Women, Desire, and Power in Italian Cinema

Italian and Italian American Studies 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 reemphasizing the connection between the two. The following editorial board consists of esteemed senior scholars who act as advisors to the series editor. REBECCA WEST University of Chicago

JOSEPHINE GATTUSO HENDIN New York University

FRED GARDAPHÉ Queens College, CUNY

PHILIP V. CANNISTRARO† Queens College and the Graduate School, CUNY

ALESSANDRO PORTELLI Università di Roma “La Sapienza”

MILLICENT MARCUS Yale University

Queer Italia: Same-Sex Desire in Italian Literature and Film edited by Gary P. Cestaro, July 2004 Frank Sinatra: History, Identity, and Italian American Culture edited by Stanislao G. Pugliese, October 2004 The Legacy of Primo Levi edited by Stanislao G. Pugliese, December 2004 Italian Colonialism edited by Ruth Ben-Ghiat and Mia Fuller, July 2005 Mussolini’s Rome: Rebuilding the Eternal City Borden W. Painter, Jr., July 2005 Representing Sacco and Vanzetti edited by Jerome H. Delamater and Mary Anne Trasciatti, September 2005 Carlo Tresca: Portrait of a Rebel Nunzio Pernicone, October 2005 Italy in the Age of Pinocchio: Children and Danger in the Liberal Era Carl Ipsen, April 2006 The Empire of Stereotypes: Germaine de Staël and the Idea of Italy Robert Casillo, May 2006 Race and the Nation in Liberal Italy, 1861–1911: Meridionalism, Empire, and Diaspora Aliza S. Wong, October 2006 Women in Italy, 1945–1960: An Interdisciplinary Study edited by Penelope Morris, October 2006 Debating Divorce in Italy: Marriage and the Making of Modern Italians, 1860–1974 Mark Seymour, December 2006 A New Guide to Italian Cinema Carlo Celli and Marga Cottino-Jones, January 2007 Human Nature in Rural Tuscany: An Early Modern History Gregory Hanlon, March 2007 The Missing Italian Nuremberg: Cultural Amnesia and Postwar Politics Michele Battini, September 2007

Assassinations and Murder in Modern Italy: Transformations in Society and Culture edited by Stephen Gundle and Lucia Rinaldi, October 2007 Piero Gobetti and the Politics of Liberal Revolution James Martin, December 2008 Primo Levi and Humanism after Auschwitz: Posthumanist Reflections Jonathan Druker, June 2009 Oral History, Oral Culture, and Italian Americans Edited by Luisa Del Giudice, November 2009 Italy’s Divided Memory John Foot, January 2010 Women, Desire, and Power in Italian Cinema Marga Cottino-Jones, March 2010

Women, Desire, and Power in Italian Cinema Marga Cottino-Jones

women, desire, and power in italian cinema Copyright © Marga Cottino-Jones, 2010. All rights reserved. First published in 2009 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: 978-0-230-62287-6 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 Scribe Inc. First edition: February 2010 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction

1

1

Cabiria: Women in the Italian Colossals

11

2

Woman-as-Spectacle in Love-Story Films: The Dramma Passionale versus the Melodrama Genre and the Phenomenon of Divismo

19

3

“Mothers of Italy”: The Legacy of Fascism in Italian Cinema

37

4

Women in Neorealist Cinema

53

5

A Woman’s Search for Change and Meaningful Relationships in the Films of the 1950s

75

6 7 8 9

Women and Men as Victims of Violence and Alienation in the Films of the 1960s

105

The Sexual Power Game and Its Impact on Women and Men in the Films of the 1970s

141

Decentering the Masculine and Spotlighting the Feminine in the Films of the 1980s

187

Female Agency in the Films of the 1990s

211

Conclusion

225

Notes

227

Selected Bibliography

243

Index of Films

247

Index of Names and Topics

251

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To the women in my life. There are several women in my family to whom I owe a great deal and who have inspired me in many ways to write this book. There was my mother, who was the first person who taught me to be self-reliant through her example and teaching. Then there was my Piera, who took care of me since I was a little girl and who, with her love and belief in me, made me confident and ready to work toward a professional career as a teacher and a scholar. I wrote this book especially because of my daughter Vanna, whose love for cinema and theater has always inspired me. With this book, I hope to inspire her to write and to express herself creatively. This goes also for my granddaughters Gabriella, Caterina, and Elissa Glasser, who are already at an age when they can enjoy reading and learning how to use their many gifts to express themselves creatively in order to fulfill their own and their nonna’s expectations! And I also hope that one day my three other granddaughters, Tia, Mimi, and Cici, will be able to enjoy this book and learn about the culture of their nonna and feel inspired to become strong, self-reliant, and understanding women of their own times. Both my daughter Vanna and my daughter-in-law Edie have made a conscious choice early in life to opt for motherhood rather than for a professional career, and I have always respected their self-imposed preference that shows a personal determination that has often been missing in the choices made by earlier generations of women. Besides my close family, there are other women in my Italian family belonging to mine and to younger generations. In the north, there are Silvana, Rossella, Linda, and Valeria, and, in the south, Elena, Luisa, Carla, Anna, and Clara. Most of them have chosen a professional career combined with a traditional role as wife and mother. Some of them, however, have chosen to commit their energies exclusively to a professional career, without feeling compelled to marry and have a family, thus showing an unwillingness to accept the traditional codification of woman as wife and mother. To all these women whom I love and respect, I affectionately dedicate this book.

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Acknowledgments

There are many people who have helped me to work and finish this book in a period of my life that has been anything but easy and pleasant. First, I want to thank my husband Jim. Without his constant care, his sensible advice, and his sense of humor, I would have never been able to complete this task. My warmest thanks go to two most dear colleagues and friends, David Black and Kristin Phillips Court, who spent hours reading my manuscript attempting to improve its style and content. My dear old friend, Professor David Black, has patiently reread and corrected my English. Any Italianisms that still are present in the text are all my doing, as I never stopped reviewing even after he had already made corrections. My former student and now dear colleague and friend, Kristin Phillips Court, has reread my manuscript with an eye at the critical soundness of the text. Also in this case, if the text still presents some critical weakness, it is all my doing, as I cannot reread my own writing without rephrasing sentences or paragraphs even if she had previously reviewed them. I am also extremely thankful to the colleagues who have read my manuscript and thoroughly criticized it with professional correctness and high, scholarly standards. I will be forever indebted to Professors Carlo Celli and Giorgio Bertellini for their generous commitment to scholarship. I owe my warmest gratitude also to my friend Ron Schofield from the University of Toronto, whose kind and generous encouragement has been crucial to the completion of this book. My cousin, Professor Gastone Cottino, former Dean of Jurisprudence at the University of Torino and a true believer in the social effectiveness of Italian Cinema, has been a great supporter of my project even when I was ready to give up completing this book. He has also provided me with essential contacts for information and bibliographic research in the archives of Torino and with important connections in the field of cinema studies in Torino. I owe him the friendly collaboration I received from Professor Gianni Rondolino, who facilitated my research in silent Italian films at the Torino Museo del Cinema. To both of them go my warmest thanks and gratitude. I owe my warmest gratitude also to my editor, Stanislao Pugliese, for considering my manuscript for publication, and to his associate editor, Brigitte Shull, and her editorial assistant, Lee Norton, whose kind and generous assistance and encouragement have been crucial to my reviewing and completing this book. I am also very thankful to Monica Vitti, Maurizio Nichetti, and Dr. Giovanni Cobolli-Gigli, assistant director of the Gruppo Editoriale Fabbri, Bompiani, for the use of the filmic and photographic material needed for this book.

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Introduction

It is incredible how very few Italian directors and scriptwriters are seriously interested in what a woman thinks or by what a woman is moved . . . In cinema, when they write a script, nobody writes for women characters. How many times a scriptwriter has told me: “My dear Monica, how can I write cinema stories for you? You are a woman and what does a woman do? She does not go to war; she has no profession . . . What can I have you do? Only a love story can I make you do; that you have children, suffer, he leaves you, you are desperate . . .” You see, this is the only function they give me. —Monica Vitti

T

he above quotation is from Monica Vitti,1 a well-known “diva” of Italian cinema whose acting and directorial expertise I greatly admire, and it succinctly provides a good explanation of the roles that women are supposed to play in Italian cinema, thus preparing the readers for the main topic of this book. This type of research, according to Christine Gledhill, has already been undertaken in the United States with results that seem to validate Monica Vitti’s statement, as they uphold the view that in film, women “do not have a voice, that the female point of view is not heard.”2 To my knowledge, this type of research has not yet been undertaken in Italy in book form, and it is the goal of this book to raise more interest for this topic. For several years, while teaching and doing research on Italian film and gender studies as a professor of Italian at the University of California at Los Angeles, I thought of combining these two areas of study in a book that would collect my observations on the representation of women in Italian cinema. Women’s presence in Italian cinema is indeed paramount, as most Italian films seem to weave their narrative plots around beautiful women and their love relationships with men. The film discourse, however, seems to limit the relevance of the female protagonists’ role vis-à-vis the male protagonists’ role, and consequently the film spectators, faced with fascinating images of beautiful but powerless women on the screen, find themselves constantly confronted with what Nancy Chodorov calls “the intertwining of sexuality, gender, inequality and power.”3 The image of a woman as a beautiful object to be admired and desired brings up an important topic in Italian cinema, the topic of divismo (star idolatry). This topic is clearly inspired by the importance that especially dive (female stars), such as Eleonora Duse or Francesca Bertini, had in earlier theatrical performances in accordance with the appeal they had on their theater audiences. Naturally, the large screen offered the perfect frame for gigantic images of beloved actresses and

2 WOMEN, DESIRE, AND POWER IN ITALIAN CINEMA

actors to be openly admired by masses of spectators ready to show in any possible way their total admiration for their idols. Such spectacular images of beautiful creatures perfectly complied with the sexual objectification of famous silent cinema dive, such as Francesca Bertini, Lyda Borelli, or Pina Menichelli, who were well on their way in the 1920s to becoming the most spectacular sexual objects of male desire on the screen and on film publicity posters. Woman as diva and as spectacle—that is, as pleasurable, sexy object of male desire4—became one of the most prevalent, iconic images of woman in Italian cinema since its origins. Later on, other stars, like Lucia Bosé, Silvana Mangano, Sofia Loren,5 Gina Lollobrigida, Laura Antonelli, and the “maggiorate fisiche”6 of the comedy films of the 1950s and 1960s (such as Marisa Allasio or Silvana Pampanini), perfectly exemplified such an image, just as Claudia Cardinale did from the 1960s on. Closer to our times, Maria Grazia Cucinotta and Monica Bellucci are doing the same in the first decades of the twenty-first century. Other actresses became equally beloved dive even if they represented images of femininity different from woman as exclusively represented as a spectacular, sexual object of male desire, like Alida Valli did for the audiences of the 1930s and 1940s or Anna Magnani, from the 1930s on; Giulietta Masina from the 1960s on; and Stefania Sandrelli, Mariangela Melato, and Monica Vitti from the 1970s on. Italian cinema seems indeed to accept in its stardom catalogue different icons of femininity, which reflect the ethnic variety of the Italian social and cultural tradition. Within this context, the phenomenon of divismo also includes male protagonists, who, as divi, are used in Italian films as a means to provide a variety of iconic representations of masculinity. Marcello Mastroianni has always been the ideal divo to represent the “Italian lover” type from the 1930s on, while Vittorio De Sica, as actor in the 1930s and 1940s, as well as Giancarlo Giannini from the 1960s on, have been very popular divi representing a kinder and more endearing type of masculinity. Alberto Sordi, Nino Manfredi, and Roberto Benigni have been equally popular divi, respectively from the 1950s and from the 1970s on, representing a playful, amusing kind of Italian masculinity that is unafraid of making fun of itself. Italian directors seem to be very aware of the importance that dive as well as divi have in ensuring the popular and critical success of their films. Casting assumes, therefore, a very essential role in their directing activities, as they use, as very important “vehicles” of their representation of femininity and masculinity, the actors and actresses who are the beloved divi and dive of their public. Because of the very presence of these divi and dive on the screen, the film spectators are willing not only to flock in the theaters where their films are playing but also to accept the implicit esthetic or sociological message of the films where they are cast. Consequently, one cannot underestimate the important role that the great dive of Italian silent cinema had in its success all over the world or that great dive like Anna Magnani and Ingrid Bergman had in Rossellini’s films, Giulietta Masina in Fellini’s, or Monica Vitti in Antonioni’s. Nor can we ignore the enormous impact that Gina Lollobrigida and Sofia Loren had in the comedy films of the 1950s through the 1970s. This study will therefore try to point out the importance of the presence of female and male stars in Italian cinema as ideal “vehicles” of the concepts of femininity and masculinity that we find in Italian cinema. Indeed,

INTRODUCTION 3

there seems to be a close connection between the traditional image of femininity as spectacle and divismo. So, when such an image of femininity starts to lose exclusivity in Italian films of the last three decades of the twentieth century, the phenomenon of divismo becomes less noticeable in Italian cinema. In general Italian cinema, like most of the other forms of Italian art before it, shows concern for social and economic issues pertaining to Italian culture. From its very origin, it has preferred, as a cinematic model, the filmic form used by the Lumière brothers, two French inventors, who, in the 1890s, first showed an interest in recording, through filming and projection, several aspects of real life, thus linking, from the very beginning, film with everyday reality.7 Obviously, the representation that films give of reality is not merely a photographic rendition of it. It is rather a choice or reinvention of reality according to the aesthetic requirements of the cinematic art form, closely related to other similar art forms, and reflecting the aesthetic, ethical, or sociological preferences of their directors. A well-known critical axiom sustains that art and artists are closely affected by the social system and dominant ideology of the country where their art has its roots and develops. Consequently, Italian cinema, since it works within the Italian social system, shows the influence of both the social institution of patriarchy8 and the dominant Catholic ideology that have controlled life—especially women’s lives—in Italy for many centuries and probably more effectively than in other European countries. According to Catholic and patriarchal ideologies, virginity and sexual control, together with submissiveness and passivity, are the essential qualifications of “good,” traditional femininity. They, indeed, signify the ideal woman—that is, a woman whose behavior is harmless to men and socially devised according to a male point of view. In the Italian social system so strongly influenced by patriarchal and Catholic ideologies, women’s roles are usually confined within the family. There women are codified as completely submitted in their early life to the authority of their fathers in their role as obedient daughters and are expected to ignore their sexual drives; later on, they submit to the authority of their husbands in their role as submissive and faithful wives and devoted mothers. Most Italian films seem to construct female characters according to the aforementioned codification—that is, as submissive wives and self-sacrificing mothers9 within a family environment, representing “good” women, or as uncontrollable, sexy creatures dangerous to men10 and to society, representing “bad” women and deserving, therefore, of punishment and social reprimand. Given such specific codification of female behavior, the roles in which women are usually cast in Italian films are as wives and mothers. If a woman tries to resist the requirements of her assigned role, she is swiftly eliminated—that is, barred from the screen—through death (like some of the heroines of Italian silent films to be considered in Chapter 2, or like Nadia in Visconti’s Rocco e i suoi fratelli [Rocco and His Brothers, 1957] in Chapter 5); through early, unexplained disappearance (like Anna in Antonioni’s L’avventura [The Adventure; 1959] in Chapter 5, or Maddalena in Fellini’s La dolce vita [La Dolce Vita; 1959] in Chapter 6); through social dismissal (like Nina in De Sica’s I bambini ci guardano [The Children Are Watching Us; 1942] in Chapter 3); through social isolation (like Nannie in Rossellini’s Il

4 WOMEN, DESIRE, AND POWER IN ITALIAN CINEMA

miracolo [The Miracle; 1948] in Chapter 4, or Irene in Rossellini’s Europa ’51 [No Greater Love; 1952] in Chapter 5); or through public humiliation (like Assunta in the 1915 version of Assunta Spina [Assunta Spina] in Chapter 2); and so on.11 Other Italian films construct women as inferior to men and very dependent on them in accordance to the traditional patriarchal system that has dominated Italian culture and society for several centuries.12 Some of the most revealing representations of weak femininity can be found in the protagonist of Rossellini’s Una voce umana (A human’s voice; 1947–1948), in Emma in Fellini’s La dolce vita (La Dolce Vita; 1960), in Stella in Pasolini’s Accattone (Accattone!; 1961), or in Eugenia in Comencini’s Mio Dio come sono caduta in basso! (Until Marriage Do Us Part; 1974). On the other hand, the comedy genre provides several examples of deviation from such traditional type of representation of weak femininity, as several light comedy films already have shown in the 1930s such as La segretaria privata (The Private Secretary; 1931) or I grandi magazzini (Department Store; 1939). In some films women are cast as mothers, as such a role seems to place women in a particularly important position even if only within the home environment and only if this female power is safely maintained under the control of their husbands’ authority. Several Italian films are very explicit about the way women view their role in the family as a source of power. For this reason, in order to keep that power, they willingly embrace and support their husbands’ authority even if it may be hurtful to them and to the other women in the family. Germi’s film Sedotta e abbandonata (Seduced and Abandoned; 1963), to be analyzed in Chapter 6, provides a good example of women’s complicit approach to male authoritarianism. In Italian films mothers may show two different patterns of behavior: by accepting the cultural codes set up as correct patterns of motherly behavior, women fit within the model of “good” motherhood, and by deviating from those cultural codes, women are labeled as “bad” or “phallic” mothers.13 Literary and cinematic texts provide abundant examples of these two different views of women in their role as mother. In doing so, most texts are “complicit” with the codes of behavior dictated to women by social or psychological pressures.14 In Italian cinema, for instance, we can find more examples of “good” mothers than we can of “phallic” mothers: “Good” mothers who immediately come to mind include the mother in Cenere (Ashes; 1916), Maria in De Sica’s Ladri di biciclette (The Bicycle Thief; 1948), Angelina in Zampa’s L’onorevole Angelina (Angelina: Member of Parliament; 1947), Rosalia in Visconti’s Rocco e i suoi fratelli, the Princess in Visconti’s Il gattopardo (The Leopard; 1963), or the mother in Archibugi’s Mignon è partita (Mignon Has Come to Stay; 1988). However, Nina in De Sica’s I bambini ci guardano, Giulietta’s glamorous and manipulative mother in Fellini’s Giulietta degli spiriti (Juliet of the Spirits; 1965), Sophie in Visconti’s La caduta degli dei (The Damned; 1969), or the Baroness in Visconti’s Gruppo di famiglia in un interno (Conversation Piece; 1974) clearly fit the role of the “bad” or “phallic” mother. Other films resist being complicit with the cultural codes of traditional cinema and create characters and situations that do not fit such codes tightly, thus projecting through them a potentially transgressive image of motherhood. I am thinking of Maddalena in Visconti’s Bellissima (Very Beautiful; 1951), Clara in De Sica’s Una breve vacanza (A Brief Vacation; 1973), Giuliana in Visconti’s L’innocente (The

INTRODUCTION 5

Innocent; 1976), or Maria in Nichetti’s Ladri di saponette (The Icicle Thief; 1989). This potentially transgressive image of motherhood, however, with the exception of Giuliana in Visconti’s L’innocente does not usually persist throughout the film, as, at the end, most of these previously resisting women give up their opposition and become traditional motherly types. Some women, cast as a wife or/and mother in some of the Italian films made by female directors and analyzed in the last chapters of this book help to reconsider, from a less traditional point of view, the problems of family life. This is clear in Monica Vitti’s Francesca è mia (Francesca Is Mine; 1986) and Scandalo segreto (Secret Scandal; 1989), in Francesca Archibugi’s Mignon è partita and L’albero delle pere (The Pear Tree; 1998), or in Cristina Comencini’s Va’ dove ti porta il cuore (Follow Your Heart; 1996), Matrimoni (Marriages; 1998), and Il più bel giorno della mia vita (The Best Day of My Life; 2002). Italian films do not seem to offer women a great variety of roles or to provide very progressive representations of women even when they convey a clearly sympathetic image of them as well meaning and sensitive individuals. In so doing, cinema, as an art form, seems to follow the path of representation proposed by the other popular media that preceded it, such as the theatrical genres of melodrama and opera. Cinema is particularly indebted to those theatrical media, as the film analyses in Chapter 2 focused on the dramma passionale and the melodrama genre will try to demonstrate. A few Italian films show different signifying strategies that, by projecting women in a benevolent and hopeful light, seem to reveal a resistance to the rules and codes of traditional Italian cinema as if inspired by neorealism’s innovative and compassionate concern for all those human beings that an unfair and elitist social system ignore and abandon to their own unhappy fate. These exceptions seem to reveal a “resisting” point of view by proposing a possibility for change through a female character, thus challenging the dominant, conservative masculine point of view, which instead seems to be interested in maintaining the status quo.15 Moreover, the films belonging to the comedy genre, such as Germi’s Sedotta e abbandonata (Seduced and Abandoned; 1963), Monicelli’s La ragazza con la pistola (The Girl with a Gun; 1968), or Scola’s C’eravamo tanto amati (We Loved Each Other So Much; 1974), aim at “decentering the masculinity” and highlighting the female potential. Some of the films made from the 1950s on by some of the masters of Italian cinema, such as Rossellini’s Stromboli terra di Dio (Stromboli; 1949) and Europa ’51 (No Greater Love; 1952), Bertolucci’s Strategia del ragno (The Spider’s Stratagem; 1972), Fellini’s Giulietta degli spiriti (Juliet of the Spirits; 1965), Antonioni’s Il deserto rosso (Red Desert; 1964), or De Sica’s Una breve vacanza (A Brief Vacation; 1973), also provide good examples of a “resisting point of view” toward traditional cinema, while some of the films made by contemporary female and male directors, as discussed in Chapters 8 and 9, offer good examples of resisting women, such as Monica Vitti’s Scandalo segreto (Secret Scandal; 1989), Roberto Benigni’s Johnny Stecchino (Johnny Stecchino; 1991) and Il mostro (The Monster; 1994), or Maurizio Nichetti’s Volere volare (To Want to Fly; 1991) and Luna e l’altra (Luna and the Other; 1996). Such resistance to traditional codification seems to reflect the social changes that were considered in Italian society of the 1950s and

6 WOMEN, DESIRE, AND POWER IN ITALIAN CINEMA

1960s and that eventually took place in the legislative and sociocultural system of Italy in the following decades, thus validating that art is closely intertwined with the cultural humus from which it takes its inspiration. My analyses will usually start with a brief outline of the plot of each film in order to make sure that all my readers will be able to follow my readings of how the film constructs its plot and characters, thus providing a pleasurable experience to its spectators. The specifically pleasurable goal that cinema has is indeed inherent to its very essence as a visual art form, which, unlike the theater, represents on the screen the shadows of things and persons rather than actual material objects and flesh and blood human beings. In fact, according to psychoanalytical theories, a strong connection exists between cinema and the unconscious.16 This connection produces most of the pleasure that cinema offers to its spectators. Cinematic representations take place in the dark and are organized with images that are projected on a bright screen in front of the spectators, while the light source, which projects the images, is behind them. This mise-en-scène that cinema presents is strongly reminiscent of Plato’s cave and of its play of illusion versus reality. These conditions powerfully underscore the appeal that cinema has as a space where spectators, even if rationally aware of the illusory quality of what they are watching, fall prey to the hypnotic power of the images they see on the screen. Simultaneously, they feel free to project their own fantasies and desires on those same images. In this way, they fulfill their own desire for and pleasure in what might be considered pure illusion under different circumstances. Cinema, then, creates the ambiance and the opportunity for its spectators to fulfill their desires at a level that stands halfway between illusion and reality while giving in to their own unconscious search for pleasure by accepting the film’s manipulation of desire. This process is what suggests the connection between cinema and the unconscious and has given cinema the intriguing title of Industry of Desire.17 In this view, cinema is a visual art aimed at satisfying human desire18 and is connected to the erotic search for beauty and sex as well as to the intellectual need for understanding and self-realization. Cinema, because of its specification as a visual art form, triggers this level of response in its audiences, thus activating the spectators’ subconscious ideological beliefs that they have inherited from their cultural past. This subconscious reaction may explain the enormous success that Italian cinema has enjoyed with all types of audiences from its origins to the present; that is, as Jonathan Rosenbaum explains, “What is designed to make people feel good at the movies has a profound relation to how and what they think and feel about the world around them.”19 I suspect that the success that Italian films have been enjoying for at least one hundred years may also be due to the fact that they appeal particularly to the traditional type of audience that is controlled by and has often been victim of “sexual conservatism.”20 This special appeal that cinema has for its public also explains the appeal that cinematic female and male divi have for their spectators. By watching and identifying with their beloved divi, the traditional spectators fulfill their often-subconscious desire for beauty, sex, and self-realization within that special cinematic space between illusion and reality provided by the images appearing on the screen in front of them. The topic of divismo therefore becomes significant in assessing

INTRODUCTION 7

what makes Italian cinema so successful with a traditional type of audience whose “sexual conservatism” is buried deep “in the dark silent layers of our mental life.”21 It is not my intention here to give a rigorous feminist reading22 of all films analyzed, even if I am concerned with feminist issues and use a feminist critical approach anytime a filmic text requires it. In fact, I rather prefer to analyze these films and the “sexual conservatism” of their representation of women with a combined formalist/sociological reading23 that aims to point out the different cinematic techniques used to highlight the pattern of social and cultural connections with which the discourse in each film constructs its gender relationships. According to Timothy Corrigan, “Any cultural product or creation carries implicitly or explicitly ideas about how the world is or should be seen, and how men and women should see each other in it. The clothes you wear express social values, just like the films you see communicate social values.”24 My film analyses will try to approach each film’s discourse with a critical reading that will focus on the roles in which women are represented and on what social values such representations may reveal. It is my hope that by reading this book, readers will better understand the complexity of Italian womanhood, which closely reflects the often-contradictory complexity of Italian society, so deeply embedded in tradition while, at the same time, yearning for defiance, transgression, and change.25 Cinema, indeed, as an art form concerned with cultural and sociological issues, succeeds in focusing upon specific situations and gender relationships that remind audiences of their own real-life experiences and thus raises their awareness of the social or moral problems they may create in society. This study deals especially with the recurrent concern of Italian cinema with gender issues. This concern is a demonstration of the centrality of gender issues in both Italian society and art. This study tries to convey the urgency of such a concern. It is indeed my hope that twenty-first century film spectators and readers may be more aware than their predecessors were of how cinema as an art form solicits their participation in recognizing the need for change, and even for subversion and reinvention, of the social and cultural conditions affecting gender relationships in Italian society. I was delighted to see a similar view of the unique significance of cinema as an art form dedicated to foster social awareness expressed in a short, but very convincing, piece published in one of the Italian leading newspapers under the title “E’ il cinema la vera coscienza della societá occidentale!” (which, in English, reads, “Cinema is the true conscience of Western civilization!”)26 written by one of the most important Italian contemporary sociologists, Francesco Alberoni. Women, Desire, and Power in Italian Cinema is not a history of Italian cinema. It provides a survey of how women and their relationships with men are represented in Italian films through different cinematic genres at different chronological times. Like any general review work of this type, Women, Desire, and Power in Italian Cinema tends to concentrate preferably on items that provide more information on its main topic rather than on others that are less promising. One of the goals of this book is to provide as many examples as I can possibly find for my readers. This approach might create a sense of unbalance in the presentation of the filmic material chosen for discussion, as the analyses of some films may cover several

8 WOMEN, DESIRE, AND POWER IN ITALIAN CINEMA

pages, and the analyses of others no more than one or two pages, while other films are barely mentioned. I am, therefore, asking the readers to bear with such an unbalance as a practically unavoidable situation in this type of book. The readers will probably notice that in Women, Desire, and Power in Italian Cinema, the bibliography provided is limited.27 The reason is that, as this work is a pioneering book in the field of the representation of women in Italian cinema, specific references to this topic are scarce. On the other hand, the most general type of reference to the films or directors mentioned is easily available in the several histories of Italian cinema already in press as well as in my own earlier book.28 Women, Desire, and Power in Italian Cinema is composed of nine chapters, preceded by a general introduction and followed by a short conclusion. The nine chapters of the book provide analyses of Italian films chronologically throughout the twentieth century. Women, Desire, and Power in Italian Cinema deals in English with a foreign national cinema, and, consequently, I felt it was important to provide all English-speaking readers with some background of Italian social history and culture, in order to help them to better understand the sociopolitical and socioeconomic situations that Italian films may present to them. Each chapter of the book starts with a brief survey of the historical/cultural trends in Italy according to the specific decade of the twentieth century being discussed, except for Chapter 9.29 At the end of each chapter, I have included a brief survey of the types of representations of women found in the films analyzed for each specific decade in order to make it easy for the readers to follow the chronological development of the view of women in the Italian cinema of the twentieth century. In the conclusion, I have summarized what roles Italian films have shown women playing in the period covered by the book and have proposed the conclusion that can be drawn from this study. Since the Italian directors I am considering are mostly very aware of their cultural and literary background, I mention and discuss the literary sources of their films wherever such sources seem particularly significant for the aesthetic and social message of the films. The nine chapters of the book deal with the way women are portrayed in Italian films, both silent and with sound tracks, through different genres all throughout the twentieth century, as specifically per the following: Chapter 1, “Cabiria: Women in the Italian Colossals,” analyzes Cabiria (1914), the most successful of the early Italian spectacular film epics, which centered upon the memory of imperial Rome and its effects on the molding of a new nationalistic spirit in Italian society of the first two decades of the twentieth century. These spectacular epic films, called Colossals, fascinated audiences all over the Western world, thus gaining Italian cinema international recognition. Cabiria was the most successful and critically acclaimed of these Colossals. The filmic text of Cabiria is not analyzed here as an epic film (as critics usually do), but it is instead approached from a different critical perspective that, by focusing on the narrative strategies of the filmic discourse, reveals that the narrative function of its two female protagonists is central to the development of the film’s narrative. Furthermore, the two female protagonists introduce, for the first time in Italian cinema, two important myths concerning women (the woman-as-slave myth and the femme-fatale myth)

INTRODUCTION 9

that will be present often in Italian films from then on. Cabiria then, besides being an important epic film, also turns out to be very important for its representation of women and for the essential function it gives them in its narrative structure. Chapter 2, “Woman-as-Spectacle in Love-Story Films: The Dramma Passionale versus the Melodrama Genre and the Phenomenon of Divismo,” shows that the phenomenon of divismo (or star idolatry) originated in Italy around the second decade of the twentieth century and was nurtured by the appeal that the sexy and dangerous femmes-fatales of the love stories and melodramas of the time had for their audiences. The focus here is on “woman-as-spectacle” as represented in silent films with dive such as Francesca Bertini, Lyda Borelli, and Pina Menichelli. The cinematic texts analyzed are some dramma passionale films and some melodrama films. This chapter discusses also a melodrama subgenre, called the maternal melodrama, which was very popular in the first decade of the twentieth century, as Cenere (Ashes; 1916) starring Eleonora Duse well proves. Chapter 3, “‘Mothers of Italy’: The Legacy of Fascism in Italian Cinema,” concentrates on the way women are depicted in Italian films during the fascist regime in the 1930s and early 1940s. In these films, motherhood is the role that is most often assigned to women in accordance to the strict fascist codification of women’s behavior typical of those times. These films belong mainly to the historical and to the light-comedy genre, even if some films seem to still favor a melodramatic mood. This chapter deals also with some films that are considered “forerunners” of the neorealist movement. Chapter 4, “Women in Neorealist Cinema,” deals with how the internationally acclaimed Italian neorealist cinema movement depicted women. Some of the most important neorealist art films are analyzed to point out the innovative representation of women provided especially by filmmakers like Rossellini. The next five chapters consider the representation of women offered in the art films made between the 1950s and the 1990s by some of the Italian film masters, or auteurs, of the twentieth century: Antonioni, Bertolucci, De Sica, Fellini, Pasolini, Rossellini, and Visconti. They also analyze films by some of the masters of comedy-Italian-Style, such as Comencini L., Germi, Monicelli, Risi, Scola, and Sordi, by some of the best-known comic actors/directors of our times, such as Benigni, Nichetti, and Troisi, and by some of the best female directors of our times, including Wertmüller, Cavani, Vitti, Archibugi, and Comencini C. Chapter 5, “A Woman’s Search for Change and Meaningful Relationships in the Films of the 1950s,” considers the way women are represented in Italian films made in the 1950s when Italians, just after the end of World War II, were still hoping to achieve a better type of life based on social cooperation and understanding. Indeed, some Italian films of this time propose unusual female characters who, even if unsuccessfully, oppose or try to change the status quo of their patriarchal society. By using such unusual female protagonists and other different signifying strategies, these films seem to convey what was so strongly felt in Italy after World War II—that is, the hope for social change and better human understanding. On the other hand, other films of this same period still presented a very traditional view of woman. Chapter 6, “Women and Men as Victims of Violence and Alienation in the Films of the 1960s,” analyzes the way women and men are depicted in the films

10 WOMEN, DESIRE, AND POWER IN ITALIAN CINEMA

of this time, a time when the society focused its interest nearly exclusively on economic growth and financial success, thus reducing men and women to becoming the victims of violence and alienation—the social plagues of the time. Some comic films of this decade provided relief from such vexing questions by using ridicule to criticize social unfairness. Chapter 7, “The Sexual Power Game and Its Impact on Women and Men in the Films of the 1970s,” considers how gender relationships develop often into antagonistic sexual power games in the films of this decade, which had a political history that was one of the most troublesome and confused in Italian modern history, when social unrest and terrorism corroded the fiber of Italian society and made it aware of its problems and deficiencies. Important Italian female directors, such as Lina Wertmüller and Liliana Cavani, become well known in this period. Several films of this period develop around a woman’s story rather than a man’s and are thus centered on her resistance to the social clichés of traditional society. ComedyItalian-style films were being produced and very successfully released during this period; they provided some relief by using humor to deflate male control. Chapter 8, “Decentering the Masculine and Spotlighting the Feminine in the Films of the 1980s,”30 analyzes several of the films made in this decade by both female and male directors that represent women and men as resistant to or transgressive of the gender codification typical of traditional Italian society. Chapter 9, “Female Agency in the Films of the 1990s,”31 focuses on how women are portrayed as trying more and more often to voice their resistance to the dictates of traditional family life or of their traditional social environment. Most of the films analyzed in this chapter weave their plot around a woman’s story, thus giving a dominant voice to a woman’s actions, words, and interests. The choice of films in Women, Desire, and Power in Italian Cinema has been mostly determined by the types of women’s roles that the films presented. The availability, or lack thereof, of the films for viewing as many times as I considered necessary for a correct analysis was also an important factor in my choice. Some films of the early twentieth century were difficult to track down, as few of them were easily available to me in California. This reduced my selection to a few worthy specimens that I had the good fortune to obtain from the archives of the Museo del Cinema in Torino, Italy, thanks to the intervention of my colleague, Gianni Rondolino, professor of cinema studies at the University of Torino. As I do hope that this book will be read not only by film experts but also by a nonspecialist public with a general interest in Italian culture and film, it is written in a fashion accessible to a broad readership.

1

Cabiria

Women in the Italian Colossals Historical and Cultural Introduction

I

taly is a relatively young nation, as it only achieved unification in 1870. The process of unifying its several regions was far from smooth. It was indeed difficult to find common ground for planning a parliamentary government that would be acceptable to all regions and for formulating a set of satisfactory policies for common political and economic development and growth. Several more or less conservative administrations governed in the first fifty years following unification. In 1915, Italy, under the pressure of the coalition in support of intervention, entered World War I on the side of Russia, France, and England against Austria and Germany. At that point, Italy had to cope with the devastating effects of the war on its population and on its economy. By the end of the war (1918), the cinematic industry, which had been so successful before the war, had reached its lowest level of production ever just like several other industrial and commercial national activities. Italian Cinema in the First Two Decades of the Twentieth Century The years from 1909 to 1915 corresponded to what was called Italy’s cinematic “Golden Age,” as it captured and dominated the world market. When cinema burst into the Italian theaters in the first fifteen years of the twentieth century, it appropriated them with a bang after just a short period of adjustment. Audiences started flocking to the movie theaters and made their liking for the “spectacular” known. Consequently, Italian directors and producers, although mostly inclined to convey realistic representations of everyday life in Lumière’s style, found themselves more and more involved in producing spectacular historical films (that came to be called Colossals). Some of them were Gli ultimi giorni di Pompei (The Last Days of Pompeii; 1913) directed by Mario Caserini, Quo vadis? (Where are you going?; 1912) directed by Enrico Guazzoni,1 and Cabiria (1914) directed by Giovanni

12 WOMEN, DESIRE, AND POWER IN ITALIAN CINEMA

Pastrone, which delighted their national audiences while also conquered foreign markets, thus catapulting Italian cinema to international fame. As already suggested in the Introduction, Italian cinema, from its very beginning, does not hesitate to draw its topics from other media, especially literature and theater, and the Colossals easily demonstrate such a trend, as several of them are adaptations from literary texts, both national and international. As the titles suggest, these imposing productions known as Colossals, focused on historical and spectacular events. The Last Days of Pompeii, for instance, is an adaptation of the 1843 novel by Bulwer-Lytton, and it deals with the volcanic eruption of Mount Vesuvius and its devastating effects on Pompeii. Other films depict equally spectacular war situations involving Republican as well as Imperial Rome and its military campaigns for the conquest of the world, as is the case in Cabiria. Cabiria is often mentioned as the best example of the Italian Colossals, as it combines several of the spectacular and historical features appreciated by the audiences of those times. The film highlights the power and glory of Rome as a world-conquering institution. In visualizing this historical process, Cabiria also satisfied the craving for the spectacular that, at the beginning of the twentieth century, had become synonymous with the filmic process in the mind of audiences all over the world. The spectacular quality of the film was formally revealed by the sumptuousness of its images and its costumes and by the magnificent and careful organization of its scenes of military campaigns and encounters. This effect was further enhanced by the overwhelming power of the music, written expressly for the film by Ildebrando Pizzetti, the most famous Italian composer of the time, and played by a one hundred twenty–member orchestra in the theater where the first projection of the film took place. Indeed Cabiria’s success as the best Colossal of the time, facilitated by a perfectly organized publicity campaign, spread quickly outside of Italy, and the film was praised as a masterpiece all over Europe and even in the United States. Cabiria’s fame was also greatly enhanced in Europe by the collaboration of Gabriele D’Annunzio, the most important and popular poet and playwright of the time, who drafted the intertitles of the film. Indeed the name of the film’s director, Pastrone, was hardly mentioned in the posters advertising the film that publicized it; instead, it was advertised as “D’Annunzio’s Cabiria” (see Figure 1). As its critics have long established, Cabiria represents the highest achievement of the historical-mythological trend in early Italian cinema, as they viewed it as a special film proposing several important, popular myths, such as the myth of the strong popular hero, embodied by Maciste. The film focuses on several historical events, such as the Punic Wars between Rome and Carthage, Hannibal’s conquest of Italy, the Roman siege of Syracuse, the eruption of Mt. Etna, and so on. The film presents all of the historical events with absolute freedom and combines them with additional fictional situations, characters, and comic motives inspired by the Latin comedy tradition. The narrative action takes place in different locations, while the spectacular and climactic moments—such as the sequences showing Mt. Etna’s eruption, the naval battle at Syracuse, or the sacrificial rituals to the god Moloch—are also moments of high stage-designing and cinematographic invention.2 For the goal I have set for this book, I would like to add a different reading of the film by highlighting the essential role played in the film narrative by the

CABIRIA 13

two main female characters of the film: Cabiria and Sophonisba. By following the development of the life stories of the two female characters, it becomes evident that the film’s narrative structure is firmly rooted in them, with Cabiria controlling the first part, and Sophonisba the second. In this reading that closely follows the female protagonists of the film, two of what have been called the most “spectacular and climactic moments” of the film—the eruption of Mt. Etna and the sacrificial rituals to the god Moloch—are closely related to Cabiria’s story. The volcanic eruption is the cause of Cabiria’s separation from her family when she is just a little girl and of her subsequent abduction by a band of Phoenician pirates who take her to Carthage and sell her to the High Priest Kartholo for him to sacrifice to the god Moloch. Cabiria provides therefore the trait-d’union between these two spectacular events of the film, which by themselves are not directly connected with its key epic conflict—that is, the Punic Wars between the Romans and the Phoenicians. Only the presence of Cabiria gives these two events a convincing narrative function, thus confirming the importance of this female character within the narrative strategies of the film. This is also evident if we consider Cabiria’s role in suggesting, even at this early time in the film, its ideological message in favor of the Romans. In the episode of the sacrificial rituals to the god Moloch, Cabiria, as a little Roman girl kidnapped by Phoenicians pirates and doomed to be sacrificed by a Phoenician priest, stands for innocence and goodness, while her Phoenician abductors and tormentors are cast as villains. This pro-Roman message will clearly surface in the second part of the film, especially through the role of the Roman Consul Scipio. In addition, the two heroines introduce, for the first time, myths about women that will become popular later on in Italian cinema. Through the character of Cabiria, the film develops the myth of woman-as-slave or of woman-as-innocentvictim to be sacrificed in order to maintain the status quo. This myth will later materialize around the image of the helpless and weak woman, whose fate depends exclusively on men who are willing to help her in order to demonstrate their physical and intellectual superiority. On the other hand, through the character of Sophonisba, the film brings into the cinematic discourse the myth of woman-asdangerous-temptress, or femme fatale, often found in literary narratives. Furthermore, through its female characters, the film activates several different narrative dimensions that enrich its narrative texture. The positioning of Cabiria as a helpless little girl and as a victim to be sacrificed, introduces in the film the “pathetic mood”3 dimension, typical of what will later be called the “woman’s film.” Moreover, the imaging of Cabiria as a little girl in need of help provides the film with the dramatic suspense typical of the “adventure film.” Through a helpless heroine, cast in a very dangerous situation, the film borrows, indeed, from the action-adventure genre in creating the narrative need of an active hero, personified, in this case, by the Roman Patrician Axilla, whose mission is to save the little Cabiria from her deadly fate. He accomplishes this task with the help of an extraordinary assistant, Maciste, who introduces in the film another myth that will make his character very popular in Italian cinema, the myth of the Good Giant, already well known in the narrative tradition of the folktale. Maciste appeals to the popular imagination with his Good Giant mythical qualities—that

14 WOMEN, DESIRE, AND POWER IN ITALIAN CINEMA

is, an exceptional physical strength and a kindly disposition.4 The two male heroes successfully accomplish the task of saving Cabiria twice, and at different chronological times. The first time is when Cabiria is still a child, and her savior has to find her an appropriate protector, until she is ready to recognize him as her savior and mate. The second saving attempt takes place when Cabiria has grown into a beautiful young lady and has fallen again into the hands of the High Priest, who still intends to sacrifice her to Moloch. The film narrative positions twice the heroine as a helpless slave, completely under the control of a powerful and cruel man. Technically, the camera strategy of hardly focusing on her effectively succeeds in imaging Cabiria as weak and powerless. When she is on the screen for the first time as a little girl with her parents in her beautiful house in Sicily, the camera concentrates almost exclusively on her father rather than on her. Besides, she is never on the screen by herself but always with other characters, and, in these cases, the camera mostly focuses on the latter rather than on Cabiria. In addition, the camera often loses sight of her and does not distinguish her in crowds. For example, in the temple at the moment of the sacrificial ceremony, the viewers do not distinguish her from the other sacrificial victims until the two heroes come onto the screen and rescue her or, more precisely, until Maciste snatches her away from the priest who is about to throw her into the flaming pit inside the statue of Moloch. In this situation, the camera’s eye and interest are not on Cabiria, but rather on the male heroes and especially on Maciste’s incredible feats of strength. Furthermore, in several of the scenes where she is with other characters, the camera frames her almost exclusively from the back. This happens, for example, in the scenes with her nurse at the time of the eruption of Mount Etna or when, after Axilla and Maciste have rescued her in the temple, the camera shows her from the back and Maciste from the front, while he embraces her and lightly touches her hair. Indeed, there is one feature in Cabiria, her blond, often disheveled hair that most of the characters, who are framed with her, from the nurse to Maciste, to Sophonisba and the High Priest, seem to view as most valuable. Her blond hair, in those Southern regions, like Sicily and Northern Africa, becomes decidedly a sign of difference and consequently of exotic beauty. In addition, whenever the narrative action becomes particularly lively, Cabiria is often treated as a lifeless object, abandoned somewhere in a corner, often off screen. This is the case in the staging of her rescue from the temple. Once the two male heroes have climbed up to the top of the temple, she is left motionless on the floor. Only after defeating their pursuers, Maciste eventually picks her up as a lifeless parcel and holds her under his arm to start their descent to the level of the street. The same positioning of Cabiria as a lifeless object occurs when Maciste meets Sophonisba in her palace gardens, where she is having a rendezvous with her suitor, Massinissa. Maciste begs her to take the child under her protection in order to save her from death in the temple as a sacrificial victim. Also in this sequence, Cabiria is left on the floor as a lifeless white bundle, until Sophonisba’s maid picks her up, but only after Sophonisba’s meeting with Massinissa is over. In this sequence, the camera focuses almost exclusively on Sophonisba, as if to make sure that the spectators are aware of the important role that she will be playing in the story from then on. The camera accomplishes this goal especially by focusing on her with the same technique used for the military heroes of the film; that is, the

CABIRIA 15

camera follows her with long takes ending on meaningful close-ups that reveal her beautiful body and face in detail. Once she agrees to protect Cabiria, Sophonisba takes over the main female role in the film. In fact, Cabiria, at that point, disappears entirely from the screen, to reappear only toward the end of the film, under the rather different image of a beautiful young woman, going under the name of Elissa. The etymology of this name is given in a revealing caption that underlines her fairness as part of her exotic appeal and her silences, clearly signifying her submissive status as slave. It’s quite clear that Cabiria’s narrative purpose in the first part of the film is fulfilled once she has been rescued by the two male heroes, and the film narrative needs another female protagonist to carry on the action of the film, through a different narrative strategy. Cabiria’s role, as the female protagonist of the film, is thus taken over by Sophonisba from the moment of her first rescue. Only toward the end of the film are the two female characters framed together when their stories intertwine in a very meaningful way that pulls together, in a grand finale, all the different narrative strategies of the film. The second part of the film deals more directly with the war between the Romans and the Phoenicians. The film cleverly develops this theme by closely connecting it with the character of Sophonisba and her love story with Massinissa. Sophonisba is openly on the side of the Phoenicians, while Massinissa is a valiant ally of the Romans. From the very beginning, Sophonisba is presented in such a way that the spectators are alerted to the significance, the power, and the danger that her physical beauty holds, not only for her, but also for several of the male protagonists of the plot, such as her husband, King Siface, Massinissa, and even the Roman Consul Scipio. The first time Sohonisba is projected on the screen, she is framed together with a large leopard that she strokes tenderly and with no show of fear. The proud and power-hungry side of her character is thus early signified through these shots of her with her unusual pet. The powerful and regal leopard foreshadows Sophonisba’s future as a powerful and dangerous queen. The eye of the camera lingers quite ostentatiously on her beautiful body, thus drawing the spectators’ attention to the seductive power of her sexuality. This initial presentation of Sophonisba on the screen with her leopard is immediately followed by a meaningful sequence of scenes focusing alternatively on her and Massinissa. The camera first focuses on Massinissa, the King of Numidia, to whom she is engaged and who is being entertained in the grand hall of her father’s palace. Then the focus is on Sophonisba, again in her room, after receiving Massinissa’s gift of precious jewels and his request for a rendezvous in the palace gardens at night. In these scenes, again the camera lingers on Sophonisba with close-ups and medium-length shots, especially on her beautiful face and changes of expression, to alert the spectators also to the complexity of her character. The happy, nearly childish smile at the sight of Massinissa’s gift soon contrasts with the preoccupied frowning of her forehead and with the knowingly self-confident, and at the same time languid, look in her eyes while she is contemplating a romantic meeting with him. Sophonisba is thus positioned in the film in a role that makes of her a powerful representative of the myth of the femme fatale,5 or the dangerous, beautiful

16 WOMEN, DESIRE, AND POWER IN ITALIAN CINEMA

woman who is the activator as well as the victim of forceful, passionate love and power drives. Sophonisba, in fact, is very attracted to the young and valiant Massinissa, but as soon as he loses his kingdom to Siface, she accepts her father’s decision to rescind her engagement to Massinissa and to marry the old but powerful Siface, who too is very much taken by her beauty. The love-power conflict in Sophonisba’s character is carefully formulated in full-length shots of her when she is at her father’s presence in the Grand Hall of the palace for the celebration of her engagement to Siface. In this scene, Sophonisba is at the presence of several important male characters, such as her father, King Siface, and the High Priest. In spite of this, her appearance in an elegant and sexy gown, with a large entourage of maids and servants, takes center stage, and the camera visibly focuses on her with closer takes and highlights her physical beauty and dignified countenance, which properly impress spectators on and off the screen. She is clearly ready and willing to become a queen, King Siface’s queen! Yet, when she is asked to join in the celebration of her own engagement, she can hardly hold the nuptial cup and falls into a revealing swoon that exposes her inner conflict between desire for power and love for Massinissa. From the Romans’ point of view, which will be made clear later, a point of view that seems to be shared also, at least partially, by the camera in her imaging, Sophonisba is a dangerous woman who uses her seductive power on men to influence their political alliances and to gain power for herself, Indeed, she is the one who convinces her husband, Siface, to fight against the Romans on the side of the Phoenicians, a choice that brings him loss of power and, ultimately, death. Later, the Roman Consul Scipio openly expresses his fears that she might induce Massinissa, too, to break his allegiance with the Romans. It is evident that Massinissa is very much affected by Sophonisba’s beauty, especially when, as soon as Siface dies, after losing his kingdom to the Romans and to Massinissa himself, who had been fighting on their side, he does not hesitate to propose marriage to Sophonisba, who promptly accepts. In this later scene, the camera concentrates again with medium and full-length shots on her majestic demeanor and physical beauty, enhanced by a tight black gown and a becoming veil. These shots confirm again her regal position as well as her powerful hold on her lover, who dedicates to her his sword and speeds up the wedding ceremony, visibly affected by her seductive beauty. Soon, Sophonisba’s seductress role reveals also its hidden motivation—that is, her hope that through their marriage, Massinissa can spare her the humiliation of being taken prisoner to Rome. Massinissa, however, cannot convince Scipio, who unwaveringly believes that Sophonisba is a very dangerous woman, especially for the strong influence she has on Massinissa, and is determined to take her with him to Rome and make her an important part of his war booty. When Massinissa realizes that he is unable to spare Sophonisba that humiliation, he sends her another gift, not jewels this time, but poison, with a note praising her royal strength. The captions on the screen read, “Massinissa sends Sophonisba what is worthy only of a regal heart.” As a real femme fatale, Sophonisba is at the same time the activator and the victim of the fatal passion that she has inspired in both Siface and Massinissa and

CABIRIA 17

of her own inner conflict between love and desire for power. Her end emphasizes particularly her role as victim of the image that the world of men has created of her, as a dangerous woman to be feared, subdued, and eventually eliminated. Well aware of her destiny, Sophonisba swallows the poison, preferring to die a queen rather than to keep on living as a prisoner of the Romans. The last few scenes where Sophonisba’s drama ends masterfully balance the imaging of her as a powerful queen who still has a whole court under her command and, at the same time, as a dying victim of her own destiny as well as of Roman intransigent authoritarianism. Toward Cabiria, Sophonisba’s role is ambivalent. She protects Cabiria as a child and keeps her in her palace until she has grown up into a beautiful young lady who attracts the High Priest’s not-too-platonic attention. Yet, later on, when she is tormented by the frightening prophetic vision she has had in a dream, she asks for the High Priest’s help and gives in to his request to have Cabiria back under his control. Before dying, however, as her last gesture as queen, she orders Cabiria’s release and entrusts Axilla with her protection. Sophonisba’s prophetic dream visually projects the ambiguous conceptualization of her representation in the film. She projects herself as devoured or at least locked up inside the mouth of a powerful monster that frightens her and holds her prisoner behind its teeth that are visually projected as prison bars. The monster may represent either the military power of Rome that intends to hold her as a political prisoner or the uncontrollable power of her seductive beauty that will ultimately bring her to death. In either case, Sophonisba projects herself in her own dream as victim and prisoner, unable to free herself from the power that dominates her. This dream illustrates the fate of women who raise fear in men and consequently are viewed as dangerous enemies to be defeated and eventually eliminated because of their actual or alleged power and for showing their excess of desire or passion. Sophonisba’s fate proves that women, even if they have political power as queens, do not have any chance to survive in a world controlled by men who fear powerful women. Cabiria’s fate, instead, is different. Once entrusted to her savior as a weak and helpless young woman in need of protection, she finds happiness and reward in his love for her and in her own submissiveness to his desire. Cabiria’s story ends, therefore, in a happy marriage and reintegration into her own family and society, while her persecutors are destroyed. The message that her story conveys, in opposition to the one brought forth by Sophonisba’s story, is one of reward and praise for women who are meek and enslaved, as well as untouched by sexual desire or desire for power. These different messages delivered by the stories of two different types of women will occur repeatedly in Italian films from that time on, as the analyses in this book will, I hope, make clear. This reading of Cabiria sets up this film as a cinematic milestone, specifically for the essential role that women play in its filmic strategies and also because of the richness and diversity of the film discourse that they introduce in the texture of the film. It is worth noticing also the important role that the two women characters play in the delivery of the film’s overall ideological message in favor of the Romans; Cabiria is a Roman girl, tormented and

18 WOMEN, DESIRE, AND POWER IN ITALIAN CINEMA

unjustly intimidated by the Phoenicians, and thus sharing the positive aura that the film bestows on the Romans. At the end of the film, the only successful characters left are Romans, such as the consul Scipio, Axilla, and Cabiria, while all Phoenicians hostile to the Romans are eliminated or defeated, such as Hannibal, King Siface, and Sophonisba. Only Phoenicians who are allies of the Romans are left alive, such as Massinissa and Maciste. The enormous success that Cabiria had at its time and the strong critical and popular appeal it still has nowadays6 confirm its importance in the history of Italian cinema, and, especially for what concerns our topic here, this film clearly shows the cultural complexity that seems to surface in Italian cinema any time women characters play important roles. Cabiria and Sophonisba stand here as the key elements supporting the narrative structure of the cinematic action, and yet they are constructed from an exclusively patriarchal, masculine point of view that favors meek, submissive, and asexual women and disapproves of powerful and sexually active women.

2

Woman-as-Spectacle in Love-Story Films The Dramma Passionale versus the Melodrama Genre and the Phenomenon of Divismo

Historical and Cultural Trends in Early Twentieth-Century Italy

B

efore and during the first years of World War I (1914–1918), a spirit of intolerance toward the scientific and bourgeois interests of the nineteenth-century society was being spread by a new cultural movement called Decadentismo, which flourished in those times side by side with the pictorial and architectural style known as “Liberty.” The most visible proponent of this movement was Gabriele D’Annunzio (1863–1938), a very famous literary man who was strongly opposed to a bourgeois state, preferring the old aristocracy of birth and means, the only class that, in his view, had culture and sensitivity. He owed his popularity as a poet and playwright to his search for exhibitionism and the most self-serving type of individualism. D’Annunzio’s works and rhetoric contributed to create the myth of the superman that helped promote in literature and cinema the image of an allpowerful virile man and formulate the image of woman as sex object and totally dependent upon such a man. Naturally, such a myth was not ignored in fascist ideology, as we will see in Chapter 3. Italian Cinema in the Early Twentieth Century Woman as sex object becomes the role that women play in several love-story films made in Italy mostly in the second decade of the twentieth century. As the Colossal genre was reaching international fame, another type of spectacular genre was becoming very successful on the national scene. It was called dramma passionale, a dramatic genre centered on a tormented love story often set in spectacular places (such as luxurious hotels or rich villas and palaces) and starring a high-class female protagonist of exceptional physical beauty and transgressive sexuality. This

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type of film highlights the myth of the beautiful, sexy woman who uses her body, with its seductive movements and forbidden charms, to attract and conquer an otherwise-unattainable male and his social milieu. These female characters represented the type of woman that was to be called later the femme fatale, played by women seductresses charged with the power to destroy the men attracted to them and, consequently, to be destroyed themselves in punishment, as the analysis of the character of Sophonisba in Cabiria has already shown in Chapter 1. The dramma passionale genre was representative of the Decadentismo cultural movement and of its search for exhibitionism and sexual indulgence. In a social milieu dominated by such a cultural trend, a woman’s role was obviously confined to that of a sex object in man’s obsessive search for sexual self-fulfillment. Consequently, the femme fatale role became routine in the dramma passionale films. Because of their irresistible sex appeal and its disastrous effects on the men fascinated by them, these femme fatales were mostly projected as erotic objects of male desire, and, as such, they became “spectacle” themselves. A suitable profession for a woman of this sort would be that of an actress, who, by her very nature, enjoys being a spectacle. In Ma l’amor mio non muore (Love Everlasting; 1913), the protagonist (Elsa) is an actress. The female image that these dramma passionale films projected was so highly charged with emotional impact and endowed with beauty, seductiveness, and elegance that the women protagonists became beloved and desired not only by the male actors on the screen but also by the male spectators who crowded the movie theaters of the time. Also, female spectators were very attracted to dramma passionale films and desired to identify with their female protagonists and partake of their sexual appeal and social superiority. These dramma passionale films were thus immensely popular at that time and helped give birth to the phenomenon of divismo, or star idolatry, especially regarding female actresses, or dive, who exercised an enormous appeal upon their audiences. Divismo1 is not, therefore, the exclusively contemporary curse that plagues our social life and, most specifically, the life of contemporary actors and actresses as well as of politicians and social entrepreneurs. Divismo actually originated in Italy in the early twentieth century when cinema actors and especially actresses or dive suddenly became the idols of their spectators, who found themselves exposed for the first time to that new art form. The most fascinating objects of this new cult were some very popular actresses who were cast as the stars of the dramma passionale films,2 such as Francesca Bertini (in Gustavo Serena’s Assunta Spina (1915), Lyda Borelli (in Mario Caserini’s Ma l’amor mio non muore), and Pina Menichelli (in Giovanni Pastrone’s Il fuoco [The Fire; 1915] and Tigre reale [Royal Tigress; 1916]). Because of their obvious show of seductiveness, these female characters transgressed the patriarchal codification of female behavior and often became subject to punishment and suffering in order for the status quo, overturned by their subversive presence and its effects, to be reestablished. The prerogative of these femmes fatales is “excess,”3 signified especially by the transgressivity of their actions and by their overpowering sexuality. Since all the films that presented this type of female protagonist, made in the second decade of the twentieth century, were silent, such overpowering female sexuality had to be conveyed exclusively by visual representation of their bodies rather than through sound and voice. Consequently,

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the camera tended to concentrate on the women’s active bodies and to linger on parts of them, such as the hands or arms in their waving movements, or on their heads violently jerking back and forth, on their eyes spasmodically rolling, or desperately or knowingly staring at the audience off screen. We have already seen this mechanism at work in Cabiria through the character of Sofonisba, whose seductiveness, formulated in terms of the overrepresentation of her physical attractiveness, was viewed as a threat by the Roman authority exclusively run by men. Afraid of the power she might have over the men in love with her, the Roman authority decrees that she is “evil” and punishes her with a prison sentence. While Francesca Bertini is probably the best known diva of the time, I will approach chronologically the dramma passionale films chosen for discussion and will consider her later. Now I am going to concentrate on the films of the other two above-mentioned, equally popular dive, Lyda Borelli and Pina Menichelli, whose most important films are Ma l’amor mio non muore by Mario Caserini with Lyda Borelli, and Giovanni Pastrone’s Il fuoco and Tigre reale, with Pina Menichelli. In these films, both actresses, in their femme fatale roles, belong to the high society and clearly show a very rich and sophisticated standard of life. Thus, they become the embodiment of woman as object of desire, producing pleasure in looking for the beholder and pleasure in being looked at for the woman.4 These women characters, in their exhibitionistic position, become spectacles to be admired and idolized; that is, they become dive.

