” Studies in Documentary Film [P], (Bristol, UK: Intellect) 5.2–3 (2011): 183–96; “The Personal Is Still Political: Films ‘by and for Women’ by the New Documentariste ,” Italica 87.3 (2010): 488–500; “‘Vite sospese’: Representing Female Migration in Contemporary Italian Documentaries,” Italian Studies 65.2 (July 2010): 192–203, http://www.maney.co.uk/journals/its , and http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/maney/its ; “Gendering Gendering Mobility and Migration in Contemporary Italian Cinema,” The Italianist 30 (2010): 165–82. We thank these journals for their permission to include content from these articles.
Finally, we wish to thank Steele Burrow and Klaus Neumann for being on call for emergency readings and consultations in the gestation of the book, and we thank our sons, Alexander Luciano Burrow and Claudio Scarparo Neumann, for patiently enduring our endless cross-Tasman conversations. We thank you also for accompanying us to Rome during our periods of research and writing and sharing with us the excitement and challenges of life in Italy.
Chapter One
Introduction
On the eve of International Women’s Day 2010, Kathryn Bigelow became the first woman to win an Oscar for Best Director for her Iraq war drama The Hurt Locker . Announcing the winner, Barbra Streisand exclaimed, “the time has come” (qtd. in Quinn 1), implying that women had finally broken through the celluloid ceiling. Only the third woman ever to be nominated for an Oscar in the Best Director ca