Dramma Passionale Films Ma l’amor mio non muore In Ma l’amor mio non muore, Lyda Borelli plays the role of Elsa, the female protagonist of the film. From the very beginning, she is framed as a many-sided female character. She is first presented as the affectionate and well-mannered daughter of a high military officer in Wallenstein, a small northern European country; at the same time, she is also projected as being involved with a dangerous man who turns out to be a spy and will eventually bring about her father’s shameful downfall. After her father commits suicide, after unjustly being accused of high treason, Elsa arouses the audience’s compassion as a young victim of social injustice, left alone in the world and exiled from her own country. The sequences that show her dressed in black, in full-length shots, being escorted to the border by three military men and left on her own to wander in a foreign and desolate landscape create the condition for the audience to feel compassion for her as an innocent, suffering creature. Elsa, however, once in Paris, shows another side of her personality. She becomes a shrewd businesswoman who knows how to take advantage of her natural talent as a singer and of her physical attractiveness as a woman. In the sequences of her audition in a room full of men who are obviously enchanted by her many talents, the camera, by concentrating with medium-length and close-up shots on her physical beauty, clearly reveals Elsa’s readiness for playing the role of the erotic object of the desire of all the men around her, who are depicted as

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totally fascinated by her. Her seductiveness is clearly projected by the overrepresentation of her body, displayed in abrupt physical movements carefully watched by her onlookers, who, with their own bodily countenances, reveal the uncontrollable sexual drive to which they are subject in her fascinating presence. In these sequences, then, Elsa already plays the role of woman-as-spectacle. Shortly afterward, she will become spectacle even more clearly when she is framed singing and dancing on a theater stage in front of many spectators who look intensely at her, some with large binoculars, and applaud her frenetically. Here, the camera is placed behind her in order to frame her on the stage from the back and her audience from the front. This technique highlights the effect that she, as female spectacle with her beauty and natural talents, has on them, intensifying further her significance as spectacle by closely following the opening and closing of the stage curtains in front of and behind her. Eventually Elsa is formulated as a femme fatale because of her transgressive sexual attraction toward the heir to the throne of Wallenstein, who becomes infatuated with her, even if she, besides being an actress and, consequently, a woman of ill repute, is still viewed in their country as a traitor’s daughter. This transgressive relationship provokes the consternation of the prince’s parents and of the official government agents who have discovered it. The prince, however, does not want to give her up; the film discourse, in order to reestablish the social order that Elsa has disrupted with her dangerously subversive sexual presence, has to find another way to get her out of the prince’s life and out of the narrative plot in order to eliminate the threat she represents. The dramma passionale genre, then, offers the proper means for disposing of this dangerous woman. By overcharging Elsa with an uncontrollable, passionate temperament and an unusually overpowering love emotion, which compels her too to view herself as an obstacle to her lover’s social position and to self-destruct in order to disappear from his life, the film discourse turns her into a romantic heroine sacrificing herself for love. Thus, with a sequence of revealing shots focusing on an overrepresentation of bodily movements and agonizing expressions, the camera quickly abolishes a very sick Elsa from the screen and from the prince’s life. The dangerous woman, by eliminating herself in a self-sacrificing death, offers the film’s discourse the opportunity to reestablish a patriarchal order where men with authority can continue to exercise their control over their world, away from the disrupting influence of dangerous women. Because of this change, at the end, the film’s mood turns pleasantly harmonious, as the spectators at this point feel empathy and compassion for Elsa who, by sacrificing herself for love, behaves just like a “good” woman is expected to in a patriarchal society. In this way, at the end of the film, the spectators react toward her in the same way as they had at the beginning of her story when she was projected as a fatherless and exiled young woman. This film is thus a very powerful example of the Italian dramma passionale film, which depicts woman endowed with excessive sexuality and with such an overpowering control over men that she becomes dangerous for them and disruptive for their lives. At this point, her own elimination is viewed by the woman herself as necessary in order to reestablish the traditional social order disrupted by the

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uncontrollable power of her sexuality. The audience, thus, appreciates her for reestablishing such an order with her own sacrifice, which shows her acceptance of the overwhelmingly patriarchal message of the film. Pastrone’s Il fuoco and Tigre reale Equally significant examples of the dramma passionale genre are provided by G. Pastrone’s Il fuoco and Tigre reale, both starring Pina Menichelli in the female protagonists’ roles. Il fuoco derives its title and plot from a novel by Gabriele D’Annunzio, the most popular writer of that time. Even if the film is not a close adaptation of D’Annunzio’s work, it is influenced by D’Annunzio’s rhetorical style and spectacular representation.5 The title is clearly symbolic of the passion of love that develops here in three narrative parts, marking the different stages of the love story between a beautiful, rich, and successful woman poet from the city and a poor and naïve but talented painter from the countryside. The first part is named La favilla, or “The Spark,” as it centers on the encounter between the two and the immediate sexual attraction they feel for each other. The second part is La vampa, or “The Blaze,” where the height of their passion is played out, while the third part, La cenere, or “The Ashes,” dwells with the end of their relationship and with the devastating effects, it has on the young man, who is unable to cope with his lover’s rejection. In each one of the three parts, the woman poet is clearly the one in control of the love relationship, playing thus both the erotic object of the young man’s desire and the shrewd initiator, activator, and eventual terminator of the relationship she had started to fulfill her own erotic desire. The camera is very careful in depicting the woman’s controlling role in the relationship, as it follows her closely in all her activities and initiatives while it is only minimally interested in catching the young man in revealing close-ups. Pina Menichelli masterfully projects herself as an erotic object in the first two parts of the film, while in the last part she sets herself up as a cruel and dangerous femme fatale who drives her lover mad with her indifference and refusal to recognize him. She dresses very elegantly and plays the role of an experienced and well-to-do, high-class city woman whose beauty and sophistication are hard to resist, especially for a poor and naïve young man who still lives with his mother in the country. The narrative indeed plays out extensively this conflict between city and country, connecting the two lovers and the binary polarities they represent with the juxtapositions of experience/naïveté, richness/poverty, cruelty/good nature, and control/acceptance. This binary pattern creates a clear-cut gender differentiation. The woman, contrary to the traditional view of the city-country6 conflict, symbolizes the city and stands for experience, richness, cruelty, control, all of which are typically male qualities, while the man connotes the country and represents naïveté, poverty, good nature, acceptance, or mostly feminine qualities. The film introduces this unusual pattern in the first sequences where a car, the woman poet’s car, symbol of urban technology, is riding on a small country road and defiling the peaceful, natural beauty of the countryside with the noise of its engine, the smoke of its exhaust, and the dust it creates on the unpaved country

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road. This unfitting, obtrusive image of the car as symbol of city life prepares the audience for the appearance of the creature that will actually bring havoc to the peaceful serenity of a normal countryman. Indeed, when the car stops, the majestic and elegantly clad woman poet steps out of it, as she has come to the country from the city in search of inspiration. The camera follows her in medium- and full-length shots in her elegant, expensive attire, with a curious owl7 hat on her head, walking and then sitting on the grass with her notebook and pencil. Her presence there clearly visualizes her out-of-place condition and the conflict that exists between her and the natural backdrop where she has chosen to place herself momentarily. However, when the young painter is framed with similar shots on the same background, his presence clearly conveys the impression that he belongs there, with his modest appearance, inexpensive clothes, and rugged shoes. The second part of the film deals with the sexual fulfillment of these two very different lovers and cultures, which takes place in a neutral space, the owl castle, a space midway between city and country. The owl castle indeed combines the sophistication and sumptuousness of the city in its interior with the serenity and tranquility of the country in its parklike exterior. In this way, both lovers feel at ease in this neutral environment, and their love burns naturally to its climax, until the woman, informed of her husband’s return, decides to put an end to their affair. She does not, however, communicate her decision to her lover, who is brusquely faced with the loss of her and of the beautiful dream of love, that he had naïvely believed could last forever. The love affair at the owl castle does produce an artistic masterpiece—the young man’s nude painting of his lover—on which the camera lingers with obsessively long close-ups that underscore its mixed significance for both lovers. It will provide important proof of the woman’s controlling power in her city environment and in her lover’s life, as she will succeed in having the painting glamorously shown as a masterpiece in the city museum, thus instantly providing fame and success to its creator. At the same time, she will use this opportunity to break up their relationship, which has now become too dangerous for her social life in the city. For the young painter, his creation is his gift of love to her, but his main concern is to keep up their dream of love together, and he does not quite know how to react to his sudden notoriety. The experienced city woman, on the other hand, knew that dreams usually end, and the dreamer has to wake up and face reality, a reality that is often cruel and painful. Indeed the full range of the woman’s cruelty and self-centeredness is revealed during the lovers’ last and only meeting in the city, when she publicly rejects him and maintains she does not even know him. In this sequence of scenes, the film discourse seems to willfully overturn the gender role in the couple relationship in order to highlight the transgressiveness of the female image, as had been previously done in the handling of the city/country polarity. In this sequence, she is framed in full-length shots together with an older and dignified man and in the company of several other men and women, all elegantly attired respectively in smoking jackets and evening gowns, in the hall of an imposing building, presumably a modern art museum, where the young man’s large painting of her is exhibited and attracts the attention of a large crowd. Fame has thus been bestowed on the young painter through his relationship with the woman poet, whose connection with the city and its cultural elite has made it

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possible for his talents to be recognized by the city crowd. Yet he does not look at ease in the city. The camera follows his arrival closely in front of the imposing museum building where his painting is exhibited. From the fearful expression on his face in the middle-length shots we have of him, we see that he feels lost in and unfit for the crowded, noisy, and cold cement milieu of the city, so different from the quiet, peaceful, and cozy country environment where he has lived all his life. Furthermore, the camera sometimes loses him in the crowd that surrounds him, thus underscoring the lack of importance that city people attach to an unknown, badly dressed, shy young man, whose name and physical presence have not yet been connected with the successful painting that has attracted such a mob to that very museum. He looks terrified and lonely, but he stifles the impulse to run away and enters the building. When he first sees the woman poet, he looks reassured, but not for long, as she refuses to recognize him, and, when he tries to get closer to her over and over again, she summons several men to protect her from him, and they surround him and push him out of the building toward a waiting car that will eventually speed away and take him away from her forever, as she had wanted. In the meantime, the woman poet is still framed in full-length shots among all her socialite friends with whom she engages in lively conversation and several bursts of laughter. The camera then catches her face with a close-up, as she looks straight at the audience with a derisive smile on her lips and a knowingly complicit look in her eyes, as if to involve the spectators in her cruel, male-humiliating game. She seems perfectly at ease in the city space that culturally and socially reflects her personality and social status. This same city space, instead, is very hostile to the young man from the country, and even the car that he had earlier ridden in with her in the country in a positive way becomes a very negative experience at the end of the film, as it takes him away from her to the lunatic asylum, where we see him in the last sequence of the film. He is now reduced to a pathetic figure sitting on the floor, cutting up and playing with paper dolls, with his back to a white wall dominated by a large drawing of an owl. A final close-up catches him looking straight at the camera as if to communicate directly to his audience the tragic finality of his condition as a poor naïve man from the country led astray by a beautiful, cruel, and selfish city woman. In this film, the femme fatale prevails at the end, and it is the man in love with her who is destroyed by her, thus fulfilling the darkest fears a man can have: of a seductress’s dangerous influence. On the other hand, the film clearly allows for the representation of a woman’s desire and pleasure without connecting it with punishment or personal loss. The woman is here portrayed as the manipulator and organizer of her love story, as well as of her lover’s artistic career, and she maintains total control over her own and her lover’s life until the very end. The film, therefore, conveys an ambivalent message by constructing, on one side, a positive male figure whose honesty, naïveté, and emotional weakness easily gain the sympathy and compassion of the film audience. On the other side, the film constructs the woman as a threat to him and a destroyer of his life. In this way, the female figure is very powerful, as her desire and manipulations dominate the action, and, in spite of the excess that she represents and that the film discourse

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handles—with a clearly misogynist attitude—she achieves total control of her own and the young man’s life. This film’s harsh misogynist view is toned down considerably in Pastrone’s next film, Tigre reale, which projects a more humane, compassionate view of the female protagonist, Naktia, a Russian countess, also played by Pina Menichelli. This film is also an adaptation of a novel, the homonymous novel by Giovanni Verga, one of the best-known Italian writers of the time and the best representative of the literary movement called verismo.8 Pastrone follows Verga’s narrative quite faithfully until the end of the story. At that point, he gives in to the decadent mood of the time required by the dramma passionale genre and endows his male protagonist with an unwavering passion for his sick aristocratic lover. Verga, instead, in his novel had played upon his male character’s need for money to transform him into a bourgeois character, who eventually opts for a financially convenient, loveless marriage with a well-to-do, young, middle-class heiress. The film opens with a big party at a sumptuous palace where, eventually, a beautiful fur coat–clad woman makes her entrance under the attentive looks of all the men and women in the hall. At this point, the screen projects a written text that reads, “This is the Russian countess who has brought death to her latest lover.” The intrusion of the written text on the screen corresponds to what Barthes has called the “‘anchorage’ of the connotations of an image by means of a written text.”9 In this case, the image the beautiful countess assumes, through the written text, the connotation of a dangerous woman even before her story has been told by the film’s narrative. The whole film will work out ways to deal with such a connotation, especially in relation to the male protagonist, Giorgio, who loves and desires her intensely. To transform this simple assumption into a very real character trait, the film’s discourse lingers on her relationship with Giorgio and the destructive influence she has on him. Because of her, he is nearly killed in a duel, and later he constantly lives in despair, as she flirts with him but never commits to him while demanding, instead, a full commitment from him. The female protagonist, who is looked at and desired by men who immediately fall prey to her dangerous attractiveness, is framed here too as an erotic object of the male gaze. At the same time, her unusual female power is highlighted by the camera as it frames her as the looking subject, whose gaze falls very intensely on the man she intends to attract and bring under her control. This two-way imaging of the countess as an erotic object and as an active subject is already activated in the opening sequence of her arrival at the party, where the camera frames her in full-length shots emphasizing her exotic, dramatic beauty on which all eyes are immediately fixed so as to confirm her status as an erotic object. Soon after, she is framed with a long, medium-length shot from the back while, through a mirror in front of her, she closely watches Giorgio moving toward her. Once he is close to her, she acts out her disruptive seduction routine, keeping her back to him as if she were refusing her own role as an erotic object of his gaze, while using her own gaze to control him through the mirror. By framing the female character in these two contrasting ways (as an erotic object of male gaze and as a subject looking on her own), the film creates a complex female image that combines eroticism and self-control to such a dramatic level that it risks producing an unsympathetic reaction in a traditional audience.

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At this point, the film, in order to remain within the contextual frame of the dramma passionale genre, has to recapture the audience’s feelings toward the heroine. A long flashback, a film technique very unusual at those early times of cinematic development, is here introduced to provide Giorgio and the audience with the explanation of the earlier written text. In this flashback, she is projected as a young romantic woman married to a cold, authoritarian husband. She has an affair with a lower-class man with whom, for the first time in her life, she has a very gratifying sexual experience, which she, inspired by her youthful, romantic view of love, interprets as the true love that she had never experienced before. When her lover is exiled to Siberia at her husband’s request, she does not hesitate to challenge her husband’s authority and withstand the freezing weather of northern Russia to go in search of her lover in the snow-covered wilderness. When she finds him, however, he is with another woman. She is so hurt and humiliated by his behavior that, when he comes to her to implore her forgiveness, she refuses to see him and goads him on when he threatens to kill himself. He does kill himself, and consequently she is thrown into a psychologically and physically critical condition, tormented by remorse and sick with tuberculosis. Another written text spells out on the screen the countess’s sad, antiromantic view of love: “He was dead. And I am still slowly dying. This is true love for me!” At the end of the countess’s retelling of her love story, both Giorgio, the character on the screen to whom she has been speaking, and the audience off-screen, have been affected by the countess’s sad story, which weakens the dangerous connotation of her character. Soon after this sequence, she disappears from Giorgio’s life, dutifully agreeing to follow her husband, who has come to take her back to Russia. She does, however, promise Giorgio that she will come back to die close to him. When she finally comes back to keep her promise, she chooses to take up residence in a sumptuous hotel, and at this point the film turns on a very powerful, spectacular performance. The countess is first framed in her elegant hotel bedroom looking at her doctor’s letter wrapped around the phial of a drug that is supposed to make her feel miraculously better for at least a little while longer. She is then framed in a long shot in front of a tall mirror where she scrutinizes herself carefully as if to assess her female sex appeal and the potential she still has to attract her lover. In this sequence, the countess again plays both roles through the mirror: as erotic object and as subject in control of the gaze as she had done at the beginning of the film. Once Giorgio enters her room, after going through the hotel’s majestic hall, the camera frames them both together in a series of full- and medium-length shots, first standing up and then sitting down, until, after a frightening series of spasmodic and uncontrollable body motions, she lies on her bed and he kneels next to her. From this point on, the shots inside the bedroom are constantly alternated with shots of the hotel outside: first the entrance hall, where a large crowd is watching the performance of the “Dance of Fire”; then the stairs; and eventually the hotel’s façade glimmering with lights. At a certain point, a fire breaks out in the hall of the hotel, causing a lot of commotion and movement up and down the stairs and out of the hotel. In contrast to this excitement, in the countess’s

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bedroom all is calm. Both occupants are still in their original positions, the countess lying down on the bed and Giorgio kneeling next to her. A new character is now introduced who acts as a link between the public, chaotic excitement of the outside fire spectacle and the private, calm, secluded world of the sick countess’s bedroom. The countess’s husband knocks at the bedroom door, but, when he opens the door and sees Giorgio with her, he leaves the room, locking the door behind him, thus excluding all possibilities of escape for the two lovers—at least from that exit. More spectacular sequences of the fire follow, until the firemen’s truck comes into sight in front of the hotel and starts pumping water through all the hotel’s open windows. In the countess’s bedroom, Giorgio finally realizes the dangerous situation they are in and runs to the window to open it, giving the firemen the opportunity to help them escape. It is a rather spectacular escape, with Giorgio dropping the countess onto the firemen’s safety canvas and jumping after her, on a backdrop of flames and chaotic crowd movements. The spectacular effect of the fire furiously attacking the façade of the hotel and illuminating the grounds with a sinister, reddish hue is a powerful reminder of the dangerous countess’s adventurous life spent under the sign of the passionate flames of love and marred by the presence of death. The narrative, however, does not end here and, following its own logic of alternating conflicting narrative moods and situations, it provides a final view of the lovers tenderly embraced on a small boat slowly moving on calm waters toward a beautiful sunset. This image seems to suggest that, by renouncing her loneliness and her cruel fight against true love and against the men who love her, the countess has been able to escape death, and her life has become full of love and tenderness in the close embrace of her faithful lover on a backdrop of natural beauty and serenity. The story of the dangerous countess ends then, somewhat unexpectedly, on a more reassuring note for both her and her lover, thus fulfilling the audience’s needs for a traditional happy ending and a sympathetic identification with both lovers and their dramatic love story. This film offers, then, an unusual female character that undergoes a drastic change from an exclusively dangerous and cruel femme fatale, unwilling to commit to love, into a pathetic suffering creature in search of true love with whom any audience can sympathize. This change is carefully prepared throughout the film with specific cinematic and narrative devices, such as the long flashback recounting her earlier sad love story, and the careful buildup of her character as a sick, suffering, and lonely woman. In conclusion, then, the dramma passionale genre carefully builds images of women according to the strictest dictates of the patriarchal, misogynist ideology, which disapproves of women questioning male authoritarianism. At the same time dramma passionale films allow glimpses of the possibility for change and self-determination for women, which opens up a potentially new and more positive depiction of woman as self-reliant yet also emotionally supportive of men, to propose a world where men and women are able to interact positively and create truly fulfilling, human experiences and relationships even outside of marriage. The exhibitionistic overrepresentation of woman as femme fatale, which fits so well the decadent climate of excess typical of early twentieth-century Italian

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culture and life, will not find any revival in later Italian cinema, in spite of the fact that its overrepresentation of female sexuality will become an important element, with a very different narrative impact, in the comic genre films of the 1950s and 1960s. These later comic films celebrate the typically Italian maggiorate fisiche (or physically overdeveloped women), which we will consider in Chapter 6. Serena’s Assunta Spina Among the best-known Italian dive of early Italian cinema, Francesca Bertini was also a most popular diva, and she played the protagonist’s role in Assunta Spina (see Figure 2), the film, directed by Gustavo Serena, that launched her cinematic career. The film follows very closely the stage text by Salvatore Di Giacomo and weaves its plot around Bertini as the female protagonist. She plays a femme fatale,10 thus providing Italian cinema with yet another successful femme fatale character and dramma passionale film. Assunta Spina is shot largely in the open air, with strong natural sunlight, well in tune with the warm and sunny Mediterranean background provided by Naples and its opulent natural beauty. The camera focuses intensely with medium-length shots and close-ups on Bertini’s face and body, highlighting her features in such a way as to accentuate the thematic context of the plot that places her as the erotic object of the look and desire of several male characters. This positioning unleashes her fiancé’s jealousy as well as his fears of losing control over her and their relationship. At the end of the film, her fiancé finds a way to reassert his control over her, desperately attacking her with a knife and disfiguring her with a deep slash on her cheek11 in order to shame her and destroy her beauty and attractiveness. The bleeding cut on her face is clearly a sign of public denunciation of her as a femme fatale. This wound openly proclaims the “excess” of her femaleness by visibly reproducing on her face that atavistic female wound, which is usually hidden under clothing and away from public view and that, with its castrating potential, dangerously threatens the virility of men. The closing of the film brings, then, the punishment of the transgressive woman who, up to that point had dominated the screen as spectacle with her uncontrollable, seductive body. As such, she is set up as evil and deserving of punishment because of the threat that her sexuality represents for her fiancé’s sense of security and control. At the moment of his assault on Assunta, the use of dark-tonality lighting accentuates at the visual level the darkness of the human situation created by the woman’s excessive seductive power and by the man’s obsessive need for control and power over her. At the same time, the confused movements of the people on the screen, who are unable to protect Assunta from his fury, increase the dramatic tension of the whole situation and, together with the darkness on the screen, highlight the dangerous nature of the assailant’s rage and his witnesses’ anguish as well as his victim’s failure to understand the fears that her seductiveness had inspired in him. This version of Assunta Spina powerfully conveys the ambivalence of the character of the femme fatale, underscoring on one hand the sexual power of Assunta’s

30 WOMEN, DESIRE, AND POWER IN ITALIAN CINEMA

overrepresented body and sexuality and, on the other hand, the danger that this overrepresentation may pose to her as a woman. By having her lover disfigure her, the film’s discourse makes sure that such a sexual power in a woman does not overcome the institutionalized rights of men to control women and their sexuality. This very strong condemnation of female sexuality becomes even more revealing of the misogynist bias of a whole generation of men as well as of women in the early twentieth century once we discover that Francesca Bertini herself had a very important role in this film, not only as the protagonist, but also in the direction of it.12 The significance of this film for understanding the ambivalent role given in the Italian cinema of the 1900s to woman as sex object becomes even clearer if it is compared to a later version (1948) of the film, where another equally attractive and successful star, Anna Magnani, plays Assunta’s role. The narrative process in this later version, proposes several important changes to the earlier one and creates a film much closer to the family melodrama than to the dramma passionale genre, as our analysis will demonstrate in Chapter 4. Melodrama Films Melodrama films, or “weepies” and “women’s films” as they have been called through the different stages of the melodrama genre’s development, focus their narrative action nearly exclusively on women in their role as the protagonists of sorrowful love stories. In these stories women perform usually in strict conformity to the codification of female behavior set down by patriarchal ideology. Melodrama is indeed a preferred genre of early twentieth-century Italian cinema as well as of later Italian films. The pathetic mood typical of melodrama seems to impact most dramatic films of later decades, especially Rossellini’s films as we will see in Chapters 3 and 4. Furthermore, through its concern for real-life sad human experiences, melodrama seems to prepare for neorealism, the most successful Italian cinematic movement of the 1940s. Melodramas present situations very close to everyday life and involve women’s relationships with men, children, and other women, especially in what concerns love, marriage, and family.13 Consequently, because of their more recognizable, everyday real-life background, melodramas differ from the dramma passionale love-story films and concentrate on economically modest types of real-life situations. Furthermore, they construct their female characters nearly exclusively as victims of the ideological and economic male-oriented system of values that dominate Italian society and, more specifically, the gender relationships that develop in such a milieu. This is evident especially in La signora dalle camelie (The Lady of the Camellias; 1915), the melodrama that we are going to analyze here. In this characterization of women as victims, the cinematic form of melodrama finds a most promising model in the much earlier form of musical melodrama. This form developed in sixteenth-century Italy with the Florentine musical productions that climaxed later into the masterpieces created by Monteverdi in the seventeenth century, by Metastasio in the eighteenth century, and developed into

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the nineteenth- and twentieth-century popular Italian musical operas of Verdi, Puccini, Rossini, and Donizetti. Most of these music melodramas focus on women protagonists moved by love and who, in love’s name, are eager to face sacrifice and even death. Those musical melodramas as well as the modern cinema melodramas, in their emotional handling of the narrative situations, create a pathetic mood, which produces a very moving effect on their audiences.14 In the musical melodrama, the pathetic mood was masterfully conveyed by the contribution of music to the narratives. Music, indeed, according to Doane, “marks a deficiency in the axis of vision. Because emotion is the realm in which the visible is insufficient as a guarantee, the supplementary meaning proffered by music is absolutely necessary. The incessant recourse to music in . . . melodrama and its heightening effect suggest that the rationality of the image is at a disadvantage.”15 In the cinematic melodramas, music is still an essential tool to highlight the emotional level of the narrative and its pathetic mood. Indeed, the first cinematic melodramas were adaptations of popular operas, such as La signora dalle camelie. La signora dalle camelie La signora dalle camelie is one of the earliest examples of the Italian cinematic melodrama. It was directed by Gustavo Serena with Francesca Bertini playing the leading role of Margherita Gautier, the beautiful courtesan, who was very popular in nineteenth-century Parisian society. Armando, a young country squire, falls desperately in love with her. This film presents in cinematic form the same story that Verdi popularized in his opera La traviata, thus confirming the close connection between musical and cinematic melodramas. It also shares with the dramma passionale genre the same type of love plot, as it has characters uniquely concerned with love. But while most dramma passionali of the times, such as Tigre reale, Ma l’amor mio non muore, or ll fuoco, concentrated upon the overrepresentation of a woman’s sexuality, this trend is usually not present in melodramas. This is also the case in La Signora dalle camelie, where the female protagonist, as a high-class prostitute, is clearly a very sophisticated and sexy woman. Margherita does not project the negative symbolism of an oversexed, sophisticated city woman, as was highlighted in Il fuoco. Instead, the film discourse insists, in spite of Margherita’s profession, on her feminine virtues. Her generosity and total dedication to her man mark her as a “good” woman in patriarchal terms. Indeed, contrary also to her opera counterpart, Violetta, who thoroughly enjoyed the freedom and excitement of her single life in Paris,16 Margherita seems to find total happiness in her monogamous dependence on Armando, thus arousing the enthusiastic approval of her spectators. In order to add to her emotional appeal, she is also proposed, like the dramma passionale heroines of Tigre reale and Ma l’amor mio non muore, as a frail and sick woman who needs to be taken care of by a man who is truly in love with her. Contrary to what is usually expected of a loose woman in a patriarchal society, Margherita is here depicted as a woman who is sincerely in love. She demonstrates her intention to dedicate herself completely to Armando by giving up without hesitation her glamorous single life in the city and by selling all she

32 WOMEN, DESIRE, AND POWER IN ITALIAN CINEMA

owns in order to finance their life together in the countryside. This acceptance of lifestyle changes—from promiscuity to monogamy, from wealth to indigence, and from independence to a traditional relationship of dependence on a loved man— highlights Margherita’s potential for goodness and unselfishness and her readiness for assuming the traditional submissive and self-sacrificing female role expected in a patriarchal society. The film underscores such change not only with a very emotional musical score but also with a change from its earlier harsh, contrasting dark-tonality lighting of the city interiors to the high-tonality lighting of the countryside where a whitedressed Margherita happily enjoys her lover’s closeness within a beautiful, sunny, natural landscape while she regains hope for a better and healthier life. Here, then, country life stands for happiness and health, which even a sophisticated and experienced city woman like Margherita can enjoy and appreciate. In this film, therefore, rather than standing for all negative connotations of urban life, woman is proposed as fundamentally good and unselfish, thus symbolizing nature’s positive values, such as serenity, health, and harmony. Once Margherita has been depicted as a virtuous, monogamous, and submissive woman who fits the traditional image of woman proposed by her patriarchal society, the social system that she has by now accepted sets up a situation where she is asked to provide the ultimate proof of her femininity—that is, unconditional submissiveness to the law of the father.17 At this point, a new character is introduced whose goal is to break up the harmonious relationship between the two lovers. This character is Armando’s father, who embodies the ultimate authority in the patriarchal system to which they belong. Out of his unquestionable wisdom and authority, he plays God in Margherita and Armando’s romantic liaison. For the sake of his family’s honor and prosperity, he demands the end of their relationship. By saving his son from falling into social disgrace because of his involvement with a prostitute, he feels that he will also be able to save his daughter’s marriage with a prosperous, high-class, conservative young man, whose father would not allow him to marry her if Armando keeps his liaison with Margherita. Armando’s father, expecting full and unquestioned obedience from both Armando and Margherita, brandishes his authoritarian will. While Armando resists his father’s pressure, Margherita, instead, gives in to his will with little resistance, thus confirming her full acceptance of the law of the father that expected and required from women total obedience, submissiveness, and self-sacrifice. Margherita’s sacrifice entails renouncing her love for Armando and the happiness and health of their life together in the country. This renunciation will also entail returning to her former city life of promiscuity that will affect her physical health and ultimately bring her to an untimely death. Thus, Margherita seems totally powerless in front of the law of the father. Her powerlessness turns her into a creature victimized by the father’s authority, and consequently, she becomes a very pathetic figure with whom a large part of the film’s female audience can easily identify and who also earns the male spectators’ approval and appreciation. At the same time, the realization of her physical frailness increases the level of sympathy that the audience feels for her. The pathetic mood that develops out of the heroine’s unhappy story is further enhanced by the use of music, fittingly expressing the sorrowful emotional

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message of the film. The strong, dark tonality of the city interiors, used again at the end of the film, highlights the evil and unhealthy connotations connected with the heroine’s resumption of her former promiscuous life. Armando, at first unaware of his father’s influence on Margherita, is deeply hurt by her sudden return to her former life. As soon as his father explains his own responsibility in her decision, however, Armando tries to make her renounce her sacrificial role and hope again for a happy life together, even if the shadows of death are already hovering over her. The heroine’s near-death physical condition arouses again a very strong sympathy in the audience, as they react to the pathos aroused by the mistiming of the communication between the two lovers due to Armando’s father’s disrupting influence. Armando’s and his father’s recognition and appreciation of Margherita’s sacrifice for the welfare of the patriarchal family increase this sympathy. This seems to validate the point made by Noel Carroll when he declares that “the victim of melodramatic misfortunes often accepts her suffering in order to benefit another, often at the expense of satisfying her own personal desires and interest . . . Were melodrama only a matter of pity— of witnessing horrible things happen to people—it might strike us as a particularly sadistic genre. Instead, because typically the misfortunes in melodramas also provide the occasion for characters to exhibit noble virtues amid adversity, these films encourage the spectators to leaven pity with admiration.”18 Margherita has, indeed, exhibited such virtues, and we spectators react to her with emotions that combine pity and admiration, even while we recognize the damaging influence that their society’s patriarchal ideology has had on these remarkable film heroines. The Maternal Melodrama Subgenre The influence of the patriarchal ideology, especially for what concerns the family system, is also very important in another type of melodrama, the so-called maternal melodrama. This subgenre centers specifically on the complex relationship that exists between mothers and children, particularly sons. Maternal melodramas, according to Doane, are “scenarios of separation, of separation and return, or of threatened separation—dramas which play out all the permutations of the motherchild relation.”19 The typical maternal-melodrama depiction of woman-as-mother usually brings into play the contradictory position of a mother within a patriarchal society, a position formulated by the injunction that she focuses desire on the child and the subsequent demand to give up the child to the social order. Motherhood is conceived as the always-uneasy conjunction of an absolute closeness and a forced distance. Motherhood is marginalized, situated on the cusp of culture . . . looking in from the outside, because it is always a source of potential resistance to the child’s entry into the social arena . . . The price to be paid for the child’s social success is the mother’s descent into anonymity, the negation of her identity.20

A “descent into anonymity” is indeed the only goal that the mother in the silent film Cenere (Ashes; 1916) desires for her son. Cenere, directed by F. Mari, as an

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adaptation of a very popular novel written by the Italian Nobel-prize author Grazia Deledda, is one of the best examples of the early maternal melodrama, where Eleonora Duse, a popular stage star of this time, plays the role of the mother who sacrifices herself for the sake of her son’s “social success.” This film represents the anguish of an unwed mother, who, out of guilt and shame for her sin of love, gives up her own son in order to protect him from the shameful conditions of life that he would have to face as a bastard in a society codified by the law of the father. Set in a rough, rural environment, the film shows the hardships that a fatherless boy must endure as the favorite object of the other boys’ cruel and pitiless insults and ridicule. The mother, in order to spare him such deleterious experiences, deprives herself of the only joy and love she has in her life and arranges for him to go and live with his father and his family, a situation that the boy needs in order to silence the negative criticism his community has bestowed on him as a fatherless boy and to make him able to “enter the social arena.” In light of this depiction of the mother character, we can consider Noel Carroll’s suggestion that she, too, “accepts her suffering in order to benefit another (her own son) . . . at the expense of satisfying her own personal desires and interest,” thus “encouraging the spectators to leaven pity with admiration.”21 The son does not willingly accept their separation. The story of a mother and her son, with its play on separations and attempts of reunion, conveys, therefore, the film’s main cinematic topic typical of the maternal melodrama subgenre and sustains its pathetic effects through the conflict developing from the different reactions mother and son have toward their separation. The mother, notwithstanding her love for him, keeps on running away from her son in search of anonymity. The son, however, yearns for that time of juissance22 that he had known in the past, when he and his mother formed a single, undivided entity, happily functioning outside of the social system dominated by the authority of the father. Once the son has grown into a well-educated, independent young man, his yearning for his mother brings him finally in touch with her, even if she still tries to escape his attentions. The rather dark hues of the setting that had been predominant up to this point, as if to underscore the lack of bright prospects for the mother and son, seem to gradually slip into lighter shades, especially in the shots framing the young man at the end of his laborious search for his lost mother. The rural background that had been portrayed in its harshest and most unpleasant aspect turns here into a domesticated and sunny landscape, where the young man hopefully prepares himself for the trip that will bring him to his mother. Once he enters the poor and bare dwelling where she spends her life, the dark tones, however, become again compellingly evident, as if to highlight the conflicting reactions of the two protagonists and to prepare both protagonists and spectators for an unhappy ending. The framing of the two, even when they are finally in front of each other in the same room, fulfils the same intentions, as each of them is framed mostly by himself or herself in full- or medium-length shots in different corners of the room. The editing, furthermore, consists of very noticeable cuts that separate, rather than unite, the two characters. Only at the end of the sequence the two, embracing and close to each other, are briefly framed together in a closer, medium-length shot, until the mother again moves away toward the door

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and exits. The story ends on a sorrowful note, as a neighbor finds the mother lying dead on the floor of the house the next day. The purpose of the mother’s life had been to keep her son away from her so that he could live a normal life in a patriarchal society where human beings need the support and authority of the father in order to succeed and be accepted without questions or criticism. If the mother had lived, the son, in order to live with her, would have had to give up all the social success he had already achieved—that is, a professional life in the city and the prospect of a good marriage with a beautiful, well-to-do girl, in short, all that makes a man’s life a success in a patriarchal society. The mother’s death is thus the ultimate sacrifice needed to reestablish her unwilling son within the social status he had achieved because of the physical separation she had imposed on both of them. While a “descent into anonymity” is the only goal of the mother in Cenere, the mother in De Sica’s I bambini ci guardano (The Children Are Watching Us; 1942),23 hardly wishes for such a “negation of her identity.” Because of her transgressivity (see Figure 3), the mother in I bambini ci guardano takes a critical position not only against the patriarchal family structure but also against the typical maternalmelodrama trope of woman-as-mother. The melodrama genre, then, and particularly its maternal melodrama subgenre, strongly reinforce the patriarchal view of women that Italian cinema frequently conveys in its representation of women as frail, submissive creatures who, in their relationships with men, are often drawn to suffering and humiliation, even if they are also capable to “exhibit noble virtues amid adversity, encouraging spectators to leaven pity with admiration.”24 Margherita in La Signora dalle camelie is a good example of such a representation. Furthermore, the maternal melodrama subgenre clearly defines women as mothers—that is, within the only role definitely reserved to them by the patriarchal system. The mother in Cenere well represents such a role. On the other hand, melodrama, as well as the dramma passionale genre, also tends to propose an unusual representation of men as being as equally frail and irresponsible as women, a depiction quite unexpected in a patriarchal social system. The character of Armando in La Signora dalle camelie and the husband character in I bambini ci guardano fit such a representation of weak and irresponsible human beings. This representation is further exploited by another Italian cinematic genre that has ridicule, rather than pathos, as its ultimate goal. This genre is the comedy, as we will find several examples of weak masculinity in the comic films from the 1930s on and especially in the comedy-Italian-style subgenre films from the 1960s on. The dramma passionale genre has given Italian films attractive and often powerful women in roles as appealing, beautiful, sexy objects of men’s desire and gaze, like Elsa in Ma l’amor mio non muore, the woman poet in Il Fuoco, the Russian countess in Tigre reale, and Assunta in Serena’s early version of Assunta Spina. The beautiful actresses who played those roles and ensured those films’ popular success were immediately recognized as beloved, popular dive of Italian cinema, thus obviously highlighting the importance for a film’s success of casting actresses and actors who embodied the representation of femininity and masculinity most appealing to Italian audiences. From then on, the phenomenon of divismo is here to stay in Italian cinema.

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“Mothers of Italy” The Legacy of Fascism in Italian Cinema

Historical and Cultural Notes: Italy under Fascism

B

y the end of the 1920s, Italy had become a totalitarian state under the dictatorship of Benito Mussolini and his fascist regime. In fascist Italy, individuals could survive only if they unquestioningly accepted the regime’s totalitarian dictates and, if they equally unquestioningly played the gender roles that the regime outlined for them in their social environment. The men were required to project a very virile image of masculinity and to respond promptly and enthusiastically to the military call of the regime that required them to fulfill its imperialistic goals. The women, on the other hand, were required to fulfill their reproductive role as mothers so as to provide the regime with as many future soldiers as possible. A very active social program was put in place in order to promote demographic increase and financially reward the most prolific families. Women were also publicly given another important role as providers of sex for the oversexed fascist males, with whose virility and sexual satisfaction the regime was constantly concerned. Bordellos controlled by the state were opened at that time, where female prostitutes were kept at the state’s expense with free medical care provided by the regime in order to ensure a safe exchange of sex for the fascist men involved. In fascist times, women were thus assigned the two very specific traditional roles of mother and of prostitute. With this statement, I do not intend to suggest that fascist ideology invented these two roles for women, as women have played them in every culture and in all eras since the world began. Fascism simply made them more visible by insisting on rigidly categorizing its male and female citizens by rigorously assigning them fixed gender roles that also held a strong political significance.1

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Italian Cinema in Fascist Times In the 1930s, at the height of its political power, fascism discovered cinema to be a very effective propaganda tool that could visualize and effectively demonstrate what the regime required from its citizens. The cinematic genre preferred at the time was the documentary,2 a short-feature genre of film that Mussolini particularly liked, as, with its supposedly faithful representation of contemporary events, it could be easily used to publicize the social and military accomplishments of the fascist regime and to demonstrate visually the roles prescribed by the regime for its citizens. Madri d’Italia (Mothers of Italy; 1934) was one of such documentaries that carefully outlined the exclusive role that the fascist regime projected for Italian women.3 This documentary seems to work for women just as well as Figli d’Italia: caduti in Africa (Sons of Italy: Fallen in Africa) was supposed to do for men. The overall goal of fascist documentaries was, indeed, to promote the regime’s totalitarian ideology that aimed at codifying the roles that Italian women and men should play in fascist Italy. In such a totalitarian environment, film directors soon understood that, in order to survive, cinema had to become the most important instrument of propaganda that the regime could use in order to influence its citizens and to make them more aware of its controlling power.4 In order to help the regime accomplish its goals, Italian cinema had to expand its exclusive documentary production by producing full-length feature films in order to attract and influence the masses with spectacular offerings. Italian directors responded, therefore, to the fascist regime’s request to fictionalize history in order to create recognizable links between the illustrious Italian historical past and contemporary fascist Italy, especially by proposing heroes in whom Italian spectators would recognize Mussolini, their fascist leader.5 In order to foster their propaganda goals, fascist authorities, moreover, showed a preference for historical feature films that projected what the regime considered the perfect type of society upon which fascist Italy should be modeled, such as imperial Rome or the Renaissance city. The most significant among the historical films of the times were Scipione l’Africano (Scipio Africanus: The Defeat of Hannibal; 1937) and Ettore Fieramosca (Ettore Fieramosca; 1938). Scipione l’Africano, directed by Carmine Gallone, is a remarkable example of how fascist cinema used the history of Rome and its heroes to strengthen the connections between fascist Italy and imperial Rome. Ettore Fieramosca, directed by Alessandro Blasetti, on the other hand, attempted the same comparison between fascist Italy and Renaissance Italy. In these times another genre of films, the “light comedy” ones, made its appearance in the Italian theaters. The comic films of this time had the goal to entertain their audiences, by portraying the everyday life of women and men who could be easily ridiculed for not fitting the standards of the codified gender behavior dictated by the regime. We will be analyzing a few of these films, such as Goffredo Alessandrini’s La segretaria privata (The Private Secretary; 1931) and Mario Camerini’s Gli uomini, che mascalzoni (What Scoundrels Men Are!; 1932), Il Signor Max (Mister Max; 1937), and I grandi magazzini (Department Store; 1939).

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In the 1940s, as soon as fascist Italy joined Nazi Germany in World War II, the regime needed a different genre of films, the so-called war film, which aimed at building up fascist war propaganda even when the Italians were being defeated by the Allied forces in the African campaign or on the Russian front. Because of their military plots, these films obviously lack female protagonists, thus I will not analyze any of them, as they do not offer significant information for our research topic. In their stead, we will analyze some other films made in the early 1940s, which will prepare us for the neorealist movement that will make Italian cinema internationally recognized again. Historical Films Scipione l’Africano The narrative strategies adopted by some historical films made in fascist times show the pressure that fascist gender ideology exercised on Italian cinema. Scipione l’Africano, for instance, while proposing the same historical situation; that is, the war between Carthage and Rome for the domination of the Mediterranean that Pastrone’s Cabiria (discussed in Chapter 1) had already focused upon, deals with its main male characters in a decidedly different way so as to highlight fascist gender ideology. Both films concentrate on the superhuman qualifications of the two military leaders of the opposing armies, Scipio of the Romans and Hannibal of the Carthaginians. The narrative strategies introduced in the fascist film propose, however, new gender relationships that reveal the role-playing network that the regime had devised for both its male and female citizens. Scipio in this film is presented as having all the positive qualities that a Roman or fascist leader should have (such as heroism, daring, military commitment, and strategic ability in battle planning, popularity, and nationalistic pride). In addition, he is also endowed with the required type of masculinity (a topic that was ignored in Cabiria), as he is specifically charged with fathering children, a characteristic that was required by the fascist regime from all men, as Mussolini himself had proclaimed in one of his most publicized mottoes, “A man is not a man if he is not also a husband and a father.” This reveals the importance that fascism placed on men’s virility and on their reproductive role within the family. In order to represent such an important masculine dimension essential to the regime’s project of increasing Italy’s demographic output, Scipio is positioned at both the beginning and closing of this film within a family environment. There he is welcome by a devoted wife fondly holding a baby in her arms and by a doting little son who plays soldiers with him. This new family role-playing required from the male hero is achieved by introducing in the plot a new female character who plays the wife and mother role that fascists recognized as essential for any “good” woman. The addition of this new female character in the story of Scipio works on two levels: On one level, it reflects the fascist requirement for a family-engaged masculinity that Mussolini himself strongly endorsed. In spite of his long-lasting relationship with Claretta Petacci, his official lover, and his several affairs with

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other less-publicized female companions, Mussolini always tried to highlight this fatherly image of masculinity by having his private life with his wife and children filmed and photographed as often as possible and publicized extensively in newsreels and newspapers. On the other level, the character of Scipio’s wife projected the role that every Italian woman in fascist times was expected to accept and desire for herself in real life; that is, to be the wife of a man who, besides protecting her by being a soldier, could also make her a mother. That, in fact, was the only worthy and acceptable role in life to which a “good” woman was allowed to aspire in fascist Italy. In Pastrone’s Cabiria the two female protagonists were Cabiria, a little girl in need of the assistance of a daring hero, who turned into a beautiful and virtuous young bride by the end of the film, and Sophonisba, depicted as a sexy and dangerous woman. In Scipione l’Africano, we still find Sophonisba, but Cabiria is replaced by a new character, Velia, who plays quite a different role, even if she does share some of Cabiria’s main characteristics, such as virtue and kindness as well as her condition as slave. Velia is a beautiful, young Roman woman of marrying age, betrothed to Urunte, a valiant Roman soldier. She lives in one of the Italian villages that were invaded and pillaged by Hannibal’s army that makes all its inhabitants their prisoners. As a prisoner, she is taken with the other village women to Hannibal’s headquarters where he sees her, becomes interested in her, and decides to keep her as his own slave. Velia becomes thus involved with Hannibal, the other main hero of the film, who displays toward her the virile, sexual drive that is traditionally seen as one of the essential traits of masculinity. Hannibal’s goal, however, is not to father children with her and create a regular family, but only to possess Velia sexually and humiliate her because she had dared to stand up to him and question his orders. Velia’s main role in the narrative strategy of the film is to highlight Hannibal’s flaws as a man (lust without fathering children) and as a hero (self-conceit and exploitation of power). These flaws make him a much less heroic figure than Scipio, which prefigures his final defeat by the latter. At the same time, Velia’s virtue and faithfulness to Urunte propose her as another role model for Italian women, underlying the importance for a woman to be virtuous and renounce seductiveness and personal power in order to be faithful to her man. While both Scipio’s wife and Velia represent the type of “good” woman approved by fascist ideology, Sophonisba, instead, in both Cabiria and Scipione l’Africano, plays the role of a woman dangerous to men, as she knows how to use her seductiveness for her own personal power. While in Cabiria, Sophonisba is constructed as a complex character that combines both dangerous and heroic qualities, in Scipione l’Africano her role is reduced exclusively to that of a “bad” woman, or one who is very dangerous to the men who fall under her spell. In this way, Sophonisba reflects more faithfully the fascist negative view of independent and controlling women, as women, according to fascist and patriarchal standards, should always be under the control of men as the proper objects of sexual drives. Instead, Sophonisba, with her seductiveness, is the one who is in control of men— of Siface first and of Massinissa later—and only Scipio’s virtue and authority can stand up to her, suspend her negative power, and take away her controlling influence

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by making her a prisoner of the Romans. Scipione l’Africano, thus, demonstrates how fascist cinema clearly conveys the view of gender relationships that the regime has codified, especially in the role playing assigned to its male and female citizens. Ettore Fieramosca The cinematic strategies used in Blasetti’s Ettore Fieramosca (1938) convey similar ideological messages, even if the historical setting has changed from Imperial Rome to Renaissance Italy. The story is set during the time when Italy was the battleground for the Spanish and French armies, each with the goal of invading and conquering the whole Italian peninsula. The film chooses to concentrate its action on and around a very strategically located Italian fortress that both Spain and France wanted to conquer. This fortress is ruled by a woman, Giovanna di Monreale. In the film discourse, then, to conquer the fortress is synonymous with conquering its female ruler. The narrative action is thus organized in terms of power and sex: whoever conquers the woman will also possess the fortress and vice versa. This premise allows the film to exploit the typical lovemaking clichés used for seducing women, giving them political implications. Giovanna, even without knowing him personally, is impressed by the heroic deeds performed by Ettore Fieramosca in defense of her castle. Fieramosca is an unknown local Italian warrior who offers to protect Giovanna against the foreign troops attacking her castle. This rather simple love-power plot is complicated by the presence of the knight from Asti who wants to marry Giovanna and does not hesitate to take credit for the heroic deeds performed by Fieramosca, thus exploiting Fieramosca’s bravery to his own ends in order to win Giovanna’s admiration and attention. Once he has conquered Giovanna through his first act of deception, the same knight moves on to conquer the fortress for the French with another, even worse, act of treason, which costs several of Giovanna’s people their lives. Giovanna up to this point is presented as a very virtuous woman shown exclusively inside the walls of her castle and always dressed in white. In addition, she is framed mostly by herself with low-angle, tilted shots to convey her isolated superiority as a ruler and as a virtuous woman. Once she becomes aware of the deception and treachery of the knight from Asti, Giovanna allows her own admiration for Ettore Fieramosca to show. Within her status as a just and generous ruler, she rewards Fieramosca’s bravery and protects him from his deceitful enemies. By this point, Giovanna is shown as a much more sociable character. No longer isolated, and no longer framed through low-angle tilts of the camera, she is shot frontally with several other characters around her, talking to and asking advice from the ones she trusts, as if to suggest that a ruler has to be able to live with her people and rule from among them rather than over them. This more human image of Giovanna is also enhanced by the fact that now she no longer dresses exclusively in white and does not hesitate to leave her castle when the need arises. Eventually Giovanna allows herself to show her love for Fieramosca and to accept him as her husband because of his valor and unselfish love for her and her cause. Indeed, Fieramosca loves Giovanna as a woman whose virtue and strength he admires. Even though he does not view her exclusively as a means to gain power

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and political status, he too, however, has a political, nationalistic goal: to keep Giovanna and her fortress from falling into the hands of either the French or the Spanish. He also intends to start a family with her that would forever rule her land. In this way, he also fulfills Giovanna’s equally nationalistic goal of maintaining Italian land independent of foreign rule. The story of Giovanna and Fieramosca thus succeeds in conveying a very important nationalistic message, one that was particularly significant in fascist Italy at the time when the regime was embracing a strong nationalist ideology. At the same time, the film clearly conveys the fascist codified images of men and women by presenting Ettore as a very strong and successful military hero who channels his virility toward a family-fathering goal by loving Giovanna as a wife and future mother of his children. Giovanna on the other hand, after emerging at the beginning of the film as an unusual, heroic, and self-reliant female character, is later reduced to a more fascist-like female role, dependent on the assistance of a strong hero in order to be saved from destruction. Her role as wife and future mother becomes therefore necessary for her, as well as for her fortress’s, survival. Strong, independent, and politically powerful women are hardly acceptable to fascist ideology, so Giovanna, although she comes across at first as strong and self-reliant, has to change in order to ensure success at the end. Thus, she turns into a more typical female character; that is, she assumes the more acceptable role of the wife of the hero and the future mother of his children. Consequently, unlike Sophonisba, who was threatened with slavery and eventually drawn to death because of her dangerous sexual power and of her politically incorrect anti-Roman ideology, Giovanna’s story has a different outcome. Because of her virtue and her politically correct nationalistic ideology, she is made a partner of Fieramosca’s glory and is allowed to conduct a contented woman’s life as wife and mother. In both these historical films, fascist ideology clearly shapes the destiny of men and women according to the selective projection of male and female roles proposed by the regime and dictated by its militaristic and nationalistic goals. The following films will show similar gender-role projection, even if according to a more specific consideration of contemporary, everyday life. “Light Comedy” Films In earlier Italian films, the phenomenon of the working woman had hardly been considered, except in a few films by Elvira Notari in the 1910s that were centered on young working female protagonists, such as Chiarina, la modista (Little Claire, the Milliner; 1919) or Carmela, la sartina di Montepulciano (Carmela, the Little Dressmaker from Montepulciano; 1916).6 In the 1930s, plots based around working women as protagonists became surprisingly common. Italian cinema started proposing, in a comic key, a new image of woman whose space was no longer the family home but rather an office (as in Goffredo Alessandrini’s La segretaria privata), a shop, a hotel, or a department store (like in Mario Camerini’s Gli uomini, che mascalzoni, Il Signor Max, or I grandi magazzini).

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This new image of woman was conveyed with the comedy genre that in literature and theater had already been used for centuries to entertain the public with characters and situations that readers or spectators would consider inferior to themselves and their social situation and that were, therefore, easy objects of laughter and ridicule. The comic films of this time had the same goal. Alessandrini’s film, La segretaria privata, tells the happy-ending story of a young provincial girl, Elsa, who goes to Rome with the well-defined goal of finding a job and a husband, and she succeeds in ensuring both. She is hired as a secretary in a bank and eventually marries the bank’s director after overcoming several obstacles, including becoming a victim of sexual harassment on the part of her boss (a very familiar problem still for women in the Italian workforce). The film deals with a supposedly weak and unprotected young woman from the countryside that, in spite of her shortcomings, succeeds in finding and maintaining a job in a big metropolis. She does this by conquering everyone with her optimism and positive view of life, which suggests a new trust in women and the power they have to change the world by believing in themselves and in their inner moral and emotional strength. The film, by portraying Elsa as a not particularly attractive or seductive woman, shows that it aims at viewing the potential of women beyond their physical appearance. Even if Elsa’s highest goal is still the traditional female goal of finding a husband, motherhood and self-sacrifice are not her primary concern. Instead, economic stability and rising to a higher rung in the social echelon are what she expects from life. These interests well represent the expectations of the middle class that was beginning to come to power in Italy during this time. Camerini’s films convey similar messages, even if sentimentality overrides the serious relationships facing the new working woman. The woman protagonist in Uomini, che mascalzoni is Mariuccia, a young woman working as a clerk in a perfume store in the center of Milan. Her day starts early in the morning, when she leaves home to go to work just as her father, a night watchman, comes back home from his job. She takes the streetcar and gets off close to the store where she works and where her other friends and coworkers join her, and all together they step into the store and start their day. This detailing of Mariuccia’s life aptly conveys the novelty of the representation of this new type of woman. She moves rapidly out of the private space of her home to the several public spaces she enters, such as the city streets, the streetcar, and the store. Mariuccia seems to be at ease in all of those spaces, as made visible by the camera that follows her with full-or mediumlength shots, mostly from the back and, consequently, rather anonymously as if to suggest that this is now the life of most Italian women living in the city. The representation, however, loses its anonymity when Mariuccia becomes aware of Aldo—played by a young Vittorio De Sica—a young man who is attracted to her and tries to get her attention by following on his bicycle the streetcar she is riding on. At this point, the camera frames Mariuccia from the front with some close-ups and concentrates on her facial expressions, which reveal the contradictory feminine ways with which she reacts to the young man’s attentions. She seems pleased and, at the same time, afraid of him and of his audacity. These different frontal shots frame Mariuccia in the traditional image of a woman who finds herself the object of a man’s attentions. In this way, upon the anonymous representation of

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her as the new type of working woman, achieved by framing her from the back on her way to work, is superimposed the more traditional feminine image of her as a woman aware of being desired by a man and both pleased with and afraid of such a desire. From the beginning, Mariuccia is projected, therefore, as a character combining both new and traditional traits, and this combined imaging is kept up throughout the film until the end. Most suggestive of this representation, are the film sequences at the Milan Fair, the biggest commercial annual event in Milanese city life. In order to earn some additional money, Mariuccia accepts a girlfriend’s offer to work with her at one of the fair stands. Yet when she becomes aware of her boss’s friend’s sexual advances, she refuses to become a victim of male authoritarian abuse. She does not hesitate to refuse the additional job, even against her friend’s advice, and prefers to ask for Aldo’s assistance. In this way, Mariuccia shows an unusual awareness of her woman’s right to be respected as a worker and to refuse victimization. At the same time, she recognizes the dangers to which a woman is exposed in a man’s world and does not hesitate to request the protection of a man who loves her and whom she trusts. Thus, also in this case, over Mariuccia’s representation as the new woman consciously affirming herself in the working world, a more traditional representation of her is superimposed: as a weak woman in need of a man’s protection. This representation satisfies the requirements set for women by fascist ideology. At the same time, Mariuccia is also proposed as a romantic woman, who prefers to relate to a man in terms of love rather than in terms of economic opportunism. This trend, noticed in “light comedy” films, of depicting gender relationships in a romantic, sentimental mood helps to gain the audience’s interest with their tear-inducing plots, like the melodrama genre films often do. This melodramatic trend is typical of Camerini as a director and can be found in most of his films. This trend is clear also in Il Signor Max, where both the male protagonist (Gianni/Max, played as well by Vittorio De Sica) and the young working female character of the film (Lauretta) opt for a modest life of love and respect together rather than one of adventure in the world of the high society. The film centers on the unexpected fortune of a poor newspaper dealer (Gianni), who is invited by his rich and socially successful friend (Max) to take his place on an expensive cruise. There, all the rich socialites of their city accept him as Max because of their incredible physical likeness and a beautiful and rich widow, Paola, who is also Lauretta’s employer, becomes interested in him. Lauretta is the only working person in that group of rich and prominent people with whom Gianni gets involved. Lauretta instinctively recognizes him as a kindred spirit, and she confides in him the problems she is facing in her new position as Paola’s little sister’s nanny. She admits that she had left her previous position, a modest secretarial job, for this opportunity to travel in high-society circles. She has come, however, to realize that she has made a great mistake. In spite of her excellent salary, she takes offence at being constantly insulted by a twelve-year-old brat who is unquestionably protected by her older sister, who has no patience or respect for Lauretta. Lauretta, then, is the first to realize that she is different from the people for whom she works. She is aware that she can find happiness only in living a type of life where she is respected and can respect herself. Economic success is no longer

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a goal for Lauretta, who is here proposed as a fair and responsible young working woman, the antithesis of Paola, her rich, spoiled, and manipulative female boss, whose beauty and social graces fascinate Gianni/Max, the man to whom Lauretta is attracted. This triangular relationship is played out through the film, adding to the suspense established from the beginning by the Gianni/Max double-personality play. Eventually influenced by his family, who like Lauretta very much, Gianni too falls in love with her and gives up Paola. Lauretta, then, in spite of her proletarian consciousness that makes her suspicious of the upper class, ends up happily accepting the traditional goal to which all women, from whatever social class they come, constantly aspire—that is, marriage. In spite of its subject matter, which handles the challenging implications of women in the workplace, the story in this film closes with the traditional happy ending: marriage. A new view of woman as a contributing member of the proletariat emerges here. The message of these comedy films is, then, that the best type of woman is indeed the working woman who looks at work as a means for improving her economic situation, like Mariuccia (in Gli uomini, che mascalzoni) and Elsa (in La segretaria privata). This type of working woman is also capable of realizing on her own the importance of belonging to one’s own social environment where communication is possible and respect is essential. Lauretta, on one hand, is depicted as a victim of her superiors’ abuse, but, on the other hand, she is also depicted as a woman who looks for dignity and self-respect in both her private life and at work and who is capable of making decisions on her own, even without a man’s assistance, particularly in matters of love. Contrary to traditional gender relationships, her love affair with Gianni is decisively initiated by her and developed by her interest in him. Besides openly showing her sexual interest for Gianni, Lauretta is indeed the holder of the gaze, as she is the one who constantly searches for him and follows him with her gaze rather than vice versa, as we have been accustomed to notice in traditional male-female relationships. Even if the mood of the film is comic, the self-reliant and active woman of modern times seems to be born here with Camerini’s Lauretta. Obviously, in order to be able to convey such a nontraditional view of woman in fascist times, all these films had to propose it in comic terms—that is, as laughable, ridiculous projections that were not to be taken seriously. It will take a long time before we will be able to see the likes of Lauretta being taken seriously in Italian cinema. In his next film, I grandi magazzini, Camerini employs his signature tearjerking cinematic strategies to convey the inherent sentimentality paramount to love relationships. He uses the same actors, Vittorio De Sica and Assia Noris (by then well on their way to becoming popular divi of early Italian cinema) to play another couple of lovers, Bruno and Lauretta, working in the same department store. In I grandi magazzini, the suspense is kept up by a different series of misunderstandings and tricks that seriously affect Lauretta. She is framed as a thief by her unscrupulous boss, and it is only at the end that the truth comes out and Lauretta is saved. The love affair between Bruno and Lauretta is handled in a much less romantic way than in the earlier films. Bruno is a not very reliable lover, as he does not hesitate to have affairs with other women even while he is engaged to Lauretta. Furthermore, he is in part responsible, even if unknowingly so, for

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framing Lauretta as a thief. Lauretta, however, overcomes all her problems and shows an unusual presence of mind that helps her to get out of the mess. I grandi magazzini also creates, even if still within a comic mood, an impressive image of woman as strong, intelligent, and self-reliant. At the end, however, the film cannot resist transforming this image by stressing Lauretta’s interest in getting male protection through marriage. In so doing, the film proposes a traditional happy ending to its love story, which sees the lovers reunited and pacified and ready for marriage. I grandi magazzini focuses more on the pathos-evoking representation of Lauretta’s condition as a woman worker, victimized by her boss, rather than on the sentimental outcome of her love story with Bruno. Female workers are thus often seen as the victims of pathologically unstable boss figures. In this film, there is no indication of a class conflict, as noticed in Il Signor Max, as all characters belong to the same lower-middle class. The main narrative conflict develops out of the different way women and men are treated in a working situation. Among all of Camerini’s films, I grandi magazzini is clearly the one that concentrates, through the character of Lauretta, on the unfair and painful treatment that women are subject to in the workplace. While in the other films, the victimized women could at least count on the assistance of the men who loved them, in this case, Lauretta cannot even count on that, as Bruno is hardly a person she can trust. Lauretta, therefore, stands up as a strong woman character that succeeds on her own against all odds. Yet this film, too, proposes a strong female image in a generally comic mood as if to question the reliability of such an image. To conclude, in these comic films of the 1930s, women are projected as having to pay greatly for their first attempts at emancipation. They do, however, brilliantly pass the tests with which their new lives confront them and often turn into much stronger characters than their male counterparts do. Even the binary collocation of man as holder of the gaze and of sexual desire versus woman as object of the gaze and devoid of desire, traditionally formulated for love relationships, is overturned here. Woman here is hardly proposed as the object of the male’s look or desire but is often set up as the holder of the look and of the desire and as the initiator of a love relationship, thus relegating the male protagonist to a position of passivity and submission, hardly considered acceptable in traditional Italian cinema. Furthermore, these films show an unusual way to deal with marriage, as, even if they suggest that marriage is an inevitable happy ending to a love story, here it is actually offered as a social, rather than a romantic, solution. Indeed, marriage is introduced to reestablish the status quo seemingly threatened by the new depiction of strong, potentially independent women. All these films fall within the comic genre, and this can explain the change in the positioning of the male heroes as weak and devoid of control. This change promotes the comic mood, usually triggered by the unexpected as well as by the demystifying process typical of the carnivalesque. In this process, as noted by Bakhtin,7 characters usually held as heroes and superior to the public are demythicized and reduced to a level inferior to what is expected. The male heroes then, who are presented as weak and unable to stand up to a female protagonist, create an unexpected situation and consequently become a topic of ridicule and a cause for laughter. To this purpose, it is also useful to bring up a quotation by Ruby Rich

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about the power of comedy, which “has a revolutionary potential as the deflator of the patriarchal order and an extraordinary leveler and reinventor of dramatic structure.”8 We will find a similar condition later on in films belonging to the comedy-Italian-style genre of the 1960s and 1970s that proposes a similar combination of unexpectedly weak male characters and strong female protagonists. The new twist introduced by these films in their representation of male-female relationships, proposing strong heroines even with little sexual appeal and weaker male heroes, may explain the fact that few films of this type can be found in this period of Italian cinema and later. The historical situation of the times may well explain this trend. fascist ideology was dominating the culture of the 1930s and early 1940s, and was not ready to accept the representation of weak males and strong females that these comedies were proposing, even if only with the intention of ridiculing them. Forerunners of Neorealism Other films, even if they belong chronologically to the fascist period, propose female characters that are clearly different from the traditional representation of women in fascist cinema. These women, in spite of their staging as victims of their socioeconomic condition, have the strength to stand up to their environment and express their need for independence. In Chapter 2, we have briefly noticed how transgressively I bambini ci guardano, directed by Vittorio De Sica in 1942, has handled the fascist obsession with motherhood. De Sica, together with Cesare Zavattini, was to become one of the most outstanding directors of the neorealist movement. It is significant, therefore, to see whether, in fascist times, these two important future neorealist filmmakers handled women according to the regime’s codification or whether they preferred to attempt something different in their representation of women. It seems to me that this film offers both alternatives, and, consequently, it deserves to be analyzed briefly here as well. I bambini ci guardano, indeed, highlights an interest for change and transgressivity in the main female character of Nina while showing that the society around her was still influenced by the traditional gender values of the fascist regime. Nina is a married woman who leaves her husband and son in order to go and live with her lover. In spite of the potential that the story has for representing a different type of woman, the film’s narrative strategies clearly stress the negative view that society has of Nina. With little regard to Nina’s motivations, the film discourse centers on her actions and their deleterious effect on her family. Any Italian man in a similar situation would not incur any open criticism or hostility on the part of his society. Nina, instead, as a woman, is constantly subjected to negative and openly disapproving consideration from family members, acquaintances, and even strangers. The society in which Nina lives conveys the latent message of the film—that is, the disapproval of women who refuse to deny their sexuality and to play the roles of faithful wife and self-sacrificing mother exclusively reserved to them. Actually, Nina herself never verbally admits to be anything but a good wife and mother. Indeed, Nina’s husband and son, and the

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audience along with them, are never informed of the true reasons that inspired her to choose a lover over her family. According to what she says, she has no intention whatsoever to do so. When speaking to her son, she constantly assures him that she loves him very much, and when she speaks to or about her lover, she always states that she does not want to go away with him but wants to stay with her family. These statements, clearly proclaiming what fascist ideology had codified as a “good” woman’s purpose of life, are thus blatantly in conflict with her actions, as she twice leaves her family to go and live with her lover, and no explanation is provided to make sense out of such a contradictory situation. By refusing to give Nina a voice to accurately explain her own feelings and motivations, the film presents her situation in purely economic terms through the eyes and judgments of other characters who view her as a lucky and yet ungrateful and irresponsible woman. According to them, once she has married a well-to-do husband belonging to a higher social class, Nina does not appreciate her good fortune and loses everything because of her unwise behavior. In this way, the film makes sure that both the other characters in the film and the film audience never develop any kind of sympathetic feelings for Nina, thus revealing the uneasiness and antagonism that the fascist society felt toward any woman who resisted and refused the strict gender codification imposed by the regime. At the same time, the several close-up shots of Nina’s face and her suffering expression clearly convey her unhappiness and inability to communicate or express her innermost feelings. On the other hand, the unusual way in which the film handles the character of the husband seems to deviate most radically from the expected representation of masculinity as dictated by fascist and patriarchal ideology. This representation seems to fit with the type of weakened male representation that has already surfaced in the earlier melodrama genre and in the comic films of the times. Nina’s husband indeed presents, on one hand, a character trend that discloses a strong patriarchal need for exercising control over his wife and for disciplining both his wife and son. At the same time, he often shows a softer, weaker side of himself that contradicts the fascist model. He seems unable to make decisions by himself regarding his wife or his son, thus demonstrating, especially at the end of the film, the same inability to cope with the demands of the patriarchal family that his wife had demonstrated all throughout the film. In this way, the representation of man in this film undergoes that process of sensitization that the later comic genre will develop in full. The shots framing the husband in a black suit running away from his little boy down the imposing white marble stairs of the military boarding school where he has just left him, are taken from the son’s perspective, who is looking at him through the balustrade of the stairs and crying and calling for him aloud. The man’s decision to leave his young son in that military school environment, just after he has lost his mother and her love, is apparently taken in a moment of confusion and hardly takes into account the boy’s psychological and emotional frailty. The close-up shots of the little boy’s sad eyes full of tears clearly show his anguish at his father’s decision and the fears of abandonment that torment him. The final decision of the father to commit suicide in order to avoid facing the difficult situation he and his son find themselves in as the result of the mother’s desertion thus leaves his little boy completely alone in the world. It hardly looks

“MOTHERS OF ITALY” 49

like the decision expected from a responsible father in a patriarchal system. The lack of communication and the many separations that plague all the film’s relationships and the final mistiming of the father’s suicide increase the pathetic mood of the film, as the events develop into a complete break of communication and total solitude in a painful, melodramatic aura of missed opportunities and unexpressed emotions. I bambini ci guardano clearly deviates from the gender codification set forth by the fascist regime to regulate Italian male-female relationships in the 1930s and early 1940s. We will analyze here two additional examples of this type of resisting film that stand chronologically between fascism and neorealism: Visconti’s Ossessione (Obsession; 1943) and Rossellini’s Desiderio (Desire; 1943). Ossessione is Visconti’s first long feature film, set in fascist times as an adaptation of James Cain’s novel The Postman Always Rings Twice (published in 1934,with a stage version in 1936).9 It was considered the first Italian film to set and promote neorealist ideology and style, especially in its representation of real-life characters caught in conflicting economic situations. Giovanna, the female protagonist of the film, is at the center of such a conflicting situation. She is constructed at first as a resisting female character, as she clearly challenges the patriarchal codification of the role of woman as wife. She is, indeed, openly intolerant of her husband and uses all means to escape his control and desire, even if she is not ready to leave him because of the economic security with which he provides her. Giovanna’s resistance to patriarchal codification is cinematically conveyed during her first encounter with Gino, the handsome handyman working for the couple. The camera reveals that, in fact, she is in control of her gaze and, therefore, her desire, thus setting her up as a femme fatale type of woman whose beauty and sexual power dangerously affect the men involved with her and will eventually destroy her as well. Contrary to the traditional cinematic rules by which the gaze is exclusively a man’s prerogative used to reveal the female character on the screen, in the first encounter of Giovanna and Gino, it is the man, Gino, who is revealed to the spectators in his physical prowess and handsomeness by Giovanna’s intense, fascinated gaze concentrated on him when he stands in her kitchen door. Her gaze also reveals her husband’s physical unattractiveness and old age, while his unpleasant character is signified by the expression of disgust with which she reacts to his voice and behavior. Giovanna is thus shown as a resisting wife character, intolerant of and disgusted by an ugly and coarse older husband whose control and advances she refuses. On the other hand, her unwillingness to give up her economic stability binds her tightly to the materialistic ideology of fascist bourgeois society. Giovanna is represented here as a complex human character unwilling to accept any traditional “good” woman role. She seems, thus, to fall easily into the “bad” woman category. Unwilling to accept her husband’s control, she is sexually interested in another man outside of the family. Later in the story, however, it becomes clear that her interest in Gino is dictated not only by her sexual drive but also by her inner urge to change her life. She sees Gino as the tool by which she can get rid of her disgusting husband while keeping her economic security intact. Her unwillingness to give

50 WOMEN, DESIRE, AND POWER IN ITALIAN CINEMA

up her economic security marks Giovanna as a materialistic creature. At the same time, by informing the audience of the unfair circumstances that had conditioned her to marry her rich, disgusting husband—that is, her extreme poverty and her dismal family situation—the film discourse projects Giovanna as a victim of economic and social injustice, as most neorealist films do with their protagonists. This obsessive need for economic security combined with her disgust for her husband drives Giovanna to Gino and eventually to plot her husband’s murder. After faking a car accident to cover up his murder, together they manage her husband’s restaurant and gas station, which, after his death, she has inherited. By introducing the points of view of several minor characters, and especially of Gino’s friend, lo Spagnolo, a new character that Visconti added to Cain’s novel, the film discourse gives a clearly unsympathetic representation of Giovanna as a woman and a wife. Her beauty and sex appeal are often proposed as dangerous for men, for her husband as well as for Gino, who, in order to have her, becomes involved in a crime that will give him no peace. Indeed, of the two lovers and partners in crime, Gino is the more remorseful and tormented one, while Giovanna is more concerned with the economic side of their partnership, which for her represents the tangible result of her husband’s death and the only mean she has to keep Gino tied to her. This obsessive clinging to her material possessions reveals Giovanna’s fears of inadequacy in her relationship with a young and handsome lover. She assumes a matter-of-fact approach to their postcrime situation in order to calm Gino and oblige him to rely on her. As a more rational personality, Giovanna is also concerned with how to avoid the police investigating her husband’s death, which is unnerving Gino. His remorse, however, causes a violent crisis between the two, until Giovanna reveals that she is pregnant. Only at this point does she acknowledge their crime, as she sees her pregnancy as a sign of divine forgiveness of the two of them who, although they have taken a life, are now going to bring a new life back. Soon, however, both she and their unborn baby die in a real automobile accident, and Gino is accused of a murder that he has not committed. Giovanna, then, oversteps the role-playing boundaries imposed on women by fascist cinema. Although she is framed in the traditional roles of wife and temptress, she is an unusual female character who has experienced life at its worst and has survived to develop a strong awareness of a woman’s rights to sexual satisfaction and economic stability together with an equally strong rational capacity to understand and control situations and people. She is thus endowed with a human complexity rarely attained in former fascist films but that will be attempted again by several later neorealist filmmakers. Giovanna’s death, combined with that of her unborn baby, opens up a pathetic parenthesis in the narrative with a tear-jerking finale, a typical melodramatic ending focusing on Gino’s desperation that promotes compassion and empathy in the spectators. The ending of the film, with its pathetic mood, links the film to the melodrama tradition of early Italian cinema, while the rest of the film successfully foreshadows the new neorealist cinematic movement emerging in the mid-1940s. We will see several other examples of such a blend in this period, especially in Rossellini’s films, such as Desiderio or the later Una voce umana and Il miracolo.

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Rossellini’s Desiderio also seems to overstep the traditional representation of women as either “good” or “bad.” The female protagonist, Paola, although framed at first in a traditional “good” woman role, is later obliged by her precarious economic situation to accept life as a prostitute in the corrupt urban milieu of Rome. Later on, she tries to escape such a life and reach out for a more human type of existence in a small country village far away from the city. Paola is thus represented as a responsible and self-reliant creature interested in bettering her life, but yet unable to change and improve it. When she realizes that her expectations are impossible to fulfill, Paola chooses her own destiny and commits suicide rather than return to her former life as a prostitute in the city. In this case, the disappearance of the woman does not convey a negative moralistic judgment of her as a “bad” woman, but rather it proposes her as a victim unable to resist the unfair pressures of a corrupt society. The moral dilemma that a woman has to face in an unjust society will return in several of Rossellini’s and other neorealist directors’ films with different outcomes, depending on the types of individuals the films are portraying. In this case, Paola’s death entails two different reactions: On one hand, there is a pathetic one of commiseration and empathy for a suffering creature left alone to fight for her own principles of morality and decency. This appeal to pathos also inscribes this film within the melodrama genre. On the other hand, Paola’s suicide stands as a criticism of a whole society unable to uphold the traditional values of human respect and compassionate assistance for people in need. This powerful critical indictment of a whole society, here conveyed through a female character, is clearly a precursor of the strong social criticism to be conveyed by later neorealist films, even if they do not always employ female characters to convey it, as we will see in the next chapter. In conclusion, we can say that the representation of women in fascist cinema seems to drastically reduce women to the roles prescribed for them by fascist ideology, which is closely influenced by traditional patriarchal ideology—that is, of woman as wife of the hero and mother of his children or of woman as temptress, as we have seen respectively in Giovanna in Ettore Fieramosca and in Sophonisba in Scipione l’Africano. The exceptions we found were mostly relegated to the comedy films of the times, where the representation of weak males and strong females was conveyed with the purpose of ridiculing them, as the couples Mariuccia and Aldo in Gli uomini che mascalzoni, Lauretta and Gianni in Il Signor Max, and, especially, Lauretta and Bruno in I grandi magazzini well demonstrate. Only in the films that can be called forerunners of neorealism, which were strongly influenced by the melodrama tradition, can we find the exceptions to such rigid traditional codification of women’s roles, embodied in complex and sometimes pathetic female characters, like Nina in I bambini ci guardano, Giovanna in Ossessione, or Paola in Desiderio.

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4

Women in Neorealist Cinema

Introduction to Neorealism

T

he neorealist film movement rushed into Italy on the heels of the departing Nazi troops. The sense of relief coming from the realization that Mussolini, the fascists, and the Nazis had been defeated was matched only by the conviction that the story of the widespread suffering of the Italians needed to be filmed immediately, especially the story of the terrible World War II years (1943–1945) of devastation and civil war when the Allies’ invasion of Italy (1943) triggered the fall of Mussolini and fascism and the Nazi occupation of the peninsula in order to restore Mussolini’s regime, while a strong insurgent reaction, called the Partisan Resistance, arose and fought on the side of the Allies against the combined fascist and Nazi forces. In those years, the war was fought on Italian soil and it became a civil war, with Italian Partisans fighting Italian fascists. The filming of Rossellini’s Roma città aperta (Open City; 1945) started in 1944 as soon as the Allies entered Rome, and the film was released in 1945, the same year the war ended. In the next seven years, the neorealist movement was to inspire some of Italy’s best directors who made several of the finest films in the history of world cinema. More than any one stylistic element or theme, there is a certain attitude that best characterizes neorealism. That attitude includes a strong desire to uncover the truth about the widespread suffering in Italy and to identify sympathetically with the plight of the victims. The director Alberto Lattuada expressed this view in what was called the “Neorealist Manifesto” where he proposed to see neorealism as “the great combat with truth”: “So we’re in rags? Then, let us show our rags to the world! So, we’re defeated? Then, let us contemplate our disasters! Then, let us pay our debts with a fierce love of honesty, and the world will be moved to participate in this great combat with truth.” When Cesare Zavattini was accused of being exclusively concerned with portraying a poverty and misery-stricken Italy, he replied, “We have started with misery, simply because it is one of the most dominant aspects of our society.” What is common about all descriptions of neorealism1 is the clear sense that they convey a “mission.” Neorealist directors and theorists saw the movement as a social phenomenon as well as aesthetic force. By warmly identifying with the victims of

54 WOMEN, DESIRE, AND POWER IN ITALIAN CINEMA

social injustice, they hoped that they could instill in their viewers a positive response and a desire for reform. That they were able to seek such a response without turning their films into propagandistic documentaries is to the credit of neorealism. A major element of the “newness” of neorealism was the strong commitment to the immediate sociopolitical situation. As different as the neorealist films are, they all share the mission of inviting our solidarity for those “who suffer and hope” in an everyday life dominated by social injustice and economic inequity. Given this common mission, it is not surprising that there are many stylistic similarities among the neorealist films. These include the almost exclusive use of on-location shooting in authentic settings, a preference for nonprofessional actors, a rejection of elaborate plots, and the frequent employment of improvisation. Obviously, some of the neorealist techniques were developed out of necessity. For example, Rossellini had to use on-location shooting for Roma città aperta because the Cinecitta studios in Rome were unavailable, as they were still occupied by war refugees. Each individual director had his own particular interest. Roberto Rossellini was mostly concerned with the upheavals of the war itself, as shown in Roma città aperta and Paisà (Paisan; 1946), Luchino Visconti and Francesco De Santis addressed the problems of the peasantry respectively in La terra trema (The Earth Trembles; 1948) and in Riso amaro (Bitter Rice; 1949). Poverty in urban sites became the favorite topic of Vittorio De Sica’s and Cesare Zavattini’s Ladri di biciclette (The Bicycle Thief; 1948) and Umberto D. (1952). The flaws of the bourgeoisie attracted Michelangelo Antonioni, as shown in Cronaca di un amore (Story of a Love Affair; 1950). In this chapter, we will consider these neorealist films to assess specifically what type of images of woman they convey. Neorealist Films Rossellini’s2 films Roma città aperta and Paisà include a strong political indictment of fascism and Nazism as the totalitarian regimes that caused havoc, destruction, and suffering in twentieth-century Europe and particularly in Italy. Roma città aperta The narrative strategies of Roma città aperta focus upon the conflict between Nazism and fascism on one side and the Italian Partisan Resistance on the other. In order to highlight this conflict, Roma città aperta uses two main male characters, Manfredi and Don Pietro, representing two real-life Resistance heroes, respectively a Communist leader and a Partisan priest. Yet, in order to emphasize the awful effects that a totalitarian regime brought upon Italian life, the film uses two female characters, Pina and Marina, who effectively personify the civilian victims of Nazi cruelty, injustice, and corruption. Pina, a widow with a young son and engaged to marry Francesco, a partisan friend of Manfredi, is struck down by Nazi fire, while Marina, Manfredi’s

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girlfriend, is corrupted through drugs and, equally although indirectly, destroyed by the Nazis. The sympathy of the director and of the film’s audience goes naturally to these two women who are clearly victims of those awful times. There are two other female characters in the film, Lauretta and Ingrid, who are closely connected to Marina. Lauretta is Pina’s younger sister who is eager to break away from her family and from their dire conditions of poverty and deprivation. She is a childhood friend of Marina and works with her as a dancer in the same nightclub. Ingrid is a German woman affiliated with the Nazi S. S. headquarters in Rome in charge of discovering and arresting all Italians involved with the Partisan Resistance. Ingrid is the one who supplies Marina with drugs in order to make the young woman dependent on her and eventually induce her to betray her boyfriend. Of these four women, only Pina is presented in a completely positive way, as she is the only woman in the film who fully reflects the film’s political message. She shows a clear distaste for the fascist and Nazi militiamen who patrol the streets of Rome and raid the city’s apartment houses. She willingly assists Manfredi, Francesco’s friend and one of the leaders of the Partisan Resistance, and shares Francesco’s view of how joyful and serene life will be once the day of liberation from fascist and Nazi oppression comes. Pina is a many-leveled character, partly a heroic woman and partly the image of the “good” woman and mother canonized by Italian tradition and prescribed by fascism. In Pina’s role, Rossellini cast Anna Magnani (see Figure 4), who was his girlfriend at the time and had been a well-known vaudeville actress in the 1930s.3 Pina is shown as a popular heroine from the very beginning of the film. The first time the audience has a glimpse of her is during a bread riot. She is framed with all the other screaming, upset poor women who are raiding a baker’s shop out of frustration and despair at not finding any bread for their families and children, as the baker makes bread and cookies only for his rich fascist customers. Pina is projected as the main instigator of the riot, a popular female leader whom the other women respect and follow in their attempts to do justice on their own. Pina’s moderation and generosity are also highlighted by showing her leaving the riot site with just two loaves of bread, one of which she promptly gives to the equally famished Italian policeman who helps her with her bag all the way home. The film visually conveys this image of Pina as a popular and yet moderate heroine by framing her exclusively in full- and medium-length camera shots with other people and never on her own or in close-ups. At this point, the audience is also made aware of her pregnancy, which immediately makes her a reassuring mother-image that is well liked by Italian audiences. Her exceptional qualifications are emphasized again in the following sequences, when she encounters and accompanies to Francesco’s apartment his friend Manfredi, now being pursued by the Nazis. In these sequences, the camera frames Pina constantly with the same types of shots used to frame Manfredi, as if to convey the message that the two are on the same level of importance, and that Pina is as much a hero as Manfredi is even if she is a woman and belongs to a lower social class. Indeed, Manfredi and Pina share the same ideals of freedom and justice and are both strong enough to be ready to fight and die to uphold them. The dialogue between them is also kept on a level of equal exchange, as Pina explains the women’s state of mind to Manfredi, who, as an

56 WOMEN, DESIRE, AND POWER IN ITALIAN CINEMA

intellectual, tends to be cut off from the everyday life and needs of simple people. Pina’s unusual, down-to-earth, and reasonable personality is carefully formulated in the clear explanation she gives Manfredi of her own situation. As a poor widow with a little boy, now pregnant with Francesco’s child, she is planning a religious marriage with him, not because of strong religious motivations, but rather because, in her own words, as they are both antifascist, it makes more sense for her and Francesco to be married in church by Don Pietro, a friend who shares their own political beliefs and ideals, rather than in city hall by a fascist government officer. Pina further shows her generous and modest personality when she offers to assist Manfredi in his request to see Don Pietro by sending her son, Marcello, to fetch the priest and convince him to come promptly to Francesco’s apartment for a very important and urgent matter. Once the two men are together, she withdraws and leaves them alone to discuss their urgent matters in private, thus showing her understanding of and respect for the gravity of the political situation the two men are facing. Later on, Pina is revealed as a very apprehensive mother, who is worried about her son’s absence at night during the curfew imposed over the city by the fascists and Nazis in order to control political unrest. This additional facet of Pina’s personality works well as it places Pina within Italian society’s traditional, positive view of woman as mother. In this way, Pina’s character acquires an emotional, feminine dimension that makes her more likeable to general audiences who may experience distaste for political heroines. This trend to endow Pina’s personality with an emotional dimension that allows her to cast an image of womanhood acceptable to all kinds of traditional audiences continues into the following sequence. There Pina is framed sitting close to Francesco on the steps in front of their apartment, the only place where they can be alone to prepare for their wedding that is supposed to take place the next day. In this sequence, Pina and Francesco are framed together, mostly in close-ups that convey their personal, private situation as individuals in love. Francesco holds Pina close to him while he talks to her of the changes that spring, a time when they achieve freedom and liberation from the repressive totalitarian regime that is persecuting them, will bring in their life and in the country. While Francesco talks, Pina looks up to him with an expression of love and admiration and emphatically agrees with what he is saying. This attitude of total consent and dedication to her man, together with her show of affection for him, casts Pina in the image of a woman in love, thus further endowing her with the qualifications acceptable to the traditional Italian view of woman totally integrated into a life dedicated to her man and her children. With these traditional qualifications attached to her character, Pina’s heroic dimension is put on hold. This strategy allows all audiences to sympathize with her while momentarily forgetting the earlier and more unusual characterization of her as a political heroine placed on the same level with the male heroes of the film. This compounded construction of Pina as a female character makes it possible for all audiences to appreciate and sympathetically respond to one of the most dramatic sequences of the film, which focuses on her being gunned down by the Nazis who have seized Francesco and are taking him away on a military truck. This sequence is masterfully filmed with careful use of subjective camera techniques and full- and medium-length shots alternated so as to arouse the emotional

WOMEN IN NEOREALIST CINEMA 57

as well as political reactions of the audience. It starts with a long shot of Pina among the other women gathered in the apartment-house courtyard during the raid organized by the fascist and Nazi militiamen to round up the Italian men believed hidden there. Then the camera pans away from the women to the men being seized by the Nazis, and, once Francesco is framed among them, the camera turns back on Pina, who, unlike all the other women, who cry or withdraw in their own pain and become resigned to their destiny, decides to react and pushes the Nazi guard away from her. Calling Francesco’s name aloud, she starts running to get out of the courtyard and reach the street after Francesco, who in the meantime has been pushed onto a military truck that starts moving away. Up to this point Pina has been followed mostly from the back by the camera as if from the other women’s points of view. As soon as Pina reaches the street, however, and starts running after the truck that is taking Francesco away, she is followed by her son Marcello who is running after her, calling out her name. In this sequence, Pina is framed mostly from the front, seemingly from Francesco’s point of view; that is, the camera is placed inside the truck as it moves away with Francesco. When Pina is gunned down by the Nazis who are on the truck, her movements forward in unison with the camera’s are suddenly halted, and the distance between her dead body and the camera multiplies with a very strong dramatic effect that underlines the tragic importance of the event. Concomitant with this point of view, the camera alternates also another perspective: that of Marcello, Pina’s son. Through his perspective, we can see in a close-up her inanimate body lying in disarray on the pavement where Marcello throws himself, repeatedly crying out her name. Eventually Don Pietro moves in the frame and, after rearranging Pina’s clothing and imparting a belated benediction on the dead body that he holds briefly in his arms, he turns to Marcello and pulls him away from his mother and walks away with him. This careful maneuvering of different subjective camera points of view accentuates the dramatic human impact of the event, especially highlighting its emotional effect. At the same time, by placing the camera on the military truck, where the shots that kill Pina are fired, the film also succeeds in highlighting the uncalled-for cruelty of the repressive regime that causes such a gratuitous killing of a defenseless woman whose only crime was to be emotionally unwilling to accept the Nazis’ arbitrary seizing of her man. This sequence highlights Pina’s many-leveled image as a woman in love, as a mother, and as a political rebel because she stands up to Nazi oppression as a true heroine, both at the political and at the personal level. In the representation of women offered by Roma città aperta, Pina stands at one end of the spectrum, conveying a complex view of woman that combines the traditional “good” woman image with a heroic one, hardly ever attached to a woman in traditional Italian films. This heroic side of Pina’s character places her on the same level of the male heroes of the film, such as Manfredi and Don Pietro, thus suggesting that the film intends to question and defy the traditional, fascist view of women exclusively as frail and submissive to men. According to what seems to be the film’s obvious message, a woman, as long as she is truly committed to a just, political ideal, can reach heroic status comparable to that of a man. In Pina’s case, however, in order to make sure that such an unusual representation of woman can

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be accepted and appreciated by all audiences, the film discourse handles her death in a romantic way—that is, by presenting it as motivated by her love for Francesco and by her despair at his capture. Manfredi and Don Pietro’s deaths, instead, are presented exclusively in political and ideological terms, and the two characters are even given narrative time to explain their motivations so as to leave the audience with no doubt about their exclusively political commitment, a characteristic that is perfectly acceptable for male heroes. Furthermore, by reflecting the traditional view of a “good” woman as mother and would-be wife and by introducing a new heroic dimension handled in a very positive, unthreatening way—as opposed to the negative view of strong female characters displayed in fascist cinema (such as of Sophonisba or even of Giovanna)—Pina, in her complexity, seems to contradict any negative or typically fascist view of woman. On the opposite side of Pina, in its representation of women, the film discourse in Roma città aperta places its three other female characters: Marina, Lauretta, and Ingrid. They form a trio of women activated mostly by greed or selfishness and are closely interconnected with Marina at the center of these relationships, as she is the person who holds something that the other two women try to obtain, for social (Lauretta) or political (Ingrid) reasons. For Lauretta, Marina has been able to gain all the social comforts that she (Lauretta) is still trying to achieve: an elegant apartment with privacy, away from the crowded quarters of a vociferous and poverty-ridden family; plenty of elegant clothes; money to buy all she needs; and a handsome, higher-class boyfriend. For Ingrid, Marina is the connection she needs to approach and arrest Manfredi. In order to bring Marina under her control, Ingrid uses all the means she can think of, including drugs and expensive presents. Once she has achieved her goal, and Manfredi is securely held in the Gestapo torture chamber, Ingrid discards Marina as a useless object. When Marina faints at the sight of Manfredi’s tortured corpse, the camera frames Ingrid while she takes off of Marina’s inanimate body a precious fur coat she had given Marina as a gift earlier in the same day after Marina had delivered Manfredi to the Nazis. Once Ingrid has achieved her goal, she does not hesitate to take back her gift, ready to use it again in different circumstances and Marina is left alone on the floor as a discarded, useless object. Ingrid represents what could be seen as the extreme of an incorrect political commitment, devoid of all moral motivations. In order to fulfill her Nazi headquarters’ goal of eradicating the Italian Partisan Resistance, Ingrid does not hesitate to resort to corruption and deceit. Her relationship with Marina clearly demonstrates her methods. She introduces Marina to drugs and keeps her well provided with them. There is even more than a hint that she has also ensnared Marina in a lesbian relationship, of which Lauretta, in her popular wisdom, strongly disapproves, seeing it as a proof of Ingrid’s corrupting influence on Marina. In addition to her relationship with Marina, the film also positions Ingrid in a working relationship with her boss, the German commander, Major Bergmann. In this relationship as well, Ingrid is the one in control. She is a very efficient

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officer who gets things done, while the Major is always sitting behind a desk in his Gestapo office. Once he shows Ingrid a street photograph of Manfredi and Marina together, Ingrid activates her plans and does not stop until she has accomplished them. Ingrid thus is formulated as cold-minded, calculating, efficient, and rational in comparison to her often excitable, fidgeting, and nervous male boss. In this way, she fits the category of a dangerous woman, especially in her evident masculine attributes that make her clearly superior to and in control of the men and women with whom she becomes involved. All three women clearly fit the traditional category of “bad” women, challenging men’s or family’s authority with their independent actions and their wishes (at least for two of them) to be financially independent of them. Marina especially defies the traditional codification of woman as wife and mother, as she openly refuses to accept those roles for fear of the poverty she had experienced in her own family. Marina also refuses the condition of woman as self-sacrificing victim for the welfare of her family and boldly prefers a comfortable life by herself, away from all the emotional and social burdens that a family entails. Marina also defies this traditional codification by practicing and accepting prostitution as a regular means to solve the financial problems of her life. Contrary to Pina, Marina refuses all types of commitment, emotional as well as political. In the film’s action, Marina’s lack of commitment brings about the downfall and death of all those who are instead highly committed in their society, such as Pina, Manfredi, and Don Pietro. Ironically, Marina’s lack of commitment eventually leads her to her own destruction, as is suggested in the sequence in which she is framed lying on the floor, unattended even by the very people from whom she expected rewards and riches. The characters of Marina and Ingrid clearly demonstrate, then, how helpless or dangerous a woman can be according to traditional representation when left to handle life on her own, away from a family or a man who could help her to find another goal in life beyond her self-centeredness. This message seems to be repeated in the story of all the three “bad” women of the film, thus suggesting, in its repetitiveness, the exasperated view of women as dangerous and consequently “bad,” typical of fascist ideology. Two of these women, Marina and Lauretta, are, however, also presented as victims of the difficult social and political conditions of the time that are provoked by the war and the Nazi occupation. As victims, then, these women are to be commiserated and empathized with rather than harshly judged and penalized, as fascist ideology would prescribe. Thus, when the representation of women becomes negative, neorealist films, by constructing women as victims of dire social and political circumstances, offer a new, more understandingly humane view of them. Paisà In his next film, Paisà, Rossellini seems to handle women again in both a traditional and an innovative way. From a historical point of view, Paisà is an important film because it faithfully presents several episodes of the war that was fought by the

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Allies and the Italian Partisan Resistance against the fascists and the Nazis directly on Italian soil between 1943 and 1945. Cinematically it is important because it not only shows Rossellini’s special interest for the war and the consequences it has for the human beings affected by it but also proves how film can catch the spirit of a certain historical time in a documentary style and keep it alive visually, even long after the events have occurred. Furthermore, the film used an unusual structure, an episodic one, similar to a collection of short stories in narrative prose. Paisà became a prototype for other films that use the same method. The film consists of six episodes, all of them introducing different characters, mostly Allied soldiers, Partisans, Germans, fascists, and Italian common people, including women and children. Three out of the six episodes of the film cast female characters. Two of these female characters, Carmela (Episode 1) and Francesca (Episode 3), are central to their respective episode’s action. Harriet, the American nurse of Episode 4, is a female character romantically in search for a never-to-befound phantom Partisan leader, and, as such, she seems merely an addition to the episode’s action, centered upon Massimo, a Florentine who is attempting to reach his family trapped on the other side of the Arno River, which is still under German occupation. Harriet’s presence seems nearly an afterthought used to spike Massimo’s story and to further dramatize Massimo’s dangerous quest inasmuch as, by following him everywhere on difficult terrain, often under cross-fire, she doubles Massimo’s dangerous adventure, thus increasing the suspense of the story. In Episode 1, the background is Sicily, at the time of the Allies’ landing on the eastern coast of the island. The episode focuses on a small group of American soldiers who, having just landed, are trying to set up a stronghold next to a small village that the Americans believe the Germans have just abandoned in their retreat. The main characters are Joe, an American from New Jersey, and Carmela, a young Italian girl from the village, who, as an expert in shortcuts and unfrequented paths, is chosen by the villagers as a guide for the Americans to help them avoid the dangerous terrain around the village that the Germans had heavily mined. The narrative strategies of this episode focus upon the type of communication that the two main characters, Joe and Carmela, try to establish, once they are left together alone by the other Americans, notwithstanding the language barrier between them. Communication is indeed achieved by them through many means, such as gestures and the use of pictures and objects. One object that Joe uses to improve communication with Carmela—that is, the light of a match—produces, however, an interference on the military level as it is seen by the Germans, who are still hiding around the village and, seeing the light, shoot and kill Joe, thus cutting off the personal communication between the two young people. Technical elements such as cuts, parallel scenes, and freezing of movements are used to convey visually this interference. Later on, the sound of the shot by which Carmela kills a German soldier to avenge Joe’s death produces another interference on the military level that is picked up by the American soldiers. When they return to find Joe dead with no trace of Carmela, they assume that she has killed him. This assumption gives way to a tragically ironic misunderstanding that definitely stops communication between the Americans and

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the Italians. Later on, a zoom reveals exclusively to the audience Carmela’s body smashed upon the rocks under the tower from where the Germans had thrown her to avenge the death of their comrade. The message of the episode, then, is rather somber and definitely tragic: Both main characters are killed in warlike circumstances. Furthermore, no communication can be achieved on the political level, and even if communication on the personal level seems to be possible, it does not help anyone, and it proves to be dangerous, as it brings death. In Episode 3, the background is Rome. The main characters are Fred, an American soldier, and Francesca, an Italian girl living in Rome. The story starts at the time of the liberation of Rome by the Allies in the summer of 1944, and then the main plot develops six months later when the two protagonists of the story meet again. The main action of the episode takes place at this later time, when the economic conditions of life in Italy are still difficult. Here we have the Americans on one side, the providers (of chocolate, chewing gum, boogie-woogie, alcohol, and dollars) and on the other, the Italians, or the needy (mostly women), who have lost every material possession and human support during the war, and who, in order to survive, are ready to try out different, and even unorthodox options for support. Francesca is played by Maria Michi, the same actress who in Roma città aperta was cast in the role of Marina, the actress-prostitute who was corrupted by the Germans through drugs. The first encounter between Fred and Francesca is projected through a flashback, an unusual technical device for neorealist films. Their earlier encounter seems to suggest the possibility of true communication on a personal level through human offerings and linguistic exchange between the two representatives of the two different social groups involved. Francesca offers water (there was no running water in Rome at that time) to Fred, who needed to wash, and Fred offers chocolate to Francesca who did not have anything edible to offer him. In addition, communication was attempted through an English-Italian phrase book. Furthermore, the light tones of the sequence and the white dress worn by Francesca seem to denote innocence and the possibility of a meaningful personal relationship. Six months later, however, when they meet again, the social conditions and their personal situations have changed. Popular enthusiasm and celebrations for the Americans’ arrival give way to military-controlled riots. Real human encounters no longer take place; rather, there are only brief, heartless sexual encounters between soldiers and prostitutes. Francesca, who in the meantime has become a prostitute as well, still wishes to maintain an honest relationship with Fred. Yet she does not dare to speak openly to him about her present condition. Fred, on his part, is not interested in her as a human being (he does not even recognize her), and he passes only negative judgments on Italian women, all of whom for him are prostitutes. In the sequences of this second meeting between Fred and Francesca, the lighting on the screen is committed to dark and half-tone values to give an aura of ominous foreboding and no hope for a positive outcome for their encounter. At the end of the episode, Francesca is standing in the rain at the door of her apartment building waiting for Fred to come, while he is standing in front of the Colosseum waiting for his military bus to come and take him out of Rome: the bus

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arrives for Fred, and he leaves, but for Francesca no one comes. Meaningful communication between men and women is no longer possible in this postwar Rome, where people still live in very precarious economic circumstances. Rossellini, thus, in these two episodes of Paisà, creates different types of Italian women embodying traditional as well as innovative traits, as already shown in Roma città aperta. Carmela, for instance, while clearly showing the shyness and reserve toward men traditionally required of young Italian women, also displays, from the beginning, an unusual form of bravery unexpected in a young woman of her age and class. She does not hesitate to leave her family and friends to accompany a group of strangers whom she cannot even understand. Later on, when she is faced with the death of her new American friend whom she had come to like and respect, she reacts atypically for a woman (no tears nor lamentations) and coldly prepares to avenge him by shooting a German soldier with Joe’s gun without fearing the consequences of such an act. Carmela, then, like Pina in Roma città aperta, shows the same combination of traditional feminine qualities and unusual heroism; here, too, her bravery is disguised under her emotional feelings for a man she likes. Francesca, on the other hand, seems to be a more traditional type of woman, although she, too, seems to offer a variant, as she is constructed both as a “good” woman (at the beginning of the episode) and as a “bad” woman (in the rest of the episode). But, in her representation, the film seems to aim at removing the stigma of “bad” woman from Francesca and to point an accusing finger to the social circumstances (being left alone as a very young orphan because of the war and in total indigence) that have transformed her, at least apparently, from an innocent and naïve young girl to a prostitute. In this way, the film clearly undermines The traditional codification that aims at creating abstract polarities that ignore the complex makeup of a human being. Both films reveal the overall compassionate view of women as suffering individuals that will be emphasized in Rossellini’s two later short feature films, Una voce umana (A Human Voice; 1947–48) and Il miracolo (The Miracle; 1948), which exclusively center on female protagonists, who, even if no longer victims of political injustice, are still presented as socially defeated, suffering creatures. Rossellini cast again Anna Magnani as the protagonist in both films. These films provide a liaison between Rossellini’s neorealist films and his later ones, especially those with Ingrid Bergman playing the protagonist’s role, as we will see in Chapter 5. Una voce umana Una voce umana is a unique cinematic experiment, as it corresponds to what in the theater would be called a dramatic monologue. It is, in fact, an adaptation of a one-act play by Jean Cocteau, and it concentrates exclusively on one character, a woman in love who has just been left by her lover and is unable to adjust to such a loss. The setting is exclusively her bedroom where she confines herself, unwilling to leave it or to open herself up to new experiences and new people. The camera frames her with a series of close-ups and medium-length shots that reveal her

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looking ill and slovenly, her clothes in disarray and her hair unkempt. In the initial sequences, the woman’s confinement is obsessively intensified by the camera panning the bedroom and thus revealing its space constrictions, while an exasperated silence surrounds her. The dark-key tonality lighting and the use of several mirrors that reflect ad infinitum the same image of the lonely, disheveled woman confined in her small, dark bedroom further emphasize her desperate condition. At the point of the highest tension, a telephone ring breaks the silence and the woman’s voice fills the room with lies and misrepresentations. From what she says, we realize that she is talking to her former lover and that she is trying to offer him an interpretation of her present life, which is totally contradictory to the situation we have been witnessing from the beginning. The woman’s condition is thus made even more desperate by this outburst of linguistic misinformation that highlights her unwillingness to face the reality of her situation as well as the total lack of communication that exists between her and the world outside her bedroom. The use of the woman’s own voice to project a completely fantasized version of her life accentuates the drama of her existence without her lover, an existence that for her now is useless and worthless. Anna Magnani’s intense, expressive face, focused upon by the camera in close-up shots, creates an unforgettable image of a desperate woman. This film represents one of the most moving examples of how impossible it is for a woman in Italian society to live on her own. At the same time, it conveys the strongest criticism of the codification of woman as totally dependent on man as well as of the ideology of romantic love that asks a woman to dedicate herself completely to the man she loves, making him her only reason for living whether his interest in her continues or not. This ideology thus creates the inescapable situation where a woman, as soon as she loses her lover and her “dream of love,” feels deprived of all reasons for living. Consequently, she refuses life altogether, thus acknowledging the frailty and worthlessness that her society has assigned to her as woman and that she herself has unconsciously accepted in her “dream of love.”4 Il miracolo The thematic matter of Il miracolo, Rossellini’s next short-feature film, was suggested to him by Fellini.5 The story develops around a female character, Nannie, played by Anna Magnani. Nannie is a simpleminded goat herder, who believes she has met St. Joseph, and she finds she has become pregnant. Rather than see herself as a woman victimized by an unscrupulous male or guilty of having succumbed to lust as the moral codes of traditional Italian society would prescribe her to do, she sees her pregnancy as a proof of being “in God’s grace.” All the villagers ridicule and mock her to the point that she abandons the village and finds refuge up in the mountains inside a deserted church where she gives birth to her son, calling on God to help and protect them both. The camera pans over the rocky, desolate, mountainous landscape to connote the loneliness and hardship of her situation, until it focuses upon the deserted church that becomes a haven of protection for the poor, lonely goat herder. A few close-ups and medium-length shots of Nannie inside the church reveal her newly acquired spiritual strength.

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So Nannie, the gullible goat herder, against all odds, finds in herself and in her new condition as mother the strength to survive and achieve self-respect regardless of the ostracism to which her community has condemned her. This is an unusual portrait of a woman who, although victimized, stands by herself against the harshness of life without showing the need to depend on a man for whom to live or on a “dream of love.” Rossellini’s critics have constantly viewed him as one of the few Italian directors who strongly believes in the potential of an individual to survive in a hostile world through faith or spiritual enlightenment. Nannie is one of these individuals. Her strong faith in God and her belief of being “in God’s grace” and of having a divine mission to fulfill through her pregnancy do actually seem to give her the strength and the willingness to survive on her own. We, as laic viewers, are well aware that faith can be another type of psychological crutch, another type of “dream,” inspired by a woman’s need for a “defense against the difficulties of facing the unhappiness, limitations, and individual loneliness of her own body and her own destiny without laying the blame on other people.”6 Compared with the woman in Una voce umana, who, although well to do and psychologically more stable, is not able to survive the loss of her lover and the end of her “dream of love,” Nannie is willing and able to overcome her unhappiness and loneliness. She finds strength and independence by solidly rooting herself in her mountain village community, where the church stands high on top of the mountain as the only place of comfort and refuge for all those who are poor and forlorn. From now on, spirituality and faith become important tools for survival for most of the female characters found in Rossellini’s later films, as we will analyze in the following chapter. Additional Films of the 1940s The incredible versatility of Anna Magnani’s screen acting was highly successful in all of the dramatic films of the 1940s in which she played, and we are going to consider here her most famous melodrama film, the 1948 version of Assunta Spina. Assunta Spina The narrative strategies of the 1948 version of this film directed by Mario Mattoli introduce several important changes in characterization and in plot development that transform the cinematic mood and message of the story in comparison to the original version by Pastrone and Bertini. These changes are drastic enough to also convey a change in the film genre from dramma passionale to melodrama while reducing the complexity of the female protagonist’s imaging. In this melodrama film, Assunta Spina is a mature woman, still very beautiful and sexy, and the object of several men’s desire. While her husband is spending time in jail, she becomes romantically involved with his lawyer, a very handsome man who, although married himself, is always in search of well-to-do lovers willing to support his expensive habits, such as gambling and spendthrift living. Assunta falls madly in

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love with him, while he treats her just like the many other women he uses, exploits, and then casts away. The construction of Assunta’s character here ignores the complexity of the dangerous femme fatale role of the earlier version. Here, Assunta’s unhappy love story creates, instead, the “pathetic mood” typical of the melodrama genre. The female protagonist is a frail, heartbroken woman, a victim of her own romantic infatuation and her sexuality hardly poses any threat to the male protagonists of the story, even if it causes pain and suffering to her husband once he is aware of her adulterous relationship. The husband is constructed as a kind human being who has no intention to punish Assunta in order to gain control over her or her relationship. The “pathetic mood” is indeed increased by constructing both Assunta and her husband as victims, thus confirming a specific, unique trend typical of the melodrama genre—that is, the characterization of men as weak and as frail as women, as several scholars have noticed in their critical studies of the genre.7 The pathetic mood of the film is hardly undermined by the dramatic ending that, rather than focusing on the punishment and disfiguring of the heroine as shown in the earlier dramma passionale version, plays on the suspense that develops out of the supposed confrontation between the two men, which takes place off-screen. When Assunta’s husband is unexpectedly released from prison and comes home the same night when she is expecting her lover for the last time, she confesses to him her adulterous relationship without revealing her lover’s identity. When they hear steps outside their house, the husband, presumably thinking that they are her lover’s, leaves with a knife in his hand never to be seen again on screen. Nor will her lover ever be seen again. The end of the film plays on the suspense of who might be the victim of the murder that has taken place outside Assunta’s house: is it the lover or the husband? The audience is partially informed of what has happened with some camera shots revealing an unidentifiable corpse stretched out under a blanket surrounded by police officers and passersby in the middle of the street. The shots, however, are all too far away for the audience to recognize who the murder victim is. The only hint that the audience is given to identify the victim seems to be furnished by Assunta’s behavior. Before the arrival of the police, she hides her husband’s clothes and hat as if she were trying to hide his presence in the house that night and she wanted to protect him from the police and, consequently, from being accused of killing her lover, thus suggesting that he is still alive. Later on, she gives herself up as the guilty one to the police, and the film ends with her being taken away as the culprit, further suggesting a traditional patriarchal closure to the story, by proposing that both male and female adulterers have to pay for their sin. Instead of depicting woman as a sexually threatening object of men’s desire and fears, this film frames Assunta as a self-sacrificing wife. By having her surrender herself to the police as guilty of murder, the film discourse represents her as a remorseful wife who intends to punish herself for her sexual transgression against married life. This version of Assunta Spina shifts, therefore, the characterization of woman toward the “pathetic,” typical of the family melodrama genre where woman is constantly projected as the sacrificing victim for her family’s welfare. Anna Magnani was also very successful as an actress in the comic arena in a film of the 1940s, which I will mention here briefly to underscore the exceptional range of acting capabilities that Magnani as a very popular diva displayed for her spectators.

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L’onorevole Angelina It is not easy to find comic films, and especially comic films that focus on female protagonists in the late 1940s, just after the fall of fascism and at the end of World War II. L’onorevole Angelina (Angelina: Member of Parliament; 1947) by Luigi Zampa is an exception, as it provides an interesting example of light comedy focused upon a female character, Angelina, masterfully played by Anna Magnani. Angelina is a working-class, middle-aged woman who, tired of the deprivations of her hard life, decides to do something about it and chooses to fight social injustice and discrimination in her neighborhood. This film shares with the neorealist movement an interest for characters living in difficult economic situations as victims of social injustice. The comic mood of the film, however, pushes the protagonist’s character away from experiencing a total sense of social mission, which was so typical of neorealist films. Angelina, with her generous desire to be of help to her community, becomes a heroine to all her downtrodden neighbors and friends, who are so enthusiastic about what she is doing for them that they convince her to run for public office. She does, and thus becomes an onorevole, a title that in Italy is bestowed on senators and high-ranking political figures. Angelina as a woman shows a rare blend of self-determination, personal strength, humor, and care that makes of her a truly unusual woman in the Italian cinema of the 1940s. The casting of Anna Magnani as Angelina seemed therefore highly suitable to convey the unusual dimension of the female protagonist character. Angelina is such a strong female character that one expects that she would develop into a fully selfreliant individual, capable of fulfilling all kinds of social-reform goals, rather than of accepting her traditional female role within the secure environment of her family. Angelina, instead, toward the end of the film and even after achieving social and political recognition, is not convinced that she should give up her role as wife and mother. Consequently, she renounces her political career and chooses a life within her family, where she falls again, to the relief of both her family and traditional spectators, into the traditional role of wife and mother. The comic mood of the film, by highlighting the exceptional, unreal situation of Angelina’s public career, has actually prepared us spectators for the manipulation of Angelina’s story with an eye for reestablishing the real and the normal. We are again faced, then8 with an unusual female character who, at the end of the film, is reduced to a traditional type of woman in order to reestablish the required status quo that she, throughout the film, had openly disrupted with her personal independence and self-determination. More Neorealist Films While Rossellini’s neorealist films tend to represent women in much more diversified and untraditional roles than fascist cinema had ever done, De Sica’s and Zavattini’s neorealist films, focus their narrative interest nearly exclusively on men, and consequently they confine women to mostly traditional roles, reminiscent of fascist codification, such as in Ladri di biciclette.

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Ladri di biciclette In this film, De Sica presents his and Zavattini’s view of neorealism.9 It was Zavattini who described neorealist cinema as a cinema that reflects a “hunger for reality, for truth,” a cinema that should describe poverty as a result of social injustice, since “to describe poverty is to protest against it.”10 Neorealism was thus seen by them as a cinema of protest not only against fascism and political injustice but also against social injustice. De Sica and Zavattini made four neorealist films together: Sciuscià (Shoeshine; 1946), Ladri di biciclette (Bicycle Thief; 1948), Miracolo a Milano (Miracle in Milan; 1951), and Umberto D., which is considered the last neorealist film made in Italy. Ladri di biciclette, like most neorealist films, had the embarrassing quality of showing a gruesome side of reality that many people, particularly the classes that were not interested in social reform who preferred to ignore and keep Italy’s social problems away from the public view, did not want to see or accept. This particular view held by the society of the late 1940s and 1950s is masterfully presented in a later film by Scola, C’eravamo tanto amati (We All Loved Each Other So Much; 1974), to be discussed in Chapter 7. This view was shared by the majority of the Italians and by the Christian Democrat government majority, who led the post–World War II Italian republic. This explains the lack of financial success that neorealist films encountered in Italy as well as the hesitation and eventual refusal of the government to finance them. Indeed, by 1948, Italian society had shown signs of regression into a system where social reform was not as widely sought. Government welfare policies were suspended, leaving underprivileged individuals alone in their own unhappy and unfair situation. De Sica was particularly attentive to this post–World War II socioeconomic situation and to how proletarians in an urban environment were affected by unemployment and economic hardship. His Ladri di biciclette is the main example of this concern. At the same time, the film, released in 1948 and bringing into view a clear example of social injustice, was hardly well-accepted in Italy because of the unpopular problems it dealt with. De Sica states that in Ladri di biciclette, he was interested in “the absurdity of incomprehension, through which it is difficult for truth and good to penetrate.” In order to help with this situation, he dedicated the film “to the suffering of the poor and the humble.”11 For André Bazin, one of the first renown critics of De Sica’s work, the film is “one of the first examples of pure cinema . . . No more actors, no more story, no more sets, which is to say that, in the perfect aesthetic illusion of reality, there is no more cinema.”12 The social world of the film is decidedly a man’s world, where the main problems represented concern men exclusively. Indeed the film’s imagery concentrates on the representation of a man trapped in closed spaces. Man is isolated in his own environment, and this suggests his basic alienation. Streets, stores, and apartments in Rome stand symbolically for the loneliness of the individual and the indifference of the crowd. The action of the film is centered on a man, Antonio, whose bicycle is stolen the first day he begins a new job; a job that he had finally found, after years of unemployment, only on the understanding that he owned a bicycle. The loss of the

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bicycle, then, also means for Antonio the loss of a job that would provide food and shelter for him, his wife Maria, his son Bruno, and another child still in the cradle. Maria is the female protagonist in the film, and is presented in the traditional role of dedicated mother and wife, supportive of her husband in his search for a job. The first long shot of her frames her in a group of poor women fetching water from a public well, and the next full- and medium-length shots frame her trudging up an embankment behind Antonio with a bucket full of water. Within this traditional representation, Maria, at the beginning of the film, seems, however, to suggest some novelty. Indeed, contrary to Antonio, she shows strength and resourcefulness when Antonio, once he is offered the new job that requires the bicycle, is desperate because he does not know how to retrieve his bicycle, as he had pawned it earlier in order to provide food for his family. At that point, faced by her husband’s desperation and lack of initiative, Maria is the one who solves the problem when she decides to wash and iron their bed sheets and take them to the pawnshop and pawn them to redeem the impounded bicycle. The series of close-up tilted shots from Maria’s point of view of the piles of merchandise pawned and carefully filed in the pawnshop provide a clear, sorrowful commentary on the economic conditions of poor urban families in postwar Italy. As soon as the day comes for Antonio to start his new job, Maria is, however, presented again as exclusively engaged in her traditional housewife activities. As a devoted wife and mother, she fixes her husband’s clothing and prepares lunch for her family. She is then framed saying good-bye to them and preparing for a day of domestic chores. We next see Maria in the evening of that same day. After her son has informed her of the bicycle theft, she goes and looks for Antonio at the neighborhood union headquarters where he tries to ignore her and avoid what he calls her tears and lamentations. Actually, Maria is neither crying nor complaining; she simply wants to know what has happened to the bicycle. Antonio, however, does not want to deal with her, as he is convinced that she is of no help to him and that he can find help only from his male friends. In this scene, Maria is literally pushed out of the union and the world of men and, consequently, from the action that follows, which focuses on Antonio’s search for his lost bicycle and its thief. This search is reserved only for him, his son, and his male friends. Maria will not appear again in the film and her role as mother is briefly taken over by another woman, the mother of the young thief who has stolen Antonio’s bicycle. This motherly role is played at the height of its emotional impact, as the woman through actual tears, lamentations, and screams tries to protect her son and save him from being apprehended by the police. Her attempts are successful, and Antonio is left without any further hope of finding his bicycle or keeping his job. At the end, he too tries to steal a bicycle but with no success. He is caught and further humiliated in front of his son, and the film closes with a series of full-length shots of father and son walking hand in hand, surrounded by an anonymous and indifferent crowd of men, toward a hopeless future of poverty and disillusion where only masculine relationships buffer the pressure of an unjust society. If we compare this film with De Sica’s earlier I bambini ci guardano, the differences in the representation of the social milieu are striking. The earlier film dealt

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with a well-to-do, middle-class family that was hardly touched by economic instability and where relationships between characters seemed to be dictated either by mundane interests or sexual drives. The only strong emotional bond dealt with by the film in romantic terms was the love that the little boy had for his mother, shown in the feverish nightmare he experiences on the train. Nina, the runaway wife and mother, is an important resisting female character in the story, even if she is constantly being criticized and ostracized by the other characters and by the film’s discourse and its imaging. Ladri di biciclette deals, instead, with low–social class characters who are constantly threatened by dire poverty and social humiliation. Maria, as the female protagonist of the story, fulfils woman’s traditional role as wife and mother, and, as such, she is kept away from the world of men, who are busy in practical activities that take place in public spaces outside of the family home where Maria is mostly confined. De Sica’s view of woman in Ladri di biciclette is, thus, quite traditional and seems to be in line with the ideological legacy that had inspired cinema in fascist times. What is new in this and most other neorealist films, is the attitude of compassionate understanding that surround all characters in the film who suffer as victims of social abuse and injustice, whether they are men or women. They are therefore hardly handled with the negative judgmental approach shown toward Nina in I bambini ci guardano. After Ladri di biciclette, De Sica seems to be unwilling to deal at length with female characters in his neorealist films. He barely attempts to use them in the representation of the dismal Italian economic and political reality that he gives in both Sciuscià and Miracolo a Milano. Umberto D. One single exception occurs in Umberto D., a film nearly exclusively concentrated on the misfortunes of an old state employee who, once retired, ends his life in a boarding house in a materialistic and cruel world where he realizes he no longer belongs, penniless and lonely and with only the companionship of a little dog. The only human contact he has is with a young woman who works as a maid in the boarding house. She is the only living creature who shows him and his little dog respect and kindness. She fares hardly better than he in society, however. She is constructed at the beginning of the film as a sexually active young woman, happy to be simultaneously involved with two boyfriends who are equally sexually satisfactory to her. Once she finds herself pregnant, however, the young woman promptly loses her emotional stability, as she is abandoned by both boyfriends. Even her economic stability is in danger, as her female employer, the boarding house’s owner, fires her on moral grounds. Thus, the servant girl offers another example of how De Sica, adopting his society’s traditional point of view on women, disapproves of a woman’s search for sexual and economic independence. This disapproving view of the young servant girl is disturbing, especially if we compare her with her female employer who shows an equally active sexuality but who is better at covering it up under a faćade of social respectability. In so doing, she remains, at least apparently, in tune with her society’s hypocritically moralistic concept of life, and she successfully avoids any

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danger of negative social criticism. She is indeed regarded by the interior audience of the film as a social success. She is constantly increasing her economic patrimony by exploiting those less fortunate than she and acquiring a stronger and stronger position in the social echelon through money and her influential male connections. She represents, therefore, the same, new interest in materialism and capitalism that the Italian society of the 1950s was starting to display. In the world of Umberto D., as well as in the Italian society of the 1950s, there is no room for poor, socially unconnected people like the old man or the young maid. Those who are openly indifferent to the new materialistic ideology of life, exclusively funded on money and self-interest, become the new victims of an economically affluent society. De Sica’s and Zavattini’s neorealist cinematic intention invites their audience to empathize with both the old man and the maid as victims of social indifference and hypocrisy, in spite of the disapproval that a patriarchal morality may have for the servant girl’s search for sexual and economic independence. A new interest surfaces in this film for a more in-depth study of men and women’s social and psychological frailty that will become central in the films of the great masters of Italian cinema, such as Antonioni, Visconti, and Fellini, as we will see later. Indeed, the lesson of neorealism will always be present in Italian cinema from the 1950s on, as several critics of Italian cinema have successfully demonstrated.13 Antonioni’s Cronaca di un amore As noticed before, Antonioni was particularly interested in criticizing the flaws of the bourgeoisie.14 Cronaca di un amore is a good example of this interest, as it shows the life of a well-to-do couple in an urban context. The plot of the film is based on the love affair between Paola, an extremely beautiful and wealthy, married woman of the high Milanese middle class, and Guido, her former boyfriend, now unemployed and in a dire economic situation. Paola, played by Lucia Bosé, is unfavorably projected as “bad,” that is, she is imaged as a greedy adulteress who causes her husband’s death and her lover’s financial ruin because of her unrestrained sexuality. She represents the opposite of the traditional image of the ideal wife of patriarchal ideology, and, as such, her portrayal could have proposed an interesting deviation from the traditional representation of woman as submissive, passive, and asexual. The film, instead, frames her through the stereotypical male lens—that is, as a woman controlled by greed and unbridled sexuality and unable to choose between love and money. Paola seems thus to show some of the traits typical of a femme fatale character, as she is clearly dangerous for the men involved with her and ends up destroying both her husband’s and her lover’s lives. While the lover’s inner conflict between love and morality is effectively voiced in the film, the woman’s own conflict is hardly formulated. She is reduced to what a male perspective would project in such a situation; that is, she is depicted as a woman who is unable to master her sexuality and behavior and who should be kept under a man’s control. Indeed, the novelty of the film discourse seems to develop out of the suggestion that her “badness” is caused by the flaws (i.e.,

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the unmanly behavior) of the two men who love her. Neither of them is able to control her or to convince her to follow the right path rather than her own “bad intentions.” Later on, in Il Deserto rosso, Antonioni will present the same theme— that is, that the flaws of the main male characters and their lack of meaningful communication and leadership may be the main cause of the female protagonist’s neurosis. Unlike other neorealist films, Antonioni’s Cronaca di un amore does not represent poverty nor dwell on the physical suffering characteristic of poverty and deprivation. His film, instead, harps on the flaws of the very wealthy and shows a deep concern for the corrupting influence that money and financial power have on individuals and society in general; a concern that is still very much felt today in our wealthy business world. Paola, the female protagonist of Cronaca di un amore, plays a role very similar to the one played by Giovanna, the female protagonist of Ossessione, Visconti’s first long-feature film. They both are unfaithful wives who are unable to definitively choose between economic stability and love, as they are unwilling to give up their comfortable married condition to go and live with their poor lovers. Paola, however, with her middle-class background, lacks Giovanna’s firsthand experience of utter poverty, which had made her a victim of social injustice. Paola, thus, lacks this social dimension and falls into the role of a rich and spoiled insensitive woman hardly worthy of the audience’s empathy. Instead of highlighting the financial needs of the proletarians, as De Sica and Zavattini have done, Antonioni’s and Visconti’s films highlight the loss of moral standards in the more affluent classes. Thus, they open the way to investigate the malaise of the century—that is, human alienation and its effects, which will be the preferred topic of consideration in many films of the following decades. Francesco De Santi’s Riso amaro As noticed earlier, neorealist films were not too successful at the box office, as the public would avoid going to see them because of the dismal and unhappy representation that they gave of Italian post–World War II real life. Francesco De Santis’s Riso amaro15 was an exception, as it introduced into the typically neorealist formula some novelty that made the film very popular and financially successful. Riso amaro reflects some of Zavattini’s requirements: it concentrates on poverty and lower class people by presenting the hard life of the female rice pickers in Northern Italy and analyzes their social situation in depth with mostly on-location shooting. These women’s lives are very hard, as they are shown working in water twelve hours a day, mostly bent down to pick rice; furthermore, their living quarters are barracks, where they are kept locked in at night. While they work they are not allowed to talk, and for all the hard work they do, they are paid two pounds of rice for a day’s work and are paid nothing if it rains. Riso amaro reflects also a strong commitment to a social group of people, in this case, peasant women from the north of Italy, and places them in the context of a real sociopolitical situation: that is, the peasants’ struggle against the landowners backed by the government that took place both in the north and the south of Italy

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between 1946 and 1948. Riso amaro is indeed the second of De Santis’s three films on this topic that make up his “land trilogy.” His first one was Caccia tragica (The Tragic Hunt; 1946) about northern peasants and his last was Non c’è pace fra gli ulivi (No Peace under the Olive Tree; 1950) about southern peasants. Riso amaro focuses on peasant culture, which finds a powerful expression in music, as the rice pickers sing in the fields and change the words of their songs to fit their situations, thus using them to communicate among themselves, even if they are forbidden to talk to one another while they work. On the other hand, De Santis’s film, while being faithful to some important neorealist tenets, also shows a movement away from neorealism. De Santis believed that cinema as a visual form of art speaks to all our senses. He displays a strong interest in his audience, whose tastes and preferences he wants to take into consideration in order to reach, to move, and to influence them. He thus holds the spectators’ attention with many different elements: music, singing, dancing, ritual, and so on. For him, realism, then, is a creative way to tell a story of real people and events. He chose as the main female character of this film an exceptionally beautiful woman, Silvana. In her role, De Santis cast the actress Silvana Mangano, who was, like Lucia Bosè before her, a Miss Italia beauty-contest winner. Both Silvana Mangano and Lucia Bosè will become popular dive of the Italian cinema of the 1950s because of their exceptional physical beauty and will become perfect vehicles for the representation of woman-as-spectacle—that is, as beautiful sex object—from that time on. Mangano was thus ideal to play the role of a beautiful woman who would attract the audience with her physical appearance and inspire dreams of sexual fulfillment and material success. The dream of a better life to which Italian society was driven at that time reflected the effects of the materialistic and consumerist American culture, seen as the ideal way of life—comfortable, easy, and with money and material goods. De Santis modeled the character of Silvana on the comic picture books (fotoromanzi) so popular at the time and uses a film discourse that ironically highlights the danger of the materialistic, make-believe ideology inspiring those popular picture books. Silvana, indeed, looks up to models she finds in those picture books and in magazines representing the Hollywood dreams of success and riches, together with its symbols: chewing gum, the boogie-woogie, and the record player. De Santis, thus, gives a fantasy-inspired elaboration of reality that is the opposite of Zavattini’s call for dismissal of a fictional elaboration of reality. De Santis accomplishes this task in Riso amaro by projecting upon the realistic representation of the dismal social conditions of the female rice pickers a melodramatic love story between an exceptionally beautiful woman, Silvana, and the man who is the villain of the film, Walter. He is the one who had induced Francesca, a former maid of a well-to-do bourgeois family, to steal a diamond collar from her mistress. He then had obliged her to hide from the police. According to his will, Francesca disguises herself as a rice picker and becomes acquainted with Silvana, who finds and is fascinated by the collar that Francesca had tried to conceal in her mattress. Through the collar, Silvana meets Walter and, in the hope of improving her condition of life with him, falls under his spell against Francesca’s advice and to the disappointment of Marco, a young, honest soldier who is interested in Silvana. Thus,

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the love story between Silvana and Walter involves also these two other characters, who stand for experience (Francesca) and honesty (Marco). By casting Silvana Mangano in the film, De Santis seemed to project the downtrodden female rice picker, Silvana, as a sex symbol. This aroused a lot of criticism, as several critics accused him of exploiting her erotic potential for the success of the film. De Santis, however, insisted that his casting of Silvana was aimed at expressing the primitive quality of the female rice pickers and that Silvana’s fascination with melodrama was symptomatic of her economic and cultural victimization as a female rice picker. Indeed the film is especially interesting in the way De Santis projects Silvana’s beautiful body as a mythical image of natural beauty and instinctual force, while her hard condition of life suggests her victimization as a deprived human being, subject to dream for a better type of life. Moreover, the film discourse combines the typical neorealist style of the documentary genre that is based on a real representation of the everyday life of female rice pickers with other, more popular genres borrowed from Hollywood cinema. Some of the genres to be found here are the western (country background, and confrontation between good [Marco] and evil [Walter]; the gangster story (action through violence, use of guns, open conflict between the law [Marco] and the outlaw [Walter]; the melodramatic love story (the main protagonist is a beautiful, romantic woman, Silvana, caught in a love affair, in conflict with her society, corrupted by the new materialistic values that exalt the Hollywood myth of beauty and financial success, and eventually destroyed by the collapse of the make-believe reality that she had created for herself out of the comic books’ ideology.) De Santis’s cinematic techniques are fascinating, especially his use of very long, uncut shots with a camera usually placed high up on a crane so that the shot is from above and in depth. This shot usually moves from a single character (in a full or medium shot) to the discovery of a group of people and a specific space, often in the open air, and then it returns to a close-up of a single (or the same) character. It reflects De Santis’s socially committed view of the world. Silvana, as well as Marina in Roma città aperta, embodies the lower-class woman’s quest for social change from poverty to riches. Both characters are seduced by whomever promises them a life of ease and wealth. Silvana, however, seems endowed with a social consciousness that is absent in Marina. She indeed realizes the gravity of her criminal actions toward her companions and punishes herself by committing suicide at the end of the film. Through Silvana, the film represents woman in much more complex terms than was found in Ladri di biciclette. She combines a powerful sexuality with a natural human interest that attracts the sympathy of the people around her, thus confirming the film’s intention not to represent her as a dangerous or “bad” woman. Furthermore, faithful to the principles of the neorealist ideology, Silvana’s character shows a strong sense of social commitment that arouses guilt in her when she realizes how wrong she had been in accepting Walter’s evil plan to steal the rice belonging to all the rice pickers. Silvana, therefore, is a complex woman, physically exuberant, emotionally vital, and morally alert; she has a wide range of different experiences that may sometimes blur her best judgment. She is, however, willing to pay personally for her mistakes and is eventually capable of distinguishing good

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from evil on her own and undoing the wrong. Silvana then can hardly be pigeonholed into the tight role playing codified by either patriarchal or fascist ideology. She reveals a much more progressive portrayal of women in Italian cinema, even if she too meets death at the end of the film. It seems therefore fair to state that, although aware of the patriarchal legacy of earlier cinema, neorealist films, in their handling of women, usually show a compassionate understanding of them as victims of social unfairness, like Marina in Roma città aperta, Francesca in Paisà, or the young maid in Umberto D. We have also noticed a new interest in constructing multidimensional female characters who even succeed in gaining heroic status, like Pina in Roma città aperta, Carmela in Paisà, or Angelina in L’Onorevole Angelina. There are also women who prefer to show a resistance to traditionally codified roles of female behavior, like Marina in Roma città aperta or Paola in Cronaca di un amore. In this last case, the filmic discourse does not hesitate to intensify the negative view that Paola’s social environment holds of her, while in Marina’s case she is mostly viewed as a victim of her historical situation. In the case of Silvana in Riso amaro, the filmic representation of woman reveals a new complexity of moral and social traits, a complexity that will be found again in some films of the 1950s and later. The drive that women show to sacrifice themselves for love, often highlighted in Italian cinema and particularly in melodrama films, is another example of the power that patriarchal ideology exercises on women and their representation in all aspects of Italian culture, as it becomes particularly clear in the 1948 melodrama version of Assunta Spina. At the same time, both Assunta and Silvana in Riso amaro accept their “suffering in order to benefit another, often at the expense of satisfying (their) own personal desires and interest,” and, in so doing, they “exhibit noble virtues amid adversity” and “encourage the spectators to leaven pity with admiration.”16 These women, therefore, by choosing to sacrifice themselves and showing “virtues amid adversity,” seem to bypass their patriarchal representation and become endowed with superior, ennobling auras that elevate them as human beings socially and morally committed.

5

A Woman’s Search for Change and Meaningful Relationships in the Films of the 1950s

Historical and Cultural Trends in the 1950s

B

ecause of the heavy losses suffered during World War II, Italy in the 1950s was in desperate need of economic aid, and the United States, at the height of the Cold War, used economic assistance through their Marshall Plan to persuade the Italian Christian Democratic Party to reduce Communist and Socialist participation in important decision-making deliberations. American policy was facilitated by the presence of a Christian Democratic Italian Prime Minister Alcide de Gasperi, who, along with Charles De Gaulle of France and Konrad Adenauer of Germany, helped to give Western Europe stability after five years of war. By 1949 economic production had reached prewar levels and the ground was laid for what was called Italy’s “economic miracle”1 of the late 1950s and 1960s. Indeed, 1958 marks the beginning of Italy’s economic development when Italian economic production climbed to the seventh largest in the world. In the same years of the “economic miracle,” Italy experienced a strong wave of exodus from the south toward the northern Italian industrial towns, where thousands of poor, jobless southerners emigrated in search of work. The overcrowding, disorientation, and crime that such a disorganized influx caused in the northern cities of Milan and Turin became a major social and political issue in Italian life and a recurrent topic in literature and cinema. Despite the fact that problems of unemployment, poor housing, and regional underdevelopment showed little signs of improvement, they soon ceased to have a hold on the public consciousness, when, instead, materialism and consumerism continued to rise, causing a severe drop in social commitment and a remarkable loss of traditional human values. Italian Films in the 1950s In this decade, Italian cinema produced several auteur (art) films as well as quite a few popular melodrama and comedy films that are important for our topic. The

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auteur films we will choose for discussion confront the above-mentioned conflict between materialistic drives and social commitment or spiritual needs. Often the narrative strategies of these films work out this conflict through female protagonists who show a potential for change but become the victims of men who apply their society’s cruel and domineering materialistic tactics against them. Karin and Irene in Rossellini’s Stromboli, terra di Dio (1949) and Europa ’51 (No Greater Love; 1952) as well as Gelsomina and Cabiria in Fellini’s La strada (The Road; 1954) and Le notti di Cabiria (Nights of Cabiria; 1957) are good examples of female protagonists who try to propose enlightening human values to their power-and money-hungry male partners and their society. Unfortunately, their efforts are not successful, and the women end up defeated, or even dead, and it is up to the spectators of the films to evaluate and learn from the lessons of humanity or social commitment that can be drawn from these women’s behavior. Often, in the representation of their women’s stories, these films develop the pathetic mood typical of the melodrama genre that focuses its narrative action on female protagonists and their sorrowful stories. Other art films of the 1950s propose interesting, potentially transgressive representations of women as mothers. Maddalena in Visconti’s Bellissima (Very Beautiful; 1951) and Irma in Antonioni’s Il grido (The Cry; 1957) are good examples of these unusual types of mothers. Other interesting types of female characters representing the problems that women have in their search for change and meaningful relationships are found in the art films of the 1950s, such as Livia in Visconti’s Senso (Sensuality; 1950), Nadia in Rocco e i suoi fratelli (Rocco and His Brothers; 1957), and Claudia in Antonioni’s L’avventura (The Adventure; 1960). What makes these films particularly interesting in the context of this book is the fact that in them the main characters who resist their society’s traditional outlook are mostly women. Their representation closely fits the social conditions of the time, while it also suggests significant connections with earlier Italian cinema, especially with the melodrama genre and with neorealism’s commitment to faithful social representation and with its compassionate attitude toward the victims of social injustice. Melodrama seems to be again a favorite mood and popular genre in the 1950s, as we will notice in the analyses that follow. The Italian comedy films of the 1950s, on the other hand, show a continuing trend toward the acceptance of women as pleasant sexual objects. Men appreciate and enjoy such sex objects as positive images of what nature can offer to society even at a time when the concern for money and financial success seems to overpower all other human values in life. The maggiorate fisiche2 of these times, such as Gina Lollobrigida, Sofia Loren, and Silvana Mangano, become the very popular protagonists of most of the comedy films of this decade and the next. Rossellini’s Women: Karin in Stromboli, terra di Dio and Irene in Europa ’51 Stromboli is the first of Rossellini’s films that deal in depth with the dilemma of the modern woman—that is, a woman who combines beauty, sexuality, a questioning nature, a rational awareness, and a deep need for freedom and self-realization.

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To play such an intense character, Rossellini chose a beautiful foreign actress and a regular diva of the Hollywood world, Ingrid Bergman, and his casting choice worked perfectly for the character of Karin as well as for the film’s financial and critical success. In fact, the love affair between the director and his star did not go unnoticed, and it added to the film’s success. Karin, the film’s protagonist, is a tall, blonde, sophisticated Eastern European woman who agrees to marry Antonio, a short, dark, passionate, southern Italian man, in order to get out of the concentration camp where she has been held after the end of World War II because of her earlier Nazi political affiliations. Antonio is madly in love with this beautiful foreigner whose physical difference and intellectual superiority add to his primitive male urge to conquer and possess her. After their marriage, he takes her to live on the island of Stromboli where he was born and raised and where he wants to spend his life as a fisherman in his ancestral house under the shadow of the powerful volcano that dominates the village with its phallic mountain peaks. The representation of the concentration camp as a prison at the beginning of the film is symbolic of Karin’s present and future condition as a prisoner of the Italian police, at first, behind the concentration camp’s barbed wire (see Figure 5). Later, she becomes a prisoner of the closed society of the island where she lives between the sea in front and the volcanic peaks in the back. As soon as she arrives on the island, Karin finds herself in conflict with the people of the village, especially the women. They find her different and dangerous and treat her with distrust and disapproval because of her physical aspect and cultural upbringing so different from theirs and especially because of what they consider her overly friendly behavior with men. For these women, Karin represents a dangerous female type, similar to the femme-fatale protagonist of the dramma passionale genre. The conflict that develops between Karin and the village female community is further intensified by the divergence of opinions and cultures that troubles Antonio and Karin’s relationship. Karin’s growing intolerance of the island’s constricting milieu is carefully built up by the camera. Several camera shots frame her locked up in her rundown house (at one point her husband, in order to keep her in the house, actually resorts to nailing large planks of wood over all doors and windows). Moreover, several tracking shots follow her in her lonely walks over the ragged and rocky terrain of the island, against the volcano’s domineering mountainous backdrop, thus highlighting her unhappy conditions of life by underscoring the desolate and threatening natural environment of the island. Verbal communication is very difficult between Karin and Antonio, and the villagers, as she speaks little Italian and the whole community, Antonio included, does not speak or understand English. Indeed the sound track of the film is very limited. It mostly favors natural harsh sounds, such as the volcano’s thunderous explosions or the pounding of the sea over the rocky shores of the island, or instinctual sounds, such as the barking of a dog, the crying of a child, or the yelling of Antonio while he is beating Karin. The film often uses animal images, like the little rabbit exposed by Antonio to a ferret’s vicious, deadly attack or the many tuna fish bloodily beaten by the

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fishermen while still alive in their nets. The use of such imagery suggests parallels between these animals’ conditions and Karin’s, as they are all victims of male violence and of the primitive social customs of the island. Karin is obviously aware of such connection between herself and the animals and relates emotionally to the latter, as is clearly demonstrated by the fearful compassion she feels for them. Nature and men’s actions are shown in these episodes at their most violent and irrational level and thus stand in conflict with Karin’s rational search for understanding and for meaningful relationships. The awesomeness of nature, on the other hand, is here presented as a primordial, unshakable life force and human resource instinctively accepted and revered by Antonio and his people. It will eventually be recognized also by Karin when she attempts to ascend the volcano and escape the island once she realizes that she is pregnant. The final sequences of the film cover Karin’s ascent, with the camera following her obsessively as she walks more and more laboriously up the mountain, which is intermittently shaken by the thunderous sounds of the exploding volcano. Alternatively, the camera offers wide panning of the mountain and its raggedness to call attention to the hardships that Karin is undertaking in her quest for change and self-awareness. At the highest point of the volcano’s explosion, the night falls on Karin and the mountain, and a series of close-ups of Karin highlights the precariousness of her position at the mercy of the volcano and in the darkness of the night. At this point, Karin recognizes her human frailty and confesses her fears aloud: “I’ll finish it, but I haven’t the courage. I am afraid.” This first recognition of fear is immediately followed by her crying out to God twice, just as Nannie had done in Il miracolo, at the most painful moments of her solitary labor in the abandoned mountain church. A cut interrupts this scene, substituting for it a more serene shot of the same night with a starry sky. This is then followed by another cut, which moves the action to the early hours of the next day, at the moment when Karin wakes up in the sun surrounded by a peaceful, serene, natural background that drastically contrasts with the hellish environment of the night before. It is as if nature, in all its superhuman power, had acknowledged Karin’s first humble recognition of her human frailty and is showing compassion for her. Karin’s voice is heard again, at this point, calling out again twice to God, no longer in fear, but in awe and admiration, as she adds, holding her stomach as if to embrace her unborn child: “What mystery! What beauty!” These words show her new appreciation for the majestic power and beauty of the nature around her. Karin’s awareness continues to develop, as it becomes clear when the camera, following her look, focuses in the direction of the village, and her voice is heard again admitting her unwillingness to return there: “No, I can’t go back!” A series of cuts follows with different shots of her, while her voice is heard again, commenting on the villagers with an evangelic finale: “They are horrible. It was all horrible. They don’t know what they are doing.” These words, too, recall Nannie’s words at the end of Il miracolo with her comments about her village inhabitants. But Karin does not stop here in her self-realization process and adds, “I’m even worse!” thus showing a new awareness of her own role in the whole situation, which was missing in Nannie’s experience, and thus suggesting a potential for change. In this case, as it was in Nannie’s, this potential for change is embedded in

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the baby that Karin still carries in her and to whom she refers in her next words: “I’ll save him. My innocent child!” The camera then cuts to a storm of white birds flying in the sky, possibly symbolizing Karin’s potential for escape from the island or for reaching a higher level of consciousness that includes a renunciation of purely materialistic impulses and an acquisition of a more spiritual awareness of life. It is not Nannie’s deeply religious belief in God that gives Karin a potential for change in life but rather her personal traumatic humbling experience of the power of nature and of her own human frailty. This experience allows her to achieve, through humility, a new awareness of life and personal relationships. The film does not show what Karin’s final decision will be, whether she will go back to her husband and the village community with a new realization of her role there or whether she will continue her escape to the other side of the island and eventually from the island itself. We, spectators, are left with the awesome memory of her heroic confrontation with the power of nature, of her new appreciation of it, of her acknowledgment of her own human frailty, and of her humble recognition of the difficulties of social relationships. Karin’s long, difficult ascent to self-realization has been successful, and through her, we, as spectators, are witnessing a new type of woman entering the world of Italian cinema, a resisting woman who is a self-reliant individual ready for change and understanding. From now on, the road to achieve subject-status will not be much easier for women, but the door has been opened and a direction has been pointed out. Rossellini’s innovations will thus inspire the construction of other resisting female characters in search of self-awareness, even if only within a family situation, and of meaningful relationships especially with men, both in Rossellini’s own films3 and in other Italian directors’ in the 1950s, such as Fellini, Antonioni, and Visconti, as well as in later decades, especially Bertolucci, and most women and men directors discussed in Chapters 7, 8, and 9. With Europa ’51, Rossellini approaches a different type of social reality, an urban environment, rather than a natural one, within a well-to-do, high middleclass milieu. In Europa ’51, we find another resisting woman, Irene, and her laborious attempts to find herself and to understand what is important to attain in life. Irene is a successful socialite, famous throughout the city for her cocktail and dinner parties. Her life drastically changes when her son, while recovering from attempting suicide, suddenly dies of a blood clot. This personal tragedy triggers in Irene a self-questioning search for how to change her life and for how to find the type of love she is actually able to offer to the people around her. This search brings Irene to abandon her protected, comfortable condition of life in a middle-class milieu and to approach people from different backgrounds and lower social classes for the purpose of understanding and financially helping them. Her new friends include a sick prostitute who is dying of tuberculosis and an indigent single mother who, although very poor, refuses to go to work in a factory and prefers spending her time with the several children she has had out of wedlock. These new acquaintances of hers are not welcome by her family and friends. Conflict arises, especially between Irene and her husband, whose cold, materialistic outlook makes it impossible for him not only to understand but also to discuss

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rationally Irene’s needs for a more inwardly rewarding type of social volunteerism. Several other representatives of middle-class society are consulted in an effort to solve the problem Irene is creating for her family. They all, including a priest, a lawyer, and a doctor, side for the entrenched materialism of the family, and Irene is sentenced to be locked up in a mental asylum. The prison-like conditions of the asylum are powerfully conveyed by the close-ups of Irene’s desperate face behind the bars of her hospital cell while she is looking at her husband’s car moving away in the dusk and is waving good bye to the only friend she has left, the single mother, who is standing under Irene’s window with her whole gang of children around her. The end of this film is decidedly more explicit and less hopeful than Stromboli’s, as Irene’s quest for self-awareness and truly meaningful relationships brings her to defeat in her conflict with a close-minded, loveless, and materialistic society, which is shown here to be much more subtly dangerous and destructive than the natural island community of Stromboli. In this type of society, any individual aiming at finding a goal in life that is different from the materialistic search for riches and self-gratification cannot be accepted and is doomed to be pushed to its margins and totally isolated without any personal consideration or understanding. Thus, even if Irene, in her quest, shows a potential for change and human understanding, the film does not allow any hope for a future interaction between her and her family or community in order to achieve a self-improving type of social experience. The film discourse of Stromboli, instead, had suggested that such a change might be possible for Karin. Europa ’51 starts from the very beginning with a tragic occurrence: the death of a child. This sets the hopeless mood for the story, as that death blows away all the hopes usually connected with a child’s growing up to be a fulfilled human being. Irene’s attempts at freeing herself from selfishness and lack of love is thus set from the beginning within a tragic mood that makes it destined to fail. Irene’s strength and the self-awareness she has of her rights to show love and understanding even to people who belong to a different, lower social class and the struggle that she puts up against her husband’s, family’s, and friends’ materialistic ideology prove her moral stamina and social commitment, even if she is eventually defeated and socially isolated. Irene becomes, therefore, the symbol of the enlightened social individual who wants to break the class barriers between people and who is determined to show personal understanding and social commitment. Although defeated, she stands for the best of society, even if she is not motivated by an orthodox religious or political ideology. The Stromboli legacy is already working in Europa ’51, which makes an even stronger statement in favor of the potential for women to achieve self-awareness and respect as subjects on their own and even to rise over their social environment and to stand for the best of humankind. Rossellini’s next films, Viaggio in Italia (Journey to Italy; 1952) and La paura (Fear; 1954), although they continue to deal even more in depth with the conflicting relationship between husbands and wives, are, however, far from constructing powerful, resisting female characters to be compared to Karin or Irene. Between 1951 and 1954, Rossellini directed some additional films that are important to our concern with women in film, such as his very controversial

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rendition of the story of Joan of Arc (1954) or the short feature film, called “Ingrid Bergman,” that he contributed to a collection of short films, Siamo donne (We, the Women; 1952). Unfortunately, I have not been able to view this collection or Rossellini’s sketch, so, instead of giving an analysis of it, I would like to call the readers’ attention again to Rossellini’s unusual directorial willingness to deal with women’s topics in various cinematic forms, such as war films, short feature films, regularlength feature films, historical films, and so on. Again, in Joan of Arc, he openly portrays a woman who is a hero (as he had done in Roma città aperta with Pina) and concentrates on her search for an unorthodox form of religiosity and spirituality, which some of his earlier female protagonists (such as Nannie) had displayed. When his collaboration with Ingrid Bergman broke down, Rossellini seemed to lose interest in portraying women’s quests for self-awareness and for more refined ways to interact with other individuals or their community. He resorted to documentary types of film (like India [1958]) or war films about male heroes (like Il generale della Rovere [General della Rovere; 1960]) and eventually to exclusively historical documentaries, such as Louis XIV (1966), Socrates (1970), The Age of the Medici (1972), and The Messiah (1975). Rossellini’s special way of approaching women’s issues, however, has been unique in Italian cinema of the 1940s and 1950s, and we may find its impact on several of the important filmmakers who are his contemporaries. Antonioni’s Women: Irma in Il grido Most of the women in Antonioni’s films4 display a fragile type of femininity that is also visible physically, as these women lack the physical exuberance and sexual flamboyance that several protagonists of Fellini’s films exhibit, such as Silvia in La dolce vita or Suzy and Fanny in Giulietta degli spiriti. Probably the only film by Antonioni that portrays a strong, independent woman is Il grido. This woman is Irma,5 a widow who intends to shape her life according to her own needs and desires rather than to those of Aldo, her male partner, who is the protagonist of the film. Although she is not the protagonist of the film, Irma is the motivator of the film’s narrative action, which is centered on Aldo. When Irma refuses to marry Aldo, he sets out on a long, unsuccessful search for a new woman, a new place to live, and a new job in order to forget her. As if to alert the spectators to Irma’s importance, the film opens with a series of shots that frame her as the only figure that enters and dominates the screen in a variety of ways. The first shot is a long pan of a country landscape divided in the center by a deserted country road on which the camera pauses for some time, until Irma enters left, crosses the road with long, firm steps, and exits right. A cut introduces another type of country landscape, centered on two farmhouses, well fenced in, and the camera again lingers shortly on one side of the screen, while Irma enters center from far away and briskly moves toward the camera alongside the fence in medium shots. Another cut changes the backdrop again, focusing this time on a more animated city street, where Irma enters from center left, moves

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briskly again toward the camera, and, before coming to a close-up shot, turns right into another street followed from behind by the camera in closer long shots, until she enters the main door of a large building. Here the camera loses sight of her, while lingering to frame three other women in long shots, who turn around to watch her and probably gossip about her, although their voices are not heard. In all these shots, the camera clearly frames Irma as a strong character by focusing on her determined, powerful stride. She is thus presented in control of all the different types of backgrounds she enters by the way she resolutely walks in and becomes the main character who knowingly and decisively steps into whatever space is projected on the screen. This type of control that Irma has over her environment, as is visually established by the initial sequence of the film, is extended in the following sequences to the people who are projected around her, and particularly to her lover, Aldo, who is constantly looking for her at home as well as in the city’s streets. She usually appears suddenly, as if to baffle and sometimes upset Aldo, who tries unsuccessfully to control her and order her around. Upon learning of her husband’s death, Aldo proposes marriage to her, but Irma refuses to marry him and resists all his attempts to keep her with him. The irony of this situation that totally subverts the traditional relationship between man (who is usually the one who refuses binding love and marriage) and woman (who is traditionally the one who confesses total dependency on a man and always places marriage at the top of her priority list) is further enhanced by the film’s handling of the male look. Traditionally, the woman’s presence on the screen is revealed by the man’s look that searches for and lingers on her while he asserts his control over her. In this case, things work out differently. Aldo is still the one looking inside the house for Irma, who is nowhere to be found. He then walks outside, still looking for her, and eventually, through his look, Irma is revealed leaning against a tree and looking at the river below and at the countryside around it. The woman, therefore, appears on the screen through the man’s look, as often happens in traditional cinematic narrative. Yet, as soon as Irma has been activated by Aldo’s look, she looks back at him and informs him of her decision to leave him for another man, thus escaping his control over her. Irma seems to know what she wants out of life and what type of man with whom she wants to be involved. Since Aldo does not seem to fit her view of life, she does not hesitate to leave him and go and live with a younger man, who, according to her, will better fit her liking and desire. Naturally, her choice comes under criticism from the society around her, and especially from Aldo and his mother, who both voice the patriarchal dislike for a woman who resists a man’s desire and control. They despise and fear a woman who stands for her right to choose a life for herself according to her own desire. The film’s narrative, however, at first does not share this negative view of Irma but is sympathetic with her, as it constructs her as a very positive image of womanhood, strong and independent but also maintaining traditional feminine traits, such as thoughtfulness and a nearly maternal caring. When Aldo runs away with their little daughter, Rosina, Irma prepares a suitcase for him with all the documents and clothes he had left behind and does not hesitate to carry it herself to Aldo’s former girlfriend’s house where he actually is. In this way, she is revealed as

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an individual who understands him well and who still cares for him as a human being and as a friend. At the end of the film, however, the representation of Irma changes. When Aldo comes back to their little city after all his efforts to forget her have failed, we see Irma again through his look when he stands in front of her new home looking in from the window. What he and we, the spectators, see is a traditional image of female warmth and caring as Irma is framed in the motherly role while she holds and cuddles in her arms a small baby boy. Again, Aldo’s look activates her here and shows her to the spectators, but at this point, he also realizes that she, as the mother of a child who is not his, is now completely out of his life, and he walks away. It is this recognition that eventually drives him to kill himself. When he turns his back to the window, Irma catches a glimpse of him and, guessing his state of mind, runs after him, showing again her understanding of his feelings. The last camera shot of the film frames her kneeling in front of Aldo’s dead body stretched lifeless over the pavement, and it conveys the same image of caring devotion for him, which seems to contradict the daring choice to leave him that she made at the beginning of the film. At the same time, this kneeling position in front of his dead body and the painful expression of despair on her face seem to suggest that she is now seeing herself responsible for Aldo’s suicide or, at least, aware of the tragic impossibility for a woman to make her own choices in matters of love. In this case, too, the filmic narrative closes Irma’s story by assimilating her, too, within the patriarchal codification typical of traditional Italian cinema. It first formulates her within the patriarchal role of mother, and then it frames her as a woman suffering and possibly even remorseful for her defiant act of resistance to Aldo’s desire and control. If we consider the strategies used in this film in handling the love relationship between Irma and Aldo, we realize that the roles here are completely overturned. Contrary to what we have been experiencing in traditional cinematic handling of love relationships, the woman here is the controller of the relationship, while the man is the one who suffers and is unable to cope with her decision to end their love affair. Aldo here reacts like the lonely woman of Una voce umana, who, once her lover abandons her and she realizes that her sogno d’amore is destroyed, finds her life totally useless and not worthy of living. Aldo, too, finds his life without Irma worthless and empty, and, indeed, he goes even further than that poor lonely woman of Una voce umana. He actually commits suicide, throwing himself down from the tower where he used to work. This film discourse, then, suggests to us spectators, that, in matter of love, men as well as women can be victims and losers. We, and our film directors with us, have probably always known that, but we did not dare to voice it in our social environment where many are so eager to establish a strong gender differentiation for what concerns love and power. Antonioni clearly voiced this view in Il grido, and we owe him much for this and for representing such a fully developed, independent woman in Irma, even if she remains a lonely specimen in his gallery of frail, neurotic female characters.

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Visconti’s Women: Livia in Senso, Maddalena in Bellissima, and Rosalia and Nadia in Rocco e i suoi fratelli In Senso, the narrative develops around a female character, Livia, who is cast as the protagonist, in the role of a noblewoman belonging to an aristocratic family in Venice at the time of the anti-Austrian Italian Independence wars. In this case, too, as in Ossessione (Obsession; 1943), the female character is at first constructed as a resisting wife, intolerant of an old husband’s conservative ideology and strict control and involved in an adulterous relationship with a younger, more handsome lover (Franz). Livia is at first presented as capable of making her own choices in matters of sexual desire as well as of political ideology. In conflict with her husband’s pro-Austrian political connections, Livia shares the revolutionary pro–Italian-Independence views of her cousin, who belongs to the clandestine anti-Austrian patriot organization active in Venice at those times. Visconti chose a remarkable and well-known group of actors for this film. In the role of Livia, he cast Alida Valli, a longtime diva of Italian cinema, and, next to her, he placed, as her patriot cousin, Massimo Girotti, another longtime divo of Italian cinema whom he had already cast in Ossessione as Gino. In the role of Franz, he cast the handsome American actor Farley Granger, thus initiating the trend of availing himself of well-known foreign actors, especially American actors, which will be customary of him in most of his later films. Senso is clearly proposing a woman’s story and possibly even a resisting woman’s story. The deviant traits in Livia’s character that can propose her as a potentially resisting woman are, however, manipulated soon enough in the film discourse to project an image of Livia as an unreliable and unsympathetic woman, ruled by lust and emotions. Several sequences of the film carefully create the contradictory image of this aristocratic woman. The first sequence of the film builds her up as a beautiful, admired, in-control lady of high social status when she is framed in close full-length shots at the Fenice theater in Venice. From her box that she shares with her powerful, older husband and other Austrian authority figures, she and the camera with her look down on the lower balcony where younger Austrian officers in uniform are now involved in a scuffle with Italian patriots in plain clothes and wearing the tricolor emblems of their national flag. Franz and Livia’s cousin are among them. Livia’s strategic upper position here suggests that she might be able to control the conflict between Austrians and Italians from a position of authority and on the side of the Italians, as her visible concern for her cousin makes us believe. The next key sequence, however, contradicts these expectations, as she is framed still mostly in full-length shots with Franz, whom she is trying to convince to let her cousin go free. Once she gets what she wants in exchange of what Franz wants (a clandestine rendezvous with her), another important sequence positions her as completely under Franz’s control after a close-up frames her looking at herself in a mirror and thus recognizing her femininity. Consequently, she gives in to Franz’s and her own sexuality without caring any longer for her social status or nationalistic beliefs. Livia’s adulterous relationship with Franz, a handsome, arrogant young Austrian officer in Austria-occupied Venice at the time of the Italian Independence

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War, becomes thus the main topic of the story, branding Livia not only as an adulteress but also as a traitor to her country. This traitorous quality attached to her character is even more intensified later on when, in order to keep her lover near her longer than allowed by military regulations, she gives him money to make it possible for him to buy a medical document that would exonerate him from those regulations. The money Livia gives Franz, however, is not hers but rather belonged to her cousin’s patriot organization that had entrusted her with it in order to support their revolutionary activities against Austria. At this point, even if she sees herself as a traitor to her country, Livia is still romantically convinced that her passion for Franz is much more important than a political cause. Only at the end of the film, when she realizes Franz’s hypocrisy and lies and finds herself cruelly rejected by him in favor of a younger woman, does Livia realize her situation. She becomes aware that what she thought was the grand love of her life was instead nothing more than a libidinous lust for a young and virile body and the sexual pleasure it could provide her. When all her dreams are shattered and her illusions lost, Livia descends even further down the road to self-degradation. She bursts into the Austrian High Command Headquarters and accuses Franz of desertion, thus causing his death by a firing squad. While Livia, then, is clearly the victim of her romantic belief in the overwhelming power of love, which was a strong component of the nineteenth-century Romantic movement, she is here vested with a much darker depiction by the film discourse. She thus falls within the codification of “dangerous” woman who not only dishonors her husband and family and causes her lover’s death but also betrays her country. By accepting and satisfying her own desire and passion, Livia defies the patriarchal codification of women as faithful wives, respectful of family obligations and nationalistic ideologies. Her defiance is doomed to failure, as the film discourse reveals her as weak and unstable as well as naïve and easily manipulated. At the end, she seems to acquire some awareness of her own weaknesses. This awareness, however, does not bring her a new self-respect but rather intensifies her emotional reactions and pushes her to an even lower level of psychological unbalance, as demonstrated in her running through the streets of Verona, crying and yelling as though demented. Through Livia, then, Visconti unleashes his view of women as frail, unstable, emotionally and sexually uncontrollable, and dangerous to men. This dark view of women, already visible but still controlled in Ossessione, is present also in his later film, Rocco e i suoi fratelli. As mentioned in the Introduction to this study, motherhood in Italian society represents a stronghold of patriarchal ideology. Several of Visconti’s films show an interest for constructing female characters, particularly mothers, from a traditional point of view. Some of his films will therefore be analyzed concentrating especially on the most important female characters that play a mother’s role. In practically all of Visconti’s films, the family plays a leading role as the motivating force of the narrative action. Within this space, women are cast most of the time in the rather traditional roles of wives and/or mothers, beginning with Giovanna in Ossessione and Livia in Senso, who are both represented as unfaithful wives. The first film of Visconti that focuses its narrative action on a mother character is

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Bellissima. This film is centered on a mother-daughter relationship and shows how a very independent but still family-oriented woman, Maddalena, fulfills the role of the mother in a family of the 1950s. While Maddalena (played by Anna Magnani)6 is positioned in the traditional role of a very dedicated mother and wife, her behavior and some of her responsibilities go beyond the patriarchal codification of such a role. She indeed combines her mother and housewife role with a parttime job as a nurse, and it is she rather than her husband who is in charge of the family’s financial resources. Her general behavior often brands her as a threatening and domineering phallic mother because of the exceptional control that she has over her daughter and husband, as shown in her one-sided decision to enter their daughter Maria into a beauty contest for the “most beautiful little girl” in Italy. Moreover, she is the one who decides to use the family savings to bribe the director to choose Maria as the winner of the contest, against all the odds and even against the little girl’s interest. This choice strikes the audience as another sign of Maddalena’s overbearing control over her family. It is as if Maddalena intends to act according to her own ambition and needs rather than out of an unselfish love for Maria or a real understanding of the needs of her family or of her daughter’s or her husband’s goals in life. Maddalena thus aptly combines traits of both the “good” and the “phallic” mother. On one level, she is totally dedicated to her family. On the other, she is competitive and manipulative. She exercises total control over her child in the hope of overturning, through Maria’s economic success and prestige, her own female subordination and motherly ineffectiveness. To this end, the film reveals Maddalena’s ambivalent characterization with a mirror shot, where Maddalena scrutinizes herself in the mirror in her room while some men look at her from the street through the open window. It is as if Maddalena is here discovering her femininity and attractiveness and is fascinated with the possibility of still using it to her own profit. The ending of the film, however, repositions Maddalena in her role of “good” mother when she recognizes her daughter’s childish frailty and acts in order to protect her. She refuses to sign Maria’s contract and resigns herself to an uneventful life within the close but secure boundaries of her own family. Maddalena, then, combines several conflicting characteristics that make her mother role rather complex and cinematically convincing. A major part of the film concentrates on Maddalena as a powerful but also insecure human being rather than a one-sided mother character. By the end of the story, in spite of her initial resistance, the patriarchal status quo is reestablished in Maddalena’s life. In Rocco e i suoi fratelli, Visconti splits his representation of woman between two main female characters, Rosalia and Nadia. Rosalia is a mother who projects both “good” and “phallic” qualities. As the aging mother of five sons, she immediately shows her control over them by deciding to move them from economically stagnant southern Italy to industrial Milan, one of the centers of the booming Italian economy in the late 1950s. She is, therefore, projected from the beginning as the living force and the decision maker of her fatherless family, thus embodying the main qualities of the threatening and controlling “phallic” mother. At the same time, Rosalia deeply cares for her sons and inspires in them a strong sense of family closeness: her favorite metaphor for such a concept is embodied in her hand comparison

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in which her five sons are like the fingers of her hand, always together and belonging to the same roots. In this way, she represents the patriarchal view of “good” motherhood: totally dedicated to her sons and constantly watching over them. Nadia, instead, represents Visconti’s dark view of women already noticed in Ossessione and Senso. Nadia is presented as a troublemaker in the patriarchal world of the film. She is a prostitute, who, early in the film, causes a heated discussion between the five brothers (all charmed by her) and their mother, who expresses the patriarchal negative view of a sexually active and independent woman. When Simone, one of the brothers, gets involved with Nadia, she is constantly accused of being the cause of all his failures in his boxing career and in his attempts to become financially successful. When Nadia then starts a meaningful relationship with Rocco, the most stable and dependable of all the brothers, she is again projected as the cause of the antagonism between Simone and Rocco. By the end of the film, she is seen by four of the brothers and their mother as the cause of Simone’s degradation, and when Simone eventually murders her, all the characters, except Rocco, see the murder as well deserved. Nadia, then, represents the threat for men that patriarchal society constantly connects with a sexually active woman. All the characters in the film except Rocco view her in these terms. According to Rocco, instead, Nadia is a weak but potentially good individual, ready for change but unable to transform her life, as she is the victim of the violently misogynist world of men. The film sequences that prepare for and show Simone raping Nadia while his male accomplices hold Rocco back and force him to watch the scene with them are clear examples of such a violent trend against women that predominates in the society of urban, underprivileged southern Italian males that the film represents. The narrative strategies of this film represent life as experienced in Italy in the 1950s, especially the critical conditions of life faced by southern Italian immigrants transplanted in a northern urban environment where they spend cold and dark winter days and nights in miserable abodes and in precarious conditions. In this environment, materialistic values have taken the place of social concern and compassionate behavior. Nadia is the sacrificial victim of such a social environment: one of the last shots of her dead body frames her in a full-length shot as a Christ figure with her arms extended as on a cross. Her human potential is totally ignored and eventually destroyed by the violent, materialistic world where she and Rocco try to live. Her tragic death clearly confirms the dangerous effects of the violent, ideological system of the 1950s of which Visconti was well aware as a socially committed individual and director. Fellini’s Women: Gelsomina in La strada and Cabiria in Le notti di Cabiria Fellini, too, seems to be very aware of the danger that women face in the difficult social milieu of the 1950s. The representational dynamics that construct femininity in Fellini’s films may differ depending often on the gender of the film protagonist, whose point of view controls its narrative action. I am thinking of Gelsomina in La strada and of Cabiria in Le notti di Cabiria, who, as female protagonists of those films, influence their discourse with their feminine points of view.

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La strada provoked a lively and differentiated critical reaction as soon as it was released. The Italian Catholic critics praised the film for its human values. The Italian pro-neorealism Marxist critics of that time, instead, saw the film as a deviation from neorealism and its social concern and a return to the traditional “poetry of the solitary man” typical of pre-neorealist cinema, Contrary to that view, I feel that La strada is a profoundly socially committed film, at least at the level of the plot of the story, which describes the life and tribulations of very poor, disenfranchised people. Consequently, I agree with Fellini’s own statement in response to the same critics’ view of his film. For Fellini, “La strada reconciles the personal and the social”: as he explains further in his own prophetic words that faithfully forebode our own contemporary society, “In order to learn the richness and the possibilities inherent in social life, today, what is more important than anything is for a man to learn to be, quite simply, with another. I think this is what every society must learn, and that if we do not solve this humble but necessary problem, we may tomorrow find ourselves facing a society externally well-organized, outwardly perfect and faultless, but in which private relationships . . . are empty, indifferent, isolated, impenetrable.”7 The axiom that the personal is the political is by now well accepted in contemporary criticism, especially for what concerns women’s lives.8 In this view, Fellini can be seen as the first Italian director to openly acknowledge the importance of the private dimension of human beings in order to come to a full understanding of their sociopolitical system so that they might succeed in changing it. According to him, in La strada he was trying to show “the personal communication between a man and a woman . . . and if one is showing the transition between individualism to true socialism today, in order to be persuasive, this must be seen and analyzed as a need of the heart, as the impulse of a moment, as a line of action in the humblest part of our lives.”9 In order to achieve his goal, Fellini uses a strategic interaction of different levels of cinematic discourse: One of these levels presents a plot and characters in the neorealist style aimed at developing topics, types, and situations very close to the everyday reality of life at the lowest possible social level, implying social criticism and concern. On another level, however, the development of characters and situations is conveyed at a more personalized, inner level of meaning, thus adding to the neorealist representation of social reality, another representation of a more intimate type of reality, which Fellini calls “spiritual reality” or “anything man has inside him.”10 La strada presents the life story of Gelsomina, in whose role Fellini cast his own wife, Giulietta Masina, who at that time was not a professional actress but soon became one of the most beloved dive of Italian cinema, well known all over the world as Fellini’s star. Indeed Giulietta Masina played the protagonist in most of Fellini’s films, even if not in his masterpiece La dolce vita. In the male protagonists’ roles, Fellini cast important American actors, such as Anthony Quinn as Zampanò, and Richard Basehart as Il matto. In the film, Gelsomina is the oldest daughter of a very poor, homeless, and fatherless family, where a pathetic mother figure tries by any and all means to provide her younger children with food and shelter. Gelsomina becomes one of those

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means, as her older sister had become before her. She is sold by her mother in exchange for enough money to provide food and shelter for her family. The buyer is Zampanò (a wandering circus showman), who, once Gelsomina has become his property, demands of her total submission and obedience. He teaches her, sometimes violently, with beating and name-calling, how to assist him on his “roadshow” and forces her to provide him with all the services he needs, sexual favors included. Gelsomina becomes his companion in his wanderings all over Italy in a rundown motorcycle van that serves as their home as well as their means of transportation in moving from one village square to another, where Zampanò exhibits his supposedly exceptional feats of physical strength with Gelsomina’s assistance. Zampanò represents brute force. He is violent and often hits people. His relation with all human beings around him is one of dominance, not of communication. His brutal, violent nature is often signified through animal imagery, as the cover of his motorcycle van symbolizes with its colorful representation of bulls, dogs, owls, pigs, snakes, and so on. After an unsuccessful attempt to escape from him, which ends with beatings and violence, Gelsomina accepts her situation as Zampanò’s slave. Her low self-esteem and her fear of physical harm and discomfort play an important part in her early submission to Zampanò’s will. Another important character in the film is Il matto, or the Fool, another circus artist specializing in rope walking and sometimes playing the clown. He is portrayed as a quasi-mythical figure that represents for Gelsomina a type of masculinity very different from Zampanò. The first shot of the Fool in the film is a subjective tilt from Gelsomina’s perspective, when she is in the square below looking up and watching him with admiration. This tilt shows him moving lightly on a very thin rope pulled high on top of the square. In the film, he is a sacrificial figure who ends as a victim of Zampanò’s brutal force. Gelsomina, by staying with Zampano, will also meet her own death when he becomes annoyed with her obsessive moaning for the Fool’s death and decides to abandon her on the side of the road. The long subjective shot from Zampanò’s motor van, slowly moving away from her, frames her as a minute, motionless figure lying on the frozen ground in a cold winter day. She could no longer perform all the services she had been bought for by Zampanò, so he disposes of her. By now sick and demented, she is left to die alone by the side of the road. At this realistic level of the plot, briefly summarized above, La strada, through the character of Gelsomina, very powerfully represents the difficult conditions of women. Economically deprived and exploited and physically subjected to violence, they are preconditioned by their upbringing to accept, and even to choose, male domination. The film formulates this message by placing Gelsomina in a very unfavorable situation that exploits and degrades her childlike innocence. Her connection with nature (the sea and, it follows, the water and the rain) and with children reveals her sensitivity and vulnerability. In her childlike construction, Gelsomina is projected as an easy victim of physical violence and authoritarianism. This is clear from when she is first presented on the screen. She is framed in several medium-length shots as a small figure covered by an old gray cape. She looks like a child happily running on the beach, with the sea in the background, and stopping here and there to pick up wood for her family’s needs, responding

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promptly as soon as she hears her siblings’ calls that summon her to their mother. The shots in these sequences frame her diagonally in relation to the ocean and the beach, as if to hint at the brusque ending of her childlike relationship with that beautiful natural background that she loves so much. When she gets back to her mother and sees a stranger (Zampanò), a close-up of her expressive face reveals her childish shyness and fear of the unknown. The following series of shots and countershots between her and the stranger highlights the two characters’ distinguishing features through careful framing. Zampanò is framed in a full-length shot with a tilt up, standing against a rock and looking down at the other people in the scene. Gelsomina, instead, is framed in a medium-length shot with a tilt down, while she is kneeling on the sand and looking up. The sound is produced exclusively by Zampanò, whose loud voice is heard ordering Gelsomina’s siblings to go and buy food and wine. Gelsomina is silent. This sequence clearly envisions what will be the relationship between these two characters: the authoritarian, all-powerful male buyer, and the submissive, frail, powerless woman-as-slave female figure. This sequence ends with Gelsomina’s departure with Zampanò on his motorcycle van, where her desperation at leaving her family is caught with a close-up shot of her tearful face. This shot changes into a long subjective shot from her point of view as she looks from the back of the van at her family, waiving good-by to them as they become smaller and smaller until they disappear from the screen and from her life. The only thing left on the screen is Gelsomina’s tearful face showing her loneliness and frailty. The formulation of Gelsomina as a human being reduced to an object exchanged for money corresponds to the Marxist view of the capitalist system. In such a system, the traditional humanistic values of communication, human respect, and love are being swapped for capitalism’s consumerist laws that prescribe the use of money in exchange for objects needed for everyday life and for business or personal services as well. In such a society, money becomes synonymous with power and authority, and poverty with weakness and submission. According to consumerist laws, whether they are applied to objects or human beings, the reasons for such exchanges are formulated in terms of usefulness and disposability. Within such a social system, objects, such as cameras, telephones, or cars, once no longer usable, can be easily disposed of and replaced. This consumerist law pertains, however, not only to objects but also extends to human beings, and particularly women. Once Gelsomina becomes sick and unable to fulfill her services to Zampanò, she is disposed of like a useless object on the side of the road. That Fellini views contemporary society in these terms is proven over and over again in most of his films where women, belonging to very different socioeconomic and cultural milieus, are used by men to fulfill their many needs and are eventually discarded as soon as they are no longer of use to them. And yet the cinematic discourse of La strada formulates another image of Gelsomina that transcends this consumerist representation of woman as slave and as disposable object. In her relationship with Zampanò, she always plays the role of a dependent, silent, and submissive woman. In contrast, she projects a different image of herself when she performs, masquerades as a clown, sings, dances, and

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plays the trumpet for the enjoyment of her audience. Children are especially the ones who relate naturally to her, recognizing her as one of them and warmly showing their appreciation for her performing talents. This appreciation helps her in her search for self-validation that culminates in her meeting with Il matto. He is the pivotal influence in developing Gelsomina’s talent as a circus artist, as he gives her the opportunity of experiencing and trying out for herself a different acting routine. But his influence is particularly important in her search for selfhood, as he teaches her the value of human communication and interpersonal understanding. ll matto stands for a different, nonthreatening type of masculinity, enlivened by humor and softened by compassion. His type of masculinity allows Gelsomina to develop and express her real self, while with Zampanò she is usually too afraid to speak, and, whenever she attempts to, she is ordered to keep silent. With ll matto, Gelsomina even learns to verbalize her emotions starting with her rage and helplessness for her situation, and ending eventually with an understanding of it in truly human terms. The following outburst is a good example of her emotional assessment of her situation: “I’ll . . . one of these days, I’ll take some matches, and I’ll burn everything, mattresses . . . blankets, everything . . . That way he’ll learn. I never said I didn’t want to go with him. He paid ten thousand lire, and I set to work. And he gave me slaps. Is this the way to behave? He doesn’t think! And I tell him so, but him . . . nothing doing. And what good does it do then? I’ll even put poison in his soup! Oh no? And I’ll burn everything down! . . . If I don’t stay with him, who will? Right?”11 The film’s discourse makes sure that the audience understands the deep human relationship that exists between Gelsomina and ll matto by connecting them through music. The tune that Gelsomina likes so much and that she eventually learns to play on the trumpet is the same that ll matto plays on his violin the day that Gelsomina and Zampanò join the Grimaldi circus in Rome. From then on, the tune is played as external music any time either of the two characters is on the screen. This strategy succeeds in underscoring the profound relationship that has been established between the two of them by their common search for finding their inner self and for understanding their relation with other people. By adding a new dimension to the character of Gelsomina—that is, her selfawareness as a performer and as a human being who shows caring for and understanding of other human beings—this film endows its female protagonist with an awareness of her potential that works in defiance of the earlier depictions of her as a woman as slave and as a lifeless object whose usefulness has been valued exclusively in terms of money. Gelsomina, then, endowed with a self of her own, a professional one connected with her activities as a performer, can begin her self-realization process, which culminates eventually under Il matto’s influence into a deeper understanding of her own self and of how she relates with others. Through ll matto’s parable of the pebble, which teaches that everybody and everything, even a pebble, does have a purpose in life, Gelsomina succeeds in sublimating her relationship with Zampanò as her own purpose in life. In this light, her decision to stay with Zampanò— “If I don’t stay with him?” she asks, “Who will?”—can be seen as the outcome

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of her new understanding of a meaningful human relationship rather than the unavoidable last chapter in her woman-as-slave story. This many-leveled construction of the character of Gelsomina is an example of the complexity that can sometimes be found in Fellini’s representation of women. In Fellini’s films, women are proposed usually as objects of men’s needs and control as well as their material property. At the same time, Fellini sometimes endows women with a human dimension, which makes them understand gender relationships much better than men. That both ll matto and Gelsomina die because of Zampanò’s brutality and misunderstanding accentuates the connection between the two in their role of innocent victims to be sacrificed for Zampanò’s enlightenment and transformation. The final sequences of the film convey Zampanò’s process of enlightenment, and they are exclusively centered on Zampanò, who is alone on the beach close to the sea that was so dear to Gelsomina. In these sequences, the film uses for the first time, as external music, Il matto and Gelsomina’s tune even when Zampanò is alone on the screen. Through this tune, he becomes thus connected with his two victims just at the moment when, for the first time, he shows some human emotions, such as sorrow and a sense of loss. This humanization of Zampanò is shown in medium- and close-up shots that frame him looking up to the sky, lying down on the sand as if asking forgiveness for his deeds, and crying as if he were missing Gelsomina. In Le notti di Cabiria, Fellini deals with prostitution as a way of life for women who are poor and defenseless, and who are represented in the film as victims of their socioeconomic conditions and of men’s evil ways. The protagonist of the film, played again by Giulietta Masina, is Cabiria, a prostitute who walks the streets of suburban Rome at night in search of male clients. In this film, however, unlike in La strada, Cabiria is not the only female character in the story, which includes several other women. This film offers a very realistic handling of the plot and a true-to-life representation of the female characters and of their life in a patriarchal society. We find here several examples of men exploiting women, especially as sexual objects whose services entail a monetary value. The multiplication of female characters helps to provide a wider perspective on how women relate to prostitution. The film introduces at least three categories of prostitutes. Some are shown in economic difficulties, homeless and often obliged to spend their nights in the streets of Rome or under the archways of the Roman bridges. Some seem to have succeeded in making their life more comfortable by owning a house, even if it is modest and small, like Cabiria, or a car, like Marisa. Some are definitely more affluent, like the tall statuesque types who walk in elegant downtown Rome and look down on Cabiria and her modest attire. There is also Jessy, the tall, blond beauty who has found a steady client in a rich and handsome actor, played by Amedeo Nazzari, a well-known actor of the 1930s and 1940s, who plays himself in the film. Indeed all the female characters in the film are prostitutes, whose lives and economic survival depend exclusively on men, and most of them spend their nights in the streets of suburban or downtown Rome, avoiding the police and waiting to be picked up by male clients whose sexual needs they are paid to satisfy. Yet, in this

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film on prostitution and prostitutes, no space is reserved for any of the sexual acts between them and their clients. The only spaces where they openly show their profession are the city streets where they are picked up by their clients: either the Passeggiata Archeologica of suburban Rome, where Cabiria and her female friends work, or the elegant Via Veneto of downtown Rome. This representational choice is important in understanding the message that this film conveys about the topic of prostitution. The film stops its representation of a prostitute’s act at the instant when she attracts the look of the passersby without entering into the details of how she uses her wiles to satisfy the male’s sexual urge. In this way, the film seems to want to focus on the “normality” of these women—that is, on the fact that they behave, talk, interact, try to attract the men’s attention, and dream of marriage or of a meaningful relationship with a man just like all other “normal” women do. The episode showing the women visiting the Sanctuary of the Madonna dei Miracoli is a good example of this representation. The film thus constructs its main character, Cabiria, in these terms, focusing mostly on her womanly characteristics rather than on her profession. Yet to choose women as prostitutes as the main characters of the film proposes the view of women as victims of a social system that places them always at the mercy of men. Prostitution, indeed the oldest profession for women in the world, is the most blatant form that women’s submission to men takes in a capitalistic society, as it projects women exclusively as sexual objects whose services can be bought by men with money and who can thus be disposed of easily once they are no longer needed. The example of Bomba, the old, destitute prostitute, compelled to find shelter in a cave on the outskirts of Rome and depending on the generosity of a lonely benefactor for food, well represents the socially deprived conditions of any such woman. A prostitute, indeed, once she is no longer able to set herself up as a desirable sexual object loses her value and is pushed away outside of the city and onto the outskirts of life. This episode well represents the traditional view of man as exploiter and of woman as the victim of his lust. Cabiria is deeply affected by Bomba’s ordeal, as Bomba for her represents what might happen to her, too, in her own future. In general, however, the women in this film live exclusively in the present, and the potential of a bleak future does not seem to bother them very much. They seem to accept passively their condition as sex objects and victims of men’s lust, and some of them are quite happy to have a pimp who protects them, drives them around, and helps them handle their money. Cabiria, on the other hand, is very vociferous in asserting her independence and her difference from the other women in the profession. She voices her belief in herself as a tough, down-to-earth person who knows how to take financial care of herself, as she owns her own house and has a savings account that provides for all her needs. She repeatedly states that she has control over her own life and does not need anybody, least of all a pimp, to protect her in her business. In the course of the film, however, Cabiria’s independence and self-assurance are seriously tested by the encounters she has with two men who exploit her. She is indeed unable to protect herself when she becomes the victim, not of the type of exploitation involving sexual favors that one would expect in a

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prostitute’s life, but rather of the foul play of a man who makes her believe that he loves her. He preys on her “dream of love” and then deceives and leaves her after taking possession of all her money. This is the type of deception of which any woman, not necessarily only a prostitute, can become a victim in society. This is a common type of deception that plays out in an unequal relationship between a man and a woman, where there is only one individual (the woman) who loves and gives while the other (the man) lies and takes. Cabiria experiences this type of deceitful relationship twice in the film. Both at the beginning and at the end, she plays the woman who loves and gives and is thus victimized by a man who only wants her money. The filmic strategies controlling the couple’s relation seem thus to suggest the traditional view of woman as victim of man’s exploitation. We are reminded again of Fellini’s view of human relationships as voiced in his rebuttal of the Marxist criticism of La strada, where he restates his antimaterialistic belief in the need of authentic human relationships: “I could tell you what for me is one of the most pressing problems, one which provides part of the theme for all my films. It’s the terrible difficulty people have in talking to each other; the old problem of communication, the desperate anguish to be with, the desire to have a real, authentic relationship with another person.”12 In the opening sequences of the film, a long pan establishes the background of open fields in suburban Rome, where two people, a woman and a man, are running in the fields. The woman laughs, sings, and, while running, swings her purse with wide movements of her arm. The man, in contrast, is silent and keeps running after her. Several times the woman stops for him, and they embrace. All this is projected from far away, in full-length shots that do not clearly frame any of the two characters nor reveal their identity until they reach the shores of a river and stop running. At this point, the camera frames them with closer full-length shots in the moment when the man grabs the woman’s purse, pushes her in the water, and runs away. The camera frames the woman, still with full-length shots from a closer angle, while she tries to keep afloat in the water and starts yelling for help. The woman framed is Cabiria, the film’s protagonist, but the camera does not linger on the man, as if to inform the spectators that his identity is not important; he is just a man, and indeed he will not reappear on the screen. From this moment on, the camera alternates middle- and full-length shots of Cabiria gasping for air in the water while the current pushes her further and further away from the shore, with middle and long shots of some children and another man who hear her call for help and start their rescue mission. These sequences end in a series of shots of the children pulling Cabiria to the shore and eventually out of the water, where the man applies some rudimentary first-aid assistance and, together with another man, holds her up by her feet and shakes her to get the water out of her mouth and lungs. At this point, the woman looks like a puppet held upside down and moving only because of the shaking that her rescuers inflict on her. Soon, however, a full-length shot frames Cabiria as they lie her down on the ground and she starts struggling with them, trying to get up. She cries out that she is fine and wants to go home. There isn’t any show of gratitude on her part toward her saviors but rather resentment against them who are now trying to calm her

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down and convince her to rest for a while. She keeps on struggling to get up, and she eventually leaves to go back home in a fury, without even thanking her rescuers. When she arrives at her home and finds the door locked, she shows the same defiant and enraged attitude against her best friend Wanda, who wants to know what has happened to her. Cabiria does not go into details but from the dialogue between them, it becomes clear that the man who robbed and nearly killed her is Giorgio, her boyfriend whom she trusted and loved and to whom she had given all he wanted: money, silk shirts, expensive coats, special food, shelter—everything she had. She eventually gives Wanda her own interpretation of what happened to her: “We were out for a walk near the river and I fell in. Giorgio panicked and ran away with my purse.” From this explanation, it is clear that she is in denial and is trying to protect him in order not to face the truth, which is what battered or persecuted women do in a patriarchal society. Later on, however, her rhetorical questions addressed to herself and Wanda bring out the deep emotional resentment she is starting to feel against him: “But what need was there for him to do this? He loved me and I gave him everything he wanted! Does one kill for 40,000 lire?” To which Wanda replies, showing her better understanding of the environment where they live, “I know of people that would do it for 5,000 lire!” She then tries to counsel Cabiria wisely: “How can you talk of love. You just met him a month ago, you know nothing about him, nor his real name nor where he lives nor what he does! Go and denounce him to the police!” But Cabiria does not intend to follow her advice. When Wanda leaves, the action of the film seems to pause, and the camera follows Cabiria angrily gathering all of the presents she had given Giorgio, taking them outside and burning them while her voice comments on her actions with resentfulness: “What if I had died? My God! But now it is over, the party is over! What a jerk have I been! But it will not happen to me again, never again!” Could Cabiria’s earlier unusual reaction of ingratitude and rage at being saved from a sure death have been caused by an unconscious death wish once she realized that with his actions, Giorgio had shattered all the dreams and the hopes she had to establish a meaningful relation with him? Or was her rage a reaction to her frustration in recognizing that she, too, was a helpless female victim, completely at the mercy of a deceitful man, contrary to her conviction that she could always take good care of herself? Cabiria was probably facing for the first time a situation that many other women often experience, where women, convinced of having reached a satisfactory level of economic and emotional security after years of painful efforts spent in building up their life and self, abruptly find themselves again at level zero as victims of a man’s deception. What is there to do at this point? Wouldn’t death be a better alternative to restarting the economic and emotional rebuilding of one’s self all over again? And yet, later on, when she contemplates death more rationally, Cabiria does not seem to welcome it as a viable alternative, as her questioning and exclamation suggest: “What if I had died? My God!” These words are followed by what seems a silly, unrelated action that reveals, however, Cabiria’s need to be close to some creature, be it a human being or an animal. She reaches into a box and pulls out a chick, holds it and fondly caresses it. With that gesture, Cabiria shows her affectionate side and her need for companionship, even

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if it might be experienced at an animal level rather than at a higher and more fulfilling human one. At this point, the spectators are anxiously looking for Cabiria’s next move, which comes seemingly abruptly when a dissolve13 moves the action to the street where the prostitutes who work with Cabiria are attending to their business and admiring Marisa’s new car. Cabiria gets off a motorcycle van and joins them for a short time. The camera switches then to a full-length shot of her dancing on the sidewalk to the rhythm of a popular song blasting from the radio of Marisa’s car. Cabiria invites some young men to join her, and they all end up dancing in the street, where she is ridiculed by another prostitute about her adventure with Giorgio. An altercation between the two women breaks out, and they are soon rolling in the middle of the street hitting, kicking, and pulling at each other’s hair. The fight is looked upon very differently by men and women. The men urge Cabiria to continue the fight and laugh at the two women’s struggle. The women, instead, try to stop them and pull them apart and call on the men to help them. Finally Cabiria is pulled away from the other woman. With torn clothes, ruffled hair, and a bloody nose she is placed in Marisa’s car to calm down, even though she is still resentful and belligerent. She insists on being driven to Via Veneto, the most elegant street in downtown Rome where only the very sophisticated and goodlooking prostitutes walk and attract rich and famous clients. A full-length shot of Cabiria with two such prostitutes looking down on her clearly highlights the difference between those two gorgeous creatures and Cabiria’s insignificant presence and establishes that Cabiria is definitely out of place there. Yet it is Cabiria who ends up in the big American car of a rich and famous actor. He invites her to the most fashionable nightclub in town where she becomes the center of attention with her wild dancing. She experiences a few incidents that confirm her out of place condition there, such as when she gets entangled in the curtain that covers the door to the nightclub dance hall and has to be rescued by two waiters in black jackets. The actor eventually takes her to his fabulous home on the elegant Appia antica road, where he offers her champagne with caviar and lobster, types of food with which she is hardly familiar. In her brief conversation with him, before his very attractive, regular girlfriend interrupts them and he has to hide Cabiria in the bathroom, she finds the opportunity to proudly restate her economic independence and her conviction that she does not need anything or anyone in her life: “I do not need anything. I have my own home with everything, electricity, gas, heating, I even have a thermometer. I don’t need anything. And I have never slept under the archways of a bridge. At least nearly never, may be once or twice. Now I have my own home, not like this one. But it is enough for me!” At the same time, looking at him and at the beautiful room where they are, Cabiria is suddenly moved to tears, kisses his hand, and asks him for a picture with his autograph to show her friends that would prove that she has actually been with him. Cabiria definitely has a problem trying to harmonize the recognition of her frailty with her belief in her own independence. When she finally leaves his home, she goes back to the suburban street where her friends are still working and gives the spectators another example of the difficulty she has in controlling her emotions. The other girls are talking about going all together, the following Sunday, to

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a sanctuary close by, where they could ask the Madonna dei Miracoli that is revered in the sanctuary to perform a miracle in their behalf. Cabiria states that she is not sure that she wants to go as she does not have any favor to ask the Madonna, as she has everything she needs. Just at that point, a religious procession comes by, and Cabiria, nearly unconsciously, follows it from a distance. In all these sequences, Cabiria is framed as a contradictory character, whose voice and actions seem to be in a conflict that she cannot resolve. Her voice constantly proclaims her independence, strength, and unwillingness to accept assistance from any source, human or otherwise, thus implying high self-esteem. Her body language, however, conveys another message; her kissing the actor’s hand and her following the religious procession show her feminine emotional dependency that sets her forth as a frail and weak creature in need of assistance. The following Sunday, she joins her friends’ party headed for the sanctuary, and she partakes of the religious hysteria that overcomes most of the visitors at the sight of the picture of the miraculous Madonna. Her visit to the sanctuary and her frantic search for her friend Wanda, whom she is afraid to have lost in the crowd, together with her emotionally highly charged participation in the visitors’ hysteria seem to point to a potential resolution of the conflict with a total acceptance of her need for assistance from outside sources. At this point, both voice and body language move in unison: while she is framed in a medium-length shot looking up at the Madonna image with tearful eyes, her voice joins in the visitors’ repetitive chant: “Aiutami, Madonna” (Help me, Madonna)” and “Grazie, Madonna” (Thank you, Madonna); and in a whisper, she even asks the Madonna specifically to help her change her life. Once outside, after the ceremony, Cabiria, however, becomes very belligerent and cynical again, as if she is ashamed of her obvious surrender to the pressure of religious fanaticism. Again, her voice cries out in a rage at the conscious realization that hers and the other women’s lives have remained unchanged in spite of their religious experience in front of the Madonna. This realization, however, is undermined by the emotional instability with which she delivers her cynical message. She cries out, “We have not changed, we are still the same, we are still prostitutes, and our life has not changed,” and runs away crying, in a fit of rage. Her mood remains the same even later on, during her evening wanderings that take her to a vaudeville theater where a hypnotist is entertaining the public, and compels her to be part of his act. In her hypnotic trance, Cabiria reveals in her voice and countenance her fundamentally traditional female upbringing and discloses the deep need she has for a meaningful relationship with a man, setting herself up again as a potential victim of her own deep need for submissiveness and of her “dream of love.”14 This revelation is very moving for female spectators, while it has a very different effect on the male spectators of the vaudeville theater act who find her ridiculous and wait for her outside the theater to make fun of her. Cabiria is afraid to leave alone. One man, Oscar, comes to her rescue. He seems to have responded to Cabiria’s hypnotic performance differently than the other men and is apparently moved by her naïveté in the same way that the female spectators are. He approaches her with respect and offers to accompany her outside the theater.

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Cabiria’s reaction to him is, at first as well as later on, distrustful, and she clearly voices this distrust to him and to her friend Wanda. Yet again, her body language contradicts her voice, as she looks anxiously for him in the crowd or smilingly accepts his presents, which she shares with her friends, describing him in a very flattering way and repeating his words to them. Eventually she totally overcomes her distrust, and also her voice shows her acceptance of what he has been trying to make her believe all along and that she wants so desperately to believe: that he really loves her and wants to marry her so that she will actually be able to change her life. The final sequences of the film frame Cabiria again as the victim of a man’s deceitful scheme. She sells everything she has and takes all her money out of her savings account, and, putting all her money together, rolled up in a big bundle in her purse, she leaves her house and her friend Wanda to meet Oscar and start her new life with him. A dissolve moves the action to a restaurant on the sea where Cabiria and Oscar are eating together. A Neapolitan song about treachery and sadness plays as internal music and alerts both characters and spectators to what is to come. Cabiria, however, is not suspicious. She shows Oscar all the money she has in her purse and he proposes to take a walk to watch the sunset. While they walk in what looks like a dark forest, Cabiria sings and picks flowers, while he keeps silent. When they get to the place, he wanted to show her, a quick panning of it frames it as a natural terrace on top of a precipice that ends in the sea below. She is still unsuspecting and her voice clearly expresses her serene mood and her belief in justice and in the possibility of happiness and change after all she has suffered in life: “It is true that there is justice in this world!” she says. “One suffers, goes to hell, but eventually one finds happiness.” She calls him “My angel, my saint,” thus sublimating him to a savior role that can fulfill her needs for both human and supernatural assistance. All of a sudden, however, when he asks her if she can swim and she proceeds to tell him of her previous experience with Giorgio, the camera, focusing on her with a close-up shot, reveals her suddenly puzzled and frightened expression while she is looking into his eyes. A close-up of his eyes does not leave any doubt about his evil intentions. Her words here disclose her shock when she realizes what will happen: “You want to kill me,” she gasps, “for the money!” At this point the camera frames her in a medium-length shot, while she takes the big bundle of money out of her purse and throws it to his feet, imploring him to kill her, as, she adds, “I do not want to live” The camera moves to Oscar, while he takes the money and runs away as she still implores, “Kill me . . . throw me off the cliff!” She then falls on her knees to the ground, crying and still repeating aloud, “I do not want to live.” A cut suspends the action momentarily and then, with a fade-in, the camera focuses on Cabiria alone, still in the same place, in the dark, kneeling and still holding her flowers in her hands. She then stands up and starts walking back through the dark forest until she gets to a lit-up street where there are many young people singing, playing guitar, and walking. This is a different type of street from the ones that Cabiria is accustomed to walk in her profession. The people who are around her here are different from the prostitutes with whom she has walked before. They are young men and women, seemingly innocent and happy. A full

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shot shows Cabiria walking with them while they all surround her. A close-up shot shows her tearful eyes with a black mascara smudge. A young girl greets her with a smile, saying, “Buona sera, signora.” The sequence ends with a close up of Cabiria’s face. She is now smiling, too, and nodding. These final sequences do not give closure to the story. The last words she had addressed to Oscar, and her body language in the final sequence of the film are definitely in conflict if we compare them with the opening sequences. The words addressed to Oscar clearly express her desperation and a conscious death wish: “Kill me . . . I do not want to live.” However, her body language, her smile, her walking with all the young people in the street, her nodding at the end, all deliver a different message, a message of hope and serenity. It’s up to the spectators to find an answer to Cabiria’s dilemma, just as Fellini has suggested in one of his interviews: “My pictures never end. They never have a simple solution. I think it is immoral (in the true sense of the word) to tell a story that has a conclusion. Because you cut out your audience the moment you present a solution on the screen . . . Then everyone, with his own sensibility and on the basis of his own inner development, can try to find his own solution.”15 Following Fellini’s advice, then, I, as a spectator, will try to suggest my own solution, based on the language of the film and on a comparison between Cabiria’s reaction to her first experience with Giorgio and her last one with Oscar. We have already noticed how different are the terms of the conflict between her words and her body language at the end in comparison to the beginning of the film. At the beginning, the verbalization of her experience, as told to Wanda, aimed at changing the facts and covering up its real significance: “I fell in the water. Giorgio panicked and ran away.” At the end, instead, she clearly verbalizes her experience directly to Oscar as it is actually happening: “You want to kill me . . . for the money!” Cabiria is now able to concentrate on the reality of the situation, while earlier she had never had the opportunity to confront Giorgio directly or to make herself face the reality of that situation. There was no closure in her earlier experience with Giorgio. The only way she could cope with it was to show her rage against herself, her own frailty, and her powerlessness—“What a jerk have I been!”—or air her resentment at other people, her rescuers, Wanda, and the other prostitutes in the Passeggiata Archeologica. At that point, Cabiria was constantly in denial of her emotional dependency. The only times she expressed it were when she held and caressed her chick and when she kissed the actor’s hand. All her bragging about her independence and her knowledge on how to take care of herself brought up only the economic side of her accomplishments, never the emotional side. She had always formulated herself differently, economically, from all the other women she knew, thus cutting off all emotional ties with them, even with Wanda, whom sometimes she seems to consider her best friend but pushes away at her time of need. At the end of the film, Cabiria has lost all her economic possessions, her money, her house, and her savings account. She does not have to assert her superiority in economic terms any more. She is now free to concentrate on the weakest side of her personality: on her emotional dependency. The shots showing her walking with the young people singing, playing, and greeting her smilingly seem to open

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the prospect of a new way of life for her where human companionship is founded not on a consumerist attitude but on mutual respect and interaction, a prospect that Cabiria can smile at and nod to for acceptance. This is the type of solution that I would suggest for Cabiria, who is finally facing her own emotional dependency, which, up to now, she has fought as an unpleasant part of her womanhood. Now that she has understood what problems this dependency has created for her, she may be ready to take care of her emotional needs just as competently as she had taken care of her economic ones. By visualizing the prospect of this new way of life, one that will make her more secure emotionally in her future relationships with men or women, Cabiria, like so many of Fellini’s characters, is trying “to learn to be, quite simply, with another” in order to find really meaningful relationships rather than accumulating money to buy companionship. Cabiria will also find in herself the strength to resist the traditional patriarchal “dream of love” that presupposes woman exclusively as a frail and weak creature in need of a man’s protection. This film reveals Fellini’s ambivalence toward femininity by showing in Cabiria the unresolved conflict between a potential for self-assurance and a traditional heritage of self-denial. The film discloses Fellini’s distaste for contemporary individuals’ exclusive search for materialistic prosperity at all costs and for their indifference toward meaningful relationships. Melodrama Films Other films in the 1950s concentrate as well on female protagonists and on their sorrowful love stories hindered by powerful antagonists set on opposing the fulfillment of their dreams of love or/and of family harmonious coexistence. These powerful melodrama films were very popular in the 1950s and became the best sellers of the time, as the story of the production and performance of the popular films such as Catene (Chains; 1950), I figli di nessuno (Nobody’s Children; 1951), Tormento (Torment; 1952), Vortice (Vortex; 1954), and Angelo bianco (White Angel; 1955) by the melodrama master director of the 1950s, R. Matarazzo, well demonstrates.16 Here we will consider Matarazzo’s I figli di nessuno and thus follow the influence that the melodrama genre maintained in the 1950s in creating sympathetic female characters that the spectators could relate to even when they were defeated and victimized. In this film, we also find a very weak male character, Guido, who is completely under his mother’s control and thus unable to live his own life or fulfill his own love desire. I figli di nessuno The difficulties of mother-son relationships in film, formulated through separation and other suspense elements that fit into the maternal melodrama subgenre well, are proposed also in I figli di nessuno directed by Raffaele Matarazzo, who borrowed the title and the subject from an earlier silent film (1920) by Ubaldo Maria Del Colle. The story is set in the harsh, mountainous background of the

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Tuscan marble mines around Carrara. The film projects a clear social conflict between the aristocracy (the wealthy countess who owns the mine and her educated son, Guido) and the working class (the poor guardian of the mine and his daughter, Luisa). This film proposes two different mother characters: the countess, representing the main authority as the mine’s owner and the controller of her family’s conspicuous patrimony, and Luisa, who is loved by the young count and who will give birth to his son out of wedlock. The countess, in the absence of a father figure, represents patriarchal authority and accordingly constrains her son’s freedom, as she forbids him to run the mine in the modern way he thinks it should be run in order to become profitable for them and more secure for the miners. This mother, then, as a patriarchal figure, is constructed with both masculine and feminine traits. Far from renouncing her identity for her son’s sake, this mother imposes her will on him, indicating a masculine trait as a strong and independent character. On the other hand, she obsessively projects her desire exclusively on her son, accentuating the requirement for the nearness and exclusivity of affection that are typical of motherly love. Instead of emerging as a rare, strong female character, the countess thus reverts to the stereotypical portrayal of the scheming, possessive, insecure mother, ready to do anything in order to keep her son from entering the social arena and making his own choices in matters of love and work. The countess is thus constructed as a contradictory mother character combining authoritarian and independent traits reminiscent of a father figure, along with an exclusively motherly obsessive dependency on her son’s love and devotion. The other mother character in the film is Luisa, who plays the expected selfsacrificing mother role, so dear to a patriarchal society. Luisa belongs to the lower class and, as daughter of the guardian of the mine, lives with him in a run-down little house built on the mining property. The countess’s son, Guido, is in love with Luisa and wants to marry her, even if they both fear that the countess will never allow their marriage. Luisa loves him, too, and gives herself to him without, however, informing him that she has become pregnant. This break in communication between the lovers is the first of a long series of miscommunications and mistimings that eventually cause their total separation. The countess, on her part, employs all means to keep her son away from Luisa; her last resource is to send him to England on business. While he is away, she stops all his contacts with Luisa by engaging the assistance of one of the miners, Anselmo, an evil and devious character, who intercepts all Guido’s letters and telephone calls to Luisa. Luisa, after several months have gone by without any news from Guido, convinces herself that he has forgotten her and has complied with his mother’s will. After her father’s death, she must abandon the house and the mine, as the countess has evicted her now that her father is not performing any services for her any longer. Alone, poor, and pregnant, Luisa leaves the mine and takes shelter in the forest where an old lady takes care of her and her new-born son, until her hiding place is discovered by Anselmo, who does not hesitate to burn it down, kidnap the baby, and place him in a foundling institution, according to the countess’s orders. Luisa, thinking that the baby has died in the fire, is overcome by her sense of guilt as she views herself as a sinner and thus responsible for his death. Weakened by

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this sense of guilt and her low self-esteem, Luisa withdraws from the world where she has known only sorrow, evil, and the loss of all the persons she had loved and chooses a life of prayer and renunciation by entering a convent and taking a nun’s vows. Guido comes back to the mine the day after Luisa has disappeared, but Anselmo’s deviousness and intrigues hinder his search for her. His mother’s interference keeps him unaware of his son’s existence, and eventually he succumbs to her pressure and marries the upper-class girl she had chosen for him. Missed opportunities and painful separations plague the characters in this film, and its pathetic mood arouses the sympathy of the viewers for Luisa. The last part of the film narrative focuses on a new character, Bruno, Luisa and Guido’s son, now a young teenager, whose victimization increases the pathetic mood of the film. His is also a painful story of separation and brutality that slowly brings him back to his native Carrara and, unknowingly, to his father’s mine. Here he is involved in several other mistimings, such as when he actually meets his mother dressed as a nun without, however, being recognized by her. His efforts to contact his father are dramatically mistimed, and only on his deathbed is he finally recognized by his father and receives his mother’s so-long-yearned-for embrace. The death of Bruno becomes the only means to bring closure to the tormented relationship between son and parents. While this melodrama film conveys a strong pathetic mood by harping on the utter failure of all the relationships attempted, other films of this period propose a lighter mood through a different genre, the comedy that uses ridicule rather than pathos to criticize patriarchal codification. Comedy Films of the 1950s In the 1950s, Italian cinema’s viewers showed a liking for a particular type of light comedy with a strong interest in eroticism. These films concentrated on very sexy and physically well-endowed women (called, in De Sica’s words, maggiorate fisiche) who, with their sex appeal, move the action of the films and initiate all the comic situations. Let us then consider these films, keeping in mind Ruby Rich’s definitions of comedy as a “deflator of the patriarchal order” and as “an extraordinary leveler and reinventor of dramatic structure.”17 Pane, amore e . . . The most popular series of comic films in the 1950s were the Pane, amore e . . . (Bread, Love, and . . . [UK]; 1955) series, which included Pane, amore e fantasia (Bread, Love and Dreams; 1954) and Pane, amore e gelosia (Bread, Love and Jealousy [UK]; 1954), both directed by Camerini, and Pane, amore e . . . , directed by Risi. In all these films, the action is centered on a beautiful young woman, called La bersagliera (played by Gina Lollobrigida, who became an instant success as a perfect maggiorata fisica and, practically overnight, a film diva), thus creating, with her exceptional physical beauty and sex appeal, a new woman-as-spectacle trend in a comic key. The comic effect of all these films develops out of the reactions that her beauty elicits from the men around her because of their typically Italian

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“Casanova” complex that draws them to her, ready to surrender their male power in the hope of making love to her. The great public success that these films had was due mostly to the presence on the screen of that beautiful female protagonist idolized by her spectators as a diva. The la bersagliera character, indeed, was formulated in traditional terms; that is, she was constructed according to what Italian men would view as the “ideal woman.” This ideal woman is not only a beautiful sex object and, as such, is able to attract, hold, and fulfill a man’s desire, but also an honest and faithful woman to the man she loves. In short, la bersagliera’s sexuality did not threaten men, even if it deprived them of their controlling power. Next to Lollobrigida, Camerini cast an amusing Vittorio De Sica, in the role of an older maresciallo dei carabinieri (i.e., a marshal of the Italian state police) still set on his irresistible seducer’s role to win la bersagliera’s attentions, in spite of the fact that he knew she was in love with his shy subordinate. His character, then, like most male characters of the comic films of this and other times, is decidedly ridiculed and deprived of his authoritative role as mover and controller of the film’s action. By weaving the narrative action around the beautiful female protagonist who controls all the men around her with her sex appeal, these films, as well as other comic ones, clearly work as “deflators of the patriarchal order.” L’oro di Napoli Male authoritarianism is brought up again in one of the episodes of the episodic film L’oro di Napoli (The Gold of Naples; 1954), where Sofia Loren, another maggiorata fisica who instantly turned into diva, played the role of a Neapolitan pizzaiola (or pizza maker). Her striking beauty and irresistible sex appeal create problems for her lame and elderly husband. His ugliness and jealousy are underlined and ridiculed by both the film’s narrative and imagery, especially in the full-length shots that frame husband and wife walking toward their pizza shop. She briskly walks ahead of him with long and determined steps, joyfully offering her beautiful body to the admiring look of shopkeepers and passersby, while he unsuccessfully tries to keep up with her with his limping gait and disapproving look. Sofia Loren was cast as a very conniving maggiorata fisica, aware of her beauty and its power, in several other films of the time, such as Blasetti’s Peccato che sia una canaglia (Too Bad She’s Bad; 1954) and La fortuna di essere donna (Lucky to Be a Woman; 1955). In both of them, she again plays the role of a woman who knows how to take advantage of her exceptional beauty in order to improve her own life and escape men’s controlling power. Italian comic films that focus their plots on male characters usually delve inside the male protagonists’ psyches to highlight their social or personal flaws, such as Luigi Filippo D’Amico’s Bravissimo (Very Good; 1955), Antonio Pietrangeli’s Lo scapolo (The Bachelor; 1955), or Alberto Lattuada’s Mafioso (Mafioso; 1962), where Alberto Sordi plays the protagonist.18 This detailed introspection, however, does not occur in the comic films where women are the protagonists. In these films, women are projected exclusively as sexy objects of male desire, as the above

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mentioned films clearly demonstrate, and there is no attempt made to investigate what is hiding behind the physical faćade of their beautiful bodies and faces. This holds true in a slightly later but very successful episode film, Ieri, oggi, domani (Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow; 1963), a film that shows interest in social criticism typical of the comedy-Italian-style genre and that I will analyze in the next chapter. At this point, it has become clear that Italian cinema in the 1950s, both with its art films and with its popular films, has offered us a rich spectrum of female characters that provide some variations to the traditional portrayal of passive and submissive femininity that prevails in earlier Italian films. Most of the dramatic and comic films I have analyzed in this chapter tell a woman’s, rather than a man’s, story, as noticed in Rossellini’s Stromboli and Europa ’51, in Visconti’s Senso and Bellissima, and in Fellini La strada and Le notti di Cabiria, as well as in the melodramatic film, I figli di nessuno or in the comedy genre series, Pane, amore, e . . . . Moreover, even when the films tell a man’s story, they often propose a female main character that is much more interesting than the male protagonist and functions as the actual motivator of the film action, as we have seen in Antonioni’s Il grido and Visconti’s Rocco e I suoi fratelli. And yet, in spite of this seemingly new importance given to female protagonists, their stories are not very successful, as they are usually stories of failed attempts to change an unsatisfactory existence, as was the case with Irene in Europa ’51 and with Maddalena in Bellissima. Stories of failed attempts to find a meaningful love relationship are Cabiria’s in Le notti di Cabiria, Gelsomina’s in La strada, Karin’s in Stromboli, Livia’s in Senso, Nadia’s in Rocco e i suoi fratelli, and Luisa’s in I figli di nessuno. Even if most of these women clearly stand for a much more enlightened view of life than their male partners, their resistance to the pressures of their society’s patriarchal requirements is doomed to fail. Indeed, most of these women are eventually punished for such a resistance, even when the film discourse deals very sympathetically with them, as is the case with Irene in Europa ’51, who is locked up in a mental asylum, or Gelsomina in La strada, who is abandoned on the side of the road to face death on her own. At other times, the film discourse seems to agree with the disapproving ways in which their social community looks at these resisting women, as it is clear in the way that Nadia in Rocco e i suoi fratelli or Livia in Senso are being drastically eliminated from the screen: Nadia by being brutally murdered, and Livia by being reduced to a demented state of mind. Only in the comic films of this decade do we find women who triumphantly escape the controlling power of their male partners and the restraining pressures of their social environment. This happens because their extraordinary physical beauty and sex appeal inspire in men an uncontrollable sexual desire that weakens their controlling power and reduces them to ridiculous characters that the women playfully manipulate. In this way, the women create the comic situations that effectively display what Ruby Rich has called “the revolutionary potential of comedy as the deflator of the patriarchal order.”19

6

Women and Men as Victims of Violence and Alienation in the Films of the 1960s

Historical and Cultural Trends in the 1960s

A

s mentioned in the previous chapter, toward the end of the 1950s, some important social changes influenced European political life as well as the Italian economy. The Cold War began to ease, and in 1956, the European Common Market was established and became instrumental in stimulating Italy’s economic vitality. The year 1958 marked the beginning of what was called Italy’s “economic miracle.” Emerging from a period of serious economic hardships, the newly prosperous middle class of the 1960s plunged into a way of life that aimed at forgetting those hardships. Enjoying the new freedom from money problems, it rebelled against the value system of the previous era, and it concentrated on searching for immediate gratification of the senses. The search for materialistic prosperity was producing a consumerist society whose human values were being substituted by materialistic values, as Fellini had already foreseen in his films of the 1950s. Success, in terms of money and social prestige, was taking the place of a more intimate way of human communication based on love, understanding, and social commitment. The final outcome could only be alienation and solitude or social unrest, for which the workers’ strikes and the students’ demonstrations of the late 1960s paved the way, together with the beginning of terrorist activities by extremist groups from both the political Right and Left. Italian Cinema in the 1960s In the 1960s, Italian cinema offered a great variety of films, both art films and popular films, especially the comedy-Italian-style genre. Most of the art films of the 1960s reflect the mood of alienation and lack of meaningful communication typical of the Italian society of those times.

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Women again are portrayed in several art films during this period as the typical representatives of this period of general social malaise, as was especially the case in Fellini’s and Antonioni’s films. Furthermore, the social violence and upheaval that were starting to shake Italian society in the 1960s became the topic of several films with women ending up as victims of men’s cruelty and violence, like Stella in Pasolini’s Accattone (Accattone!; 1961) or the mother and daughter couple in De Sica’s La ciociara (Two Women; 1961). Motherhood remains an important topic in several films of this decade that resist the patriarchal representation of woman as “good” mother. Sophie in Visconti’s La caduta degli dei (The Damned; 1969) and la ciociara in De Sica’s La ciociara are examples of such types of resisting mothers. In view of the need for change that the new feminist movement will propose in the 1970s, a few films of the 1960s already bring to light the unfairness of the exclusively male view of women as objects of desire and the selfishness and indifference that men show toward their female partners in their intimate relationships. The best examples are furnished by Fellini’s films, especially La dolce vita (La Dolce Vita; 1960) and Giulietta degli spiriti (Juliet of the Spirits; 1965), and by Antonioni’s, especially La notte (The Night [UK]; 1961) and Il deserto rosso (Red Desert; 1964). My analyses, here, will start with Fellini and Antonioni’s films, to be followed by Bertolucci’s, Pasolini’s, De Sica’s, and Visconti’s. I will then approach popular cinema to consider how comedy films handle the same topics by way of ridicule. Fellini’s La dolce vita and Giulietta degli spiriti In La dolce vita, Fellini again examines the unresolved conflict between the potential for independence through self-assurance and the disempowering tradition of self-denial that plagues women who are displaced by the patriarchal modes of dominance. As seen in our reading of La strada and Le notti di Cabiria, Fellini had already intimated this trend in those two earlier films. There he was mainly concerned with the need for meaningful communication and love hidden in the deepest secrecy of the souls of social outcasts, such as vagabonds like Gelsomina and Zampanò or prostitutes like Cabiria. What these two films have in common, besides the exceptional performance of Giulietta Masina as Gelsomina and Cabiria, is a profound lesson of human understanding and a strong belief in woman’s potential for hope and independence conveyed through the point of view of the main female protagonists. By the end of the 1950s, prosperity was pushing a new class onto the foreground, and a completely new perspective seemed to offer itself to any director who was interested in probing a new field of social and moral investigation. Both Fellini and Antonioni accepted this challenge, and Fellini’s La dolce vita was particularly successful. Fellini worked at the film from 1958 to 1959 and released it in February 1960. In May 1960, La dolce vita was awarded the Cannes Film Festival Palme d’Or prize, and, in 1961, it was awarded the American Academy Award for the best foreign film. The film created a controversy that lasted a whole year, and the critical debate about it was even more intense than for La Strada, but this time the points of view were drastically changed. Now the Marxist critics were all in

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favor of the film. They viewed it as a harsh condemnation of the contemporary capitalist society turned openly materialistic and hedonistic, idealizing individuals in their exclusively egotistical quest for financial success and pleasure and in their indifference to any social commitment. Most of the Catholic critics, on the other hand, were against the film, as they saw in it the representation of a society that had lost its faith and was dominated by egoism and indifference. Indeed La dolce vita, in its thirteen episodes, can be seen as a gigantic fresco of the society of the 1960s, not only Italian, but also cosmopolitan, in what is now called the “jet set” of models, actors, writers, poets, singers, and aristocrats of all nationalities, speaking different languages and hardly communicating among themselves. This society thrives on exhibitionism, and its perfect representatives are reporters, like Marcello, the protagonist of the film, and press photographers, from then on to be called paparazzi, from the name of Marcello’s photographer friend, Paparazzo. These new social harbingers are the ones who try to satisfy the inexhaustible thirst for sensationalism of their society, and they are the violators of every secret and the absolute masters of the streets and squares of Rome and even of its sky. The impressive first sequence of the film clearly shows this, with the brilliant shot of an helicopter pulling a statue of Christ over the roofs of the city, followed by reporters and photographers who are clearly the new priests and faithful followers of that modern type of sensationalist cult. In this society, women are projected always from a male point of view, as whores (most of them), as hindrances (i.e., Emma) who suffocate men with overbearing demonstrations of love and hold them back in their quest for success and pleasure, or as angelic, unreachable creatures (i.e., Paola). This positioning of women in the film as objects, rather than subjects, is achieved by setting up the narration of the film from the male protagonist’s perspective. This is different from what we have seen both in La strada and in Le notti di Cabiria, where the female protagonist’s point of view was the organizing principle of both films’ narrative action. For this film, Fellini arranged to cast an incredibly powerful group of divi who greatly contributed to its success: in the protagonist’s role, he cast Marcello Mastroianni, the most popular Italian divo of all time, a true icon of Italian masculinity. For the role of Silvia, the beautiful American actress that Marcello is supposed to interview for his scandalous magazine, Fellini chose the voluptuous Anita Eckberg, a popular contemporary sex symbol. For his other two important female characters, Fellini looked into the latest list of French popular dive and chose Anouk Aimèe for a superb Maddalena and Yvonne Furneaux for Emma. La dolce vita tells the story of a man, Marcello Rubini, a reporter who turns publicity agent by the end of the film in order to make more money. He is dissatisfied with his shallow and useless life, yet he is unable or unwilling to change it. His presence in all the episodes of the film provides it with narrative continuity, and he also works as the activator of the main themes of the film; that is, he exemplifies the inability to relate to others; selfishness; the search for financial success and pleasure; and the indifference to, and exploitation of, women. Marcello is involved with all the main female characters in the film: Maddalena, Emma, Silvia, and Paola. These women belong to different social classes and are endowed with different psychosomatic characteristics. Marcello plays a

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very important role in all of these relationships, as it is expected from traditional Italian filmic narrative, and the women, although each one of them reveals specific, different characteristics, are all constructed as equally traditional images of patriarchal womanhood. Maddalena is the only one of these four women who tries to escape from or at least resist the tight patriarchal imaging in the film, but she is not successful in her efforts, and she soon faces elimination from the narrative action of the film and from the screen as well. We read her resistance mostly in her behavior, keeping in mind the most common tenets of patriarchal codification of masculine versus feminine behavior.1 Maddalena is introduced in the first episode of the film, projecting characteristics that belong alternatively to masculine and feminine codification. As soon as she appears on the screen framed in full-length shots, she shows a clearly masculine bearing. Alone, she enters a popular Via Veneto nightclub with long decisive strides, dressed in a long, black, simple-but-elegant evening gown that fittingly accentuates her very attractive body. She is tall, thin, and beautiful and has a stately countenance. This countenance, together with her authoritarian demeanor and elegant attire, clearly discloses her high social class and privileged social condition. Once in the nightclub, she walks directly to the bar and speaks to the barman with an autocratic tone, orders herself a drink, and, turning around to lean with her back against the bar, takes control of the space around her. She also uses her gaze from behind dark sunglasses in a masculine way to scrutinize from above the interior of the nightclub down below. At a certain point of this sequence, Maddalena, however, seems to get distracted, when she looks at herself in her pocket mirror, focusing her gaze on herself and removing her dark glasses. The power of social codification controlling women is clearly suggested here. By seeing herself as a woman in her mirror, Maddalena abandons her masculine persona and withdraws into her feminine behavior. At this point, the camera frames Marcello, and the gaze’s source suddenly changes as it shifts from Maddalena to Marcello, who singles her out from far away and holds his look on her while he walks up to her until he stands next to her and starts looking at the nightclub space around them. Maddalena’s control of her environment seems therefore to be over as soon as she recognizes her femininity in a mirror and as soon as a man, Marcello, enters the space, she occupies. She attempts to regain her control by deciding to leave the club, but Marcello authoritatively dismisses this attempt by taking hold of her elbow and steering her outside with his hand and arm. Once outside, she does, however, take control again of the situation when she walks firmly toward her car, a large convertible Cadillac—an important status symbol that establishes her financial control over the space and people around her. Maddalena is still framed as in control as she takes the driver’s seat, while Marcello is framed sitting next to her in the less-important passenger seat. As soon as the car moves, Maddalena decides what to do and where to go and also expands her control to the verbal exchanges that follow while she is framed in medium-length and close-up shots. She is the one who asks questions and often does not wait for Marcello to reply but rather proposes her own answers, showing an unusual easiness in verbalizing her existential crisis in terms of lack of vital energy. She invites a prostitute to go with them for a drive and offers to take her

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home. Once there, she also takes control of her sexuality and invites Marcello to join her in bed. After their love making, she walks out of the house on her own, seemingly unaware of Marcello trying to touch her lightly with an affectionate gesture. Her control of the situation is visualized by framing her in full-length shots as she gives the prostitute a sum of money, which is obviously quite generous as the woman thanks her profusely before she and Marcello take off in her Cadillac, which she drives away in a rush. A cut closes the episode without restating Marcello in any controlling position in relation to Maddalena, who instead maintains her control over space and people. Marcello meets Maddalena again at a large party given by an aristocratic Roman family in their castle outside of Rome. On this occasion, it is Maddalena who sees Marcello first and playfully sneaks close to him from the back and covers his face with a veil, in defiance of the traditional use reserved to veils as objects employed to cover a woman’s face, and consequently her femininity.2 In this context, one may read Maddalena’s action toward Marcello as an attempt to reverse this typical signification of the use of the veil, thus aiming at covering, or suffocating, his masculinity. She keeps her control of him by taking him on a tour of the castle, starting from an impressively long gallery where hundreds of portraits of ladies belonging to the homeowners’ princely dynasty hang on the walls. This tour is aimed at impressing Marcello and preparing him and the spectators for the final act of the party, when the old princess, on her way to church at dawn, clearly shows her control over her family, and particularly over the men of her family: her son and her two grandsons. These men have been constructed all throughout this episode as very weak and dominated by their sexual drives rather than by an awareness of their ancestral heritage. The whole episode aims at creating a weak image of masculinity, starting with Marcello and ending with the aristocratic males at the party. Through the connections with the veil and the gallery of portraits of important women, Maddalena seems to stand for unusual female strength and control. This image is, however, handled contradictorily in the following sequences, after she takes Marcello to a room, where she leaves him by himself while she moves to another corner of the castle. From there she communicates with him through a hidden conduit that allows for her voice to reach him and his voice to reach her even if they are physically distant from each other. It is at this point that Maddalena uncannily shows again a combination of masculine and feminine traits. She takes control of the conversation as well as her desire by proposing marriage to Marcello rather than waiting for him to propose to her. With this bold proposal, Maddalena definitely reverses the normal patriarchal standards of codification, proposing herself as an agent and a subject rather than as an object of desire. Yet, this unusual request is immediately followed by a retreat into a more conventional feminine discourse, as heard in her statement, “I want to live with you as a good and faithful wife.” This statement is then, followed again by a contradictory projection of herself as agent of her own desire and yet presented in a language that reformulates the traditional, masculine view of women as objects of men’s desire: “But I want also to be your whore,” she states, stressing it to the maximum by adding, “Because I am a whore. I have always been and always will be a whore!”

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To this verbal construction of herself as a whore, the film discourse adds a visual confirmation of her words and frames her definitely as a passive object of male desire by introducing on the screen an unknown man who controls her with his look and desire and eventually forces her to make love to him, while Marcello’s voice formulates his acceptance to marry her. Marcello’s acceptance uses words that combine a feminine, rather than a masculine, perspective on marriage, as they project Maddalena as a companion and an equal, rather than an object to exploit, as traditional marriage often implies from an exclusively male perspective: “You would be a perfect companion for me,” he says, “as I could talk to you of everything and you would understand me.” These words, however, raise suspicions. Could this statement of Marcello’s, a very promiscuous type of man, simply mean that, by marrying a woman who calls herself a whore, he would be able to find understanding in her for his own sexual escapades? We have indeed two earlier cases in the film when Marcello does try to contact Maddalena while he is involved with other women, such as Emma at the time of her attempted suicide and Silvia when he is trying to find a safe place to make love to her. Maddalena, then, in her proposal of marriage to Marcello, as well as in her self-projection as a whore, represents resistance to the typical formulation of marriage and woman in patriarchal terms. Yet, the final shot of the episode that frames her as passively accepting the lust of an unknown man, unaware of Marcello’s offer to treat her as an equal, reduces her definitively to the traditional image of woman as sex object. Maddalena’s presence in the film ends here, and neither Marcello nor the spectators will encounter her again. Her deviant ways are a threat to the masculine world of the film and, after the camera has framed her in a position of total submission to a stranger’s sexual urge, the film discourse has taken care of her for good, and she is banned from the narrative action and from the screen forever. Contrary to Maddalena, Emma seems to be perfectly at ease with the traditional patriarchal construction of woman as subject to and dependent on man. Emma is Marcello’s steady girlfriend and plays the feminine, nurturing, motherly role for him. She is overprotective, jealous, and overwhelming in her desire to be the woman that Marcello is destined to marry. She is completely dependent emotionally, and probably financially as well, on Marcello, and she cannot contemplate life without him. Her several attempts at suicide clearly prove it. Emma is first presented on the screen as having just attempted suicide, again, in the hope she might regain Marcello’s love. The first full-length shot of her is from Marcello’s point of view when he enters his apartment and finds her groaning, crouched on the floor on her knees. Emma’s total submissiveness to Marcello is thus clearly established as soon as she is framed on the screen, as she is ready to die if he does not love her. Marcello’s conflicting emotions about her and their relationship are also shown in this episode. At first, he is antagonistic, threatening, and even cruel to her verbally; he calls her “crazy, wretched” and selfishly sets himself up in the role of victim of her actions: “Do you want to ruin me? Why did you do this to me? One of these days I am going to let you die!” His actions however, suggest a different attitude, or at least partial understanding and slight feeling of guilt, as he picks her up in his arms, carries her to his car,

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tries to calm her down with endearing words, and takes her to a hospital emergency room. Here a doctor and a nun take care of her and revive her while he nervously waits outside. When she is out of danger, Marcello shows understanding in his words. He calls her “love” and, with a softened tone, rephrases his previous question, leaving himself out: “Why did you do it?” he asks now. She never replies, and it is at this point that Marcello leaves the room and goes and telephones Maddalena who is framed asleep on a black-covered bed in her elegant home. She does not hear the phone or wake up, and Marcello goes back to take care of the police investigation into Emma’s attempted suicide. The last shot of Emma in this sequence is as a still body on a hospital bed. Emma comes back in three additional episodes of the film. In each of these episodes, Emma’s emotional dependency on Marcello is displayed repeatedly, together with Marcello’s ambivalent attitude toward her. In one of the episodes, Marcello and his photographer, Paparazzo, are assigned by their magazine to cover a story on religious fanaticism: two children, popularly called “the children of the miracle,” maintain that they have seen and spoken to the Virgin Mary several times in a special field outside of Rome, and they are expected to meet her there again on that particular day. Marcello and Paparazzo are sent to that site to report on and photograph the miraculous event. Emma is with the two men in Marcello’s car on their way there. The camera frames both her and Marcello in medium-length shots in the front of the car, with Marcello driving and Emma in the passenger seat with a bag of picnic provisions on her knees: an image of a domesticated, nurturing woman, which is very reassuring for a patriarchal audience. This image is reinforced by Emma’s voice and actions aimed at providing her man with all nourishment she thinks he needs. This attitude reminds us of a very popular Italian proverb that advises women to be sure to keep their men’s stomach full if they want to keep them happy. Emma seems to be determined to follow this advice even at the cost of overdoing it. This excessiveness endows the scene with a comic undertone that seems to develop both out of Emma’s obvious overrepresentation as a nurturing female and out of Marcello’s inability to control such an excess. She literally forces first a hard-boiled egg and a banana into Marcello’s mouth, without paying any attention to his refusals. She also denies Paparazzo any coffee, as she states, “The only coffee left is for Marcello.” This overwhelming image of female’s self-imposed servility to man’s needs is verbally reinforced later when she shows her pride in introducing Marcello as her fiancé and insists on following him at his work, in spite of his obvious uneasiness at her pressures. Emma’s emotional frailty comes to a climax in the middle of the fanatical uproar provoked by the “children of the miracle” running after an invisible Virgin Mary, with a religious mob following them. Emma hides away from everybody and starts crying frantically, while asking the Virgin Mary to perform a miracle in her behalf— that is, to make Marcello love her as he used to. By now, Emma’s total dependency on Marcello is well established, in perfect unity with the patriarchal construction of women as completely dependent on men for their own happiness in life. In the episode of the dinner party at Steiner’s house, where Marcello takes her as his fiancé to meet his friend Steiner and his family, Emma verbalizes to Marcello

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her conviction of being destined to live exclusively with and for him. Inspired and moved by Steiner’s apparently perfect family life, Emma tells Marcello, while the camera frames her again on her knees in front of him, “We belong to each other, the two of us! Don’t we?” Marcello, however, does not seem convinced. Instead of replying, he leaves her there on her knees and joins Steiner on the terrace to talk to him about his own existential crisis, which he seems to feel is much more important than marriage. In fact, Marcello tells his friend of his frustration with his degrading profession as a scandalous magazine reporter and of his hope to be able in the future to find a more rewarding, steady position in a publishing house, as Steiner himself suggests. Marcello reveals that he was hoping to find time to write the novel he had tried to write for years. This sequence, framing the two men talking to each other about their own existential concerns while Emma is left alone on her knees in the living room, highlights the importance that “men’s topics” have in this film in comparison to the practically nonexistent space provided for men and women’s meaningful relationships. In a later episode, an open confrontation between Emma and Marcello takes place in Marcello’s car, parked on a deserted road at night. Emma reformulates herself as the perfect match for him, as the only woman who loves him truly and completely and as a special woman that Marcello should consider himself lucky to have. Marcello, however, rejects her love and jealousy as suffocating and shows his resentment for what he calls her “bed and kitchen view of life” that does not leave any space for all the other important things in life that a man wants to do. The altercation between the two degenerates into a name-calling contest and eventually into a physical one when Marcello wants her out of the car, and she resists until he physically forces her out and speeds away, leaving her alone on the deserted road. Later on, however, when a new day is starting, Marcello comes back for her and she triumphantly gets in the car with him. The last shot we have of them together frame them in bed, where she, with a contented blissful expression, holds him close to her while he is asleep. At this point, a telephone call awakens Marcello summoning him urgently to Steiner’s house to cover the tragic events of his friend’s death. The last shot we have of Emma in this episode and in the film frames her as a mothering figure, contented only when she can hold the object of her love close and exclusively to herself. Probably because of this excess, Emma, too, drops out of the narrative action controlled by the male protagonist. She will not appear again in the film, where only Marcello is left for his story to continue without Emma’s suffocating love for him. Another interesting female character in the film is Silvia, the beautiful, exceptionally well-endowed American diva, played by Anita Eckberg, in a playful parody of herself as a foreign diva. She is constructed here mostly as spectacle—that is, as the object of all men’s looks and desire—from the first time she is projected on the screen, standing high on the top of the ramp of an Alitalia airplane that has just brought her to Rome. As such, she is the object of the look of a large crowd of male photographers that push and hit each other in order to get a good picture of her. In the same scene, she is constructed as the object of desire of other men present there, who voice their attraction to her physically well-endowed body in ways

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hardly flattering for a woman but that well express their most instinctual desires, such as “Bella bisteccona! (Beautiful big piece of steak!)” This entourage of adoring looks and sexual tension surrounds her again during her press conference. At this press conference, where both press members and diva are ironically undermined by the film discourse, Silvia is asked scandalous and silly questions about her private life, which she usually answers in a way that shows her naïveté together with her understanding of what is expected of her as a sexual object. Her answers thus heighten the sexual tension around her, as when to the question, “At night do you sleep in a pajama or in a night gown?” she replies, “Neither, only with two drops of French perfume.” Also, to, “What are the three most important things you like to do in life?” she replies, “Love, love, love.” Eventually to the question of what made her decide to become an actress, she appropriately replies, “Because I realized I had talent.” At this answer, her body language of protruding her breast in a profile shot ironically points at the type of talent she knows she is actually endowed with. This particular exchange takes place while Silvia is framed in front of a mirror where she, too, can contemplate her own voluptuous body, recognize it, and enjoy her own femininity. Unfortunately for Silvia, it is this recognition and enjoyment of her own beauty and femininity that have no place in a patriarchal view of women, and Silvia will be punished for her transgression sooner than we expect—that is, at the end of this very episode. At that point, her fiancé, Robie, makes his entrance to take control of the situation and of Silvia as well. The reporters and photographers slowly leave the room or shift their looks and interest away from Silvia onto other matters. The exchange between Silvia and Robie clearly shows the tension between the two. He is drunk, and in reply to her slightly critical words of welcome, “I was expecting you at the airport,” he laughs and keeps on drinking. This show of indifference on the part of the man of her life who is supposedly in love with her contrasts with the earlier show of admiration from all the strangers who were looking at her as a desirable sex symbol. This situation suggests that the man is nurturing feelings of jealousy and distrust inspired by the realization that other men openly admire his woman for her exceptional physical attractiveness. We have noticed the same reaction in the earlier silent movies’ representation of the woman-as-spectacle type. After this scene, Marcello continues his job of following Silvia in all the events that have been scheduled for her. In this way, the film discourse constructs her more and more as a sex symbol and as spectacle that attracts the look of all the male strangers who surround her, thus excluding the possibility for her of establishing any type of meaningful heterosexual relationship with just one man. The best example of this strategy of looks and desires, attraction, jealousy, and distrust is provided by the dancing party at the Terme di Caracalla nightclub. There Silvia is the focus of all the looks and interest. She is first framed in a very sexy outfit with a white ermine cape, her beautiful long blond hair seductively swaying on her partly naked shoulders and bosom, while she is dancing with Marcello, who is obviously very much taken by her. He tries to tell her what he feels, but their potential for understanding each other through words is practically nonexistent, as she only speaks English and does not understand Italian, while he only speaks

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Italian and does not understand English. His feelings of awe in front of her are clear from the beginning, and he tries unsuccessfully to verbalize them in Italian while they are dancing: “Tu sei tutto . . . La prima donna della creazione . . . l’angelo, il diavolo . . . tu sei la casa . . . si, si, la casa” (You are everything . . . the first woman of the creation . . . the angel, the devil . . . the home, yes, yes, the home). Silvia, however, does not understand and is distracted by seeing a person she knows, Frankie, another actor endowed with a tremendous physical energy. She loudly calls out to Frankie and dances with him, ignoring Marcello, who goes back to their table where Silvia’s producer, private secretary, and Robie, her fiancé, are sitting. Of all the people in the nightclub, the only one hardly looking at Silvia is her fiancé, and when he looks, his is a disapproving, debasing look. When Silvia comes back to the table without cape or shoes at the end of her dancing, Robie offends her, so she gets mad at him and leaves the nightclub in defiance. Marcello offers to go and bring her back, but once outside, he maneuvers her to his car, pushes Paparazzo out, and drives away with her in the passenger seat. The camera frames the two of them from the front while she expresses her anger against men and her puzzlement at her life: “Enough, enough with men. I do not want to go back! I can’t . . . Everything is so difficult, Marcello.” Marcello nods affirmatively, although he has not understood a word of it, and stops the car, attempting to express his feelings again: “I never met a woman like you!” he starts, but Silvia gets out of the car, distracted this time by the howling of a wolf to which she is deeply attracted, and she starts howling back. The wolf howling gets closer and Marcello, looking at her in amazement, gets her back in the car and drives off toward the center of Rome. There are a few full-length shots of Silvia walking in the deserted streets of Rome followed by Marcello, who is still trying to think of a safe place where he can take her without being discovered by the paparazzi that are after them. A couple of shots frame Silvia as visibly moved at the sight of a white kitten, for whom she sends Marcello to fetch some milk. She keeps wandering in the deserted streets of Rome with the kitten on her head or in her arms. Eventually, she literally falls upon the Trevi Fountain that arouses all her admiration. When Marcello comes back, he finds her in the fountain calling on him to join her there. He agrees, “Yes, Silvia,” and comments, “She is right! I am doing everything wrong. We all are doing everything wrong.” When he gets close to her and she puts water on his head as if she were baptizing him, he asks, “Silvia, who are you?” At that point, however, the water stops running and they get out of the fountain. The last time Silvia is framed in this episode and in the film, is from the back while entering her hotel through a revolving door after her fiancé has slapped her on the cheek. She cries and keeps on repeating, “I have done nothing wrong, Robie,” but accepts his order to enter the hotel and go to bed, thus submissively accepting his control over her and consequently their relationship on his terms. This last sequence, showing Silvia being slapped and accepting her angry, jealous fiancé’s orders, conveys the traditional view of a sexy woman, dangerous to men and having to be controlled by her man. The framing of her from the back entering a revolving door confirms her loss of power and foreshadows the loss of interest that she will undergo once she is under Robie’s control. Like those entering a revolving door controlled by someone else,

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she will not be able to get away but will be kept always in the same place under his control. Silvia will not appear on the screen again.3 Marcello also becomes briefly involved with Paola, a young girl who works as a restaurant waitress. She hopes to improve her financial situation, by learning how to type, so she can find an office job. With her beautiful angelic face, she stands for innocence and self-reliance, an authentic breath of fresh, clean air, within the corrupt and useless existence of Marcello and his debauchee friends. Marcello meets her after his talk with Steiner, at the time when he believed he might still be able to change his life, and become a writer. In the film discourse, Paola seems to be given a unique formulation, by connecting her on the screen with the song that is the light motif of the film, “Patricia,” that she insists on listening to, and singing as internal music, while Marcello is trying to work at his novel. As the light motif of the film, this song is mostly used as external music to accompany the story of Marcello and his descent into lower and lower levels of existence. In the penultimate sequence of the film, the song is used as internal music again, in the party episode, and the audience who hears it is expecting to see Paola again as the last hope for saving Marcello from his ruinous downfall. The melody instead is used ironically here as it is played as accompaniment to Nadia’s strip tease that sets off Marcello’s ultimate degradation and debacle, just before he meets Paola again on the beach after the party and does not even recognize her. She signals to him to join her, but Marcello by now has become unable to respond to her restrained invitation to join her in a simple, innocent life together. He turns away from her, to follow one of the unknown women with whom he has spent the night at the party, thus seemingly following Maddalena’s earlier degrading example. The final shot of the film frames Paola in a close-up while she smiles sadly, looking at the audience, and waving good-bye. She is dressed in what looks like a girl school uniform, and she conveys the image of an innocent, pure, young woman, the perfect representative of what the Christian, patriarchal society would regard as the ideal woman, for whom, however, Marcello is no longer ready or suitable. In conclusion, La dolce vita constructs exclusively traditional images of womanhood, projected from a very clearly defined male perspective, intentionally determined to represent women subject to or dependent on men at all levels of life. The film discourse also aims at overcoming all kinds of resistance to such representation, as it proposes women according to patriarchal codification—that is, innocent and pure (i.e., Paola) or totally dedicated to satisfy men’s needs and desire (Emma, Silvia, and Maddalena). All deviations to such codification are punished with violence (Maddalena and Silvia) and/or with absence (Maddalena, Emma, and Silvia). Maddalena, who expresses her sexuality and personality in masculine terms and is perceived as dangerous to men, is ultimately cast as the object of an unknown man’s lust. The last framing of her freezes her forever in an object-of-man’s lust position that denies her any chance to transform her situation as a female subject. The outcome is disappearance from the screen, in a condition of absence. On the other hand, Emma seems to be closer to an acceptable image of “good” womanhood, according to patriarchal codification. She is totally dependent on Marcello in order to be happy or just to live. Some of the shots frame her on her

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knees, submitted to Marcello and with no self-esteem. Unfortunately for Emma, she expects Marcello to love her too. She does not accept Steiner’s advice about love: “When you realize that you love Marcello more than yourself, you will be happy.” He had told her. Emma’s love for Marcello instead requires that he loves her back for her to be happy. The last shot of her, framing her in bed, blissfully holding Marcello all to herself freezes her in the image of a motherly figure whose existence counts only in relation to the male-son in her arms. By erasing her from Marcello’s life forever after this shot, the film cruelly disposes of her definitely, formulating the masculine disinterest for any woman who pretends to play a role in a man’s existence. With Emma, then, the film discourse tries to formulate a message for its audience, so as to make both men and women aware of the difficulties of heterosexual relationships. In the case of Silvia, the film investigates the dilemma, ignored by patriarchal codification, of a beautiful and sexy woman who is caught in a traditional relationship with a man. While her own physical appearance transforms her into spectacle, thus promoting other men’s desire, her own appreciation of herself and her beauty becomes an illicit pleasure a woman should never attain, according to that same patriarchal codification. The film takes her fiancé’s side and looks at her with the same disapproving and denigratory look that he has for her. The final shots then, freeze her in an unsolvable situation, trapped in a revolving door, under her fiancé’s control and potentially ignored by all the onlookers that can see only her back. For Silvia the outcome is one of violent reprisal, objectification, and, ultimately, absence. The film discourse of La dolce vita either cruelly punishes its women for their resistance to patriarchal representation in regard to desire and sexuality (Maddalena and Silvia), or eliminates them because of the excess of and the need for love that they show (Emma). Only Paola seems to be used as the icon of perfect womanhood codified in Christian terms. She represents innocence, sweetness, modesty, and restraint. She is neither object of male’s desire, nor does she show any desire of her own. Her eyes are pure and innocent, and it is on her image, so symbolically charged, that the film closes, as if to imply that the only direction left for a woman to follow is toward a complete repression of her desire and her femininity, in order to rise over the corruption and evil of their society and of men. Fellini has here decidedly taken a step back in his construction of women, in comparison to the relatively more favorable perspective on women that organized the texts of La strada and Le notti di Cabiria. The attitude toward women that Fellini will show in Giulietta degli spiriti will be closer to the one present in his two earlier films. In Giulietta degli spiriti the protagonist is a woman as well, played again by Giulietta Masina, and the film centers on the story of her life and of her tormented relationship with her husband and family. Teresa De Lauretis, in her article dedicated to the film, states that the film “thematizes the relation of one woman—an individual—to Woman as cultural representation, to the multiple and conflicting images of Woman that are suggested or exhibited to her by her culture, family, religion, and her own fantasies.”4 Giulietta degli spiriti indeed delivers conflicting representations of women, as the pervasive strategy of the text is its doubling of female images and pairing of female characters either by similarity or by contrast.5 This strategy creates endless

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duplication by the use of mirrors, and it especially sets up Giulietta, the female protagonist of the film, as very different from the other glamorous, sexualized women exhibited in the film. This strategy sends negative messages to and about Giulietta, suggesting a problem of low self-esteem because she lacks glamour and sex appeal, and she does not fit the image of woman posted all around her by family and culture. Indeed, if we compare Giulietta to the other gorgeous women who surround her in her family and her social environment, we may understand Giulietta’s dilemma. This message is already delivered in the initial sequence of the film, when the camera, once it has entered Giulietta ‘s house, stops at her back while she is looking at herself in the mirror trying on different wigs. Invisible to the spectators, the image in the mirror does not seem to please Giulietta, as she discards the wigs one after the other and gets obviously more and more nervous while she supervises the preparations for a special intimate dinner for two in celebration of her anniversary. When her husband, Giorgio, walks in the house, the camera moves to the door to frame him. At this point, the direction of the camerafocus changes, and Giulietta is finally framed from the front with a subjective shot from her husband’s eyes. The male look, then, is the primary activator of the woman’s visibility for him and for the spectators, who recognize in Giorgio’s face the indifference reserved for a woman who does not fit the traditional film’s requirements for holding the man’s look and desire. This indifference is also revealed by the fact that Giorgio has forgotten their anniversary. These first sequences of the film thus establish Giulietta’s dilemma, centered on her low self-esteem and on her emotional dependency on a husband who is now indifferent to her. At the same time, Giulietta too, as the protagonist of the film, often directs her look at the glamorous images of woman that are projected all around her and “centers her overtly sexual fantasies on female bodies—as she looks at women with male eyes, that is, the director’s.” So, here, too, as “in all patriarchal representations of gender, the image of Woman is the origin and aim of desire, the object and locus of sexuality, as defined by man, through his point of view and through his look. Thus sexuality is located in Woman, but, as Giulietta is conditioned to believe and feel, it is the property and prerogative of man.”6 At the same time, to quote Fellini himself in an interview, Giulietta degli spiriti is also “the story of the struggle taken up by a woman against certain monsters in herself, which are certain psychic components in her, deformed by educational taboos, moral conventions, false idealisms.”7 These monsters give birth to the “spirits” in Giulietta’s life—that is, to all those bizarre hallucinations that crowd her mind and materialize in front of her to torment her. Indeed Giulietta is constructed as the product and the victim of a typically Catholic and repressive education of which her mother, the nuns, and the schoolmaster are the most representative images in her hallucinations. For such an education, the highest position a woman can aspire to is martyrdom in the name of her faith. Giulietta is in fact haunted by the memory and experience of herself as a little girl playing the part of the Christian martyr in the nuns’ play, who accepts to be burned at the stake rather than renounce her faith. Giulietta is tormented by a desire to sublimate all her needs to a spiritual level and finds it difficult to accept her own physicality and sexuality. In this area, Giulietta is also struggling to come to terms

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with her authoritarian mother, who, on one side, stands for repressiveness and, on the other, with her stunning beauty, also stands for the sexually very desirable and statuesque image of woman, cherished by the society of the film. Giulietta eventually conquers her spirits by openly disobeying her mother’s orders and makes peace with the haunting image of herself as a martyr by embracing her own child image. Since her spirits had been the result of “educational taboos, moral conventions, and false idealisms” imposed on her by a “dangerous mother” figure armed with a stern authoritarian look and an overpowering physical beauty, Giulietta gets rid of them with her final act of rebellion against the mother: “I am not afraid of you any longer!” This gesture constructs Giulietta as “resisting” both the repressiveness of moral conventions dictated by ignorance and conformity and the intimidating representation of the Mother-Goddess as “omnipotent authority.”8 Her grandfather, who ended his resistance to a repressive society, by running away with Fanny, a beautiful circus ballerina, stands, in Giulietta’s hallucinations, as the representative of anticonformism and freedom of expression, in conflict with her mother and the oppressive society around her. When he appears to her for the last time, after her act of rebellion against her mother, he seems to suggest that she is finally positioning herself as an individual ready for her own selfrealization. He addresses her with these words: “You do not need me any longer . . . I too am an invention of yours; but you are full of life.” In this last hallucination of Giulietta’s, next to her grandfather stands the beautiful Fanny, the ideal image of sexual attractiveness and desirability, whom Giulietta—and we, the spectators, with her—view again as the object and locus of sexual desire, even at this moment of Giulietta’s supposedly achieved self-realization. Clearly, at this point, if Giulietta were a man, we would have no doubt that the self-realization achieved will allow him to follow the grandfather’s example toward social freedom and sexual liberation by expressing his male desire for a certain image of woman modeled on Fanny. Giulietta, however, is not a man, thus, it is difficult to propose a different way of self-realization for her. In her plainness, Giulietta does not fit the image of woman that her grandfather has chosen. She is thus bound to be left out of a world, where only glamorous women prevail and attract men’s look and desire. At the end of the film, Giulietta is framed in full-length shots outside her house, walking toward the pine forest that surrounds her house and listening to little voices that to her question, “Who are you?” reply, offering their friendship and closeness: “True friends . . . true friends. If you want us to stay with you, we can stay. Listen to us. Listen closely.” This is the personal world of her imagination, where Giulietta feels at ease, a world of friendly, no-longer frightful spirits, and with them, she takes her walk in the forest, away from the confining space of her house and of the social world of overendowed sexualized women and sex-obsessed men to which she does not belong. According to Fellini’s own views of how a film should end, these last sequences of the film hardly provide any clear conclusive message about Giulietta’s potential for self-realization. They rather propose the same solitary estranged situation that Giulietta has experienced all her life. What has changed is the type of “spirits” that now she is able to project. The happy, rather than haunting spirits

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suggest that she has now liberated herself from her mother’s overwhelmingly oppressive influence and the enslaving chains of authoritarianism that she represented. At the same time, by embracing her own childhood image, Giulietta seems to accept herself as well as her new spirit friends and those little voices of theirs that are offering her their friendship. From her smiling look, she seems happy to accept their offer, and it looks like she may find in them a new reason to live her own life outside of the requirements of a society to which she knows she does not belong. Giulietta seems then to propose the same choice of a new life that Cabiria had suggested in her own final walk outside of the forest with new younger people singing and smiling at and with her. Giulietta thus reconfirms the importance of an inner, personal choice for a woman to make in her life, over the materialistic and exclusively sexualized one that the society of the 1950s and 1960s seemed to propose to all women and men, living at that time. In his later films, and especially in his Il casanova di Federico Fellini (Fellini’s Casanova; 1976), Fellini shows again his deep patriarchal pro-male bend by choosing to idealize a protagonist universally known as an exploiter of women and even a sexual predator on young girls. In Fellini’s Il casanova’s world, woman is exclusively imaged as an object of man’s sexual pleasure, as we have already seen in his earlier La dolce vita and Giulietta degli spirits. The ending of Fellini’s Il casanova dramatically highlights this representation by projecting a beautiful, woman-sized robot-doll as the object of the aging Casanova’s lust. Antonioni’s L’avventura, La notte, L’eclissi, and Il deserto rosso Most of the women in Antonioni’s films9 display a fragile type of femininity that is also visible physically, as these women lack the physical exuberance and sexual flamboyance that several protagonists of Fellini’s films exhibit, such as Silvia in La dolce vita or Suzy and Fanny in Giulietta degli spiriti. After Il grido, Antonioni worked at what he called his Trilogy of Solitude, that is, a series of three films, L’avventura (The Adventure; 1960), La notte, and L’eclissi (Eclipse; 1962), where, as he himself explained, he showed his fascination with “the individual per se, in all his complex and disturbing truth.”10 In each of these films, the main protagonist is a woman. Monica Vitti played the female protagonist in L’avventura and L’eclissi, and Jeanne Moreau in La notte, but all these women are constructed in much more traditional terms than Irma in Il grido. All three films show the traditional female lack of control over her own life and a total dependency on male guidance and attention. They display the painful results of a social situation rooted in materialism and devoid of a deep commitment to human values. L’avventura was the first film that brought financial success to Antonioni, but its success was not as “absolute and unquestionable as it will be for Blow Up.”11 The film was, in fact, censored in several countries and its projection suspended for six months in Milan, as it was judged “offensive to public decency” because of the several scenes showing women and particularly Claudia (played by Monica Vitti) undressing in front of the camera. These reactions to the film encode a patriarchal

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message by which the uncovering of the female body constitutes a transgression of the rules imposed by a social and moral system aimed at controlling women’s activities and bodies. At the same time, the severity of these reactions reveals the deep patriarchal fear for the profound visual impact that the disclosure of the nude female body may have on the film’s male viewers, confirming thus the male fear for the disturbing and dangerous sexual power that women are supposed to have on men. It is quite clear, therefore, that the censoring operation activated against the film has established “the ideal spectator of [the film] as male and the typical object of the spectacle as female,”12 as De Lauretis found typical of traditional Italian cinema. This dichotomy, in which man is the holder of the look and woman is the object of such a look, is brilliantly reformulated by the sequence filmed in Sicily in the middle of the film. There, Claudia, the beautiful blonde young woman from Rome, finds herself the object of the looks of literally hundreds of dark-haired men in the square of a small Sicilian town, where men seem to flock down from all directions to look at her intensely, from close by as well as from the terraces that surround the square. She constitutes the spectacle for all those male looks and desire, including the look of the camera and the look and desire of Sandro, the main male character of the film, through whose eyes also the male spectators’ look from outside the film is directed to her.13 That woman in L’avventura is reduced exclusively to object of the male’s desire is implied in the event that generates the film’s narrative: Anna’s disappearance. The only thing the spectators know about Anna, prior to her disappearance, is that she is involved romantically with Sandro, and hers is the first undressing scene in the film, prior to her making love to him. This setup frames her as the object of Sandro’s look and desire. Right before Anna’s disappearance, there is another undressing scene on the yacht involving both Anna and Claudia, Anna’s best friend, where the camera’s look, together with the spectators’, is extended to Claudia, too, as if to suggest that the next time the male protagonist’s look focuses on an object of his desire, it will focus on Claudia. Indeed, shortly after that scene, Anna disappears, and, nearly instantly, Sandro transfers to Claudia both his look and his desire. Several scenes of undressing follow through which Claudia is framed as the object of Sandro’s gaze, until, toward the end, she is left alone in her hotel room feeling sad and lonely. Sandro, on the other hand, becomes the activator of an intersection of different looks, both female and male, that prepares for another transference of his look and desire onto a different sexual object. This new sexual object of Sandro’s is the call girl, who had been at the center of many men’s attention in an earlier sequence and with whom he spends the night, forgetful of Claudia who has been waiting for him and worrying about him in her room. At the end of the film, Claudia and Sandro are framed together again, but this time Claudia’s position is that of the traditional maternal image of compassion and understanding, representative of the patriarchal codes of values that underscore the overall message of the film. The film closes with the image of Claudia standing behind Sandro, bending over him and touching his head delicately with her hand while he sits on a lower bench in tears. As in traditional cinema, the female position “produced as the end result of narrativization is the figure of narrative closure, the narrative image in which the film . . . comes together.”14 This

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closing maternal image hardly leaves woman any other space but the one traditionally provided for her in order to take care of all the needs of man. Antonioni’s film, which seems to be very close to L’avventura, is L’eclissi.15 It presents a less conventional cinematic discourse, even if the social and existential message conveyed by its action and the behavior of its characters is very similar to that of L’avventura. Vittoria (played by Monica Vitti) embarks in a sentimental journey, similar to Claudia’s, with two different men, first with Riccardo, whose love she cannot reciprocate, and then with Piero for whose look and desire she becomes framed in the course of most of the film. The end of the film, however, is more baffling and ambiguous than in L’avventura. In a way, L’eclissi seems to end where L’avventura begins. Vittoria does not come to the rendezvous with Piero, implying that woman is absent. At the same time, Piero is also absent. Consequently, the film narrative closes by focusing on the absence of both the male character’s look and of the object of his look rather than on the image of a woman framed in a traditional position. Vittoria, after having been positioned throughout the film as the object of, first, Riccardo’s and, then, Piero’s look and desire at the end is not there. Is this absence an assertion of her individuality and of her refusal to assume the position of object of the male’s desire? Or is her absence the only visual projection possible for the indefiniteness of woman who is always projected as the object of the male look, created exclusively by the male, through his own narcissistic projection of desire? Being aware of Antonioni’s view of women’s function in the world of men, I tend to favor the second alternative proposed above. At the end of L’eclissi, the male look is not there and cannot project the woman-object that thus cannot be anything but absent. Between L’avventura and L’eclissi, Antonioni released La notte, the second film of his Trilogy of Solitude, and the only one of the three where the protagonists are a married couple. Giovanni, the husband, is a very successful novelist, while Lidia, his wife, is a lonely, tormented woman. From the beginning, the camera follows her in full-length shots from afar and mostly from the back while she walks alone in the busy, chaotic, and noisy streets of downtown Milan or in the less chaotic but equally alienated suburbs. The only close-up of the initial sequence of shots of her frames Lidia diagonally while she is standing at the corner of a city street, as if to convey her painful realization of finding herself at a crossroad in her walk as well as in her life. The camera, however, cuts away from her at that point and does not follow her, as if to avoid giving a clue to us spectators as to whether she will cross the street and make a change or whether she will continue walking on the same side of the road and thus accept the status quo in her life. This sequence indeed ends with a cut to her stepping out of a taxicab in a completely different location, and starting another lonely walk on the outskirts of the city, with the camera still following her with full-length shots from the front and from behind. Eventually a medium-length shot catches a calmer expression on her face while she stops to watch fireworks shooting up to the sky. Her expression becomes tense again when she talks to her husband on the phone and worsens when she faces him at home, in the bathroom, while stepping out of the bathtub. She is naked, even if the camera does not allow the spectators to see her naked body; and Giovanni, in spite of the fact that he is directly in front of her, does

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not seem to see it either, and his look is cold and devoid of desire. He eventually exits the bathroom and fixes himself a drink in a dark kitchen. Although modern and elegant, their apartment, with its dark hues and shadows, seems to convey the same darkness and coldness that mark the protagonists’ relationship. Lidia’s story is then strictly connected with Giovanni’s, just as Victoria’s is with Piero’s in L’eclissi; Lidia’s, however, like Giulietta’s in Fellini’s Giulietta degli spiriti, is the story of a woman’s realization of how totally irrelevant her role is in her man’s life and of her dilemma as to what to do. Should she leave him or accept the status quo? In her words, Lidia seems to have chosen to leave him, but her behavior, and her suffering contradict her words. The film discourse furthermore seems to favor the latter choice. The film indeed closes on the two of them making love at dawn with a peaceful country background, in notable contrast to the opening noisy and chaotic city traffic sequences of the film that had centered on Lidia’s walking alone and tense in the city streets. The film discourse seems thus to provide closure to Lidia’s dilemma, and it is a closure that clearly favors and upholds Giovanni’s intention of maintaining a peaceful, financially comfortable, and unthreatening marital relationship. Lidia, on her part, after a brief, initial search for independence and understanding, has silently accepted Giovanni’s way of life and given up her resistance, offering thus another example of Antonioni’s patriarchal view of gender relationships. Il deserto rosso is the first film that Antonioni made in color and, according to most of his critics, the color is its most outstanding feature, especially in the representation of the dismal background of the film action. In my view, there is another outstanding innovation in this film, and it has to do with the character of Giuliana, the protagonist of the film. Giuliana is another female character who faithfully fits Antonioni’s view of women as unstable, frail, and tormented creatures, as he has projected them in most of his earlier films. Here, he formulates Giuliana combining several of the characteristics typical of the female protagonists of those earlier films, thus making her more complex than each one of them. Giuliana is a married woman, like Lidia in La notte, and she is also the mother of a little boy, like Irma in Il grido. She is also involved with two men, like Vittoria in L’eclissi. Like Anna in L’avventura, she is projected from the beginning as neurotic, or at least with serious psychological problems that she is trying to overcome, with little help from anyone in her immediate family or among her friends. In the opening sequence of the film, we see her walking with her little boy in the polluted, unhealthy industrial suburbs of Ravenna, a small Northern city built on the delta of the Po River, the longest and most polluted river in Italy. This industrial suburbia area is covered at the ground level by small pools of polluted greenish water that fascinate Giuliana’s little boy and is enveloped by a thick blanket of unhealthy smog produced by tall towers expelling the fumes of industrial and refinery combustion. The hellish quality of such an area strikes the spectators as a very unusual, unhealthy place for a mother and a child to take a walk and brings to our attention the cosmic problem of pollution and its deadly effect. This problem was hardly faced by any country in the 1950s or early 1960s, when this film was made, but is still very vexing for us citizens of the second millennium. The fact that the film discourse uses such a backdrop for an apparently normal walk for a

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mother to take with her little boy, without questioning its suitability, raises some doubts about the “normalcy” of the life that these characters lead. We find out later that Ugo, Giuliana’s uncommunicative husband, works as an engineer in one of the factories that make up the industrial conglomerate of the film’s initial background. The unhealthy and threatening factory environment is powerfully represented with a concentration of deafening sounds, suffocating smoke, and dangerous machinery in the sequence when Giuliana visits her husband there and makes the acquaintance of Corrado, her husband’s friend. It is an environment where hardly any communication is possible and where only the most primitive instincts can survive. Ugo’s inability to communicate with or to understand Giuliana is clearly visualized through the environment where he works. The fact that Giuliana meets Corrado in that environment suggests that an equally problematic relationship might develop between the two of them. Another important visual indicator of the lack of communication and of the coldness that affect Giuliana’s relationship with her family is provided by the overwhelmingly whitish hues that characterize their apartment, which signal the coldness and miscommunication that prevail in their life. Indeed, early in the film, Giuliana tells of how sad her life is with Ugo. She reveals that she attempted suicide through a car accident while Ugo was away on a business trip and that he had not seen it important enough to interrupt his trip and come back to comfort her after he heard that she had survived the accident. Giuliana is now trying to overcome her feelings of inadequacy and hide her sadness, but neither Ugo nor her child seems to help her much in this enterprise. A most painful and disturbing episode, illustrating her family’s indifference to her agonizing efforts at survival, is provided by the trick that her little boy plays on her while Ugo is away again on a business trip. The little boy, unwilling to go to school, states that he cannot walk and acts as if his legs were paralyzed, causing Giuliana agonizing pain and confusion. Eventually, Giuliana sees him getting out of bed on his own without any problem when he thinks his mother cannot see him, and Giuliana falls prey of despair. In her twisted search for comfort, she turns to Corrado, who had previously impressed her as a sincere and understanding man. To reach Corrado’s hotel room she has to walk in a corridor completely immersed in the same whitish hues that characterize her own home, and these shots already foresee the other traumatic disappointment that she is going to experience shortly. Indeed Corrado turns out to be exclusively interested in possessing her sexually rather than understanding or reassuring her in her moment of despair. Their encounter turns into an attempted rape with Giuliana fighting against Corrado’s advances. Hallucinating alternations of dark and lighter shades of red project her aggravation and confusion at finding herself treated just like a sexual object to be used for his pleasure by a man she trusted. Eventually her long walk home through the ships anchored in the city harbor seems to bring her to the realization that she will have to find strength and understanding within herself in order to be able to survive. This is a very hard lesson for Giuliana, who is the product of the traditional system of values that places woman in the role of wife and mother. As wife, she was programmed to be taken care of by her husband and, as mother, to find her reason for life in her children.

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Giuliana, at this point, is now aware that she cannot count on her husband for protection or understanding and even less for affection and caring. She also understands that her little boy, in his childish condition, is hardly concerned with her as a suffering creature in need and is indifferent to her emotional state. She seems also to realize that she has to stop thinking of herself exclusively as wife or mother and judging herself inadequate in those roles. She should try to accept herself the way she is and face her life choices in the best way she can without overdramatizing her limitations. At the end of the film, the same dismal and polluted landscape of the beginning is projected again as the backdrop for another of Giuliana’s walks with her son. Now, however, there is a difference in the attitude that the two have toward each other and their environment. Instead of concentrating on its pollution, the little boy’s attention is focused on the birds that are still flying in such a toxic atmosphere, and he turns to his mother for an explanation of how they know how to survive there. The film’s message is exposed in the reply that Giuliana gives to her son’s question. She explains that it is only through experience, and sometimes even dangerous experience, that the birds can learn how to survive. Having experienced the dangers of flying through those poisonous gasses, the birds will avoid flying through them in the future and will thus survive! With this answer, Giuliana seems to imply that the same lesson can be learned by human beings, who, by avoiding the mistakes previously made and, by learning from earlier dangerous and painful experiences, can survive, too, and live a normal, healthy life. In this film, then, the female protagonist accepts her traditional role as wife and mother and consequently is still framed within a patriarchal setting. In spite of this framing, however, she seems to carve for herself a space of self-acceptance where she can reinvent herself and make sense out of her life, in the process of becoming a self-reliant and aware individual, without depending on any male authority. The film ends at this point, so we cannot talk of narrative closure here, as Giuliana is not framed in any specific traditional image of silent womanhood, like the motherly and repentant Irma in Il grido, the forgiving and motherly Claudia in L’avventura, or the sexually controlled Lidia in La notte. On the contrary, Giuliana has found a way to communicate to her own son a basic understanding of life and to propose an optimistic view of how creatures may overcome their problems by trusting their feelings and by learning from their own experiences, however dangerous and difficult they might have been. In the gallery of female portrayals that Antonioni has offered us through his many films, Giuliana seems to represent a unique image of woman as potentially capable of rescuing herself from the tight enclosure of dependency on men in which she has been obliged to live because of her condition as wife and mother. In such a role, she had expected protection and support from the males in her life, her husband and son, who represent the only worthwhile authorities in any woman’s life dominated by traditional values. When she did not receive from her husband the protection and support that she needed, she turned for them to another man, but male conceit and indifference prevailed again. Giuliana thus lost completely her self-esteem and became even more neurotic in her total loneliness. She eventually realized that she could not count on any man, as they were all indifferent to her plight or too weak themselves and unable to

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understand or help. Therefore, at the end of the film, Giuliana decides to look into herself for help, and she seems to be able to find in herself a good reason for life. This unusual positive ending of a woman’s story will not be repeated in the later films of Antonioni, such as Blow-Up (Blowup; 1966) and Professione Reporter (The Passenger; 1975), where the main female characters of the story are mysterious, unattached women, hardly known to the male protagonists on whom the narrative action of the films depends. It looks as if Antonioni16 has eventually given up focusing upon female characters and prefers to cover them up with the veil of anonymity and mystery, as if to avoid formulating them again in terms of absence, like Anna in L’avventura or Vittoria in L’eclissi. In the 1980s, however, he will clearly reveal his traditional view of women as completely dependent on men in Identificazione di una donna (Identification of a Woman; 1982), which we will consider in Chapter 8. Bertolucci’s Strategia del ragno and Pasolini’s Accattone If, among Antonioni’s films, Il deserto rosso has actually proposed a woman potentially capable to learn from her own mistakes and overcome her female weakness, Bertolucci, by positioning his characters (women as well as men) within a welldefined historical setting, often creates strong self-reliant female characters. Their representation places Bertolucci among the most innovative Italian male directors, also for what concerns the construction of women in films. This tendency is particularly successful in films like Strategia del ragno (The Spider’s Stratagem; 1969), which will be analyzed here, or Il Conformista (The Conformist; 1972) and Novecento (1900; 1976), where the fascist period provides the historical background in which the story of each film is set and which will be analyzed in Chapter 7. Strategia del ragno centers on the real-life story of Athos Magnani, who, in fascist times, was viewed as the hero of the antifascist resistance in Tara, a little town in the countryside close to Mantova. Magnani was murdered in the late 1930s, and his murderers were never found. He became a hero for the little town, a victim of fascist violence and injustice. The film portrays Athos’s son’s search for the truth about his father’s death and for what is behind the mythicizing of him as an antifascist hero. Bertolucci found inspiration for the topic of this film in Borges’s story “Tema dell’eroe e del traditore,” or “Theme of the Hero and of the Traitor,” which he applied to this specifically Italian story. The female protagonist of the film is Dreifa, who, as a young woman had been Athos Magnani’s lover and companion at the times of fascist rule in Italy. In this role, Bertolucci cast Alida Valli, the still beloved diva of early Italian cinema. Dreifa seems to be ready to assist Athos’s son in his search for the truth about his father’s death, and yet there is something mysterious about her and her relationship with Athos. In the several flashbacks that help to narrate Athos’s story, she is projected as both a passionate and clear-minded woman who was totally taken by Athos’s brilliant personality, handsomeness, intelligence and political commitment, which she strongly shared. Athos, however, was married and was hesitant to leave his wife, who at that time was pregnant with his son. Dreifa did not want to share her

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lover with his wife and, in spite of her great love for him, decided to leave him. The night that Athos was murdered, she was away from Tara. This absence, apparently caused by Dreifa’s unwillingness to accept Athos’s hypocritical stand in matters of love, seems however to have been dictated also by another reason. A partial flashback frames Dreifa with Athos, accusing him of being a coward and a traitor, and it comes just after another most important flashback. There, his three best friends violently react to Athos’s confession of having deceived them by revealing to the police the hiding place of the ammunitions they were going to use in their plot to kill the fascist dictator, Mussolini, who was supposed to officially open the opera season in Tara. The three slap his face and call him traitor and spy until Athos reveals the hidden motivation of his action. As a strong antifascist, Athos believed that the only way to counteract the influence that fascism had on the Italian people, was to create an antifascist martyr cult around a popular hero apparently killed by the fascists, in order “to have people hate Fascism more and more.” By making his friends believe that he was a traitor, he could convince them to kill him and thus make everybody believe that the fascists had murdered him and consequently turn everybody against them. Since this flashback comes just before the partial flashback of Dreifa calling Athos a coward and traitor, we can infer that the main reason for Dreifa’s decision to leave Athos had to be her disappointment in discovering his ideological duplicity. Because of her own honesty and ideological coherence, she did not hesitate to dismiss him from her life even in spite of her love for him. Dreifa, then, like Bertolucci’s later heroines, formulates herself in terms of political commitment rather than emotional dependency. She provides us with one of the best examples of self-sufficient womanhood in Italian films up to the 1960s. Her political commitment seems to include the best values that may shape the human consciousness of men as well as of women, such as honesty, unselfishness, courage, fortitude, self-assurance, and indifference to financial gain. Especially in the 1960s, when materialism, conceitedness, hedonism, and exhibitionism prevailed, the portrait of Dreifa proposes a refreshing and hopeful view of humanity, formulated in female terms. We cannot say the same for several other art films of the 1960s where women do not fare that well, like Stella in Pasolini’s Accattone. In the representation of women offered in Pasolini’s films, the boundaries between denigration and sublimation are not that well-defined. Two of Pasolini’s films that are most significant in representing his ambivalent vision of women are Accattone (1961), to be analyzed here, and Il Decameron (The Decameron; 1971), which will be analyzed in the following chapter. In Accattone, Pasolini deals with the deprived and undignified existence of young jobless men living in the outskirts of Rome, a topic that he had already investigated in his earlier novel, Ragazzi di Vita and that will also provide the main background of his next film Mamma Roma (Mother Rome; 1962).17 The protagonist of Accattone (which in Italian means “beggar”) is always running into trouble because of his violent behavior and his larcenous habits. He leads a life of dire poverty, on the fringe of society, because of his inability and unwillingness to hold any kind of honest, steady job. The only human creature he seems

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to feel tenderness for is Stella, another victim of the poverty and hopelessness of the miserable life which poor people live in the outskirts of Rome. Accattone convinces Stella to come and live with him, which she does out of her naïveté and the true goodness of her heart, as she feels compassion for him. Besides being good and inexperienced, Stella’s beauty strikes everybody with its innocence and its total lack of seductive guile. It seems indeed to be this rare combination of purity and beauty that attracts Accattone, who sees her as his savior, or the stella (i.e., the star), that will show him the way out of the darkness of his messy life. Stella, in Accattone, therefore, represents Pasolini’s view of woman as a spiritual guide for men, as the Catholic Madonna woman-type of the religious tradition, who will protect man with her pure, maternal type of love. She is the “angelic creature” of Italian medieval poetry that enlightens man and guides him to God’s kingdom. Stella thus reveals Pasolini’s tendency to view woman in sublimating terms. On the other hand, Accattone’s approach to Stella is ambivalent, as, just after calling her his spiritual guiding star, he turns around and obliges her to prostitute herself in the streets of Rome. He appoints himself as her pimp and regulates her business even against her resistance and her obvious distaste for such an imposition. In this way, the narrative action of Accattone obliterates the image of Stella as a superior human being endowed of spiritual power and reestablishes her in her female role of sex object, totally submissive to men and inferior to them. This ambivalent attitude toward women is rooted in the centuries-old conflict between man’s need for spirituality and the urge for sexual satisfaction, a conflict often intensified by the search for power and domination that obsessively haunts men’s lives. The character of Stella in this film represents both the sublimation and the denigration that inform the traditional male view of woman. Pasolini’s ambivalent attitude toward women will also be present in his other films, even though he will choose different characters to convey his view. Another woman projected with an ambivalent attitude within the filmic discourse is la ciociara of De Sica’s homonymous film, released in the same year as Pasolini’s Accattone. De Sica’s La ciociara In De Sica’s La ciociara,18 the protagonist, la ciociara of the title (played by Sofia Loren), is a mother who is subjected, together with her teenage daughter, to gang rape, by a band of Moroccan soldiers, who are part of the Allies’ occupation forces in Italy at the end of World War II. The horror of the mass-rape experience is here heightened by the fact that the mother, while being raped, has also to witness, without being able to help, her own teenage daughter being gang raped next to her. In this case, it would seem that the two women are clearly the victims of a series of violent and unavoidable circumstances brought about by the war. Indeed the pathetic mood of the film develops out of this helpless condition of the two women. The film discourse, however, soon loses sight of this painful war situation and begins focusing on the mother with a strong misogynistic attitude. Her miscalculations are highlighted as the cause of the unfortunate circumstances that led to the rape. Her decision to spend the last few months of the war in the countryside,

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where the rape occurred, rather than to stay in the city, where both she and her daughter would probably have been able to escape such a devastating experience, is presented as dictated by her own fears and her determination to maintain her emotional and economic independence. The film discourse thus combines De Sica’s misogynistic attitude toward economically and sexually independent women with his criticism of his contemporary society’s exclusive search for materialistic prosperity. The message of the film, then, clearly reflects De Sica’s disapproving view of women’s search for emotional and economic independence and self-assurance, which was already noticed in his earlier films. La ciociara as a mother character introduces the topic of motherhood in the cinema of the 1960s and prepares for the use that Visconti will make of it in his films. Visconti’s Il gattopardo and La caduta degli dei The films by Visconti that we are going to analyze now seem to propose different types of mothers and of women in general. Il gattopardo (The Leopard; 1963) presents a story centered on the life of the prince of Salinas, very faithfully adapted from the popular homonymous novel by Tomasi di Lampedusa. In this film, women play different roles and represent two different social classes in nineteenth-century Sicily, at the time of Garibaldi’s conquest of the island in the war for the unification of Italy.19 There are three important female characters in the film: the princess, in her role as mother and wife, and two young women, Concetta, the oldest of the prince’s daughters, and Angelica, a beautiful lower middle-class young woman. The princess plays the traditional role of mother, totally devoted to her large family of sons and daughters and profoundly religious. The film opens with the camera intruding in one of the rooms of the Salinas palace, where the princess directs the ritual of the evening rosary prayers, together with her confessor, with all her children around her participating in the prayers. The princess is also shown as a very devoted and totally asexual wife, as the prince confides to his confessor, in order to convince the priest to absolve him for his sinful, nocturnal visits to his Palermo lover: “I have made many children with my wife, and yet I have never once seen her navel!” Concetta, their daughter, is a young woman closely controlled by her parents and raised according to the strictly religious, aristocratic values of her family. The film’s narrative action is controlled by a male point of view, representing the traditional, elitist approach of its male protagonists who are the prince, the leopard of the title, and his handsome nephew Tancredi, equally aristocratic and penniless, but ready to compromise his aristocratic upbringing in order to improve his financial position in life. Tancredi is at the center of a triangular play of desire that involves the two young women, Concetta and Angelica. Both girls are attracted to him, and he seems to reciprocate their attentions alternatively, first Concetta’s and then Angelica’s. Tancredi’s final choice falls on Angelica and his decision is partly influenced by the different ways by which the two girls handle their desire. Concetta, as the product

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of a strict, religious, and aristocratic upbringing, has learned to disguise her sexual drive and to play the role of the passive, silent, asexual young woman. When her confessor tells her that her father does not approve of her relationship with Tancredi, she unquestioningly accepts her father’s decision, obeys him and, in silence, gives up her dream of marrying Tancredi. Concetta fits then the traditional codification of the “good” daughter who conforms totally to the law of the father even if it means to spend her life alone and unhappy. This is how Concetta ends up in this film. On the other hand, Angelica, as a commoner, is unaware of any religious or class restrictions and does not feel inhibited in demonstrating her sexual attraction to Tancredi. As the only daughter of the local Mafioso, she is very wealthy and thus represents a suitable match for a penniless nobleman like Tancredi. Angelica is also irresistibly beautiful, and Tancredi is obviously sexually attracted to her. The effect of Angelica’s beauty on both guests and hosts alike, at her arrival at the prince’s dinner-party, is powerfully conveyed by the camera focusing all looks on her and catching the pleasurable reaction they all register, except for Concetta, who immediately recognizes Angelica as her rival in love. Within the aristocratic milieu of the film, Angelica, with her provocative physical beauty, her coarse laughter, and her unsophisticated behavior, represents difference and, therefore, resistance to such a milieu and its controlling dictates. Yet, once the prince decides to accept her and her substantial dowry for his nephew and into his family, Angelica easily becomes part of the aristocratic milieu of the film. Il gattopardo, then, does not seem to propose any innovative female character, but rather to reaffirm the importance of strong patriarchal rules to control all women. Even Angelica, who seems, at first, to resist a typical traditional representation, easily slides into traditional female formulation once the male authorities of the film accept her within their aristocratic milieu. While in Il gattopardo the princess is a very traditional “good” mother figure, in La Caduta degli dei, Sophie Essenbeck is a strong mother character, specifically in “phallic” terms. The main story concentrates on the very powerful aristocratic family of the Essenbecks, the German industrial magnates, at the time of the coming to power of the Third Reich in Germany. Sophie, the “phallic” mother, cleverly uses her strong social and sexual power to achieve total control of the family business as well as of all of its members. Through Sophie, the woman-as-mother figure is framed in terms of power and domination, aimed at provoking an antagonistic reaction not only within the film, but also in its spectators. The decadence and corruption of the society of the times is represented particularly through the character of Martin, Sophie’s son. The cruel and sexually deviant heir to the family business and fortune reveals his perversion especially through his disturbing relationship with his manipulative and domineering mother. The ending of the film presents the mother-son relationship in a way that transforms the mother into her own son’s victim, thus overturning the exclusively negative reaction that, up to that point, the internal and external audiences have had to Sophie. Indeed, Martin deals with his mother in very abusively cruel ways: he rapes her and causes her death by poison, titillating the audience with Shakespearean quotations reminiscent of Hamlet’s oedipal complex and Macbeth’s hunger for power. These abuses, together with the fact that he accuses her of being responsible for his own sexual perversion, have the narrative effect of correcting the

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inner tension of the film by reconstituting Martin as the only and exclusively male source of evil power and corruption. This filmic text, then, after playing with the possibility of turning the “phallic” mother into a successfully defiant image of female power, capitulates in the end and turns again into a fully complicit text, framing power as exclusively male and reducing woman to an all-too-common image of submission and victimization. In the art films of the 1960s that we have analyzed here, we have actually found several resisting types of women, such as Giulietta in Fellini’s Giulietta degli spiriti, Giuliana in Antonioni’s Il deserto rosso, and Sophie in Visconti’s La caduta degli dei, even if they do not reach the level of self-accomplishment achieved by Dreifa in Bertolucci’s Strategia del ragno. These women, in different ways, continue the search for change and/or self-realization already initiated in the 1950s especially by the female protagonists of Rossellini’s and Fellini’s, films, such as Karin, Irene, Gelsomina, and Cabiria. On the other hand, several art films still propose women who are constructed in exclusively traditional terms. Emma and Silvia in Fellini’s La dolce vita, Vittoria in Antonioni L’eclissi, and Stella in Pasolini’s Accattone are examples of traditional types of single women. Lidia in Antonioni’s La notte and the princess in Visconti’s Il gattopardo typify the traditional image of wives, while la ciociara in De Sica’s La ciociara and Sophie in Visconti’s La caduta degli dei are examples of “phallic” mothers. The Comic Films of the 1960s The popular cinema in the 1960s, with its comedy films, also dealt with the topics of lack of communication and of a woman’s search for change and meaningful communication, using ridicule in their representation of male characters. Ieri, oggi, domani A very successful episode film of this decade, Ieri, oggi, domani (Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow; 1964) reveals the interest for social criticism that will be typical of the comedy-Italian-style genre. In this film, Sofia Loren plays three different female roles: In one episode she is a black market cigarette street vendor, determined to stay constantly pregnant, even against her exhausted husband’s will, in order to avoid going to jail.20 The comic mood here develops out of the representation of the “exhausted” husband (played by an irresistible Marcello Mastroianni) and of his unwillingness to make love to his very determined wife. In another episode, Loren plays a wealthy middle class married woman, interested in having an affair with a penniless intellectual. In both episodes, Marcello Mastroianni plays the male protagonist’s role. In a third episode Loren plays a high-class prostitute attracting the attention of several men, including a young Catholic seminarian. In all these episodes, the female protagonist cleverly exploits the world of men with her imposing physical beauty and sexual manipulations. This film highlights the extremes women and men are ready to go, in order to succeed in the sexual

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power game they constantly play. The main female character in all three episodes playfully manipulates to her advantage both the situation and the men involved and conquers all obstacles, visibly reducing the control and power that her male counterparts believed they had. The outcome is a pleasant and bittersweet satire of traditional heterosexual relationships. Comedy-Italian-Style Films Comedy, in the 1960s and 1970s, often combines parody, satire, and eroticism, with the goal of criticizing the ways Italians live and think. This type of socially biting comedy was called comedy-Italian-style.21 It was designed to point out the human excesses, the exaggerations, and the flaws of the Italians, especially of Italian men and of the social system controlled by them, and particularly its legal component. This type of comic cinema was also designed to ridicule these excesses with a wholesome and often buoyant attitude that, however, tended to change in the 1970s, into a much more cynical and bitter critical attitude Among comedy-Italian-style directors, Luigi Comencini, Mario Monicelli, and Dino Risi are probably the best known, although I also find Pietro Germi and Ettore Scola most significant for their view on women’s issues. For our topic of discussion, Pietro Germi was indeed the first and most representative of the comedy-Italian-style directors of the 1960s and early 1970s, while Scola has been active up to the end of the 1990s. The three comic films that Germi directed in those times, Divorzio all’italiana (Divorce Italian Style; 1961), Sedotta e abbandonata (Seduced and Abandoned; 1963), and Alfredo, Alfredo (Alfredo, Alfredo; 1972), focused their attention on family relationships, especially on those that most affected women, and concentrated on important social issues, such as divorce and abortion, that were confronting women in those times. These three films all met a great public and critical success, and with them Germi prepared the public for the change in attitude from a bitter-sweet view of Italian society to the much darker and caustic criticism of its male-controlled ideology that was to take place in the comedies of the late 1970s. The combination of neorealist social and political commitment and the increased complexity in the representation of characters and plots, became evident first in Divorzio all’italiana and Sedotta e abbandonata where the issues of divorce, abortion, and rape22 were raised, together with a concern for the unfairness of the judicial system in a society ruled by heavily patriarchal dictates. The action of both films is set in Sicily as a most conservative and elitist social milieu, whose strictly Catholic beliefs allowed for the excesses represented there. Pietro Germi’s Divorzio all’italiana and Sedotta e abbandonata In Divorzio all’italiana, Germi focuses on the methods Italian men use to manipulate their social system in order to control wives (Rosalia) and daughters (Angela). The male protagonist of the film is Fefé, a Sicilian Baron, played by Marcello Mastroianni whose point of view controls the action of the film. The female protagonists are his wife Rosalia and his cousin Angela with whom he is in love, who is played by a young Stefania Sandrelli, soon to become a beloved diva of Italian

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cinema. The action of the story develops around Fefé’s ingenious machinations aimed at driving Rosalia into an adulterous relationship, so that he can rightfully dispose of her and marry his younger cousin, Angela. The social system displayed here is strongly embedded in the patriarchal ideology, whereby the woman is the man’s exclusive property and her asexuality the site of his honor. As a secondary topic, the film also approaches the problem of how a controlling father deals with his daughter. Angela’s oppressed condition as the daughter of a violent and obsessively domineering father is offered as an example. This problem of the unfair condition of women as daughters will be specifically focused on in Germi’s next film, Sedotta e abbandonata, especially through the characters of Agnese and her sister Matilde. In Divorzio all’italiana, the film action and characters are projected from Fefé’s point of view, starting when he is on a train, bound back to his Sicilian town after he has spent a short prison term for his wife’s murder. He relives his whole life on the screen with a long flashback that covers practically the whole duration of the film, while his voice is constantly heard as voice-over that explains the events on the screen and reveals his thoughts and machinations. The voice-over device is usually applied in films to male protagonists, to confirm them as the source of authority and control. In this case, the use of both flashback and voice-over, two important cinematic devices used to reveal the inner thoughts and intentions of the character involved with them, gives the audience a very thorough understanding of Fefè, by highlighting the main traits of his personality as a lazy, sensual, self-centered, manipulative, ruthless Southern Italian aristocrat. Germi cast in Fefè’s role, Marcello Mastroianni, the favorite divo of Italian audiences, and slightly retouched his physical appearance to highlight ridiculous nervous tics or typically macho Italian details, such as a black moustache and a cigarette hanging from his lips. With these small changes, the film discourse increases its comic irony and conveys the bitter-sweet mood of its message that keeps the audience laughing at, rather than reacting negatively to Fefe’s machinations against his wife. Since the whole action of the story is projected through Fefé’s point of view, by revealing, through flashback and voice-over, the protagonist’s many shortcomings, the film ridicules him. At the same time, the film delivers an important lesson of social criticism, by making its audience very aware of the contradictions and unfairness of a social system that concentrates all authority, and even the power of life and death, in such a despicable character. Divorzio all’italiana’s message of social criticism is strengthened by the parody of the legal system that reflects the same unfair patriarchal system of rules that control the society. Indeed, Fefé finds inspiration for planning his wife’s murder in an article of the Italian penal code that states that “whoever finds his wife . . . in a carnal relationship with a man and kills her in a moment of fury may be subjected to a maximum prison sentence of 3–7 years.” This penal code article addresses exclusively the rights of men to put their wives to death in case of adultery. Furthermore, the film discourse, by repeatedly projecting this penal code article’s written test on the screen and by having the protagonist repeat its words aloud to himself several times, parodies it through exaggeration and thus it underlines even more bitterly its unfairness. Parody is also used in the representation of the forensic eloquence displayed by a very popular defense attorney who very successfully

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manipulates both public opinion and the patriarchal system of values. While he delivers his speech, the camera very effectively pans on the faces of his listeners to highlight the emotional power that his cheap rhetorical eloquence, with its romanticized vision of crime, has on a society that sees violence as the only mean to solve human conflicts and differences. Since the whole story of Fefé’s life is conveyed through Fefé and his obsessive self-centeredness, also the female characters of the film are presented through his point of view and consequently their representation conforms to the male-centered aristocratic point of view of Fefé and his social environment. Rosalia belongs to a lower social class than Fefé, and, as such, she is of no value to him, besides being devoid of any social importance. His earlier interest for her was exclusively sexual, but since he is now completely taken by Angela and her youthful beauty, he is not interested in his wife any longer. Fefé, thus, has neither respect nor attraction for Rosalia, nor has he, in his aristocratic conceitedness and arrogance, any qualms at disposing of her as a useless object. Rosalia becomes an object of ridicule for him, as he projects her as personifying all the excesses that men usually dislike in women, such as self-righteousness, obsessive possessiveness, and highly emotional sensitivity. Fefé’s fantasies on how to ensure her disappearance are provoked by these excesses, and the comic mood powerfully develops out of these fantasies that set up Rosalia’s weaknesses at such an extreme that they signify both her victimization and Fefé’s obsessive dislike of her as a lower-class woman. One of these fantasies is triggered by Fefé’s reaction to Rosalia’s criticism of what she considers his mother’s expensive way of doing laundry. He fantasizes himself approaching Rosalia from behind while she is stirring a heavy wash in a large tub and eventually pushing her into the tub full of a special acid that immediately dissolves her into soap. In another fantasy triggered by her demands for his constant attention and assistance while she is trying to lose weight by lying in the sun on the beach covered by hot sand, he fantasizes her in a jungle being swallowed up by quicksand. Eventually, annoyed by her laughter, he fantasizes her being shot up in the sky with a one-way rocket, out of his hearing range. This fantasizing of Fefé, which reveals his subconscious wish to kill his wife, together with the article of the penal code that he consciously interprets as his “license to kill” slowly bring him to really shoot and kill Rosalia. After he accomplishes his mission, and the law, as he had expected, is very lenient toward him and condemns him only to a very short term in jail, he can come back to Angela and to what he sees as the perfect type of life that he feels he has all the rights to live with her. Once the disruption that Rosalia’s presence had produced in his life as a husband and an aristocrat is eliminated, Fefé’s position in his family and society is strengthened and his self-esteem reestablished. Angela’s representation is a little more contradictory than Rosalia’s, whom we see only through Fefe’s point of view. Angela, too, is seen, most of the time through Fefé’s eyes, and as such she appears to be a very romantic, beautiful, even naïve teenager, totally in love with him. Some of her letters to him, used as written texts on the screen with her voice-over reading them, seem to vouch for this view. At the same time, her token resistance to her father’s decision to send her back to school, far from Fefé and the cold looks that she gives Fefé on a few occasions leave the spectators unsure of her total dedication to him. The audience is invited to suspect

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that her acceptance of Fefé’s love was, for her, a suitable means to escape her family and especially her father’s cruel control, rather than a total submission to Fefé’s will and love. As soon as Fefé’s flashback ends and the film action develops on its own outside of his exclusive point of view, the film discourse seems to provide the audience with a different view of Angela, closer to what the spectators had suspected all along. Indeed, the last sequence of the film seems clearly to prove these suspicions: We watch Fefé and Angela in a sailboat when he is back home and finally married to her. His voice-over congratulating himself for his newly found happiness with her controls the sound of the sequence. At the same time, the camera frames him at the boat’s prow looking out at the sea and turning his back to Angela, who is lying in the sun in a very revealing bikini, next to the young sailor who is attending the boat. When Fefé moves closer to her and bends down to kiss her, the camera in a close-up zooms in on one of her feet caressing the young sailor’s foot. At this point, we realize that Fefé has also been fantasizing about Angela, proposing her as a creature madly in love with him. At the end of the film, Angela, thus, seems to be holding a much more independent and realistic view of her relationship with an older, self-centered husband, who is completely fascinated by her beauty and youth. Is the film discourse, then, representing her as providing a sort of feminine retaliation against Fefé’s selfish, arrogant and criminal handling of Rosalia and against his conceited attitude toward women in general? Will Angela, of her own free will, give Fefé the humiliation of realizing that his wife is willfully committing the same transgression of adultery that Rosalia had been set up for by Fefé himself? In a social environment where revenge seems to be highly desirable, such a possibility could very well be contemplated, even if the action of the film stops without providing any further proof of such an eventuality. Comedy, then, also in this case, works as a “deflator of the patriarchal order” and shows a “revolutionary potential” to ridicule and “unseat men from their controlling position.”23 In Sedotta e abbandonata, Germi uses another type of transgression, a rape in another small Sicilian town, to represent the extremes of a society totally dominated by overwhelmingly oppressive patriarchal values. According to Mulvey, in a patriarchal society, woman is reduced to spectacle, that is, to object of male desire and “in herself, woman has not the slightest importance.”24 Indeed, this is what most spectators would think observing the way in which Matilde and especially Agnese are being handled in this film. As it must be clear by now, the basic structure of Italian society is articulated around the family and particularly around the key role that a father exercises there, especially toward regulating and controlling his daughters. Within this system, women are expected to remain virgin until marriage. A girl’s virginity indeed has to be preserved at all costs as the family’s honor, and her own prospects for a good marriage depend on her virginity. Moreover, marriage, in a system strongly supported by property laws, plays an important economic role in the development of family fortunes. Girls therefore become important elements for social prominence as through them a family can make important economic and political connections that will strengthen the family’s position in society. A girl’s virginity represents thus an important asset for her family, an asset that is economic as well as social and especially moral as it maintains a family honorable in the eyes

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of its social establishment. It is indeed upon the obsessive importance given to family honor that Sedotta e abbandonata focuses, an honor that totally depends on the daughters, but that the father believes that only his authority and power can preserve. The protagonist of the story is Agnese, played by the same actress, Stefania Sandrelli, who had played Angela in Divorzio all’italiana. Agnese is raped and made pregnant by Peppino, her sister Matilde’s fiancé. In these circumstances, Agnese becomes the object of her family’s and village’s disapproval and mockery as well as of her father’s rage, as by losing her virginity she has dishonored her family. Agnese does not find sympathy or understanding even from the other women of her family. Her sister Matilde sees her as her own fiancé’s seducer and holds her as the only one to be blamed in the affair. Her mother then, as expected from a “good” wife in a patriarchal environment, is supportive of her husband, as she can feel empowered only by sharing his views. The whole story is presented with an objective camera, even if the rape scene is projected in three slightly different interpretations through the flashbacks of three different characters, Agnese, Peppino, and Agnese’s father. This technique successfully conveys the complexity of relationships among the main characters of the film. Agnese is the best-developed character of the story plot that concentrates on her unfortunate circumstances and the typically patriarchal forms of exploitation and abuse to which Peppino, her father, and her whole society, even the village priest subject her. Peppino exploits her youthful romantic gratification at being desired by her older sister’s fiancé and brutally rapes her without considering the consequences for her, for Matilde and their family, or for himself. Furthermore, when he is obliged to confess his deed, he gives a completely different interpretation, bluntly accusing Agnese of seducing him, a view that Matilde gladly supports. At this point Agnese’s earlier romantic interest for him, turns into open antagonism and, contrary to her father’s will and the advice of the whole community, she refuses the marriage that her father had arranged for her and Peppino. The father, in fact, in order to protect his family honor, had quickly dissolved the engagement between Peppino and Matilde, whom he had conveniently thrown into the arms of another potential fiancé, an ugly and penniless young man from an aristocratic family. Even Peppino and his family agree to his marriage with Agnese, as, according to another revealing article of the Italian penal code, any punishment for a man accused of rape is suspended, if he consents to marry his victim. Agnese’s father does not accept Agnese’s refusal to marry Peppino, and, without her being aware of his plotting, he convinces Peppino to kidnap her, and, together, the two men stage a faked kidnapping with the assistance of Agnese’s mother, sisters, and the whole village, Peppino’s family included.25 Agnese is devastated by this additional act of violence perpetrated against her, and breaks down completely. She falls sick and, while a high fever shakes violently her body, she has a nightmarish dream where she is alone in the middle of the village square, being mobbed by tens of people, who insult and try to hurt her. This experience aggravates her desperation, makes her very unstable, and seems to break down her resistance to her father’s will. Aloud, she recognizes her stubbornness, and asks for her father’s forgiveness. At the same time, she is heard whispering to the women around her bed that she wants to go away, somewhere in

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the North, where she can be independent and find any kind of job. Indeed, even if she’d just find a job as a house cleaner, Agnese felt that to be away from home would be better than living the life her family wanted her to live, with a man she despised and who had no feelings or respect for her. The film narrative at this point continues with the preparations for Agnese and Peppino’s marriage, while her father becomes seriously ill and eventually dies while the preparations for the wedding are taking place. Agnese is thus constructed as an unusual female character, who matures fast from a romantic unaware young girl to a determined woman aware of her own human dignity, and willing to resist even the most violent and cruel attacks against her femininity and self-respect. The film does not propose a happy ending for Agnese and her struggle for self-determination. On the contrary, the film discourse has provided enough evidence that her resistance to the law of the father and to the oppression of her society will not be successful, as that law and oppression are too powerful for one woman to overturn. We are left, however, with the conviction that such a resistance is indicative that women are becoming more aware of their oppressive condition and are ready to resist it, even in such a seemingly unchangeable type of social and family milieu. What is particularly disturbing in the film representation of such milieu is the unfriendly behavior not only of men but also of the other women around Agnese, especially her mother and sisters, who seem to espouse contentedly the patriarchal view of society by which men and their rules constitute the only authority worthy to be accepted. These women indeed feel empowered exclusively by sharing male authority, rather than resisting it. This condition makes Agnese’s resistance even more special and admirable, even if also more hopeless than we would like to believe. Mario Monicelli’s La ragazza con la pistola Shortly after Sedotta e abbandonata was released, another film, Monicelli’s La ragazza con la pistola (Girl with a Pistol; 1968), proposes a similar story equally set, at least partially, in Sicily, but conveying a more optimistic view of women’s resistance against male sexual violence. Also Assunta (played by Monica Vitti) is a young Sicilian woman who is subjected to rape and kidnap by a man, in this case, Vincenzo. The narrative strategy of the story is, however, formulated in a way that allows Assunta to avoid Agnese’s sad, hopelessly unchangeable fate. The main change introduced in this film concerns the male presence in the story. In Assunta’s family there are only women, Assunta, her mother, and her cousin who was actually the supposed victim of the kidnapping attempt. The father’s role with his authoritarian conception of family honor is completely absent here. The daughter therefore, is free here to plan in her own terms her revenge against the violence that she had to suffer. Assunta stands up for herself and arms herself with a gun (as the film title has already implied!). She intends thus to shoot her kidnapper and to pursue her revenge according to Sicilian standards. To accomplish her goal, Assunta leaves her home and family to go and look for Vincenzo in London, where he has escaped to avoid the consequences of his violent actions. Life is not easy for Assunta in London, as Vincenzo keeps avoiding her, and she has to find a job to survive. At the same time, she slowly comes to realize that it is

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up to her to make a new life for herself, even outside her goal to punish her kidnapper. In so doing, Assunta fulfills Agnese’s wish to leave Sicily and make a new life for herself somewhere else, away from her Sicilian environment so closely controlled by men’s violence and injustice. Monicelli’s film, then, taking its cue from Germi’s earlier film, does propose as feasible and successful a woman’s resistance against violence and injustice, as long as she can escape her social milieu and experience a different environment, where the law of the father is not so compellingly controlling her life and destiny. Alberto Sordi’s Amore mio, aiutami! The victimization of women especially by their husbands is a topic often denounced in the films of Alberto Sordi, who is one of the first Italian comic actors to combine acting with film directing. One of Alberto Sordi’s most powerful films on the subject is Amore mio aiutami! (Help Me, My Love!; 1969). The hypocritical behavior of a self-proclaimed “modern husband,” Giovanni (played by Alberto Sordi) is cleverly formulated in a comic mood, which is often darkened by the realization of how abusive a husband can be toward his own wife, Raffaella (played by Monica Vitti). Giovanni is constantly boasting of being a most understanding and rational husband sincerely concerned with the need for real communication and trust between husband and wife. However, as soon as Raffaella confesses to him that she feels a certain attraction for another man, and she needs his help to overcome it, Giovanni reacts very emotionally and starts abusing her verbally, and even physically, in order to make her renounce her interest for the other man. When she reveals that she cannot forget him, Giovanni’s reaction becomes brutal, and he beats her up until she, in pain and all covered with blood, promises that she will try again to give up her interest in the other man. This film accurately highlights the contradictions plaguing this male character, and his total failure to accept his wife as an independent human being who recognizes to have some temporary problems with married life, and humbly asks his help to overcome them. Giovanni’s total lack of understanding and inability to reconsider the strict rules imposed on marriage by a patriarchal, malecentered social system, are the main factors that cause Raffaella to eventually leave him and start a new life with the other man, who shows a sincere understanding and concern for her as a woman. In this case, the wife turns up to be a much more understanding and sincere human being than her husband, who, when she asks him humbly for help, can only approach her as an object in his possession whose control he is not ready or willing to relinquish under any circumstances. Criticism of male authoritarianism in a comic key will become even stronger in the works of some of the contemporary directors—especially of those who combine directing with acting, such as Benigni, Nichetti, and Troisi, whom we will consider in the last two chapters of this book. The art and popular films of the 1960s, both dramatic and comic seem to offer a variety of female characters that go beyond the traditional representation of woman as frail, passive, and submitted to man. Several of these films tell a woman’s rather than a man’s story, as we have noticed in Fellini’s Giulietta degli spiriti, in Antonioni’s

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L’eclissi and Il deserto rosso, in De Sica’s La ciociara, in Germi’s Sedotta e abbandonata, in Monicelli’s La ragazza con la pistola, and Sordi’s Amore mio, aiutami! In these films the male characters do not seem to have any important narrative function, except than to provide a representation of traditional masculinity, sexually very excitable, and unable to maintain any meaningful relationship with a wife, a daughter, or a lover. Moreover, even when a film tells a man’s story, like Fellini’s La dolce vita, Pasolini’s Accattone, and Germi’s Divorzio all’italiana, the man’s story is told practically exclusively through the relationships he has with the women close to him, who become, therefore, essential elements in the narrative structure of the film, like Maddalena and Emma in Marcello’s life in La dolce vita, Stella in Accattone’s in Accattone, and Rosalia and Angela in Fefé’s in Divorzio all’italiana. In the films of the 1960s, then, as we have noticed in those of the 1950s, women stand for a more enlightened view of life and love relationships than their male partners, even if, in this decade as well, their resistance to the pressures of their community’s patriarchal codification is mostly doomed to fail. We found several examples of such failure—that is, Vittoria’s in L’eclissi and Agnese’s in Sedotta e abbandonata. It is important, however, to notice that in this decade especially in the comic films, women may succeed in changing their life, like Assunta in La ragazza con la pistola, and Raffaella in Amore mio, aiutami!, while in the dramatic art ones, they may achieve a better understanding of themselves and their relationships like Giulietta in Fellini’s Giulietta degli spiriti and Giuliana in Antonioni’s Il deserto rosso. Moreover, the filmic discourse in most of the films of the 1960s has stopped agreeing with the disapproving ways their social environment looks at these resisting women, with just a couple of exceptions relating to the representation of motherhood in De Sica’s La ciociara and Visconti’s La caduta degli dei, where mothers (la ciociara and Sophie) are represented as phallic mothers and clearly blamed for their interference with their children’s life. In the other films, women are mostly dealt with in a very understanding and positive way. In Ieri, oggi, domani, another powerful representation of woman-as-spectacle highlights the importance of physical beauty for a woman to succeed in manipulating her masculine partners and weakening their controlling power over her. Comedy, in this decade, fulfills its role of “deflator of the patriarchal order” and continues to have a “revolutionary potential” to “unseat men from their controlling position,”26 through ridicule. Italian cinema in the 1960s is clearly anticipating and expressing the hopes and potential for change and improvement in women’s conditions that the 1970s will convey in Italy’s social and legislative system.

Figure 1. The Temple of Moloch where little Cabiria is supposed to be sacrificed before she is rescued by Axilla and his friend Maciste. Image Courtesy of Fabbri Publishers.

Figure 2. Francesca Bertini as Assunta in Assunta Spina. Image Courtesy of Fabbri Publishers.

Figure 3. A poster of the film I bambini ci guardano with the little boy painfully watching his mother with her lover on the beach. Image Courtesy of Fabbri Publishers.

Figure 4. Anna Magnani as Pina in Roma citta’ aperta. Image Courtesy of Fabbri Publishers.

Figure 5. A poster of the film Stromboli, with Ingrid Bergman in the role of Karin. Image Courtesy of Fabbri Publishers.

Figure 6. Marcello Mastroianni as Marcello and Anouk Aimée as Maddalena in La dolce vita. Image Courtesy of Fabbri Publishers.

7

The Sexual Power Game and Its Impact on Women and Men in the Films of the 1970s

Historical and Cultural Trends in the 1970s

T

he fall of 1968 was the dramatic beginning of a decade of serious social unrest all throughout Italy. It started with the workers strikes, which were accompanied by students demonstrations in sympathy with the workers. Besides economic reasons, other causes were at the core of those demonstrations. They clearly started as a generational revolt against the representatives of a society that had lost all the post–World War II moral and political ideals and had replaced them with abuses of power, materialism, self-gratification, and moral indifference. These manifestations of social discontent were similar in many ways to their counterparts across Europe and especially those in France in 1968. The decade between 1968 and 1978, also called gli anni di piombo or “the leaden years” because of the violence they represented, was politically very restless. Those were the years of a very disturbed nation, constantly scared by terrorist attacks that were aimed at disrupting the state and its institutions. The first of these attacks took place in December 1969 at a bank in Milan, where a bomb exploded, killing sixteen people and injuring an additional ninety. It was not until 1979 that two neofascist activists were prosecuted and found guilty for the crime. After several such sporadic terrorist emergencies, the Red Brigades terrorist group first came to national attention in 1974 with the kidnapping of a Genoese judge. The Red Brigades, with their ultra leftist ideology, denounced not only the Christian Democratic Party in power but also the Italian Communists, whom they considered too moderate and too willing to give in to the requests of their opposition parties in the government. Visconti’s Gruppo di famiglia in un interno (Conversation Piece; 1974) tries to represent the dark and disruptive mood of this troubled social time. The most famous attack by the Red Brigades came in March 1978 against the well-known Democratic Christian leader, Aldo Moro, who had finally succeeded in working out a political agreement between Democratic Christians and Communists that was called compromesso storico (historical compromise). Moro was

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kidnapped and, fifty-five days later, executed. His body was found in the trunk of a car parked illegally in downtown Rome, symbolically halfway between the headquarters of the Democratic Christian Party and of the Communist Party. Other problems that plagued Italy in the 1970s were drug-related crimes, the increase of Mafia’s interference in social and political matters, and bureaucratic top-heaviness and inefficiency. The late 1960s and 1970s saw the rise of political activism of feminist groups in Italy as well as in other European countries,1 and the 1970s also saw the beginning of several important feminist publications, such as the national monthly EFFE (January 1973), and DWF (Donnawomanfemme; April 1973), and Sottosopra, the organ of the Milan Feminist Groups (March 1973). Several feminist demonstrations and organized conferences prepared for and helped pass important legislation during these years, such as the “Reform Law on Jurisdiction on the Family,” which regulated family rights and legally established the juridical equality of the couple and which the Italian parliament approved in April 1975, and the “Law on Equality at Work for Men and Women,” approved in December 1977. Workers unions also became engaged in fighting for the social rights of women workers, especially their right to equal pay and health insurance. The importance of that piece of legislation is well shown in De Sica’s film Una breve vacanza (A Brief Vacation; 1973). In Italian society so strongly encoded in Catholic and patriarchal values, the roles of women have always been expected to be within the family as daughters, wives, and mothers. In the 1970s, however, a more differentiated view of women’s roles in life started to prevail, as Lina Wertmüller’s Travolti da un insolito destino nell’azzurro mare d’agosto (Swept Away . . . by an Unusual Destiny in the Blue Sea of August; 1975) tries to show. There were also changes to the laws in terms of marriage and childbirth. A divorce law was approved in 1970 by the parliament through a compromise measure that permitted divorce in Catholic Italy after a five-year waiting period for both consenting parties. In 1974, the law was challenged with a popular referendum, the results of which did, however, uphold the law. On the issue of abortion, the parliament approved a fair abortion law in 1978, which was upheld by a popular referendum in 1981. Visconti’s L’ innocente (The Innocent; 1975) hints at the different reactions to the question of abortion. Comedy-Italian-style films of this decade deal ironically with some of these women issues, such as Germi’s Alfredo, Alfredo (Alfredo, Alfredo; 1972), which focuses specifically on the issue of divorce, as Germi’s Divorzio all’italiana (Divorce Italian Style; 1961) had already done in the 1960s. Attitudes, of course, cannot immediately be changed by laws and legislation. Male dominance has persisted in the 1970s in Italy despite legal measures and women’s new awareness of their social and private rights. This ambiguous coexistence of contradictory attitudes toward women is visible in several of the films of this decade, especially in those made by female directors or by some of the well-known masters of Italian cinema, such as De Sica, Visconti, and Bertolucci, as well as in the films belonging to the comedy-Italian-style genre.

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Italian Cinema in the 1970s Italian cinema in the 1970s continues to offer a vast variety of art as well as popular films that reflect the cultural trends of their times. Some of the famous Italian male art-film directors seem to show a better understanding of women’s problems in their films of the 1970s. Italian female directors start making films in this decade and become famous even outside of Italy, as is the case with Lina Wertmüller and Liliana Cavani, as we will see later in this chapter and in the next. De Sica’s Il giardino dei Finzi-Contini and Una breve vacanza The most interesting representatives in this decade of the ambiguous coexistence of contradictory attitudes toward women are the films made by Vittorio De Sica. De Sica’s hostile view of women in their search for independence noticed in his earlier films is toned down in his two 1970s films, where he portrays female characters more positively, even if they are still unable to control their own destiny, like Micol in Il giardino dei Finzi-Contini (The Garden of Finzi-Contini; 1970) or Clara, the female factory worker of Una breve vacanza. These female characters are handled by the film discourse in a much more sympathetic way than the female characters in De Sica’s earlier films, such as Nina in I bambini ci guardano (The Children Are Watching Us; 1942) or la ciociara in La ciociara (Two Women; 1961) without being openly blamed for their search for sexual or economic independence. Il giardino dei Finzi-Contini, like some of De Sica’s earlier films, uses World War II as the historical backdrop for its fictional story. In this particular case, faithful to Bassani’s novel of the same name that had inspired it, the film deals with a very influential Jewish family, the Finzi-Contini, from the northern Italian city of Ferrara at the time when racial laws were being enforced in Italy by the fascist regime. The story focuses on the November 1943 roundup of all Jewish citizens in Ferrara. The Finzi-Contini family, the most distinguished and powerful family of the city, is rounded up with all the other Jewish people of the town and shipped to a German concentration camp. Before this tragic moment, Micol, the female protagonist of the story, is presented as a self-reliant and independent woman whose strength, beauty, and sex appeal control the life of the young men around her, especially those of her brother, Alberto, and their best friend, Giorgio. Her search for independence and uninhibited sexuality are here offered as positive traits of her character and are in no way connected with her tragic end in a Nazi concentration camp. On the contrary, in her relationship with Giorgio, Micol demonstrates an unusually generous attitude toward him. She recognizes the strength of his love for her and, yet, does all she can to keep him away from her. In this way, she saves him, as if she had realized even before the events of November 1943 how dangerous it would be for Giorgio to have a meaningful relationship with her, as he would never leave her and would die, too, in a concentration camp. Thus, Micol shows contradictory trends in her character, which reveal a much more understanding and positive consideration of her on the director’s part than of the other female characters in his earlier films. Besides showing excellent

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breeding, intelligence, taste, and culture, she is constructed, on one side, as a very independent, unattached, and sexually active young woman, as her love affair with Malnate, Giorgio’s friend, clearly reveals. On the other hand, she displays very traditional feminine traits (unselfishness and quasi-maternal caring) in her relationships with Giorgio, her brother, and her old grandmother. Micol, then, because of her many special positive traits, escapes De Sica’s usual harsh criticism of women in search of sexual freedom and independence in defiance of the traditional bourgeois morality of their society. Her defeat at the end is not brought about by her female weakness but exclusively by the historical political cataclysm of World War II and the criminal Nazi and fascist ethnic-destructive campaign. Micol stands, thus, as an exception in De Sica’s gallery of frail, guilty, confused, unhappy, and defeated women. Una breve vacanza conveys an even more unusual representation of woman in De Sica’s gallery of female portraits. A larger dose of pathos is added to the mood of the film in the representation of the protagonist, Clara, an ill woman. She is also represented as victim of her own family, where they all—from her unemployed husband, to his mother, and even her small children—take advantage of her in circumstances that are already very unsatisfactory and harsh. They are all southern Italians who have moved to the North of Italy, lured by the prospect of well-paying jobs and an easier way of life, and are unexpectedly confronted by the difficulties of urban life. Clara, the family breadwinner, is diagnosed with tuberculosis and is urgently admitted to a comfortable hospital outside of the city, away from her family, and in a healthy and restful, natural environment. This brief period of hospitalization in the countryside works, then, for Clara as a time not only of medical care and physical rest but also of psychological rehabilitation. Away from her demanding family and exposed to a new, understanding male companionship, Clara can briefly enjoy some form of freedom from the onerous duties imposed on her as wife, mother, and breadwinner. Her sickness and her short hospital stay actually become for her a brief vacation from an existence completely controlled by work, husband, children, and mother-in-law. Unfortunately, vacations do not last forever, and she is soon reinstated into her original routine of factory work and family responsibilities in the city. Sickness, then, is a vacation for the poor, as the title of the film suggests. The protagonist of the film clearly represents the ordeal of a modern woman who is confronted with a full workload outside of the home and, at the same time, is still held responsible for all the family chores that a woman is expected to perform in her daily routine without getting any praise or recognition. The moralistic and unsympathetic approach to independent women, noticed in De Sica’s earlier films, is absent here. Clara’s strength and psychological stability project a new, positive image of modern woman. The film highlights the importance of social reform and medical benefits that can protect women even from their own families and from themselves and allow them, through socialized medical care, to regain their physical and mental health for the benefit of the whole society. The story and message of this film correctly reflect the contemporary reality of women’s political activism of the 1970s. With this very moving story of a woman in need of social protection but fundamentally capable of fulfilling an important role in public as well as in private life,

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De Sica closes his career as a director of films where the narrative action focuses on women. With this film, De Sica seems to discover the causes that prompt women to search for independence from the pressures of their family role; these causes involve the heavy physical and psychological burden placed on them by family life and by what is expected from them as wives and mothers. The questioning process involving woman as wife and mother that had started in I bambini ci guardano seems to end and find its answer in Una breve vacanza. The solution proposed here seems to redeem women and approve of their search. At the same time, the film is pointing an accusing finger at the unrelenting demands that a patriarchal family—husband, children, and in-laws—impose on a woman because of her role as wife and mother without taking into consideration her role outside the family or her rights to her own welfare. Visconti’s Gruppo di famiglia in un interno and L’ innocente The female portrayals that the films of the 1970s provide include some interesting women cast in mother roles. We find some of them in Visconti’s films, such as the Marchioness in Gruppo di famiglia in un interno and Giuliana in L’ innocente. After creating such an outstanding image of the “phallic” mother in Sophie in La caduta degli Dei (The Damned; 1969), Visconti, in his first film of the 1970s, Morte a Venezia (Death in Venice; 1971), seems to reduce motherhood to anonymity.2 It is with surprise, then, that we find in Gruppo di famiglia in un interno another very strong representation of motherhood in negative terms.3 The beautiful and fiery Marchioness, Bianca Brumonti, is the main female character in a story representative of the complex and dangerous 1970s in an Italy deeply affected by terrorism, lawlessness, and violence. The other main characters are the old professor, whose apartment the Marchioness wants to rent at all costs, and Konrad, her “kept boy,” as she calls him, who fascinates everybody with his handsomeness and secrecy. It is around Konrad that the Marchioness’s role as mother becomes entangled. She does not hide her affair with him from her two teenage children, a girl and an older boy who also become closely involved with Konrad. The children themselves try to keep their mother’s relationship with him in good standing so as “not to upset Mummy,” as they put it. We are confronted here with the case of a domineering and fearsome mother whose control over her children is so complete that they, in order to keep her love and attention, have become, contrary to traditional codification, their mother’s protectors. Thus, the mother, instead of being their protector and sparing them the knowledge of her sexual transgression, demands their complicity and keeps them constantly involved in her love affair, while she ignores, in her own self-centeredness, the actual and potentially dangerous nature of the relationship that exists between her children and Konrad. For the old-fashioned professor, such behavior on a mother’s part represents a total lack of basic moral principles that dangerously affects the potential for the younger generation to grow up as socially committed and morally strong human beings. The professor clearly expresses the point of view of the film. The filmic presentation of the children succeeds in revealing them as typical teenagers. Easily

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aroused sexually and fascinated by Konrad’s personality and mysterious activities, they are also capable of understanding and even appreciating a rationally controlled form of guidance, which is what the professor can provide for them. Indeed, it is their idea to make the professor the head of their newly formed family, of which Konrad would also be a part. In spite of the negative view of her as mother, as voiced by the old professor, the Marchioness does not change her view of herself and her children as free individuals entitled to oppose the conservative ways of their social milieu and to search for all kinds of experience, which they can easily afford because of their wealth. Not even Konrad’s tragic death helps to overcome the conflict between the two ideologies expressed in the film, although it does move the message of the film closer to the professor’s view. Gruppo di famiglia in un interno conveys a very dark view of motherhood, inasmuch as its criticism is formulated from the patriarchal view of motherhood as one where the mother is exclusively dedicated to her children. This view does not allow any space for woman to function as a sexual creature. In Visconti’s films, a sexually active woman is always blamed and punished for the fulfillment of her sexual desire, even if she is not a mother (the best examples are Livia in Senso (Sensuality; 1951) and Nadia in Rocco e i suoi fratelli (Rocco and His Brothers; 1960). When the sexually active woman is also a mother, the film discourse presents her in even more heinous terms to give an image of despicable and degraded femininity (like Sophie in La caduta degli Dei and the Marchioness here). Visconti, however, never fails to surprise his viewers and often alters their expectations. This is true particularly with his last film, where we find a completely different handling of motherhood. L’Innocente is Visconti’s last film,4 adapted from D’Annunzio’s homonymous nineteenth-century novel. The protagonist of the story is Tullio, an aristocrat living an idle and dissipated life in nineteenth-century Rome. The story involves several other interesting characters who are already present in D’Annunzio’s novel and that Visconti does not hesitate to subject to considerable alteration, which consequently influences the inner meaning of the filmic discourse. Tullio’s brother, for instance, who in the novel is a very wise and responsible young country gentleman dedicated to the family property to which he administers with competence and effectiveness—quite the opposite of Tullio—becomes, in the film, a dandy an elegant, superficial officer who shares the same kind of dissipated and libertine life that Tullio enjoys. With this change, the film conveys a much more powerful, critical view of the decadence of the aristocracy, which is well in tune with Visconti’s own political beliefs. The two main female characters, Teresa Ruffo, Tullio’s lover, and Giuliana, his wife, undergo changes that are even more drastic. Teresa, who in the novel is exclusively developed through Tullio’s words and thoughts and never acts on her own, becomes a very powerful female character in the film, as she is mostly framed as a very attractive object of desire, not only through Tullio’s gaze, but also through the eyes of her several other admirers. Indeed, Tullio’s attraction to her is increased by the charm she in turn exercises on the other young and notso-young men around her.

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At the beginning of the film, Teresa and Tullio relate to each other within what is known in literary criticism as Girard’s5 triangular setting of desire, with Teresa at the center as the object of both Tullio’s and the other men’s interest. Desire aside, however, Tullio also seems to be strongly motivated by an irresistible need to impose his masculine control over Teresa and against his rivals. On the other hand, Teresa has a sexual power of her own, which she displays through a very strong gaze that she focuses on Tullio and with which she dominates him at least throughout the first part of the film, which is focused on their very passionate love affair. Even the character of Giuliana, the wife, is first introduced in the story exclusively in relation to the love affair between Tullio and Teresa. In this context, she plays a very traditional role as a submissive, understanding, and insignificant wife. In the first scene where she and Tullio are framed together, Giuliana plays a definitive motherly role with Tullio, particularly in her show of understanding for his passion for Teresa. This role is visualized by framing her in medium-length shots in motherly postures toward Tullio. In order to stress this exclusively motherly relationship of Giuliana toward Tullio, the film introduces an important change vis-à-vis the novel by casting Giuliana and Tullio as a couple without children. In the novel, they have two daughters when the story begins. Through this change, Tullio is thus more effectively shown as the only object of Giuliana’s maternal affection. Furthermore, in the novel, D’Annunzio’s Giuliana fits the typical role of a nineteenth-century heroine in her mental and physical frailty. Visconti’s Giuliana, instead, played by Laura Antonelli, is visually presented as a beautiful and healthy creature, which suggests the potential for a personal, inner strength and passionate feeling that is absent in the novel’s character. This potential may already be foreshadowed in the scene that frames Giuliana and Teresa together, clearly as antagonists, with Teresa momentarily holding the upper hand in her standing position looking down on Giuliana, who is seated but whose stately behavior and gaze already give a clue of the change to come. Soon after, Giuliana meets Filippo D’Arborio, a handsome and talented novelist who will be the love of her life—as we will see later in the story—and whose child she will bear. While the first part of the film centers on the love affair between Tullio and Teresa, the second and longest part of it focuses on Tullio’s renewed interest for Giuliana, which is kindled by the presence of the “other” man in her life. In this case, too, Tullio’s attraction for Giuliana is projected as a typical triangular setting of desire in Girard’s terms. This is clearly visualized in two ways: first, through the fencing match between Tullio and Filippo, which is a representation of the antagonism between the two men viewed in high-society terms; and second, through the framing of Filippo’s naked body in the shower as the object of Tullio’s intense ambivalent look revealing the husband’s hatred/attraction for his wife’s lover. Once Filippo disappears due to his untimely death, Tullio’s antagonism turns from him to the child Giuliana is expecting from Filippo. Keeping in mind the triadic pattern that controls the arousal of Tullio’s sexual interest first for Teresa and then for Giuliana, it becomes evident that women acquire value for him only when other men desire them. Through these two different triangular love relationships, Tullio’s sexual attraction is clearly projected exclusively in terms of male power, inasmuch as Tullio’s goal is to prevent the other men from

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possessing the women he believes belong to him. Woman, then, in both cases, rather than representing exclusively an object of man’s sexual desire, is effectively projected more specifically as the object of his control and power. Within this framework formulated in terms of male desire and power, motherhood seems to carve a space for woman—and a much-less-traditional one than we would expect. Indeed Giuliana as mother does not fit easily within either of the two traditional categories of the “good” or the “phallic” mother. Giuliana’s is, in fact, an illicit pregnancy, which within any traditional middle-or high-class milieu would call for an abortion for the sake of keeping up appearances. While Tullio opts for such a choice, Giuliana is strongly against it, setting herself up, therefore, as mother in an antagonistic relationship with Tullio as well as with herself as wife. She indeed proposes to him to renounce her position as wife and dedicate herself completely to her mother role by raising her illegitimate child on her own. Tullio, naturally, opposes this choice. Motherhood for Giuliana represents, then, an option to assert her own independence against her position as wife, which holds her constantly under her husband’s control. It is this control that Tullio will never give up, as a separation, in his view, would phase out his position of power over her in his own household and, consequently, in the society where he lives. The actual presence of the child between them proposes another triadic relationship, one where the child becomes Tullio’s dangerous rival in his search for control over Giuliana. In this tense set up, Giuliana, sensing Tullio’s growing resentment against the baby, misreads it in terms of jealousy rather than of power and hides her feelings for the child. She is hoping that her apparent indifference to the child will appease Tullio and make him accept the child. The tragic outcome confirms that Tullio’s mind functions exclusively in terms of male power. In the scene where he perpetrates his crime against the child, he is projected in a large mirror through a series of full-length shots that build him up through multiple images and tilts to a power position over the cradle and the baby itself. Once “the innocent” is eliminated, the triadic dimension collapses, and Tullio and Giuliana face each other in a last conflict on a one-on-one basis. Giuliana, deprived of her role as mother, finally finds the strength to refuse for good also her role as wife and leaves Tullio, both avoiding thus his control and defeating him in his male power game. In this film, thus, motherhood paradoxically becomes the role that woman can use to challenge her husband’s authoritarianism and to defeat his power games aimed at exclusive control of her. Tullio viewed Giuliana as capable of exerting a dangerous threat to his masculinity through her function and role as mother. As soon as a woman becomes a mother and man recognizes the threat that this condition poses to him, his power, as well as his whole raison d’être come into question, and, for Tullio at least, even his crime is not enough to overcome such a threat. Suicide becomes thus, the only way out for him. After delving into the problem of motherhood in most of his films, only in L’innocente, his last film and a very “resisting” kind of text, does Visconti thoroughly and drastically represent through images, characters, and situations man’s often-unconscious fascination for and fear of motherhood that eventually may drive him to his end.

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L’innocente, like several of Visconti’s films, shows his strong fascination with literary texts, as demonstrated in his earlier films such as Ossessione (Ossessione; 1943), Senso, Il Gattopardo (The Leopard; 1963) and Morte a Venezia. This time Visconti was fascinated by D’Annunzio’s story of self-indulgence and sensual debauchery in a corrupted fin de siècle Roman society. The result is a powerful melodrama where passion, transgression, and crime dramatically mingle together with an impressive cast of divi to keep the audience spellbound to the end and captivated especially by his unforgettable female protagonist in her mother role. Pasolini’s Il Decameron Visconti’s fascination with literary texts was shared by another, younger film director, Pier Paolo Pasolini, as is shown in his films of the 1970s, Il Decameron (The Decameron; 1971), Racconti di Canterbury (The Canterbury Tales; 1972), and Le mille e una notte (The Arabian Nights; 1973). All these films reveal Pasolini’s deep interest for how literary narrative and cinema relate to each other, as they are all adaptations of famous collections of tales from medieval times and antiquity. Pasolini seems interested particularly in medieval and ancient texts, as was the case in some of his earlier films such as Il Vangelo secondo San Matteo (The Gospel According to St. Matthew; 1964), Edipo re (Oedipus Rex; 1967), and Medea (Medea; 1969). What attracted Pasolini most to medieval topics seems to be the powerful and often unexplainable combination of spirituality and physicality that can be found in medieval culture at large. The works he chose for filmic adaptation strongly highlight the importance of recognizing the power that sexuality exercises on human beings and the need for them to recognize it. Collections of short tales, such as Boccaccio’s Decameron and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, proclaim the right for men and women, even within a very religious environment, to accept sexuality and to refuse bigotry or excessive religious indoctrination in order to establish a harmonious social balance. Furthermore, if we analyze Pasolini’s Decameron closely, we again find there his ambivalent view of women, as we have noticed in his earlier film Accattone. In his Decameron, women undertake, on the one hand, a position of authority connected with spirituality and purity, as personified by the Virgin Mary, whom Pasolini, distancing himself from his narrative source, sets up as the beneficent organizer of the whole work. On the other hand, most of the female characters of Boccaccio’s tales that Pasolini chooses to adapt in his film are very sexy and uninhibited creatures who happily accept sex as a natural and important part of their life. The fact that the Virgin Mary is constantly projected as overseeing the choice and organization of these tales that focus upon such freespirited and sexually active women does not seem to affect these characters or the representation of their conduct, which would usually be considered highly questionable at least by a traditional, religious point of view. Such an open-minded narrative function that the film discourse confers on the Virgin Mary reveals Pasolini’s disapproval of the conservative patriarchal system that still ruled women’s lives in his time as well as of the close-mindedness of the Catholic mentality that still dominated the Italian middle class of the 1970s.

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Pasolini, as Boccaccio had done several centuries before him, makes fun of men’s unnatural demand that women should be devoid of sexual instincts in order to conform to the wishes of their husbands or of any other male authority controlling their lives. Peronella and Caterina represent the comic aspect of this critical trend in the film, while Lisabetta’s story provides its tragic connotation, as she has to pay with her own suffering and life for her sexual transgression against the will of her three brothers. She represents the dangers that women may be exposed to by transgressing the laws imposed by male authoritarianism upon their sexual freedom. The message that this particular story delivers is a very strong indictment of the male authoritarianism typical of the patriarchal system. The open display of sexuality conveyed by Pasolini’s Decameron contributed to its enormous success and triggered the making of several other films inspired by the Decameron stories.6 Pasolini had definitely touched a very responsive chord in Italian filmmakers and audiences. As mentioned above, he continued to investigate the healthy power of sexuality in the two films that immediately follow the Decameron, such as Racconti di Canterbury and Le mille e una notte, without, however, combining it with the search for a balanced spirituality that he had displayed in his Decameron. In his last film, Saló, o Le 120 giornate di Sodoma (Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom; 1975), Pasolini moves further toward a perverted form of sexuality, one that breeds violence and death rather than maintains a healthy balance between spirituality and sexuality. His message there is one of desperation, as the filmmaker realizes that the essence of humanity points more and more toward violence and a break between sexuality and spirituality, with spirituality being pushed to the fringe of human existence. Soon after releasing this film, Pasolini was brutally murdered, and his search for a higher form of existence was drastically stopped forever. Bertolucci’s Il conformista and Novecento We have already noticed how Bertolucci’s interest in positioning his characters (women as well as men) within a well-defined historical setting often creates strong self-reliant female characters, as we have seen with Dreifa in Strategia del ragno (The Spider’s Stratagem; 1969). This tendency is particularly successful also in Il conformista (The Conformist; 1972) and in Novecento, where the fascist period provides the historical background in which the story of each film is set.7 Whenever the historical setting is not compellingly part of the characters’ makeup, like in Ultimo tango a Parigi (Last Tango in Paris; 1972) or in Io ballo da sola (Stealing Beauty; 1996), Bertolucci chooses very young women as female protagonists of his films. These characters, because of their youth, escape any type of strong, self-reliant female characterization. In Il conformista, Bertolucci most faithfully adapts from the very popular homonymous novel by Alberto Moravia, one of the most renown Italian novelists of the twentieth century, and conveys a very significant portrayal of how individuals, men as well as women, live under the totalitarian fascist regime. The goal of the fascist regime, as already suggested in Chapter 3, was to sacrifice

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individualism to the total controlling power of the state and thus to foster an ideology nurtured by authoritarianism and violence, which promoted conformity and ignorance. The title reveals the character of the protagonist, Marcello Clerici, and his need to “conform” to fascist ideology. Indeed Marcello, a well-educated, intelligent, young Italian man from an upper middle-class eccentric family, chooses to become a fascist in order to overcome his fear of being different from his peers and “to belong” to a group. In other words, Marcello is the “ideal fascist,” as his goal is to subordinate his individuality to the group and to integrate himself in the fascist community. He is thus conforming to his party’s ideology mostly through elimination of personal initiative and through unquestioning acceptance of the regime’s propaganda. Indeed Marcello shows his passivity in the film by acting usually as a voyeur rather than a doer. This is revealed in the film by the constant use of a subjective camera from his look, projecting characters and situations from his point of view, a technique highly enhanced by a long series of Marcello’s flashbacks that faithfully reveal the story of his life and times as he sees it. Marcello is also conforming to his party’s dictates through elimination of any sense of basic human responsibility or respect for other human beings. Marcello shows disrespect for friends, parents, and, especially women, toward whom he displays the same authoritarian, controlling, and disrespectful attitude typical of patriarchal and fascist ideology. He proves his total acceptance of fascist ideology also by ignoring any sense of personal morality, as he states that he intends to atone for his personal childhood crime (the shooting of Lino, the child molester) with a public crime (Professor Quadri’s murder) officially supported by the state. This lack of a sense of personal moral responsibility is clearly shown when Marcello does not even question the major role he had played in the murder of his former antifascist professor. This type of total commitment to a totalitarian ideology causes human beings to be reduced to puppets who move and act according to the puppeteer’s intention—that is, the state, in this case, in total conformity with its will and unable to distinguish right from wrong and make-belief from reality. Indeed, Marcello is not the only character in the film that shows a dangerous lack of moral responsibility: the priest, who listens to his confession and looks out of the confessional through drawn curtains is another, even more appalling example of this trend. As soon as he hears that Marcello is planning a murder in conformity with the state’s orders, he quickly absolves him, clearly conforming to what even the church was expected to do in fascist times—that is, to accept unquestioningly the criminal acts performed in the name of the state. Conforming to the film’s goal to highlight the overpowering influence of fascist ideology, the two female protagonists, Giulia and Anna, are constantly projected through Marcello’s gaze and point of view. They are actually introduced to the audience in Marcello’s flashbacks with which he reconstructs on the screen the story of his life and of his relationships with other people. Giulia, Marcello’s wife, is presented in the film as the ideal type of fascist wife, whose sex appeal, limited intelligence, and susceptibility to religious pressure make her highly desirable to the men around her. Marcello describes her proudly to his confessor as the

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perfect wife: “perfectly satisfied to limit her activities to her house, her bed, and the church! (“Tutta casa, letto, e chiesa!” is the expression he uses). Throughout the film, Giulia’s portrayal reflects this view of woman projected by Marcello in his confession. Only at the end of the film, when she is presented objectively and no longer exclusively through Marcello’s flashbacks and look, does she seem to be different than what she had been projected to be earlier. She is not the silly, intellectually limited woman projected by Marcello but rather a sensitive, perceptive human being who is well aware of the tragic web that Marcello had spun around his former professor and his wife under the cover-up of their (Giulia’s and Marcello’s) honeymoon in Paris. She also shows a correct perspective of the political uprising against fascism that was taking place in Italy on July 25, 1943, when she recognizes that the end of the fascist regime was close. She shows fear for what could happen to Marcello, while Marcello instead seems to feel that he is still in charge of the political situation and incorrectly views that uprising as just a temporary suspension of fascist rule. The last medium-length shot of Giulia toward the end of the film frames her sitting motionless in a dark room, obviously remembering the past and mourning the Quadris. She thus shows human solidarity for the victims of state violence together with a sense of moral responsibility for their death. Her sense of moral responsibility is very unusual in this type of totalitarian society. Indeed none of the male characters who were actually responsible for their murder ever showed any. Giulia, at the end of the film, exhibits some redeeming qualities as an individual, even if she is mostly constructed as a typical product of patriarchal ideology, unable to stand up against her husband’s will and totally submissive to the fascist political authority that has completely dominated her husband’s life, actions, and thoughts. With Giulia, Bertolucci here gives us the portrait of a sensitive but weak woman. By setting her within the historical times of fascist rule, he proposes her, too, as a victim of such a regime, in conformity with neorealist ideology. Although she seems to yearn for justice and understanding, she is socially and psychologically unable to resist the pressures of her society, which is rooted in a political ideology whereby men need to be violent and to abuse power to prove their manhood. Stopping at nothing to overcome their sense of inferiority, fascist men must prove to their peers that they belong to the select few who are in power. In such an environment, women are too weak to oppose their fascist husbands’ will, even if they are aware of the fallacy of such an attitude. Anna, Professor Quadri’s wife, is constructed as a different, much stronger, and more independent type of woman. She, too, is constantly projected through Marcello’s flashbacks and gaze. In this way, she is portrayed alternatively with masculine as well as feminine attitudes, as if to suggest that even Marcello realizes that she combines masculine and feminine qualities, which make her a much less predictable female character than Giulia. Indeed, Marcello’s reaction to her is often ambivalent. On the one hand, he feels sexually attracted to her, and on the other, he recognizes her as a creature unwilling to bend to his will and desire, and consequently she is potentially dangerous to him. Marcello conveys his sexual interest for her by projecting her twice as a prostitute in his flashbacks when he projects himself looking from behind a curtain into the imposing office of a high-ranking

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fascist leader, and seeing her as the woman to whom the fascist boss makes love on top of his desk. The camera zooms in on her face from Marcello’s eyes, as if to make sure that the audience understands that this is Marcello’s own projection. Later on, when he remembers his visit to a bordello on the Italian Riviera on his way to Paris at the beginning of his honeymoon, Marcello projects again Anna’s image on one of the prostitutes that he meets there as if to emphasize his sexual obsession with her. On the other hand, when he relives in another flashback his first encounter with Anna at her Parisian apartment, he projects her in masculine attire and mannerism: she wears pants and she walks around with her hands in the pockets of her pants, visibly ignoring Marcello. It is as if he recognizes her as an independent and, therefore, masculine creature rather than as a willing female object of his desire. Later on, after she has rejected his sexual advances, he projects her as lesbian when, in another flashback, he looks into his hotel room through a door left ajar to see Anna and Giulia trying the new evening gowns that they have just bought in a fashionable Parisian store. Rather than an exciting fashion-show dress-up on the part of two thrilled young women who had just had a most pleasant experience while dress shopping, what Marcello sees, and the audience with him, is Anna proposing to Giulia and trying to touch her and to make love to her. Within this representation of women through Marcello’s gaze, the audience is often left wondering whether Anna and Giulia are actually involved in a lesbian relationship or whether it is just a figment of Marcello’s imagination in his attempt to protect himself and his masculinity from a woman who had refused his attentions. Eventually Marcello’s ambivalent feelings for Anna are revealed in the sequences in the car where he and Manganiello (his fascist mentor) travel in pursuit of the Quadris toward a special location in the middle of a forest where a band of fascist militiamen are preparing an ambush to stop and murder Professor Quadri. At first Marcello seems upset at the realization that Anna will have to be murdered, too, as, according to Manganiello, “no witness must be allowed to survive the professor’s murder.” Later on, however, when Anna, after watching her husband’s murder, runs up to Marcello’s car for help, he not only refuses to help or speak to her but also locks himself in the car and tries to hide himself against the back seat. After Anna starts running away, he keeps on watching her from behind while her murderers pursue and eventually kill her. Marcello is thus acting here as a coward, indifferent to the traumatic and tragic experience that must be endured by a woman to whom he seemed to be very attracted. This cowardly behavior adds to the questionable portrayal of Marcello as a voyeur rather than a doer and as a vindictive, insecure man who is unwilling and unable to come to terms with a woman who rejected and openly despised him. Anna, therefore, is a resisting woman unwilling to play the role of sexual object of a man’s desire. As men like Marcello view her as potentially dangerous to them, they feel that she must be put down and eventually eliminated. By positioning Anna within a historical setting where her resistance to men like Marcello symbolizes her resistance to fascist tyranny and violence, Bertolucci makes Anna into a heroine resisting not only men’s sexual abuse but also their political and social oppression. Bertolucci also sets his later film Novecento (1900; 1976) within a very sensitive historical time for Italy—the years starting with the early twentieth century

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and continuing through World War I and II—to concentrate its main action on the times when the fascists came to power up to their final fall in 1945. The story develops around two main male characters, Olmo, a peasant, and Alfredo, the landowner, who were born on the same day and on the same estate. They grew up as friends, until their political views of life and relationships divide them drastically. This film, contrary to Il Conformista, is shot through an objective camera, which documents, in a relatively objective way, the social, economic, and political conditions of the time, concentrating particularly on the relationship between the rich landowners and their poor, exploited peasants. In this film, we find two important female characters, Anita, Olmo’s wife, and Ada, Alfredo’s wife. There are also several other interesting female characters, among whom are Rosina, Olmo’s mother, young Anita, Olmo’s and Anita’s daughter who shares her father’s antifascist views, and Regina, Alfredo’s cousin who, once spurned by Alfredo, becomes Ada’s fierce antagonist. Regina marries Attila, Alfredo’s cruel fascist foreman, and becomes his accomplice in all sorts of hideous crimes. Anita is constructed in the most positive way. She is a teacher who dedicates herself to the peasants’ cause and fights next to Olmo for those families whom their rich landowners are unjustly evicting from their poor abodes in the middle of a cold winter. The sequence that conveys the most powerful image of her is when, together with the other female peasants in an act of defiance, she sits and then lies down in front of the military cavalry squad that has been hired by the landowners to charge and disperse them. Her courageous and belligerent attitude, despite her feminine frailty, makes her an unusual female character whose moral strength and social commitment elevate her to heroic status. The song she sings with the other peasant women while they are getting closer and closer to being trampled by the horses’ hooves reveals her ways of looking at herself as a woman. It goes approximately like this: “Although we are women, it does not mean that we cannot fight for justice and for a decent way of life for us and for our families!” Actually, the women’s courage and resistance succeed in stopping the cavalry from trampling them and in suspending, at least temporarily, the eviction process for some of the peasant families involved. Anita’s commitment to assist anyone who becomes the victim of violence and abuse brings her closer to Olmo, who is the most charismatic figure among the resisting peasants. Anita and Olmo, once married, become active in the local Socialist party. Socialism, however, was soon defeated in Italy shortly after the end of World War I, as the new fascist party, campaigning on the “Law and Order” slogan, slowly gained the full support of the Italian upper class. Anita’s life is cut short, as she dies in childbirth leaving Olmo and his mother, Rosina, to take care of their newborn baby girl who will be named after her. Anita is constructed mostly as an independent and politically committed woman and as Olmo’s political partner rather than as the typical wife and mother following Italian tradition. In this case, as he had done with Dreifa in Strategia del ragno, Bertolucci draws a very powerful character of a woman who resists injustice and violence within a specific social and political situation—that is, under a totalitarian regime. Her giving birth to a child, however, shows an attempt to reinstate her within a more traditional role for women in Italian culture—that is, the

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motherly role. On the other hand, death prevents Anita from fulfilling this role, which is immediately taken up by Rosina, Olmo’s mother. This situation ensures that Anita’s main role in the film is that of a resisting woman, representative of a time in Italian history when the forces of solidarity among the underprivileged classes were being crushed by the totalitarian drive of violence and oppression. The other female protagonist, Ada, plays a much more complex female role. When she is first introduced in the story, her aristocratic upbringing is played upon as the defining element to convince Alfredo and his family, especially his mother, that she would be a socially desirable addition that would bring luster to their rich but unsophisticated middle-class family. At the same time, Ada is also shown as a modern, uninhibited young woman with an eccentric behavior that sets her apart from other girls raised in a traditional middle-class milieu of early twentieth-century provincial Italy. She drives a car, she smokes, she loves modern poetry and art, and she lives with Alfredo’s equally eccentric uncle with whom she shares a passion for contemporary painting and a cocaine addiction. It is this aura of eccentricity that drives Alfredo to her and makes him decide to marry and possess her as a precious trophy. He looked at Ada as the tool that would give him all the notoriety and importance that he craved in his provincial, bourgeois environment. Alfredo thus reacts to Ada in the typical patriarchal way in which men view women as possessions and as pleasurable means by which to increase their social status and power. In this way of looking at women, no space is allowed for building a meaningful relationship that might allow a woman to reveal the inner needs, fears, and weaknesses that she might keep hidden to herself and behind the faćade of an eccentric, untraditional behavior. While Alfredo has no clue about Ada’s feelings or identity, the audience starts wondering about her real self in two particular instances early in the film. Ada voices a strong dislike for the fascists when, while driving, she sees a truck full of fascist militiamen in black shirts, probably heading to a vicious act of violence against innocent targets (and indeed they are bound to set the Socialist party headquarters on fire, where some old men who were in the recreation room will become their innocent victims). She actually expresses a desire to become blind to avoid seeing those awful people abusing their power. For a person like her, who belonged to the aristocratic class that the fascist regime had been favoring and courting for quite some time, her obvious distaste for fascist actions and violence suggests that she has a much keener moral and political awareness than meets the eye. Later on, when Alfredo forces himself sexually on her, presuming that she is his uncle’s lover, she surprises him by revealing that she is a virgin rather than the experienced sexual partner he was expecting. These two early, unexpected revelations about Ada make the audience aware of an inner complexity in her character, which Alfredo totally ignores in his typical male indifference toward the interiority of women. Alfredo’s inability to understand the moral, political, or emotional dimension of Ada’s personality eventually brings about a complete breakup of their relationship. Furthermore, Alfredo’s unquestioning support of the fascist regime and of its violent means of controlling Italian people’s lives drives Ada further and further away from him toward a deeper meaning in her life and an alcohol addiction. She finally realizes that their relationship cannot be saved and leaves him for good, disappearing from the screen even before

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the end of the film and before Alfredo can tell her that he has finally dismissed Attila and withdrawn his support from the fascist cause. By that time, the fascists have been defeated and are being hunted down by their enemies. Alfredo himself is being tried by a popular tribunal for his complicity with the fascists and for his inhuman and abusive mistreatment of the peasants working for him. Regina represents another type of female character in the film. Regina lacks the physical beauty that both Anita and Ada display. She seems to be aware of this flaw and tries to compensate with cunning and ambition by which she undermines Ada’s authority in Alfredo’s house and succeeds in obtaining supervisor’s status in running it while pushing Ada even further away from Alfredo and into alcoholism. Regina’s ambition was to marry Alfredo and, thus, drastically change her status as a poor relative who was accepted for charity into the affluent family of Alfredo’s parents. When Alfredo spurns her to marry Ada, Regina’s hopes are shattered and she has to direct her ambition toward another goal while her frustration draws her to revenge. Her involvement with Attila—Alfredo’s foreman, who, as a fascist and a very cunning man, has become the most powerful person in Alfredo’s household—allows her to fulfill in part her ambition to step up to a higher level of importance in Alfredo’s household and in society as a whole. By marrying Attila, who has a very powerful influence on Alfredo and represents the top fascist authority in their social environment, she feels she can stand up to Alfredo and to Ada, especially. In combining her own drive for intrigue and control with Attila’s, she believes that together they will be able to control not only Alfredo’s household but also the social milieu around it. Regina’s calculating attitude stops at nothing and makes her Attila’s accomplice in at least two horrendous crimes: the murder of a young boy, devised in order to frame Olmo, the only obstacle left on their path to total control, and the murder and character assassination of a widow, whose beautiful home they were coveting for themselves. Regina’s negative role as Attila’s accomplice is often underscored by the fact that she is usually presented as the instigator of the crime to be perpetrated rather than simply a follower. Her representation highlights all the elements that make a spurned woman dangerous to society, especially when the one who spurned her is not aware of the consequences of his actions. Alfredo again demonstrates his total inability to understand women when he refuses to reach out for a dialogue with Regina that might have helped to sort things out between the two of them. What we are left with, instead, is a very negative portrayal of an intelligent but ambitious and frustrated woman who at the end of the film meets with a degrading punishment for her part in Attila’s criminal career. The last shot of her is next to Attila’s dead body with the camera focusing with a close-up on her bald head, which had just been shaved by some peasant women as punishment of her earlier crimes. The only important female character that is dealt with in positive terms at the end of the film is Olmo’s daughter, who, because of her vigorous resistance against Attila and his fascist companions, becomes the only female and one of the few happy survivors of fascist oppression. The film, however, does not dwell too much on this female character, which is mostly proposed as an appendix to Olmo’s character. Considering the women we have analyzed in the above films by Bertolucci, we may notice an ambivalent attitude toward women on the director’s part. They are

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often projected as victims of the historical situation in which they live, and, as such, they pay dearly to atone for the danger they seem to represent for men, like Anna in Il conformista in relation to Marcello. At the same time, through death Anna, like her husband, acquires a heroine’s status, for her brave opposition to the criminal ways of the fascist regime. Sometimes, even if they seem to project some very positive character traits that, in different situations, might have helped them to stand up as self-reliant and independent individuals, the pressures imposed on women by the traditional patriarchal environment where they live do not allow them to succeed on their own, as was the case with Giulia in Il conformista and Ada in Novecento. Other times, when a woman shows her superiority, especially at the political level like Anita, Bertolucci does not seem to be able to resist his patriarchal bias and hastens to dispose of her in very feminine circumstances—that is, by having her die in childbirth. Bertolucci, then, as a director seems well aware of the potential that women have to overcome the limitations imposed on them by a strict patriarchal behavioral codification. He, however, finds it difficult to propose female protagonists who carry the narrative action on their own. Indeed, women in his films, in spite of the fact that the narrative gives them ample space, seem to be constructed exclusively in relation to the male protagonists whose stories are the only ones upon which Bertolucci’s films concentrate. Ettore Scola’s Una giornata particolare Fascist historical times provide the appropriate backdrop also for the story of Una giornata particolare (A Special Day; 1977). Una Giornata particolare is a dramatic film where a woman, even if potentially capable to improve her life, is ultimately unable to do so. In this film, Scola ironically cast Marcello Mastroianni and Sofia Loren, very popular Italian divi who were two accepted icons of, respectively, Italian male and female sex appeal, in roles where their sex appeal is downplayed and where they are not what their audience would be expecting them to be: Mastroianni plays Raffaele, an antifascist gay man, and Loren plays Antonietta, a middle-aged, overworked housewife and mother of six, living in Rome in the 1930s during the times of the fascist regime. Antonietta has been brainwashed by the fascist patriarchal propaganda that upheld men as the only authority in the family and in the country. Antonietta sincerely believes that only men make history and that only they have intelligence, while women are only important as sex objects and mothers. In that special day represented in the film, when the fascist regime held a military parade in Hitler’s honor, a parade to which all the Roman citizenry was expected to participate, Antonietta is portrayed as a victimized housewife who has to stay home because of all the chores she has to perform as wife and mother. By chance, on that same day she meets Raffaele, who had stayed home, too, even if for different reasons. Because he is antifascist and gay, he was fired from his job at a radio station, as his sexual preferences were contrary to the fascist ideology so strongly set in an all-male, heterosexual supremacy. With Raffaele, Antonietta experiences a kind of relationship completely new to her,

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as he treats her with respect and understanding rather than as the sexual object that she expected she should exclusively represent as a woman. Raffaele and his defiance of fascist rules make her realize that fascist ideological dogmas should be questioned in the name of human respect and fairness. Raffaele, for instance, believes that his mother, not his father, was a genius, and that she was right in leaving her husband because she was better educated and intellectually superior to him. For Antonietta, then, Raffaele, was defying one of the main tenets of fascist ideology by believing that women are intelligent and even superior to men. His belief in women’s potential gives her a sense of self-respect and self-worth that she has never had before. Unfortunately, at the end of that very special day of their encounter, Raffaele is escorted away by the fascist police to be exiled in a far away island, and Antonietta is pulled back into her housewife routine, where she must cook and clean for her family and passively submit as a sexual object to her husband’s authoritarian impositions, from which she will never be able to escape. Thus, Antonietta, even if she has the potential for change, will never be able to achieve the enlightened acceptance of her role as wife and mother that Luciana, instead, achieves in Scola’s earlier comedy-Italian-style film Ci eravamo tanto amati (We All Loved Each Other So Much; 1974). This failure is partly due to the different historical circumstances in which Antonietta lives compared with Luciana and also to the fact that her fascist husband is far from being the special, sensitive, and respectful man that Antonio, Luciana’s husband, is for her. The dramatic mood of the film has thus created a much less successful type of committed woman than the one that Scola creates in his comedy-Italian-style film, which we will consider later, among the comedy genre films of this decade. The Films of Lina Wertmüller Practically all of Lina Wertmüller’s films deal brilliantly, in dramatic as well as in comic terms, with unusual characters and situations and fascinate their audiences with a delightful combination of irony and sentimentality.8 Wertmüller, however, faithfully following her mentor Fellini’s example, constantly submits her female characters to the overwhelming pressure of the patriarchal ideology that controls Italian culture and cinema. Most of her female characters, at their best, play traditional roles as wives and mothers or are presented as prostitutes who are exclusively destined to serve male sexual needs. She does try to weave her films around female characters who seem to suggest a resistance to women’s traditional roles, but, before the end of the film, she cages them back into the most traditional roles set by the patriarchal system (like Fiore in Mimì metallurgico [The Seduction of Mimi; 1971] or Salomé in Film d’amore e d’anarchia [Love and Anarchy; 1973]) or makes them exhibit the most common characteristics of masculine behavior, like the typically male instinctual drive for power and violence. Examples of this trend are the cruel Nazi commander of the concentration camp in Pasqualino settebellezze (Seven Beauties; 1975) and Raffaella in Travolti da un insolito destino.9

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Mimi metallurgico Mimi Metallurgico is the first film where Wertmüller portrays two different types of women that will be found again in most of her later films. Mimi is the male protagonist. He is a young Sicilian working man played by Giancarlo Giannini, whose naïve socialist ideology makes him very unpopular among the Mafia bosses who own the sulfur mines of the village where he works. In order to escape their mistreatment, Mimi leaves his village, wife, and family and goes to Turin, the northern Italian industrial city where southern workers could easily find jobs because of its booming economy. There, Mimi meets Fiore, a beautiful girl who impresses him as being very different from the southern Italian women he had known in Sicily, and who is played by Mariangela Melato. Fiore is an economically independent woman; she has her own flower business and her own apartment where she lives alone, unwilling to share with any man her relatively well-off private life. However, Fiore also seems to accept the traditional Catholic dictates of patriarchal society when she boasts that she is still a virgin and proud to be so, as she would be ready to accept sex only within marriage. Fiore, then, at least at the beginning of the film, strikes us as an independent woman, capable of living on her own and with her own clear view of life and relationships. Mimi is very taken by her and, although he has already a wife in Sicily, ends up marrying her and getting her pregnant. From then on, Fiore is framed in the traditional roles of wife and mother and loses her identity as a free spirit. She eventually even accepts to leave her life in Turin and to follow Mimi to Sicily, where he will keep her hidden away with her baby while he attempts to fulfill the typically southern Italian male role of vindicator of his honor. He has, indeed, learned that his Sicilian wife has had a child by another man, and he has to find a way to minimize this blow to his virility and to his family honor. The way Mimi chooses to take his revenge is just as bizarre as the reaction he has to the sexual relationship of his first wife, whom he had easily abandoned and forgotten once he met Fiore and from whom he was by then totally estranged. Mimi decides to punish his wife’s seducer by seducing and impregnating this man’s wife, Amelia. Amelia is the first of the fat and ugly women that Wertmüller insists on bitterly ridiculing, by framing on the screen in unflattering shots. The lingering close-up of Amelia’s enormous behind is a clear example of Wertmüller’s dislike for a female physique that does not fit the standard codes of female beauty. To focus on such excesses with such an implacable camera reveals this female director’s unwillingness to deal with women as individuals. This preference of hers for unflattering generalizations and ridicule in her representation of women is very disturbing, as it seems to reveal a misogynist view of women even more deeply felt and vitriolic than the one shown usually by Italian male directors in their portrayals of women on the screen. The reduction of characters like Fiore from an independent woman to a submissive and passive traditional type of woman together with the cruel ridiculing of character traits like Amelia’s physical ugliness will be trends that Wertmüller will display in most of her films.

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Film d’amore e anarchia What seems to be Wertmüller’s most successful and innovative female character is Salomé, the Roman bordello prostitute of Film d’amore e d’anarchia,10 who, like Concetta in Fatto di sangue . . . (Blood Feud; 1978), appears at first to be a selfreliant and successful woman standing on her own and yet, by the end of the film, ends up as a submissive and defeated creature. Film d’amore e d’anarchia, like Fellini’s Le notti di Cabiria, deals with the topic of prostitution in a story set in fascist times under the regime’s strict policing of prostitution through controlled bordellos, a practice legislated to provide politically accepted outlets to fascist males’ virility. This particular space (the bordello) logically entails the presence of several female characters, even if the underlying network of the narrative action requires a male protagonist around whom the female characters develop their supportive roles. The male protagonist is Tunin (played by Giancarlo Giannini), a naïve and sensitive young man from the countryside who is profoundly traumatized by the political assassination of his best friend, an exiled anarchist charged with the task of plotting Mussolini’s assassination, who is killed by the fascists as soon as he goes back to his native village in northern Italy. Even if he had never evinced any political interest prior to this moment, Tunin, upset by his friend’s murder, decides to take his place, goes to France for training, and is eventually sent to Rome to accomplish his friend’s mission. His contact in Rome is Salomé (played by Mariangela Melato), the beautiful prostitute who lives in a bordello and as such has become the favorite of one of Mussolini’s top men, the vociferous, over virile Spatolini. Salomé is assigned to assist Tunin in finding accommodations while he is in Rome and eventually in planning the final details of the Mussolini’s assassination plot. Salomé is thus simultaneously constructed on two levels. As a prostitute she willingly plays the part of the woman as sex object, consciously setting herself up as the object of the desire of men and especially of Spatolini, whose virility is constantly upheld as the motivator of his sexual dependency on her. Salomé, as a committed antifascist, plans to exploit Spatolini’s dependency on her for hers and Tunin’s political, rather than sexual, goals. Thus, Salomé, up to this point, is constructed in very innovative terms—as a rational, calculating, and politically committed woman— who consciously uses her body to further her own political convictions in spite of her profession, which stigmatizes her exclusively as a passive object of male desire. The story she tells Tunin about her own life actually closely intertwines her political commitment with her present profession. After witnessing a mob of fascist militiamen brutally killing her young boyfriend and destroying his family, she takes over the task of avenging his death. She leaves her city to come to Rome, the center of the fascist regime, to put her plan into action. For sure, a young woman in those times did not have many choices for economic survival beyond joining a fascist bordello, which she willingly does in her search for means to accomplish her revenge. She then becomes the most sought-after member of her bordello, especially for the “fascist pigs” whom she accommodates and eventually makes dependent on her sexual performance. Salomé’s controlling role is visually portrayed by framing her in full-length shots in a domineering position on the top of

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the stairs of the bordello looking down on the men who are waiting for her and vociferously proposing herself as the best practitioner of sex while the men silently file up to follow her. When Tunin arrives in Rome, he finds her ready to assist him in his assassination plot, and she shows courage and determination, even as she is aware of the great risk she may undergo if the plot is unveiled. At the same time, Salomé also shows a tender side of her calculating character in her compassionate understanding of Tunin’s situation, his fears, and his frailty, and his need for affection and protection in such a dangerous and important moment of his life. His relationship with Tripolina, another prostitute working with Salomé, reveals this need, which he also clearly verbalizes to Salomé herself. Tripolina is in love with Tunin, who becomes emotionally dependent on her and allows her to dream of getting married to him and having a normal life together. Tripolina, as a woman in love, fights ferociously to keep Tunin and her dream of love alive and overcomes Salomé’s political intention. Tripolina’s words convincingly oppose politics and war and are indicative of a feminine voice with which Salomé can’t help but agree. At the end of the film, Salomé indeed recognizes the weaker, typically feminine side of her own character when she is faced with Tripolina’s resolution to keep Tunin from his projected assassination attempt and imminent death. Salomé gives in to Tripolina’s will in spite of the fact that she resents it, as she realizes that, because of it, her political commitment is silenced. Indeed, when Tripolina voices her typically female view of politics as useless and of war as the main cause of death for men and sorrow for women, Salomé adds an even more passionate condemnation of war as the destroyer of human lives and hopes. Realizing then how such a feminine view of war and death contradicts her politically antifascist commitment, she ends the argument with a self-deprecating view of herself and all the other women around her. “They are right,” she states, “when they say that one should never trust a prostitute!” The positioning of Salomé as an individual politically committed to fight for a better and more just way of life is thus displaced at the end of the film by Tripolina’s exclusively emotionally inspired goal to keep her man alive. Once Salomé accepts Tripolina’s point of view, together they stop Tunin from accomplishing his political mission. However, the whole situation deteriorates abruptly. When he realizes that he has overslept and has missed his appointment with death, Tunin embarrassingly vents his frustration against the two women and starts shooting at the police officers who are chasing him. Eventually, he ends up in the hands of Spatolini, who has him brutally killed. By the end of the film, even if the two women are still on the screen, the audience cannot identify Salomé, as she is in front of her bordello in a group of women confusingly moving and yelling against the police chasing Tunin. Salomé, then, at the end of the film, steps down from her spirited and uniquely superior position as an intelligent, self-aware, and all-controlling individual with a politically correct commitment. She is visually reduced to a hardly identifiable prostitute among the other anonymous prostitutes in front of their bordello’s door and destined to play the role of a woman as object of male desire forever and without any hope to change neither her life nor her society for the better. Thus, even Salomé, the most

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innovative resisting female character created by Wertmüller, is reduced, at the end of the film, to anonymity among prostitutes, a well-fitting image within a totally patriarchal ideology. Travolti da un insolito destino nell’azzurro mare d’agosto . . . A similar situation seems to be reserved for Raffaella, the authoritarian, Milanese well-to-do woman, who is the mover of the action in Travolti da un insolito destino . . . , at least for the first part of the film, where she authoritatively regulates the life of her husband and of all the guests she entertains on board of her luxurious yacht cruising the Mediterranean sea. By constructing Raffaella in such a way that her will and voice dominate life on the yacht, Wertmüller is clearly formulating woman in masculine terms and making her the controlling force for all individuals living on her yacht, the members of the crew included. By constructing her husband as a weak male figure, the film discourse suggests that Raffaella’s masculine role in their relationship is a consequence of her husband’s weakness, reminding us of the similar marital situation we have found in Antonioni’s Il deserto rosso with Giuliana and Ugo. Several comments by characters in the film express this view, together with a strong criticism of such inversion of roles, thus confirming the film discourse’s agreement with traditional patriarchal role playing in which man should be the authority in a family and woman should accept and submit to his authority. Eventually, since this traditional role playing is not possible in that type of social environment, the action of the film needs to propose another male-female relationship to repeat and strengthen its message in agreement with a patriarchal gender hierarchy. Raffaella, played by Mariangela Melato, is shipwrecked on a desert island together with one member of her yacht crew, the southern Italian Gennarino (played by Giancarlo Giannini), who, in the first part of the film, had often voiced the strongest criticism of her because of her authoritarianism, thus showing his deep-seated belief in the importance of a strong male figure in any male-female relationship. Indeed, this new relationship between Raffaella and Gennarino works according to traditional role playing, as Gennarino in this new environment does not hesitate to establish his authority upon Raffaella based on what is supposed to be the natural order of life—that is, with a physically strong man able to adapt to and control nature. He thus takes over as the film’s action mover and the only provider for their basic needs while his voice controls their relationship, placing Raffaella definitively in a secondary role under his total control. At this point, this pattern of control establishes itself in their sexual relationship, which is formulated in equally patriarchal terms, as Gennarino reveals how much he is taken by Raffaella’s beauty and sex appeal while Raffaella is completely overcome by Gennarino’s overpowering virility. She tells him that he is the only real man she had ever known sexually, implying that her former sexual relationships had never satisfied her the way he has. She goes as far as to confess to him that she is sorry for not having given herself to him as a virgin so that he could have for ever branded her as his only possession. With such an authoritative and virile male figure and an accepting and controlled female partner, the male-female relationship proposed here is in total

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agreement with the patriarchal order of natural survival. To stress this point, the film plays visually on an “earthly paradise” representation of the island where they are shipwrecked. The perfect natural background of the place, with its wide white beaches, its intensely blue, peaceful sea, and luxuriously green vegetation, becomes the focus of the director’s photographic interest, while the two main characters are visually projected as exclusively bound to a natural, primitive way of life where sex and natural instincts prevail. Thus, the film, with this wholly positive rendition of natural life away from civilization, clearly proposes the patriarchal message by which gender relationships can be harmonious only in a primitive, natural environment devoid of any social constraint. There, the man is the master and the woman accepts her own role as a submissive creature, exclusively dominated by her instincts and contented by being sexually satisfied by her partner’s primitive, unbridled virility. In this way, it becomes clear that the type of relationship that ties Raffaella and Gennarino on the island can last only within this natural, primitive background away from the civilized world. Such a world is indeed founded upon a class-division pattern where human relationships are based on social conventions that control sex and instinctual gratification and where money, class superiority, and social success are the ultimate goals of human life. The film then proposes the well-known binary opposition between nature and civilization, conveying a confused message for what concerns gender relationships, as here the “perfect” natural world that the film and its director clearly seem to privilege proposes gender relationships in obviously patriarchal terms: with woman willingly subject to man. On the other hand, civilization, which the film ridicules and criticizes, seems to offer women a better choice to prove themselves as equal to, if not better than, men. In spite of the film discourse and its director’s obvious preference for the natural environment of the island and for its patriarchal conditions, Raffaella, after having at first accepted those conditions willingly and happily, eventually refuses them and chooses to live in the civilized world within her family and social class. Raffaella, indeed, showing her better understanding of their condition as social beings, foresees the danger of returning to the type of social context where they had lived before and tries to convince Gennarino to live on the island forever. Gennarino, instead, with his obsessive male need to control his woman and also perpetuate his control over her in a social context, wants her to choose him publicly over her own husband and against her social situation and succeeds in getting the attention of a yacht that is sailing near their island, leading to their rescue. Once back in civilization, Raffaella cannot resist the pressures of her social obligations to her husband and her class. while Gennarino refuses his own obligations as husband and father and tries to plan for Raffaella and himself to return to the island. Some of the ending sequences of the film well portray the fundamental difference between the two: the poor sailor whose life revolves around the sea and the rich city woman who belongs to a highly sophisticated and modern world. The camera moves on two levels, alternatively following Gennarino with a down tilt, and Raffaella with an up tilt. Gennarino runs up and down the peer of his little village, cursing her desperately, while Raffaella is flying back to her world looking down from her husband’s helicopter with sadness and resignation on the little figure of the man on the peer. The last sequence fixes Gennarino in his role of natural man

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on a boat sailing toward the open sea and to their island, still cursing the woman who, by leaving him behind in her helicopter, had refused the natural paradise of the island and natural life with him. By coordinating the film story with the basic philosophic conflict between civilization and nature, Wertmüller very suggestively focuses the spectators’ attention on it and questions the role of civilization in gender relationships by highlighting the positive value of nature in bringing out a harmonious relationship between a man and a woman profoundly different in the way they normally think and conduct their life. This difference, however, cannot be cancelled in the “real” world of civilization and comes back again to destroy their dream of a harmonious, satisfied life in nature. Wertmüller seems to propose her usual message—that woman is better off and happier whenever she is subject to man and sexually satisfied. This is then the view that this film and its director propose of women, ridiculing them whenever they try to escape from such a role and establish their own control on the world around them. Pasqualino settebellezze A very different context, even if with a similar message, is created in another equally well-known and admired film by Wertmüller, Pasqualino settebellezze, where the attention is again focused mainly on a male character, Pasqualino (played by Giancarlo Giannini) and on his view of life and women. Contrary to Tunin in Film d’amore e d’ anarchia, Pasqualino, a southern Italian, is decidedly devoid of any political idealism. He was raised by a single mother together with his seven sisters in the poorest neighborhood of Naples, which was controlled by unscrupulous Mafia bosses whom the boy soon aspires to imitate in his search for self-gratification and social control. Pasqualino is a survivor, one who would stop at nothing in order to make a living or simply to keep on living, as the song that is the leitmotif of the film keeps on repeating “tira a campá,” which in English may be translated as “Try to survive!” His behavior in the concentration camp shows him as a survivor at all costs. The point of view of the film is Pasqualino’s, a male point of view, even though the director is a woman. This is made visible not only by the fact that all the narrative action of the film concentrates on Pasqualino but also by the fact that the film consists of Pasqualino’s flashbacks through which he relives his past and expresses his thoughts so that we, too, the spectators, view the actions and the other characters through Pasqualino’s eyes. In this way, the film proposes a strong malecentered view in which Pasqualino sees himself as the controller of the women in his own family like the southern male characters of Germi’s films that we have considered in Chapter 6. This control is also connected with the obsession he has for “the family’s honor,” which, according to Germi in Divorzio all’italiana and in Sedotta e abbandonata (Seduced and Abandoned; 1963), is a male prerogative that depends completely on the women’s behavior, which consequently men do everything to control. Indeed, Pasqualino tries desperately to control his sisters’ sexual behavior, and particularly Concetta’s, the older sister, who, according to him, should behave properly to set a good example for their other sisters. Unfortunately for Pasqualino, Concetta is

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involved with one of the mafiosi of the neighborhood, who first makes her his lover and coerces her into becoming a showgirl in his low-class vaudeville theater, and then, realizing she has no talent, convinces her to enter a bordello, always with the promise of marrying her if she does what he wants from her. Concetta is thus constructed in the film as naïve and submissive to her lover’s control with a romantic vision of love that causes her to be easily duped. The film discourse, however, does not stop there in portraying Concetta but keeps on depicting her in degrading terms, especially in the sequences where she plays the showgirl on the stage where she becomes an object of ridicule. Indeed her physical appearance is quite different from what one would expect from a showgirl. She has a plump and unattractive body and moves awkwardly on the stage, showing neither acting skills nor seductiveness in her movements. Furthermore, she cannot sing, and her male spectators pitilessly laugh and hiss at her, highlighting her poor appearance. The director, with this presentation, just as she had done with the representation of Amelia in Mimi Metallurgico, obviously proposes that any woman who does not fit the traditional aesthetic requirements could be an object of ridicule. In so doing, she looks at women in exclusively misogynistic terms.11 In several of her films, Wertmüller shows a strong interest in portraying ugly women, thus hinting at the need for a nontraditional consideration of a woman’s physical appearance. Unfortunately, however, she never goes beyond the most obvious representation of such a type of woman through ridicule, which has been typical of many Italian film directors before her. In Pasqualino settebellezze, Wertmüller uses another female character to represent a different type of ugly woman by brilliantly converting the Nazi commander of a concentration camp from a traditionally male figure to a female figure. This female Nazi commander here has indeed all the qualifications of any Nazi commander of a concentration camp. She has life-and-death power over all the camp prisoners and is in total control of the whole camp, including its male guards. Her gaze is constantly a domineering one and her voice echoes all over the camp, while, appropriately, the external music used for the sequences panning over the dismal conditions of the prisoners is taken from Wagner’s epic, The Nibelungen Saga, as if to underscore the deadly power of the German war machinery. This musical connection with the representation of the female commander of the concentration camp is disturbing, however. The valkyrie women have been generally viewed as heroines who chose to fight, oppose, and even kill men for the cause of female independence from men’s unjust oppression. Here, instead, the female commander exercises her deadly power and kills men to uphold the genocidal Nazi war against the Jewish race. Is Wertmüller here suggesting that Nazi and valkyrie ideals are the same and that any type of killing for an ideal, whatever this ideal may be, can be elevated to the sublime level of epic heroism? Personally, I have difficulty in accepting this suggestion, and I prefer to interpret the connection between the female Nazi commander and the valkyrie in an ironic way. That is, by building the female commander up to an epic dimension with music, the director wants to make sure that the downgrading of her image in her supposedly romantic encounter with Pasqualino will be even more ridiculous. It is the commander’s power that Pasqualino is fearfully aware of, and, like so many women have done and still do in similar situations, the only compromise

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that he sees possible in order to survive in those hellish conditions is to prostitute himself. The gender relationship that is being projected here is a clear reversal of the traditional male-female role playing where it is usually the case that a weak, powerless woman offers sex to an all-powerful man. The game here, however, is still the same: the weak partner (in this case, a man) involves the stronger partner (a woman) in a sexual play, whereby, through sex, the former gets some material reward that alleviates the hardship of his living situation. That is what Concetta had done earlier in the film, which Pasqualino, obsessed with male control over family women and male “honor,” had violently criticized and contrasted. Now, instead, it is his turn to view the world from the weak partner’s viewpoint. He even succumbs to the romantic view of love that his mother had inculcated in him since he was a little boy and that Concetta, too, had shared in her infatuation for her fat mafioso seducer. At that time, Pasqualino could not accept that view, as he had to prove his manhood and his patriarchal control over his family women. Now the situation has changed: it is Pasqualino who finds himself in dire conditions, which he hopes to alleviate by offering sex and covering up his needs with romantic words. He calls the commander “enchantress” and paints a sentimental picture of himself dying of love for her. The commander is clearly far from being convinced by his oratorical exploits. She sees through his conniving story, and, yet, she does not seem to dislike the possibility of having some quick, unexpected sex, and, making sure that she is still in control of the situation, she provides Pasqualino with some food and orders, “Now you eat and then you fuck!” and “If you do not fuck, you’ll be killed!” Luckily for Pasqualino, the Italian male-virility syndrome overcomes his physical weakness as well as his evident sexual disinterest for the unappealingly massive commander in men’s underpants. Stripped of her uniform, the female commander abruptly falls to the level of ridicule from the epic, heroic level she had enjoyed earlier when she drops also her underpants and takes up supposedly sexy positions first on a chair and then on a sofa. The camera mercilessly frames her powerful thighs and massive torso while she is waiting for Pasqualino to perform. While the visual representation clearly aims at ridiculing the woman, her voice dominates the room in her long diatribe against Pasqualino, whom she calls “sliding worm without ideals or convictions,” and in favor of her own superior race (whose downfall, however, she foresees). After Pasqualino has performed, she gives him more food and announces that she is making him the leader of his barrack. To restrain Pasqualino’s sense of triumph, however, she orders him to give the name of six prisoners from his barrack that will be killed the next morning, and she threatens that if he does not comply, all the prisoners in his barrack, including him, will be put to death. The female commander has now again turned into the controller of the prisoners’ lives, and her dangerous, unquestionable power is reinstated while she, again in uniform, turns her powerful back to Pasqualino, who, sitting on the floor, is eating out of a bowl like a dog. The sexual interlude is over, and the concentration camp situation is reinstated with the female commander again in full control. Pasqualino, like all the male prisoners of the camp, is reduced to a lower-than-human condition completely under her power. Pasqualino settebellezze, then, can be seen as a film that attempts to rescue women from their traditional, submissive position and represent them as powerful and in

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control of men. It also sets men in an unusual position by showing them needing to prostitute themselves just as women usually have to do in order to survive. The end of the film also seems to suggest that men can learn how to live differently once they have experienced the hopeless type of life that women constantly face in their inescapably controlled existence. Indeed, Pasqualino, once he is back home after the end of the war, is aware of what his sisters and even his mother do in order to survive in post–World War II Naples, but now he chooses to ignore it and does not feel threatened in his male “honor.” Furthermore, he does not hesitate to marry the little piano player who has waited for him all these years, even if she, too, has had to become a prostitute to eat and survive. Pasqualino, then, has learned to put aside his obsessive patriarchal urge to control and discipline women in the understanding that anyone, male or female, when experiencing certain drastically difficult circumstances may have to prostitute his or herself in order to survive. Pasqualino settebellezze, then, as well as Film d’amore e anarchia, shows the potential that this female director has to look at gender relationships in innovative, untraditional ways. Unfortunately, her approach is still so deeply rooted in Italian patriarchal tradition and still so greatly influenced by the great male directors of Italian cinema that, most of the time, her attempts to create film heroes and heroines who fully resist the laws of patriarchy are not successful, even if Pasqualino here is a powerful exception. Fatto di sangue fra due uomini per causa di una vedova Fatto di sangue . . . is another example of Wertmüller’s interest in representing gender relationship in an innovative, untraditional way without, however, constructing a fully resisting female character. This is the story of a widow, Concetta (played by Sofia Loren), who, while professing she still loves her dead husband, becomes involved with two other men. She states that she has made love to one of them, Rosario (played by Marcello Mastroianni), out of gratitude for his saving her from being raped by the villain of the film, the fascist mobster who had murdered her husband under her very eyes. Her other lover is the young cousin of her dead husband, Nick (played by Giancarlo Giannini), who has just come back from the United States where he had emigrated in search of work. Nick, who has always been in love with Concetta, out of jealousy and the mistaken belief that she has been out to see her other lover, brutally rapes her and wants to take her back with him to New York. The film seems to be highlighting the destructive violence of the Sicilian environment at the beginning of the fascist dictatorship. It opens with the murder of Concetta’s husband at night in their poor abode. He is struck in bed by a burst of gunfire; Concetta survives by throwing herself on the floor and has a miscarriage. The film eventually closes with a bloody slaughter at a port where hundreds of poor Sicilians, Concetta and her two lovers included, are on the point of boarding a ship for the United States in order to expatriate and escape the hard Sicilian life and the fascist oppression. A large group of fascists interrupts the boarding and starts firing indiscriminately at the people there—women, children, men, and the elderly—to avenge their boss’s attempted murder in which Nick is implicated.

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Both Concetta’s lovers are killed in the exchange. Once more, Concetta is left to cry over her dead partners. This time, however, she is still carrying the child she has conceived with one of them; which one of them, however, the two men and the audience are never allowed to know, as she herself adds to the ambiguity by telling each one of them that it is his. Nor is it made clear whether Concetta will actually leave for the United States on her own now that Nick, who had conceived of the idea for the three of them to expatriate to the United States, is not with her any longer, or whether she will go back to her home and continue living the same life she had before meeting her two lovers. Throughout the film, Concetta projects herself as a strong and independent woman who is capable of taking care of herself and her own life even after her husband’s traumatic death. The film discourse, however, seems to contradict this projection, as Concetta is not able to stand up by herself against the sexual advances of the film’s villain, who would have actually succeeded in raping her if Rosario had not intervened. Later on, Concetta again becomes the victim of another man’s, Nick’s, violence, but this time she has no help, and she cannot avoid being raped by him. Concetta’s story, then, projects the film director’s deep conviction that women in no way can exist and function satisfactorily on their own without the protection of a man. By ending Concetta’s story in practically the same way that she had started it; that is, by having her witness her men’s murder and by portraying her alone, without showing which choice she will make about her life, is the director trying to suggest that Concetta will have again to suffer and probably be subjected to abuse and violence? We, the audience, are not given enough clues to propose a different interpretation of Concetta’s future life. At the end of this examination of several of Wertmüller’s most important films, we are left with the regret that such a gifted and brilliantly innovative director has never intentionally concentrated on creating a fully developed female subject capable of standing on her own and of resisting, to the end, the pressures of the patriarchal codification of women’s roles in society. The clear message of all of her films is that women on their own lack the strength to overcome the hardships of life, which only men with the power of their connections and money can overcome. If a woman wants to survive and win out in such a power-controlled world, she has to be under the protection of a powerful man. That’s why we have a gallery of potentially successful, intelligent, and apparently self-confident women who, however, miss the right male connections to win, like Salomé in Film d’amore e d’anarchia, who, in order to succeed in her correct ideological conflict with fascism, could count only on Tunin, a sweet, sensitive man devoid of the power needed to defeat a whole political regime. Thus both Tunin and Salomé are defeated, as along with Concetta, her husband, and her two male partners of Fatto di sangue . . . , as they are unable to stand up to fascist aggression. Only Raffaella of Travolti da un insolito destino . . . among all of Wertmüller’s female protagonists ends as a winner, flying high in the sky in the helicopter belonging to her husband whose connections and financial power she decides to hold on to in order to win in the power-controlled world that she well knows. In Wertmüller’s case, then, the fact that she is a female director does not make any difference, as her outlook on gender relationships is as male oriented as most male directors, and we certainly cannot find a definitive female gaze in her camera

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handling, even if she succeeds in creating male characters that resist the traditional male need for power and control typical of patriarchal codification and display a much less aggressive, more feminine bent for tenderness and sensitivity, as we have seen in Tunin of Film d’amore e d’anarchia, in Rosario of Fatto di sangue . . . , and in Pasqualino after his concentration-camp experience in Pasqualino settebellezze. Liliana Cavani’s Films Liliana Cavani is the other female Italian director who became famous and internationally acclaimed in the 1970s. Most of Cavani’s films, like Bertolucci’s, share an interest in stories set in a specific historical reality well known to her spectators.12 These films,13 however, also show an unusual approach to such a reality, mostly dictated by Cavani’s interest in representing women as erotic objects that become the focus of the camera and consequently of their spectators’ voyeuristic attention. This representation of women as erotic objects solicits a voyeuristic pleasure in the audiences by creating powerful erotic images that are able “to overwhelm and ravish, to enlist a voyeuristic pleasure of almost any subject, no matter how monstrous.”14 Il portiere di notte To this effect, Cavani’s Il Portiere di notte (The Night Porter; 1974) is a particularly disturbing work because of its voyeuristic effects that undermine any historically objective representation of the Holocaust.15 The action of the story takes place in Vienna in 1957, just after the end of the Russian occupation of Austria, which made it possible for Austrian ex-Nazis to return to their hometowns without fearing for their lives. The story centers on a group of such ex-Nazis who have settled in a Viennese hotel close to the opera house, either as permanent guests (like the old countess and the dancer Burt), as occasional ones (like the professor and the doctor), or as hotel staff. Max, the male protagonist of the film, is one of the latter, the night porter of the title. These ex-Nazis, all guilty of concentration-camp atrocities, meet occasionally to set up fake trials for each other in order to uncover and destroy all evidence of their Nazi collaboration and, if necessary, to do away with any witness that might still be able to bring evidence against them. At the opening of the film, it is Max’s turn to be brought to trial and both the professor and the doctor register at the hotel for such an occasion. At this point, an extraordinary event occurs: Max is faced at his desk with the appearance, among a group of operagoers, of Lucia, a survivor from the concentration camp. Lucia is now married to a successful American conductor engaged in a directing tour of the most prestigious opera orchestras of Europe. The two recognize each other in a concise series of alternate medium-length and close-up shots of both of them, and the shock of this recognition is effectively conveyed through their reactions: confusion and momentary loss of self-assurance for Max and anguish, withdrawal, and fear for Lucia. This encounter between Max, the ex-Nazi officer, the victimizer, and Lucia, his “little girl” as he called her—that is, his victim—triggers a whole series of flashbacks that introduce the audience

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to the characters’ experiences in the concentration camp. These flashbacks alternate violence and eroticism in a succession of images that clearly “enlist” what has been called “a voyeuristic pleasure” out of the concentration camp experience, “no matter how monstrous”16 such an experience may have been. Cinematically such a result is achieved through a very sophisticated use of the camera, which first synchronizes with Max’s own look through his own camera obsessively focused on Lucia’s young, naked body. Lucia’s erotic appeal for Max and the spectators following his look is highlighted by her being framed within a large, anonymous group of equally naked but older prisoners totally devoid of any physical attractiveness. Lucia thus becomes erotic spectacle and remains such at a more perverse level of erotic tension closely associated with violence in another flashback where, besides being framed as the object of Max’s look, she also becomes the target of his gun. In these sequences, the film manipulates the spectators’ gaze with an even closer association with Max’s gaze, thus constructing a connection between the spectators’ reaction to Lucia and Max’s sadistic approach to her. The effect of these images is very powerful in its combination of eroticism and violence, strong enough indeed to elicit in the spectators a voyeuristic pleasure that brings them to what Kristeva saw as the “borders . . . where desire and degeneracy mingle.”17 Indeed this seems to be the predominant reaction that the film solicits from its spectators in visually constructing a concentration-camp experience exclusively in terms of eroticism, perversion, and sexual violence. At a certain point, the two controversial protagonists are framed in an opera house setting, where they exchange foreboding glances. Lucia is sitting in the front row behind her husband, who is directing Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute, while Max, a few rows behind, intensely looks at her and provokes her to glance back. All throughout these sequences, music and singers provide the sound, while the opera audience silently and impassively listens. The same music and singing also provide an unexpected sound background for the flashback showing a dormitory space in the concentration camp, set up on a two-level perspective with a front and a back stage with its own audience. While the front stage, with its two beds well in sight, is where the action takes place, the back stage is reserved to the audience of prisoners who silently and impassively— just like the opera audience—look at what is going on in front of them. The film spectators, in turn, follow their gaze and discover once again that the action here, too, combines sexuality and violence. Under the looks of both the internal and external audience, a Nazi officer, still wearing his boots, sodomizes a young male prisoner on one of the beds, while Lucia, lying on the other bed in a prisoner outfit, watches them as impassively as the other prisoners in the back stage. The camera then slowly focuses on her, revealing Max’s look that appears suddenly next to her in a white doctor’s gown. The sequence ends by combining again the look of the prisoners on the back stage and that of the film spectators while they all watch Max leading Lucia, who is hardly able to walk, out of the dormitory. The next time we see Lucia, she is framed in a medium-length shot with her hands tied over her head, sucking on Max’s fingers as a prelude to her sexual initiation to his sadistic erotic games. These particular sequences succeed in creating very disturbing connections among the several audiences of the film through the objects of their look that propose one common theme: love. The opera audience that is part of the

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action of the film in the present is watching and listening to a eulogy of romantic love. The prisoners, on the other hand, in the flashback that is a recollection of the past, are watching a Nazi soldier in uniform sodomizing a male prisoner and another Nazi in a doctor’s garb picking a female prisoner up and taking her with him away from the common dormitory, possibly for sex. The same internal opera music and singing are played as external music for the concentration-camp flashback, and the outside film audience, who watches both present and past happenings, can’t help but wonder about the connection created by the music between the two internal audiences: the opera house spectators and the concentration-camp prisoners. Is the type of sexual intercourse being performed in the dormitory of the concentration camp to be identified with the romantic love eulogized in sound and action on the opera stage? Is there some type of ironic innuendo about love in general ending in an equation that condemns both love and audiences? That is, if romantic love is accepted in the present by the bourgeois well-to-do audience of the Viennese opera house in the same way perverted love was accepted in the past by the prisoners’ audience in the dormitory of the concentration camp, what is the external audience left with but to wonder about the ambiguity of such a message? As spectators, we are faced with the blurring of moral boundaries and with what Montgomery calls “shallow finalities and, still worse, reason for voyeurism.”18 These effects are even more evident in the last flashback. Here Lucia, now completely under Max’s sexual control, is framed as a cabaret entertainer performing for Max and other Nazi officers. Her skinny adolescent body is completely naked from the waist up, her small breasts showing between black suspenders holding a pair of oversized uniform pants. Her attire includes a Nazi officer hat and long black gloves. Her provocative movements and deep, sexy voice obviously “overwhelm and ravish” the inner audience of the film—that is the Nazi officers—for whom she becomes “erotic spectacle” in her exhibitionistic role. Moreover, Lucia, in her role as entertainer, also becomes an erotic object for the external audience of the moviegoers who look at her not only through the eye of the camera but also, in this case, through the look of the Nazi officers watching her within the film. Her seductive appeal is then confirmed also by the external audience resulting in a disturbing identification between the external spectators (us) and the internal spectators (the Nazis). If we reconsider the play of images and gazes that has been articulated in the several flashbacks reconstructing the concentration-camp experience in this film, we do not hesitate in admitting that, as a film, Portiere di notte has hardly been able to aid us in arriving at an objective criticism of the historically disastrous event of the Holocaust or of the dangerous social threat posed by Nazism. The insistence on the erotic power of the image of Lucia, the “victim” framed as erotic spectacle, clearly suspends a correct critical evaluation of the historical reality of the film by offering, in its stead, “shallow finalities and, still worse, reason for voyeurism.” What makes me even more uneasy with this film is its controversial manipulation of the spectators’ gaze that ranges from mere ambiguity in the identification of different audiences through their passive stand to open identification between Nazis and us as spectators through the common search for erotic pleasure. The eventual death of the lovers that concludes the “sentimental idyll”19 into which the story of the sadomasochistic relation between Max and Lucia has been reduced seems

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to close the film on an even stronger “shallow finality,” exalting romantic love between victim and victimizer. With this sentimentalizing stroke, the film chooses to ignore the victimizer’s criminal responsibility for the physical and moral injuries perpetrated against his young victim. Another very disturbing message of the film is conveyed by practically wiping out the Nazi criminal responsibility for the atrocities committed against humankind by limiting them to the evil-doing of a small group of deranged misfits. Al di là del bene e del male Al di là del bene e del male (Beyond Good and Evil; 1977),20 like the earlier Portiere di notte and the later Interno berlinese (The Berlin Affair; 1985), presents an all-controlling manipulative form of love. The two main characters of the film, Nina and Enrico,21 are accomplices in the murder of Nina’s mother, who is also Enrico’s wife. In spite of this, they share victim-victimizer fantasies. Through most of the film, Nina plays the role of victim of Enrico’s possessive and manipulative love, but, by the end of a long flashback, she is revealed as an even crueler victimizer than Enrico. She confesses to have plotted to lock him in prison in order to control his sexual activity and to keep him all to herself, as she would be the only woman allowed to visit him in prison, and to bind him tighter to her through the financial assistance she provided him there. This twisted type of love is, however, often referred to by the lovers themselves as a romantic type of love, and, at the end of the story, it turns into a “sentimental idyll” that tends to suspend the audience’s moral indignation for the lovers’ cold-blooded murder of the person who was supposed to be most closely associated to each one of them respectively as mother and wife. The cover of romantic love, then, is again used here to neutralize a socially unacceptable type of crime and to disguise a clearly deviant type of love. When Nina meets a younger man, Matthew, who becomes very attracted to her and wants to establish a serious relationship with her, Nina is not ready for him. Matthew’s more “normal” type of love for Nina is often ridiculed and viewed by both Nina and Enrico as an intrusion into their well-established sadomasochistic relationship. At the end, this type of relationship wins over the “normal” one and Nina leaves Matthew to follow Enrico back to Morocco. In this case, a sentimental excuse is used by Nina for her choice when she tells Matthew that Enrico now is old and needs her to take care of him even more than he did before. The charge of violence and eroticism that conditions Nina and Enrico’s relationship is visualized in some of the types of entertainment that Nina as a tourist guide offers to her clients at night. The most effective in its combination of violence and degradation is when she takes Matthew to a room in a cheap hotel where the camera, with a long pan, shows an audience of well-dressed and well-to-do women and men silently watching a man and a woman copulating on a bed. Most of the spectators seem untouched by such a show, except for a young woman in jeans, who, apparently sexually aroused by the sight, tries unsuccessfully to entice her boyfriend into some form of lovemaking. Disappointed, the girl looks around and one of the Moroccan attendants comes to the rescue and starts touching and kissing her passionately, until she, too, responds equally passionately. When the boyfriend tries

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to stop them, the Moroccan man threatens him with a knife and stops him. With the same knife, then he cuts the back side of the girl’s jeans and quickly sodomizes her, holding her tight in front of him so that she cannot get away even if she, obviously in pain, tries to. The inside audience looks away in embarrassment and keeps silent even in front of this sexual encounter, which strikes us, female spectators, as particularly violent, painful, and degrading for the woman involved. The camera, instead, remains focused on the act and especially on the satisfied expression of the Moroccan man, while practically ignoring the girl, as if to underscore her lack of importance now that the man’s sexual urge has been satisfied. The camera’s indifference for the young woman seems to imply a critical reprimand of her for having revealed her sexual needs and thus having behaved improperly for a woman in a traditional society, even if the specific situation in which she revealed her sexuality was far from being a traditional type of social event. On the other hand, the film discourse often reveals Nina as an erotic object on which the camera lingers at length with different types of shots, especially in her meetings with Enrico. They often start violently, with him beating her, and then turn into sexual encounters with passionate kissing, disrobing, and, in one case, explicit lovemaking. Al di là del bene e del male, then, proposes woman as an erotic spectacle with which to manipulate the spectators’ gaze and reactions and to titillate them erotically with images of women being disrobed, sexually aroused, and penetrated. Even if these images are not used as a cover-up of a monstrous historical reality, like the Holocaust in the Portiere di notte, they are used as means to titillate the audience and consequently to numb all the moral and social reactions that they may experience toward Nina and Enrico’s crime and deviant love affair. In Al di là del bene e del male, Nina plays an important role, as her point of view, however influenced by the male protagonist, is essential in the development of the action of the film and especially in sublimating her deviant love for Enrico into a “sentimental idyll,” which he also accepts as an excellent excuse to keep her bound to him.22 Comedy-Italian-Style Films The social conditioning of women is often highlighted by films made in the 1970s by directors who are well-known among the comedy-Italian-style subgenre group, such as Pietro Germi, Mario Monicelli, Dino Risi, Ettore Scola, and Alberto Sordi. Germi’s Alfredo, Alfredo If Sedotta e abbandonata has projected a very negative view of southern Italian society and family life under the authority of the father, Germi’s later film, Alfredo, Alfredo, extends the harsh criticism of the family to the main female character, Mariarosa. She is Alfredo’s first wife, who is projected with an antagonism typical of the strongly misogynist type of Italian literature that originated in the Middle Ages under the influence of Catholic dogmas and their unfriendly view of women. In this film, Germi avoids the obviously patriarchal Sicilian milieu he used in his

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two earlier films and sets the story among the supposedly more enlightened middle-class society of contemporary northern Italy. In spite of this change, the view of Italian society is not a positive one. The discourse of the film, by constructing a very weak male protagonist, Alfredo, and an excessively self-righteous and domineering female protagonist, Mariarosa, highlights the problems that seem to arise from this type of weak masculinity and strong femininity, thus suggesting a yearning for the traditional male-ruled family system and its networks of exclusively pro-male ruling regulations.23 By disapproving of a family dominated by a woman’s ruling, Germi is establishing a clearly negative message against excesses involving not only the Sicilian social milieu, traditionally viewed as the most backward and antiquated of the whole country, but also the excessively liberal northern Italian social milieu. Like in Divorzio all’italiana, most of the story is recounted through the male protagonist’s point of view as he relives his unhappy marriage experience with Mariarosa in a long flashback with his voice-over. Alfredo, however, is constructed not as conceited or arrogant as Fefé, probably because of his middle-class social milieu. Alfredo, indeed, is a middle-class young man who has a steady job in a bank but who is emotionally very insecure and afraid to establish any long-lasting commitment with any woman while he still lives apparently very contentedly with his father. Because of these character flaws, Alfredo hates making decisions and adopts a seemingly easier “no change/no problem” philosophy of life. These flaws make Alfredo a rather comic character, hardly aware of what’s going on in his life or in other people’s lives and unable to understand himself or the people with whom he gets involved. While the camera, following his eyes, reproduces what he sees around him, his voice-over clearly reveals the limited grasp he has on what he sees. In this case, the woman as wife is constructed according to the fears and misunderstandings that the male protagonist has of women. Mariarosa thus, while being a frustrated, self-righteous, possessive, and neurotic woman, becomes a monster through Alfredo’s eyes, out of his own emotional and intellectual weaknesses. Eventually, pressed by the worsening condition of their marital relationship and unable to make any decision to change his situation, Alfredo is driven to another woman, Carolina, who seems to be sensitive, intelligent, and capable of enjoying and appreciating both her work and her life. Alfredo’s life improves, and, supported by her, he finds the courage to file for divorce from Mariarosa. But he still has to deal with the Italian legal system and the requirements of the newly introduced divorce law, still rooted in Italy’s profoundly embedded Catholic ideology. The absurdity of the legal system’s regulations is highlighted when, once he has left Mariarosa and walked out of his house, he is charged for not fulfilling his marital sexual duties with his wife, and his girlfriend is subpoenaed in court for disrupting the institution of marriage by having a steady relationship with him. Carolina highlights this incongruity by asking the court whether she would have been found guilty if she had been a prostitute who had just had a temporary encounter with Alfredo. As expected, the reply was that as a prostitute she would not have been charged. Mariarosa and Carolina are, then, two very different types of women who, however, both show the same strong desire for finding a husband that their society

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enlists as the primary goal for a woman’s life. Carolina’s interest in marriage, however, rather than caused by a passive acceptance of the social codification imposed on women by patriarchal standards, seems to develop out of a deeply felt, intelligently, and even humorously expressed, personal need for companionship on equal terms, and Alfredo shares her view. Even if the film ends at the specific time in which Alfredo, once divorced, and Carolina make arrangements for their wedding, the film seems to end on a much lighter and more positive mood than the one it started with. This seems to suggest that Alfredo’s new matrimonial experience with Carolina might be more successful than his first one especially because of the truly well-balanced relationship Carolina seems to be able to establish with him. Carolina indeed seems to represent the self-assured, intelligent and clear-minded, modern Italian female type, more suitable to a contemporary society that looks forward to a drastic change in gender relationships and in the position of women within and without the family. By constructing his female characters with such a sensitive awareness of their social and psychological problems, Germi may well be viewed as the first master of comedy-Italian-style who shows a real understanding of women’s difficult conditions of life in Italian society as well as of their potential for change. His films seem to suggest a more positive and inspiring way to construct women on the screen and uncover their rich potential for bringing change into male-female relationships and for creating a new, healthier, and fairer society. In the 1970s, comedy-Italian-style continued to be a very popular genre, increasingly focusing on the main shortcomings of the Italian society of the times, especially on the unfairness of the condition of women in a very Catholic and patriarchal environment. Comencini focused on this specific topic in several of his films, and we will discuss here one of them below. Mio Dio come sono caduta in basso! Mio Dio come sono caduta in basso! (Until Marriage Do Us Part; 1974) gives a perfect representation of the unhappy situation in which a woman can find herself once a very strict Catholic upbringing has deprived her of any type of real mindopening education. Such a strict Catholic upbringing would make any woman afraid of any normal sexual drive, to which she would react exclusively in terms of sin and guilt. In the role of Eugenia, the female protagonist of the story, Comencini cast Laura Antonelli, one of the most beautiful and sexy Italian dive of the 1960s and 1970s. The film is set in Sicily again, like some of Germi’s films, but it also shows some features typical of the “on-the-road” film, as its main characters are often on the road and away from their Sicilian hometown. The action of the film starts in 1920, but the story goes back to the 1880s with Eugenia’s parents’ story. As in Divorzio all’italiana and Alfredo, Alfredo, the technique used to tell the story is a long flashback, in this case from the woman’s point of view. The flashback corresponds to what Eugenia wrote on her diary and is commented on by her with her own voice with some additional flashbacks provided by her father’s diary. Eugenia’s flashback starts and ends in the present of the

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film’s story (1920). Eugenia is constructed at first as a naïve, innocent, and obedient young, aristocratic Sicilian woman who, when still a child, had lost her mother and was later abandoned by her aristocratic father to the care of an old spinster aunt and a Catholic Bishop uncle (Monsignore), who raised her in a convent in the strictest and most close-minded fashion according to their strong religious beliefs thus succeeding in making her afraid of sex and convinced of her own female frailty and instability. Eugenia lives in the convent up to the day of her wedding, hardly knowing what to expect from marriage. To prepare her for her wedding night, Monsignore arranges for her to consult another old, single aunt of hers who was the only person in the household who had had a sexual relationship in her youth (an illicit one) for which she had been ostracized by her relatives and eventually locked up in her room all her life. In spite of the terrible punishment to which the old aunt had been submitted for her “sin,” she still conveyed to Eugenia her unabated enthusiasm for what was still for her (and not surprisingly so) the most pleasurable experience of her whole life. With her story, then, the old woman influences Eugenia to idolize love without ever connecting it with normal sexual gratification of natural physical needs. Eugenia, by objectively recounting her life within the walls of her aristocratic mansion in Sicily under the control of her conservative and close-minded relatives and by highlighting the excesses of such a controlling influence on her life, reveals the danger of a strict religious education for women who are thus kept in total ignorance in matters of sex. Eugenia’s naïve, uncritical recount of her own victimized existence, even if kept on a very light comic tone, offers a strong indictment of church and aristocracy as social classes wholeheartedly embracing the concept of the superiority of men and the unquestioning authority of the patriarchal social order that breeds men’s empty exaggerate rhetoric, boundless self-centeredness, and unfairness toward women. When, on their wedding night, Eugenia and her husband Raimondo are told that they are brother and sister and consequently, according to their Catholic upbringing, that they cannot have a normal marital relationship, the network of patriarchal rules and regulations that control Eugenia’s family and the whole Sicilian society surfaces with often comic effects. Raimondo refuses to reveal to anybody that they have not had regular sexual intercourse on their wedding night, as he knows that if he does, the whole community would consider him impotent, an insult that no Italian man, and especially no Sicilian man, can ever accept. For the same reason, even if he emphatically repeats that death has to be the only solution to their problem, Raimondo makes clear that it cannot be his own, as his death would also be interpreted as a proof of impotence on his part. It must, therefore, be Eugenia’s death, although he does not pursue it as he fears that the society might think that it might have been caused by her desperation at the realization of his impotence. This whole sequence is handled as a strong satire of Italian men’s obsession with their virility, which reveals their exclusive concern for themselves and their total indifference for their female partners. Eugenia, given her total ignorance of sexual relationships and needs, is indeed left very confused at what makes a difference between a marital relationship and a brotherly one, and she despairs of ever experiencing real love! This fear will be the center of her troubled existence from then on. Indeed, while yearning constantly for a romanticized, idealistic

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type of love, Eugenia experiences strong sexual drives that she can never accept as the natural physical expression of love and that she considers exclusively sinful because of the strict religious indoctrination she underwent in her childhood. When she realizes that her virginity is viewed as an obstacle by the Frenchman who was the first to arouse her sexually, in a fit of desperation at the thought that she might be a virgin forever and never experience the romantic love that she has been lusting for all her life, Eugenia attempts suicide by ingesting a large dose of mouthwash, mistaking it for poison. Once she has overcome her ordeal, Eugenia has still to face her Monsignore uncle to whom she feels compelled to confess her weakness, thus causing his indignation, not for her suicide attempt, but rather for her sinful sexual drives and especially for her unwillingness to remain a virgin. In order to increase Eugenia’s guilt, Monsignore, with the assistance of several explicit religious paintings, delivers a very emotional sermon on the heroic deeds of all those women in Christianity who had not hesitated to submit to martyrdom rather than losing their virginity. After Monsignore’s spirited “J’accuse!,” Eugenia is even more confused and overwhelmed by the conflict raging inside of her between her all-too-powerful sexual drives and the dogmatism of her religious training. Naturally, under such strong psychological stress, Eugenia becomes even more susceptible to any type of influence that might tip her precarious balance toward either side of the conflict that is tearing her apart. A new male character enters Eugenia’s life at this point. He is Silvano,24 the driver hired by Eugenia’s husband to drive her around in order to fulfill all the good deeds that Monsignore has assigned to her in order to atone for her “sin.” Silvano will be the agent that makes it possible for Eugenia to finally lose her virginity and satisfy her sexuality. Eugenia thus has a sexual relationship with Silvano, the man whom she always calls “Plebeian” with contempt, as he belongs to a much lower social class than hers. Even if their relationship is sexually very satisfying, Eugenia feels it is extremely sinful and has to confess her transgression to her Monsignore uncle, who severely reprimands and punishes her for it, locking her up again within the walls of the convent where she had spent her youth. At the same time, Monsignore, in order to avoid the scandal that might ensue and greatly hurt his aristocratic family in case the relationship is made public, takes great care to have Silvano disappear for good from her life. With the assistance of some of the nuns of the convent where he used to drive Eugenia every day, Monsignore accuses Silvano of stealing some precious silver objects and has him prosecuted and charged for theft. The class conflict is here highlighted by exposing the aristocratic class as uniquely preoccupied with their own interests and ready to use all means, lying and cheating included, in order to achieve their goals. The critical handling of the Sicilian aristocracy is here extended to members of the Catholic Church, such as Monsignore and the nuns. They are projected as devoid of moral values in their attempt to destroy an individual belonging to an underprivileged class exclusively for the purpose to avoid a scandal that could be dangerous for the reputation of an aristocrat and her family. Eugenia seems to want to be fair with her lover when in court she proclaims that he has always performed his duties well. Her fear of displeasing her uncle and husband prevents her, however, from proclaiming his innocence and so she

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becomes her uncle’s accomplice in his punitive enterprise against Silvano. She seems actually relieved by Silvano’s disappearance, as she believes that, once he is gone, she will not feel any more sexual drives and will not fall into sin again. It is evident that Eugenia sees the unfairness of the charges against Silvano, and yet her weakness and inability to stand up to her uncle make her as hypocritical as he is so that, by concentrating exclusively on the danger that her sexual drives pose to her Catholic conscience, she chooses to ignore the plea of an innocent man. This episode effectively reveals the unhealthy influence that religious dogmatism can exercise on individuals and society and how it can influence the creation of a world devoid of basic human values, such as honesty and understanding, and controlled exclusively by the power of money and class. After this experience, Eugenia leaves Sicily and undergoes several other experiences that disappoint her and make her wonder about the meaning of her life. In an effort to break the impasse of her unusual marriage, constantly under the threat of incest, her aristocratic upbringing combined with her romanticized view of love brings her to espouse the Decadentist ideology of the times. This movement, through D’Annunzio’s influence, was spreading the belief that superior “chosen” individuals were not supposed to be bound down by the laws or social obligations imposed by the legal and moral systems of the time. Eugenia and Raimondo, who were both D’Annunzio’s enthusiastic followers, proclaim themselves superior, “chosen” individuals who have the right not only to ignore the religious and social laws that condemned incest but also to enjoy their incestuous relationship and finally consummate their forbidden marriage. Before they can realize their intention, Eugenia’s Monsignore uncle informs them that their relationship is actually not incestuous, as new evidence has revealed that they are not brother and sister and that it is perfectly legitimate for them to consummate their marriage. Such a normal, legitimate type of relationship, however, is absolutely of no interest for Eugenia and Raimondo, who, in their role of superior “chosen” individuals, can be aroused sexually only if they experience what is forbidden and transgress the established laws. Each of them then takes a separate road away from the other and they are actually separated by World War I, which had just been declared and where Raimondo promptly enlists to fight with the hope to die in battle and thus become a hero worthy of eternal glory. This hope only partly materializes, as he does die in battle without, however, gaining the hero status that he had hoped for. Consequently, Eugenia becomes a young widow, still unhappily dreaming of that romantic love she had never known. Eventually after the end of the war, she returns to Paris, where her diary, together with her long flashback over her life, ends, while she plans suicide again by jumping to death from the Eiffel Tower. Eugenia’s plan, however, is put on hold by the unexpected arrival of Silvano, her former driver and lover, who she fears has come to take revenge on her for her earlier betrayal. Silvano has a different purpose in mind, which he explains to her in a very plain language, very different from her highly rhetorical and contorted verbal expression. Eugenia seems to appreciate his approach and accepts his offer of love and peace, thus renouncing her decadent, elitist view of herself as “superior” or “chosen.” The film ends thus on a hopeful message of potential understanding

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and communication between Eugenia and Silvano as individuals and also as representatives of two different social classes that up to that point had had very little in common to share, besides sex. The fact that the basis of the successful relationship between these two very different individuals is the strong sexual attraction that they feel for each other seems to convey another important message, especially for what concerns Eugenia, who, at this point, seems to have finally overcome her religious indoctrination and the fear of sex that had dominated her all her life. The film’s ending seems to fully accept the message that Pasolini conveyed in his episode films of the 1970s, especially in Il Decameron and Racconti di Canterbury (The Canterbury Tales; 1972). It highlights the importance of accepting sex and of enjoying one’s sexuality as an important human natural drive essential for a healthy, normal way of life, if one is capable in ignoring the oppressive, traditional religious regulations that held sex exclusively as sin. The ending of the film makes clear that Eugenia has finally learned this lesson, especially if it is compared to the shameful and hypocritical way with which she had previously reacted to her own sexual drive and enjoyment. This was clearly caught by the camera in the earlier film sequences when, after her first sexual encounter with Silvano, Eugenia instructs her maid to rub forcefully her beautiful body in order to thoroughly clean it. The cleaning is clearly a spiritual one that would deliver her from sin, rather than a physical one, as she insists on keeping her long gown on in the bathtub, which the maid ironically suggests she takes off if she really wants a good body wash. When, at the end of the film, Eugenia finally accepts Silvano’s love, she also overcomes her overromanticized view of love, renouncing the excesses that such a view had provoked in her inner feelings and verbal expressions. Comencini, with this portrait of Eugenia, seems to have a very good understanding of women’s ordeals in Italian society. He shows his belief in the potential for women to develop into independent individuals capable to lead satisfactory lives, even when their earlier education had weakened their self-esteem and had taught them to feel shameful for any type of sexual pleasure they might experience. This film thus successfully represents the message conveyed by the advocates of the sexual revolution principles formulated in the late 1960s. Ettore Scola’s Comedy-Italian-Style Films Another equally important master of the comedy-Italian-style subgenre deeply interested in the unfairness of women’s conditions in Italy is Ettore Scola, who extends his concern for the plight of women both in comedy-Italian-style films and in dramatic films, such as Una giornata particolare and Passione d’amore (Passion of Love; 1981). Among Scola’s comedy-Italian-style films, the most significant for what concerns the topic of this book are C’eravamo tanto amati (We All Loved Each Other So Much; 1974) and I nuovi mostri (The New Monsters; 1977), a nine-episode film that Scola made in collaboration with Mario Monicelli and Dino Risi, two other very well-known comedy-Italian-style directors.

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C’eravamo tanto amati In C’eravamo tanto amati Scola conveys a very forceful portrayal of Italian society from the end of World War II to the 1970s through the story of the friendship of three former Partisan Resistance fighters. Gianni, Nicola,25 and Antonio’s war-time experience becomes the most significant event in their lives, even if they grow apart from one another in later life. Gianni, the handsome, intelligent, sophisticated lawyer sacrifices his social commitment and leftist integrity for a life of leisure and capitalist power. Nicola, an idealist teacher, sacrifices his family life to his conceited and unrealistic belief in his intellectual superiority. The strongest male character in the story is Antonio, a hospital nurse, who combines a strong sociopolitical commitment with a solid understanding of the importance of cultivating and maintaining meaningful human relationships. Antonio is also the character who provides the comic situations in the story with his spirited and accurate ability to focus on the incongruence of life. He is also handled comically when he withdraws within a common-sense realistic attitude in front of Nicola’s conceited argumentations or of Gianni’s self-celebrating recriminations. The two important female characters26 in the film are Elide, Gianni’s wife, and Luciana, who becomes Antonio’s wife after having been romantically involved with Nicola and Gianni. Both these female characters, especially Luciana, are constructed as they undergo a process of significant transformations toward a revealingly complex and rich imaging of modern women. Elide is first introduced to the audience through Gianni’s eyes when she walks into the living room of her house where Gianni is explaining to her father the reasons why the senior partner of his law firm and himself cannot represent him legally in one of his highly questionable dealings. Elide is then represented as an unattractive young girl, overweight and clumsy, who is obviously attracted to the dashing and handsome young lawyer. Her naïveté and clumsiness increase throughout the whole sequence until she actually stumbles and nearly falls while waving good-bye to Gianni and, with an even more embarrassed expression, tries to explain the obvious by confessing to him, as he watches her from far away, that she has “stumbled!” This imaging of Elide as a clumsy, ridiculous young woman totally spellbound in front of Gianni is cleverly projected through Gianni’s eyes and is maintained all throughout the film. Gianni views her as an inferior being to be educated and dealt with in a patronizing and contemptuous attitude. On the other hand, when we do not see her through Gianni’s eyes, Elide has actually changed a lot and has become a beautiful and refined woman. She is eager to improve her education through reading and cultural exposure that encourage her to search for a true meaning in life, which her unsatisfactory relationship with Gianni cannot give her, notwithstanding the love and attraction she still feels for him. Elide then is clearly projected in the film as the victim of Gianni’s close-minded, judgmental view of women as inferior and unimportant creatures who are hardly worthy of taking up a man’s time with their silly requests and needs. Elide, indeed, in spite of the actual changes visible in the film’s objective portrayal of her as woman, becomes a real victim of this masculine view of women. It spurs her to commit suicide and opt for death rather than life. The feelings of inadequacy that her husband constantly inspired in her foment her inner lack of self-respect and her unbearable inferiority complex. Elide represents

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the tragic dilemma of a modern woman’s existence. Caught between the overbearing male distrust in woman’s potential for improvement and change, her own desire to believe in her own potential for improvement and self-determination is doomed to fail in a social environment dominated by men’s negative view of women. Luciana, the other female protagonist of the film, plays an important role not only in Gianni’s life but also in Antonio’s. Luciana is constructed as a much stronger female character than Elide. She survives a suicide attempt to become first an independent and self-reliant single mother and then a serene and welladjusted woman as Antonio’s wife and mother of two. The fact that Luciana fulfils the expectations of the wife-mother role that the traditional patriarchal society imposes on women does not necessarily imply that she has submitted passively to those requirements. The film follows her life from her arrival in Rome as a naïve, poor, and inexperienced young woman raised in a small northern Italian town and lured to the capital because of her passion for the theater. Antonio is the first of the three male protagonists of the story to meet and fall in love with her when she is admitted for malnutrition to the hospital where he works. Luciana indeed confesses that she prefers to spend the little money she has on theater tickets rather than in food. Her obvious preference for the make-believe world of the theater and its romanticized view of love, rather than for the reality of everyday life, is skillfully conveyed with the technique of projecting on the screen her dreams and romantic wishes as short asides while the characters around her perform different, more realistic actions. The prime example can be found when the three of them, Luciana, Antonio, and Gianni, are having lunch together in a Roman restaurant. Luciana projects her own inner feelings in an aside where she reveals her attraction to Gianni and projects Gianni himself telling her the loving words she is expecting from him. While she projects on the screen her dream of a romantic love life with Gianni, Antonio, in the real time of their lunch together, keeps on narrating to both of them real episodes of his and Gianni’s war days. The superimposition of these two levels of experience, Luciana’s dream-like, romantic one and Antonio’s real-life one, helps to underscore Luciana’s fantasizing tendency and to foretell the painful disappointment she might suffer once her dreams of romantic love crash with the reality of life. Gianni’s personal ambitions and greed are indeed much more powerful than his love for Luciana, so he leaves her to marry Elide, the daughter of the rich, unscrupulous entrepreneur for whom he now works. Luciana’s self-respect and her hopes for a happy life with Gianni suddenly collapse and she attempts suicide by poisoning herself. Antonio’s intervention saves her and helps her to come back to life as a much stronger and less fantasy-prone woman capable of facing the reality of life and adjusting to it. When Antonio meets her next, she seems to have been able to find a position as a film extra and is dressed accordingly, but, instead of romanticizing this achievement, she downplays its importance and makes clear that she views it just as a job that might help her financially. Indeed the next time she meets Antonio, it is in a public park where she is sitting on a bench watching her little son playing in the sand. She has left the world of cinema now, and is working as an usherette in a movie theater, apparently able to finance and accept her new condition as single mother. At this point, the roles are being reversed. While they are all (Luciana, Antonio, and the little boy)

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in the movie theater where Luciana works, with Luciana attending at her job and Antonio and the boy sitting and watching the film projected on the screen, it is Antonio who, in his romanticized projection of his personal feelings for Luciana, dreams of changes in the words that the actors are speaking in the film he is watching to reflect his love for Luciana and his expectations from her. The discourse of the film seems therefore to construct both Luciana and Antonio as capable of fantasizing without losing sight of the reality of life and thus ready to understand and accept each other with respect and love, well rooted in the reality of a difficult but socially committed life. The last time we see Luciana is toward the end of the film, when she is, together with Antonio, Gianni, Nicola, and a whole community of parents, in front of the school where they want to enroll their children. Again, she impresses us with her clear view of how committed and satisfactory her personal life has become. When Gianni confesses to her that he has always loved her and thought of her as the only great love of his life, Luciana does not hesitate to contradict him. She states that, for her, their love was just an episode in her life that she has by now completely overcome, as she is now satisfied with her present life as Antonio’s wife and mother of two. Luciana is now surely a person who stands firmly upon and appreciates the reality of her existence, far from the dream-like fantasy world of her youth where Gianni seems to be still ensnared with all his bitterness and unhappiness. In this film by Scola, then, we find the portrayal of two very significant types of Italian women: Elide represents the disabling process that women are submitted to in a world dominated by men’s rules and regulations as victims of male self-centeredness and insensitivity. On the other hand, Luciana shows how women can improve their conditions by standing up to and even defying those rules and regulations, especially with the assistance of generous and sensitive men (like Antonio) who can learn from them, just as well as women can learn from their male partners, to make a better and more human kind of world in which both women and men can live a fulfilling life. I nuovi mostri The same year that Una Giornata particolare was released, Scola returned to the comedy-Italian-style genre by directing a new episode film together with Risi and Monicelli. The Italian title of the film, I nuovi mostri, refers back to a similar film directed by Risi on a script by Petri, Age, Scarpelli, and Scola, called I mostri (The monsters) of 1963, composed of twenty sketches employing the versatile comic talent of Vittorio Gassman and Ugo Tognazzi, two of the most popular comic divi of the time. I nuovi mostri is made up of nine episodes different from one another in characters and situations, some of them very grotesque, depicting Italians and their flaws. The main actors, besides Alberto Sordi (Episodes 4, 6, and 9), are still Vittorio Gassman (Episodes 2, 3, and 7) and Ugo Tognazzi (Episodes 1 and 7). In each one of the nine episodes we find violence, problems of communication—as straight communication is missing and is substituted by a twisted use of language or a willful use of rhetorical ambiguity in order to exploit people— indifference toward people who suffer, and the dissolution of human values and especially of the family. No trust exists between husband and wife, parents and

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children, sons and mothers, and exploitation, particularly of women, for personal gain is rampant. This harsh criticism underlines even more strongly than in the earlier film the problems of Italian society in the 1970s, even if the title suggests that the film continues the comic portrayal of Italian society begun in 1963 by Risi. All throughout the episodes, these themes are played over and over again at different levels of the social systems (low, middle, and high society) and in different worlds, such as the world of entertainment (nightclub/dancing hall [Episode 1]; cinema [Episode 5]; restaurant [Episode 7]; and Vaudeville [Episode 9]), the religious world (Episode 2), the medical world (hospitals [Episode 4]; and homes for the elderly [Episode 6]), and so on. Some other social and political problems presented are kidnapping (Episode 3) and political terrorism (Episode 8). The last episode (Episode 9) of the film seems to rescue the whole genre by stressing the importance of the comic word that goes on even after death and makes people happy, thus counteracting violence. In this episode, there is a clear recognition that the comedy-Italian-style genre is the only cinematic form that can bring people to realize the folly of their violent or hypocritical life without using tragic tones or condemnation but only laughter. Out of the nine episodes of the film, five of them carefully portray the exploitation of women and their victimization by their husbands (Episodes 1 and 3), fathers (Episode 5), sons (Episode 6), or lovers (Episode 8). In Episode 1, Fiorella and her husband are a couple in the entertainment business. She is a singer and the main provider of the family. Her husband plays the role of her agent. As long as Fiorella is in good health, things go well, and she is not subjected to any physical abuse by her husband. As soon as her voice starts to weaken, however, she is submitted to actual physical violence by him in order to put her back into business. First, she is obliged by him to undergo a vocal-cords operation even against the surgeon’s advice. After the operation, once the husband realizes her voice is still getting weaker, he finds another way for her to go back to work and still be popular with her public. He arranges for her to fall and break both her legs, inventing for the media the story that she was hit by a car while running across a street to save a child. According to her husband, the story of her heroic action will conquer her fans again and keep her in business. This short episode ends with a close-up of Fiorella in a wheelchair with both her legs in a thick cast, still singing with a very frail voice with eyes full of tears, while her husband’s voice towers over her, calling her a hero and inciting her to keep on singing. The whole story portrays a sick society where women are cruelly exploited for money through physical violence and verbal abuse. In Episode 3, a woman has been kidnapped, so she is never projected on the screen, while her husband is on the screen all the time and voices his concern in what looks like an interview with the local television. He cries and loudly expresses his despair over her disappearance, pleading on television with the kidnappers to call him on the phone and to return her promptly after receiving the ransom he implies he has already paid. The camera, however, at the end of the episode, with a zoom-in, slowly directs the attention of the spectators away from him and down toward the telephone cord that has been cut and hidden under a carpet near his feet. In this case, too, through surprise and exaggeration, the film points to a man’s lies and hypocrisy, revealing thus the danger in which a woman can find

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herself because of the violence that her husband’s refusal to help her may cause. In this episode, there is evidence of the dissolution of family values, indicated by the man’s self-centeredness and by his lack of care and respect for his wife. In Episode 5, the main topic of criticism is the exploitation of children on the part of their parents. The degradation of family values and of human relations because of materialism is intensely condemned here by representing the appalling behavior of a couple, who, for money, do not hesitate to push their daughter into child pornography in a cheap film production that obliges her to mate with a monkey. The parents’ hypocritical behavior arises the spectators’ indignation for the violence perpetrated against their young daughter through the sexual exploitation they impose on her. In Episode 6, the spectators’ indignation is aroused again by a son’s hypocritical behavior toward his old mother whom he confines to a retirement home against her will because his wife does not want to keep her with them any longer. The indifference shown not only by the son toward his old mother but also by the retirement home staff toward the elderly in general is carefully focused upon by the camera, especially inside the retirement home, through the portrayal of the lack of communication and respect that exists between the rigid nuns and the unhappy, lonely, and frightened people for whom they are supposed to care. Also this episode highlights the degradation of family values and relations that exists in modern society as well as the degradation of social institutions, together with the psychological violence that the elderly have to endure through actions and language. In Episode 8, the story centers on what looks like a very romantic love-at-firstsight occurrence, where a young woman, a flight attendant, is cruelly deceived and violently disposed of by the man she believes to be a very romantic lover. Here we find again the lack of communication that was typical of the relationship between husband and wife of Episodes 1 and 3, but here it becomes total, as the young man does not speak any of the languages that the stewardess knows, and she cannot speak his Arabic language, so they cannot communicate at all through language, and all actions they perform together are planned by the young man to coverup his real identity as a terrorist and his secret mission to blow up an airplane. He plans for her to unknowingly carry a bomb on the plane hidden in the tape recorder he gives her as a present and that is playing the romantic song that was the background music of their night together. Here the cover-up of romantic love stands for the dissolution of human values, as it brings only death to the young woman who naïvely believes in it and to all the passengers and crew of the plane. In each of the sketches considered above, a woman is victimized by someone who is closely associated with her through family or emotional ties, be it a husband, a father, a son, or a lover. By highlighting this type of female victimization, Scola’s film shows a close acceptance of Germi’s legacy in the focus that it places on the indictment of the family in Italian society and of the excesses that its closeknit, male-dominated network of relations and alliances usually keeps hidden within the walls of the family home. This criticism is voiced even more strongly in Scola’s later film La famiglia (The Family; 1987), while in Passione d’amore he constructs a very unusual female character in Fosca, a brilliant young woman, who is extremely ugly and viewed as psychologically unstable by the nineteenth-century

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social establishment of a small provincial town. Her uncontrolled passion for a young, handsome captain serving under the command of her own relative makes her a female character that is defiant of the strict social codification that establishes women in traditional society as devoid of desire. Fosca, instead, conscious of the fact that, because of her ugliness, she will never be viewed as an object of male desire, is not afraid to reveal her own desire, thus resisting social and family pressure in clear defiance of traditional patriarchal rules. Her defiance unfortunately produces tragic results, as her own relative, unable to accept her behavior as an attempt to express her rights to love and to change the view of woman exclusively as an object of man’s sexual desire, challenges the young captain to a duel where he is killed. Fosca, too, dies shortly after, demonstrating once again that a resisting woman is dangerous to men and must be eliminated from the screen in some way or another. Also in this film then, Scola voices his criticism of traditional male-dominated society rules and points again, to how difficult it is for women to escape such pressures. Scola’s sensitivity to the plight of women for change is clearly revealed by the signifying strategies he uses in his films. If we look back now at the comedy-Italian-style films of the 1970s, they seem to give a representation of women that combines humor and indignation, thus conveying a healthy criticism of male authoritarianism. It seems then fair to say that in the films of the 1970s, we still find the traditional representation of woman as frail and controlled by the codified rules of the patriarchal system, as Elide in C’eravamo tanto amati or Eugenia in Mio Dio come sono caduta in basso! clearly demonstrate. The sexual power game, however, that is played in the films of the 1970s seems often to end in favor of the female characters, as we have noticed for Eugenia herself at the end of the film or for Clara, the female factory worker of Una breve vacanza, whose controlled existence as wife and mother is alleviated by an enlightened social health program, or for Luciana, who satisfactorily married Antonio in C’eravamo tanto amati. Some films propose independent female characters willing to stand up against social injustice, even if unsuccessfully so, like Anna in Il conformista, Anita in Novecento, and Salomè in Film d’amore e d’anarchia; we have also found fascinating women, who, even if still accepting their traditional role as wife and/or mother, seem to have the potential to change their life and social status if their social conditions would allow it: the best examples are Giulia, Marcello’s wife in Il conformista, Ada, Alfredo’s wife in Novecento, Antonietta in Una giornata particolare, and especially Giuliana, who actually succeeds in escaping her unhappy condition, in L’innocente. Some female characters stand up forcefully against specific requirements set by the traditional codification of women’s behavior: Micol in Il giardino dei Finzi-Contini clearly resists the sexual restrictions imposed on young women by patriarchy and freely accesses her sexuality without restrain. Giuliana in L’innocente, on the other hand, resists her husband’s control over her and accepts her illicit maternity in open contempt and disobedience of his will. The Marchioness in Gruppo di famiglia in un interno openly resists the dictates of the patriarchal code that requires from a mother total dedication to her children and abstinence from sexual activity. Concetta in Fatto di sangue defies the traditional requirements of her patriarchal community and gets sexually involved with two lovers after her husband’s death.

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Raffaella in Travolti da un insolito destino also resists both the traditional code of a natural type of relationship and the film’s overwhelming acceptance of it to establish herself as a woman with social power. She willfully gives up a natural relationship with a satisfactory sexual partner and chooses to reinstate herself within her former married life with a sexually less-satisfactory husband who has, however, good social connections and financial stability and who respects her as an equal and supports her in her social position. Nina in Al di là del bene e del male is clearly the person in charge of the ménage-à-trois that she has organized in her life and is the one in control of her life and of those of her two partners. Moreover, male characters, as represented in the films of the 1970s, seem to reveal a new function with which they are entrusted by the filmic discourse in their relationships with women—that is, to give women the possibility to better understand and eventually change their unsatisfactory life situations. We have indeed found several male characters who display qualities unusual in men as proposed by patriarchal codification—that is, sensitivity, kindness, understanding, and consideration for women’s conditions. Tunin in Film d’amore e d’anarchia or Rosario in Fatto di sangue . . . are good examples of this different representation of men in the dramatic films of this decade, while Alfredo in Alfredo, Alfredo and Antonio in C’eravamo tanto amati are good examples of the same representation in contemporary comedy-Italian-style films. There is also an attempt to make men understand the dismal conditions of women’s lives by exposing them to experiences that require from them responses typical of a woman rather than of a man. Pasqualino, indeed, owes to his female-like response to the awful experience he had in a concentration camp his ability to change into a much more understanding and sensitive human being at the end of Pasqualino settebellezze. The prevailing mood in these films of the 1970s is one of hope for a better life and better human relationships, even if the road to change and better communication is still difficult to follow for both women and men.

8

Decentering the Masculine and Spotlighting the Feminine in the Films of the 1980s

Historical Notes on the 1980s and 1990s

F

or the first time in Italian political history, the Left, and more specifically the Socialist Party, came to power in Italy in 1983 with Bettino Craxi as Prime Minister. The 1980s still recall a high level of terrorist activities all over Italy that would eventually diminish in the following decade. These activities were the work of the usual extreme Right and Left political groups, such as the Black Order and the Red Brigades. The former was mostly involved with the bombing of trains and railroad stations, like the Bologna Station bomb explosion in 1980 and the bombing of a train between Florence and Bologna in 1984. The Red Brigades were involved with the kidnapping and murdering of key Italian political and judicial figures. In this period, however, other international terrorist organizations started their activity in Italy, as proven by the assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II in May 1981, the Palestinian terrorist attack at the Fiumicino Airport in Rome December 1985, and the Libyan missile launch against the island of Lampedusa June 1986. Mafia violence also increased in this period in a growing spiral of attempted and successful assassinations of key figures in the Anti-Mafia Operations government agency, such as General Dalla Chiesa, the head of the anti-Mafia agency, who was murdered in September 1982. Later, there will be other victims: Judges Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, who at the time of their assassinations— which took place respectively on May 23, 1992, and on July 19, 1992—were close to becoming the top anti-Mafia prosecutors and lead the new juridical institution called Superprocura (or “superprosecution”). In the early 1990s, a wave of scandals, called Tangentopoli,1 involving political and economic personalities in a larger and larger network of criminal, political, and financial interdependencies, swept over the country, producing public indignation against the government’s corruption. This public indignation, and the reaction of juridical institutions to political corruption and violence, finally resulted in the action taken by the magistrates of

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several cities against the highest authorities in government and business, including the prime minister, Bettino Craxi, who was prosecuted and found guilty of corruption and abuse of power while in self-imposed exile. Women’s activism continued in the 1980s and 1990s, following a trend that began in the 1970s, and several study centers were funded to start documenting women’s history.2 In the 1980s the unfair social condition of homosexual women and men became the topic of heated national debates, and this concern is revealed by the founding of several new women centers and organizations and the organization of a large number of conferences on the topic.3 In the aftermath of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, women’s groups held several demonstrations against the use of nuclear power, thus helping to influence the later decision of the Italian parliament to oppose the establishment of nuclear energy stations on the Italian territory. With their new activist approach to social and sexual concerns, women were thus starting to have a visible influence in Italian public affairs as well as in their own private existence. Italian Cinema of the 1980s In the Italian cinema of the 1980s, we find a rich output of films made by Italian male and female directors that address more directly than in the earlier decades some of the concerns about women that were being voiced in Italy. Even wellestablished male auteurs, traditionally less inclined to deal sympathetically with women’s problems, seem to show a new sensitivity in their 1980s films, beginning with Fellini. Indeed, in the 1980s, besides Lina Wertmüller and Liliana Cavani, Fellini too shows a concern for lesbian relationships in his film La città delle donne (City of Women; 1980), which was released before Wertmüller’s Sotto . . . sotto . . . strapazzato da anomala passione (Sotto . . . Sotto; 1984) or Cavani’s Interno berlinese (A Berlin Affair; 1985). Most of the films of this decade seem interested in displaying narrative strategies aimed at “decentering the masculinity”4 from their narrative context, often by using techniques that highlight the comic handling of male characters. Fellini’s La città delle donne In Fellini’s La città delle donne, the representation of male-female relationships is set in a less traditional context. The perspective continues to be masculine, according to the male protagonist’s viewpoint, no matter on whose story the film focuses. However, as it is even visible in the posters of the film, the male-protagonist, Snaporaz, played by Marcello Mastroianni, is clearly ridiculed by the filmic discourse. Snaporaz represents a typical Italian male who is growing old, and, in spite of the fact that he is losing most of his sex appeal, he does not want to admit it and tries desperately to keep up the pretense of being an irresistible seducer. As such, he shows contempt for the women he is trying unsuccessfully to seduce. His name calling runs the gamut of degrading and vilifying expressions, revealing

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his male contempt for the resisting objects of his desire and his frustration at his own failure in seducing them. The camera skillfully exasperates this ridiculous male representation by framing Snaporaz in unflattering close-ups and long and middle shots, which convey the film’s ironic commentary on his failing masculinity. First, he is framed asleep in a train compartment, in a close-up that focuses on his head constantly falling down on his chest at each train jolt, notwithstanding his semiconscious, unsuccessful efforts to hold it up in a more dignified position and under the stern critical look of the beautiful woman who is sitting in front of him. Then, when she stands up and exits the compartment heading toward the restroom, he follows her and tries unsuccessfully to make love to her there while the train shakes so much that even standing up becomes a chore. Eventually the train stops and the woman gets off and walks rapidly away, while Snaporaz is framed in a middle shot still seated on the toilet with his pants partially pulled down, a rather ludicrous figure indeed! Still determined to seduce the beautiful woman, who is by now off the train, he too gets off and, when the train leaves, he is framed again in a humorous way, with full-length shots focusing on him running after it and missing it. He is then again pursued by the camera with unflattering, full- and middlelength shots while he tries unsuccessfully to keep up with the woman’s brisk walk, but he must stop in order to catch his breath. In all these shots, Snaporaz is definitely proposed as a ridiculous older man unable to face the challenge to seduce a beautiful younger woman that he sets up for himself. The visual language of the film has thus revealed from the beginning the limitations and ludicrousness of this male protagonist, whose look, however, is the only one that critically pursues all the women who are attending the feminist convention, which he happens upon accidentally while he is running after the beautiful younger woman who was on the train with him. The excesses, therefore, that are projected in the speeches and the sketches that make up the program of the convention seem to be the outcome of the male protagonist’s misinterpretation of what he hears and sees there. Indeed the words of the beautiful woman whom he had unsuccessfully followed to the convention address the problem of the unfairness of the man’s look by calling his eyes “quegli occhi che deformano tutto ciò che vedono” (those eyes that deform all what they see). These words make the convention participants as well as the film spectators aware of the distortion that the male look superimposes on the intentions, words, and actions of women, and they become particularly significant when formulated in the film of a director who has often projected women’s actions and words in the same deforming way in several of his own earlier films without admitting the disrupting influence that men might have had on such a representation. These words indeed reveal a new awareness on the director’s part, yet this film continues to tell the story of Snaporaz without changing its male point of view. In the next few sequences the male protagonist, in order to escape from the convention and from its angry participants, undergoes several hair-raising experiences with different types of women. He projects these women mostly as sex maniacs and drug addicts, until he is saved from them by Xavier, an equally sexually maniac male, whose house decoration consists mostly of very large phallic objects. Xavier shows an equally strong distaste for the convention participants that he labels despairingly as lesbians, unworthy of his house that he calls the “Temple of

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Love.” Here Snaporaz discovers an unusual gallery of portraits, which, once the light is turned on for each of them, reveal beautiful women in love-making positions, whose sounds of sexual enjoyment add to the general atmosphere of overwhelmingly heterosexual love-making activities that are supposed to take place in Xavier’s “Temple of Love.” At the end of the gallery, Snaporaz finds his own wife, Elena, dressed in a long red dress and holding a drink in her hand. The party that follows is in celebration of Xavier’s birthday, where he provides another, clearer formulation of his view on woman with his “Farewell” song. In this song, he bids farewell to what he calls his “ideal woman”—that is, the traditional type of woman who exists only in relation to a man whose needs and pleasure she believes she was born to satisfy. This song is interrupted by the entrance of three policewomen who are there to question Xavier and end his party, and they are ready to use even brute force against him and his dogs if he resists them. Xavier’s “Farewell” to his ideal woman is thus well staged and properly timed to signal the end of the era of male domination. Indeed now begins the era of female domination with women in charge, signaled by the police uniforms. Women, however, seem to have inherited men’s violent ways and behave in a very similar way. This new era then, as projected by the male protagonist’s point of view, seems to entail only a change of gender at the top with hardly any other change being introduced in the matters of exploitation of, or control over, the representatives of the gender that is not in power. We have to keep in mind that it is still a male perspective that proposes this view of the male-female power game. The male protagonist’s strained relationship with his wife seems to strengthen this view. The wife voices her loneliness and her exasperation at his indifference toward her. The husband, on his turn, mistakes her feelings of loneliness for emotional frailty and reassures her that he will never leave her and they will grow old together. At this point Elena rejects the traditional role of ideal wife when she states that she does not have any intention or desire to grow old with him and that she will be the one who will leave him. To visually reinforce this vocal proclamation of a woman’s claim to freedom of choice, a cut frames Elena with a younger woman whom she embraces fondly, to whom she talks with great animation and joyfulness, and with whom eventually she dances with enthusiasm and vitality. At this point, the film seems to present Elena as a liberated woman who has achieved a clear understanding of her own potential and of her rights to independence and happiness. But, when we see Elena again, she is portrayed as a frenzied female who needs her husband to satisfy her sexual urges, and, when he refuses to do so, she crawls up in a corner of their bed and turns her back to him in a humiliated acceptance of her oppressed female condition. This controversial imaging of Elena shows how hard it is for a male perspective to visualize a liberated woman who is capable of living a life on her own without depending on a man for support or sexual satisfaction. So, in spite of the new curiosity shown here for feminism and lesbian relationships, the representation of woman in the portrayal given of Elena at the end of this film does not seem to stray too far from the traditional view of women or of the unhappy heterosexual relationships already noticed in most of Fellini’s films.

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There is, however, something new here—that is, the clearly ironic tone used in the ridiculing imaging of the male protagonist and of the sexually overcharged Xavier. These two male characters give two new interesting and ludicrous portrayals of men in their failing attempts at maintaining their “Latin lover” role. Fellini’s casting of Marcello Mastroianni in the protagonist’s role accentuates the ironic mood of the film. The audience, indeed, cannot miss the ironic message conveyed in the film through such a ridiculous portrayal of a character played by the Italian divo most beloved for his representation of the Latin-lover character in Italian cinema. On the other hand, the film discourse seems to also ridicule feminist ideology by underscoring its excesses. The film discourse, however, here clearly reveals that this view is being formulated by an obviously antagonistic male perspective that represents the fears that men have of female power and independence. La città delle donne, then, goes a step further than all of Fellini’s previous films in its critical representation of gender relationships. It, actually heavily relies on an ironic handling of both women and men in order to ensure that its audience understands its message: no meaningful relationships between the sexes can exist as long as both women and men rely exclusively on an antagonistic sexual-power game. On the other hand, women in this film, without completely escaping from patriarchal assimilation, seem to offer some resistance to patriarchal codification. Their resistance can be seen in the same terms used by Tania Modleski in her study of Hitchcock’s handling of women. According to Modleski, Hitchcock’s women represent “the outcome of feminist consciousness” provided by” the depiction of victimized women that entails giving expression to women’s feelings of rage, victimization, oppression.”5 In Fellini’s La città delle donne, this “outcome of feminist consciousness” is particularly visible in the women who attend the feminist convention, while the feelings “of rage, victimization, and oppression” are expressed especially by Elena in her attempt to react to her role as a “victimized woman.” Fellini, then, in this film of the 1980s, not only shows a real concern for women’s issues regarding their own existence within a still strongly male-controlled social environment but also goes as far as giving a humorous representation of male characters, thus weakening their potential for control of and power over their environment. Through ridicule, then, aimed at “decentering the masculine,” even a traditional auteur’s film can achieve the “revolutionary potential” to “unseat men from their controlling position,” which comedy has in its role of “deflator of the patriarchal order.”6 Antonioni’s Identificazione di una donna Antonioni, in his 1982 film Identificazione di una donna (Identification of a Woman), also seems to show a new awareness of his handling of gender relationships and appears to come to terms with his own perspective on how to represent women in film. The title itself seems to suggest a new interest in women’s search for their own identities. As the spectators soon become aware, however, the title is clearly deceptive. Indeed, the film focuses on the story of a man, Niccolò, a Roman filmmaker (perhaps an autobiographical character)7 who is

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trying to make a film about a woman without having any idea of how to weave a story around her. At the beginning of the film, Niccolò is involved with three women. One of them is his ex-wife, who never appears on the screen. Another one is Miva, who disappears early enough from the screen and from Niccolò’s life. Thus, only one of the three women, Ida, is present for a while on the screen, even if she too drops out of Niccolò’s existence once she finds out that she is pregnant with another man’s baby. Given Antonioni’s nearly obsessive interest for inanimate objects in order to set up the mood of his films, the camera obsessively zooms in on the display of photographs of women’s faces that Niccolò constantly contemplates in his search for the ideal woman about whom to make his film. This obsessive focus on women’s faces discloses the cause of Niccolò’s inability to understand women and to make a film about a woman. What Niccolò is looking for is just the outside appearance of a woman, hoping to be able to move from it to her inner self. This, however, will never happen, since, as Niccolò confides to a male friend, he does not believe that a woman has an inner self. For Niccolò indeed, the “ideal woman” is “the woman who identifies herself fully with the other person” (which, to him, is naturally a man). Thus, Niccolò’s (and Antonioni’s) woman can be identified exclusively through the other person—that is, the man with whom she identifies fully. With this film, then, Antonioni formulates clearly, what he has implied in all of his other films8—that is, that woman on her own does not exist, and, in order to have an identity, a woman has to identify herself fully with a man. In this film, like Fellini did in La città delle donne, Antonioni voices his awareness of the exclusively male view of women that he had projected on the female characters of all his earlier films, whose identities could only be related to the men they became involved with. So, Fellini and Antonioni, the best-known auteurs of classical Italian cinema, have finally acknowledged in their films of the 1980s their limitations in their own representations of women. On the other hand, the bestknown female directors of Italian cinema, such as Wertmüller and Cavani, are still trying to cope with their ways of representing women in their films, as we will see in the analyses that follow. Wertmüller’s Sotto, sotto Wertmüller’s film, Sotto, sotto (which, in English, means “beneath the surface”) seems to propose an even more innovative way to look at gender relationships than her earlier films had, although ambiguities and contradictions undermine its effectiveness. The film is concerned with whether a woman, Adele, who is already married to Oscar, has the right to choose her own life partner regardless of gender. Oscar’s reaction to his wife’s revelation that she is interested in someone else, and consequently wants to end their marriage, clearly testifies to the male-oriented view that society has of marriage and of women’s rights. Oscar immediately sees himself as the victim of his wife’s sexual urges and violently reacts to her by calling her and all women “harlots,” by beating her up, and eventually by trying to force himself sexually on her.

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The character of Oscar is constructed as the perfect example of the self-centered, insensitive Italian male who is obsessed by the fear of being cuckolded and convinced that his wife is his exclusive property, constantly at his service, and thus devoid of all rights of her own. By piling over Oscar all the complexes and fears of the Italian male and thus reducing him to a ridiculous character, the film discourse seems to side with Adele and to propose her decision to end their marriage as the acceptable solution to the problem. The construction of her character and of her story, however, introduces conflicting nuances that undermine the initial positive view of her and of her life choice. The first element in the film that strikes the audience as a contradictory piece of evidence in the construction of the love story between Adele and her girlfriend Ester is the choice of the Bomarzo Park, as the background where Adele first becomes aware of her sexual interest for Ester and where they first kiss and embrace. This park, which is still the home of the most bizarre seventeenth-century collection of grotesque statues, was built as a conglomerate of disorderly architectural details in a conscious effort to deviate from the classic harmony of other similar but traditional Renaissance parks. Thus, to choose this background for the two women’s first love meeting seems to suggest that their relationship is equally deviant from the norm and to reflect the traditional point of view where lesbianism is considered a monstrous type of relationship. In so doing, the film sends out confusing messages to its audience by superimposing with its setting a moralistic criticism over the film’s very courageous attempt to deal with the topic of a woman’s freedom of sexual choice. Furthermore, the two female protagonists are not portrayed as very reliable characters. Both of them are proposed as very avid fans of Hollywood films and of their stars, who become for them the only reality worthy of being accepted and cherished. Indeed, Adele’s dream is significant at this point, as it projects her sexual interest for Ester as a fantasy inspired by Casablanca. She projects herself in the dream as Ingrid Bergman being kissed by Ester, impersonating the Humphrey Bogart of the film. Through this and other details, Adele, especially, is presented as an irrational, overly fantasizing type of woman and, as such, hardly able to make a balanced and rational decision about her life. The end of the film then visually states that it is impossible for a woman to give up her role as wife and mother and that Adele’s intention to leave Oscar for a woman must have been inspired by a temporary fancy and not by a clear realization of the failure of her marriage and of her husband’s shortcomings. The final sequences of the film frame Adele in full-length shots from the back while she is meekly following Oscar in an ambulance after he had been wounded in a violent scuffle with her and Ester. In so doing, Adele leaves Ester behind, puzzled and without a word of explanation. As in several of Wertmüller’s earlier films, the female character, who seems to start as an independent and potentially resisting woman who attempts to break away from the typical role of wife and mother imposed on women in patriarchal society, ends the film by giving up her resistance and accepting the boundaries of a traditional marriage. Thus, as was the case in the examination of other Wertmüller films, we are left here with the regret that such a gifted and brilliantly innovative

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director, in spite of her claims, has never intentionally concentrated on creating a fully developed, independent female character capable of standing on her own and of resisting to the end the pressures of the patriarchal codification of women’s roles in Italian society. This film, like Fellini’s La città delle donne, gives a ridiculous representation of the male protagonist in all his idiosyncratic male beliefs and fears, which succeeds in “decentering the masculinity” from the filmic context while highlighting the difficulty women have in both their heterosexual and homosexual love relationships. Cavani’s Interno berlinese The narrative action of Cavani’s Interno berlinese also focuses on a lesbian relationship. In this film, Cavani again uses as time setting, the political and historical reality of Nazi Germany. Again, the tragic effects of the Nazi horror machinery are relegated to a secondary position by the fictional story of the film, which here is centered on the love relationship of two beautiful women. Both women are constantly framed as erotic objects for each other as well as for the men who are attracted to them. Here Cavani seems to highlight the importance of women’s sexual pleasure, which, in Italian mainstream cinema, has always been viewed as a taboo topic to be avoided or ridiculed. In Sotto, Sotto, Wertmüller had followed the traditional trend by ridiculing women’s search for sexual pleasure as a whim of two silly, romantic women hooked on American films, a temporary whim that would never be able to break up traditional marriage life. In Interno berlinese, Cavani, instead, delves seriously into this topic, by focusing the film narrative upon the love affair between Louise, a German aristocrat, married to Hans, an important representative of the Nazi political elite, and Mishuko, the beautiful daughter of the Japanese ambassador in Berlin, and pushing it to the limit—that is, to the actual breakdown of a traditional marriage. Louise’s initial aesthetic interest for the exotic beauty of Mishuko soon changes into an obsessive, uncontrollable passion for that mysterious Japanese girl whose Eastern sexuality and infinite power to manipulate all around her are greatly underestimated by her Western lovers. Several scenes clearly reveal the amount of sexual pleasure that Louise finds in her lovemaking with Mishuko, while Mishuko seems to show the same amount of sexual pleasure in her lovemaking, not only with Louise, but also with men, and especially with Hans, Louise’s husband. Mishuko becomes the controlling partner in this unusual ménage à trois, as she is capable of manipulating both Louise and Hans to the point that both of them are totally under her sexual and psychological control. As was the case in Portiere di notte, the narrative moves on two different levels of time: In the present, Louise tells her story to her former professor in his study where, in the first sequences, he is getting ready for the arrival of the Nazi police, which takes place at the end of the film under Louise’s very eyes. The story that Louise tells the professor takes place in the past and is narrated through a long series of flashbacks, now and then interrupted by Louise’s own commentary addressed to the professor in the present.

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The historical reality, represented here by the fierce persecution that the Nazis carry out against their political enemies, is hidden behind the story of an uncontrollable transgressive passion, in this case between two beautiful women. They are constructed here too as erotic objects pursued by the gaze of both the inner and outer audiences of the film. Their representation as erotic objects also allows Cavani to monopolize the audience’s attention by providing them with a voyeuristic pleasure that numbs their moral and social reaction to the Nazis’ political persecution of Louise’s professor. As in Cavani’s earlier Portiere di notte, important historical issues slide into secondary importance behind a more titillating visual framing of women as erotic objects. Given the particularly innovative topic of lesbianism that the film seriously proposes, one would expect that the discourse of the film might deal with it in clearly supportive terms. The cinematic discourse, however, is not that clear. On one level, through Louise’s vocal criticism of the Nazi disapproval of homosexuality, a liberal view of it seems to be proposed. By involving Hans, however, in the two women’s sexual relationship, the narrative action of the film formulates the traditional belief that a woman cannot organize her own life or sexuality without men. The end of the story, with the three of them accepting suicide as their only way out, also seems to confirm that lesbianism has no place in a traditional society. After Mishuko has prepared the poisoned potion, they all drink it and lie down waiting for death to come. Hans and Mishuko die, but Louise survives to tell their story and wonders, together with us spectators, why she had been saved from the death that Mishuko herself had so strongly recommended for all three of them. Was Mishuko’s decision a gift to Louise for her to start a new life free from the frustration and oppression of traditional marriage rules, or was it the last example of her controlling power over and punishment of Louise, by purposely depriving Louise of Hans, of whom Mishuko had always been so jealous? This ambiguity seems to increase the seemingly sadistic side of the relationship between the two women, suggesting a close connection with traditional heterosexual relationships, as Cavani had represented before, where one partner (usually the man) plays the role of the controller while the other (the woman) becomes his victim.9 To conclude our analysis of Cavani’s films, they all seem to formulate a view of love as an obsessive, often perverted, and always tormenting experience where both men and women can be victimized by the all-controlling sadistic possessiveness of “the other.” In this type of relationship, women show the same, if not stronger, urge that their male counterparts have to control and hurt their lovers. In her attempt to give a new importance to her female characters, Cavani endows them with typical masculine trends, while she continues to construct them as erotic objects in order to produce voyeuristic pleasure in their spectators, who become thus unable to properly react to the more important social or political events with which her films are dealing. In the case of this important female director, who is so well prepared in documenting social reality with technical rigor and historical understanding, we must admit that the signifying tactics of her films are unable or unwilling to propose women in any other way but as erotic objects, thus revealing the unshakeable influence that patriarchal ideology still maintains even in the late twentieth century on Italian women and on Italian directors.

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Monica Vitti’s Flirt, Francesca è mia, and Scandalo segreto Monica Vitti, as a director, is a contemporary of both Wertmüller and Cavani, but she seems to be much closer to the younger female directors, I will discuss later in this chapter and in the following one, because of the strong interest she shows toward implementing a change in the cinematic representation of women.10 Vitti is not well known as a director in spite of her extremely successful and long career as a beloved diva of Italian cinema. Vitti, indeed, started her acting career in the 1950s, on the stage, first, and then on the screen and became a regular diva as the protagonist of several of Antonioni’s films, such as L’avventura (The Adventure; 1960), L’eclisse (Eclipse; 1962), and Il deserto rosso (Red Desert; 1964), as discussed in Chapter 6. In her immediate “after-Antonioni” time, Vitti kept on looking for different roles to play and showing a keen interest for creating on the screen “a woman who is not exclusively the object of a man’s desire.”11 Thus, even at that time in her career, she revealed an unusual concern for the need for a change in how to represent women in cinema. It is not surprising that, from then on, Vitti has shown a preference for the comic genre, where she could see the possibility for such a change, especially for the revolutionary potential that comedy has “as the deflator of the patriarchal order.”12 Most of the comedy-Italian-style directors, such as Monicelli, Risi, Scola, and Sordi, realized the enormous potential that Vitti had as an actress. They realized that she, besides being a beloved diva, would give a new charge of vitality in a comic key to fascinating female characters, and she could influence her spectators and make them appreciate the satire of Italian society and male behavior that her characters formulated in those films. For these directors, Vitti played a whole series of “transgressive female characters,” such as Assunta, the young Sicilian girl in Monicelli’s La ragazza con la pistola (Girl with a Pistol; 1968), or the battered and humiliated wife who eventually finds the strength to leave her violent husband in Sordi’s Amore mio aiutami (Help Me My Love; 1969). She also plays twelve different female roles in Noi donne siamo fatte cosí (This is the way we, women, are; 1971), a film by Risi in twelve episodes. The roles she plays are all in a comic key, and all characters convey a strong satire of the traditional Italian social customs that control women’s lives. The female voice is central in the films by Vitti, who, in the 1980s, has added a new dimension to her acting by writing the script for each of her three latest films, Flirt (1983), Francesca è mia (Francesca Is Mine; 1986), and Scandalo segreto (Secret Scandal; 1989),13 and by directing the last one. In all three films, the narrative is handled with an underlying complexity of psychological and social interconnections that I will try to decipher through a combined feminist/psychoanalytical critical approach that can be useful in this context. As Laura Mulvey has correctly stated in her introduction to the essays in Off-Screen, “Feminism in Italy has evolved alongside a close attention to practice and a highly politicized, militant culture. At the same time, it has also shown a particular concern with a woman’s relationship to love, or rather to the sogno d’amore or dream of love,” which “offers a starting point for understanding woman’s complicity with her oppression . . . and acts as a resistance to the negativity inherent in woman’s binary position.”14

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This sogno d’amore theme is a constant in Vitti’s films, and its function in the film discourse is essential in inscribing her, as a director and an actress, in the stream of contemporary Italian feminism. In Antonioni’s films, Monica Vitti was constantly constructed as the object of a man’s look and desire, even if she was playing the role of the female protagonist. Things did not change much in the following years, as Monica Vitti became the heroine of comedy-Italian-style plots that frame woman even more “as an object of man’s desire” and the “ground of cinematic representation.”15 In the 1980s, however, her collaboration with Roberto Russo has given her the opportunity to make three films about women as she sees them; women who, although caught in conflicts still controlled by desire and domination, “tell stories resisting the drift of narrativization (the operation of narrative closure . . . ).”16 All three films for which she wrote the script with Russo, Flirt, Francesca è mia, and Scandalo segreto, still adopt the conventional strategies of narrative that address the relationship between the text and the spectator on the level of “visual pleasure.” The casting of herself as the female protagonist, with her charge of beloved, beautiful diva, highly increases the power of such a pleasurable connection for the spectators. In all these films, the narrative plot is centered on the classical situation of comedy-Italian-style films—that is, on marriage—where Vitti plays the traditional wife who still loves her husband even when she has to deal with his infidelity with a usually powerful rival. Typical love-triangle situations develop in these cases, where the male’s desire is the activator of the films’ action even if the woman’s desire, different in each of the three films, interferes with it, producing less conventional alternatives for the outcome of the narrative process. On the whole, these three films convey a new concern with “address (whom the film addresses, to whom it speaks, what and for whom it seeks to represent, whom it represents),” which “translates into a conscious effort to address the spectator as female, regardless of the gender of the viewers.”17 Flirt, a film that, as Vitti herself says, “Roberto and I have written, rewritten, thrown out, started again, corrected, changed idea about for several years,”18 was produced in 1983 in collaboration with RAI, the state-run radio and television network. The narrative here works on a level of comic irony through the traditional love-triangle situation activated by the husband’s desire, which is here pushed to the boundaries of the absurd by positioning his new object of desire, his beloved Veronica, in the realm of the hallucinatory, and, as such, invisible to anyone but him and yet no less real to him than if she were visible. At this level of meaning, the film, through the invisibility of the object of Giovanni’s desire, works out an amusing satire of man’s narcissistic drives and of male analysts’ inability to recognize them. There is, however, another level of meaning in the film, which works out through the character of the wife Laura, played by Monica Vitti, and the conflicting situation that emerges from her maintaining the focus of her desire on the very visible character of Giovanni even when his desire has shifted from her to the invisible Veronica. Through the strategies that Laura uses in order to impose her own desire and interfere with Giovanni’s so as to shift his look and desire back on to her, the narrative creates an interesting new effect. It highlights the discrepancy between the traditional framing of woman as passive object of the man’s look and the self-consciousness displayed by Laura in framing herself as the object of

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Giovanni’s look while being at the same time the activator of the action that controls that look.19 The film closes on the image of the fulfillment of mutual desire with Laura and Giovanni making love with equal intensity and passion, as per the script: “They hug and kiss with a frightful violence as if they had waited years for this moment.”20 Female desire and pleasure are therefore recognized as important elements in Flirt and are capable not only of what Mulvey calls “subverting the dominant male-constructed discourse and gaze”21 but also of constructing what De Lauretis has called “the terms of reference of another measure of desire and the conditions of visibility for a different social subject.”22 More complex is the narrativization of the plot in Francesca è mia, where again the love-triangle situation is pushed to the boundaries of the absurd. Although her husband lives with his lover (who is also her best friend), Francesca, the wife (played by Monica Vitti) accepts without any contention that he still is the controlling force in her life. In this context, the husband stands at the center of the love-triangle situation as the manipulator of wife and lover, the two objects of his desire. Francesca is, therefore, represented as subjected to the dominant male discourse that controls the marriage’s binary structure of female oppression and male dominance, even if her marriage is far from representing a normal situation. At this point, the film discourse opens this closed structure and disrupts it. A fourth character, Stefano, is inserted in Francesca’s life. After he is seriously injured in a hit-and-run car accident that she witnesses, Francesca takes him to the emergency ward and watches over him after his operation. With the insertion of Stefano, a second love-triangle situation arises, this time with Francesca at the center as the object of desire. While the first triangle situation inscribed both women, and particularly the wife, within the typical representation of the passive woman totally subjected to the male’s desire and dominance, the introduction of Stefano disrupts such representation by constructing a different frame for Francesca around the obviously oedipal conflict in which she becomes involved—that is, between two men, one young and the other much older. The relationship between Francesca and Stefano starts on an equivocal level when Francesca finds herself in a maternal role toward the young man immediately following his accident. She is asked by the hospital staff to stay with him all night immediately after his operation to watch over him since, as his name is unknown, none of his relatives or friends could be notified. When she comes back the next day to see how he is progressing, she finds herself in the middle of another emergency, since his condition has worsened and he is in coma. She finds herself again in the role of caretaker and, more specifically in this case, of life keeper. Indeed, at the hospital, she is entrusted with the task of keeping the young man awake and alive by constantly talking to him from late afternoon all through the night until early morning. At dawn, as if in response to Francesca’s incessant flow of words, describing places she has seen and liked, relating events of her life she has particularly cherished, telling stories about people she knows or about imaginary events, or encouraging him to hold on to life and to look to the future with optimism and joy, the young man regains consciousness and utters the words she had asked him to tell her: “My name is Stefano.” Francesca, therefore, has become the voice that brings Stefano back to life, thus fulfilling the maternal role of life keeper, ambiguously experienced by the

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young man in an obviously oedipal transference. According to Kaja Silverman, it is the mother’s voice that is identified by the child long before the child can see the mother’s face or body, and it is her voice “that first charts space, delimits objects, explains and defines the external world” for the infant.23 The mother assumes therefore the role of “commentator, and . . . narrator” for the child, the same role Francesca plays for Stefano all through that long night when he hangs loosely between life and death. The “fantasy of the maternal voice,” as Silverman calls it, gives rise, however, to contradictory interpretations and “takes on a different meaning, depending upon the psychic ‘lookout point.’”24 According to Silverman, “Viewed from the site of the unconscious, the image that the infant holds within the environment or sphere of the mother’s voice is an emblem of infantile plenitude and bliss. Viewed from the site of the preconscious-conscious system, it is an emblem of impotence and entrapment.”25 Stefano’s fascination for Francesca displays the aspiration for total unity with her that the “unconscious . . . lookout point” may project: a unity full of “plenitude and bliss,” probably experienced by him earlier in his infancy, solicited now by Francesca’s voice, and that he hopes to achieve even without speaking and through visual contact. Indeed at first, Stefano constantly follows Francesca and carefully avoids speaking to her. But for Stefano, as Silverman has warned us, listening to Francesca’s voice not only has been his connection with life for a whole night but also has been providing him with the first stimulation for achieving that state of “plenitude and bliss” that he needs. After listening to her voice, then, his main motivation will be to look at her face and body in order to achieve and maintain the imaginary unity with her that he yearns for. And this is actually what Stefano will try to do as soon as he leaves the hospital. There are three key scenes in the film—the mirror scene in the bar, the encounter with the older rival, and the dialogue with Francesca—that mark the development of Stefano’s ambiguous relationship with her, which flows from the early imaginary phase, through the following symbolic or oedipal stage, down to a post-oedipal stage. The first phase, which corresponds to the imaginary one and consists of purely visual contacts when Stefano follows Francesca from far away without ever attempting to talk to her, is abruptly interrupted by the bar scene (the first of the key scenes), which is projected through a large mirror that is in front of Francesca while she is sipping a cup of coffee. The eye of the camera is positioned behind her, and, consequently, the spectators watch Francesca through the mirror. Suddenly Stefano enters the bar and comes to stand next to Francesca so that the mirror now reflects both of them together. When Francesca takes her gaze away from the mirror and turns to Stefano to talk to him, Stefano turns away and walks out of the bar, this time with the camera—and the spectators—following Francesca’s look (i.e., still from behind her, but no longer in front of the mirror). This scene brings to mind the Lacanian mirror phase, when the child, faced for the first time with the complete image of himself and the mother in a mirror, projects his own identity on that image while at the same time experiencing a sense of differentiation and loss.26 In internalizing such an image, the child overcomes the sense of loss and narcissistically invests the whole image of himself and the “other” with his own identity. In applying this stage to Stefano, his encounter with the mirror image of himself and Francesca helps him to overcome his fear of losing her by

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strengthening his sense of identification with her, thus heightening his potential for a narcissistic misrecognition of the imagined unity with her. The acquisition of language is also another way for a child to overcome the sense of loss or absence of the mother. At the same time, however, it moves the child into the symbolic stage where the figure and the word of the father predominate. There is a second important scene in the film where this stage is reenacted: the encounter between Stefano and Andrea, Francesca’s husband, at the door of her apartment, in a series of shots/reverse shots that heighten the conflictive situation between the two. When Stefano rings the bell, Andrea opens the door and, before calling Francesca, twice asks the younger man for his name. Stefano replies both times, but, by the time Francesca comes to the door, he has disappeared. The filming of this scene on the liminal space of the entrance to Francesca’s apartment, where Andrea is inside while Stefano is kept outside, stresses the position of superiority that the older man holds over the younger. This position confers on Andrea the aura of the superior father figure, which later on will be reversed through a depiction of his weaknesses and impotence. It is at this particular point that the oedipal triangle surfaces, as Stefano becomes aware of a rival in his desired unity with Francesca. It is after this encounter that Stefano speaks for the first time to Francesca in the scene that immediately follows, where the two of them stand outside her apartment building in the rain. In this scene, Stefano acknowledges the change in his own view of their relationship that has just taken place: Indeed, at the beginning, I wanted to tell you “Thank you” and I looked for you for that reason. Then, I changed my mind . . . and I felt the desire to look at you. And it was never enough. I had also thought that I would have never talked to you . . . maybe if you had not come down here, now, I would have never talked to you . . . but . . . I would have kept on looking at you . . . not following you . . . but looking at you. I have also tried to do other things . . . Last Thursday, you must have noticed it . . . you didn’t see me all day. But then I couldn’t make it. On Friday morning, I was already sick, my stomach was hurting . . . I am here because otherwise my stomach hurts.27

In the oedipal phase, after a strong recognition of the rivalry with the father, the boy child gives up his incestuous desire for the mother when he perceives the threat of punishment coming from the father. He then identifies with the father and repudiates the mother’s body and voice, accepting the voice and law of the father. However, in Stefano’s case, his narcissistic misrecognition of his unity with Francesca displaces normal oedipal development. This condition pushes for a subversive solution by which he puts himself directly in the absent father’s place, taking up his role and exercising his power over Francesca: “Come away with me,” he commands her, “do not go back there . . . Come with me . . . now and forever.”28 A couple of other scenes stress this subversive oedipal trend. This is particularly the case in the sequence of scenes inside Francesca’s apartment where Stefano has entered unnoticed and where, unseen, he watches as Francesca is alone, at first, and then with Andrea who has unexpectedly come back to her in the middle of the night. In these scenes, the complexity of the narrative situation is indicated by the play of the different looks that work on- and off-screen. While, on-screen,

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Francesca looks at the television, Stefano looks at her from behind a door, while the camera and the spectators watch both of them from off-screen through pans and zoom-ins and zoom-outs. When Andrea joins Francesca to convince her to go away with him, we have a series of shot/reverse shots between the two, with Stefano looking at both of them from different hiding places in the apartment, while the camera and spectators look at all three of them at different lengths and distances. Eventually, once Francesca has accepted to follow Andrea and leave with him by train, Stefano drastically decides to prevent Francesca from leaving by physically dragging her away from the train. At this point, the narcissistic structure that has been building around his image of plenitude with her closes upon his total misrecognition of the “other” as self. As a narcissistic subject, Stefano sees Francesca as part of himself, and he wants her there in his isolated country house, with him, forever: “Now you stay here and I want you to stay here . . . Throw away everything . . . your house, your mother, your brothers . . . your stupid fears . . . forget everything, pretend to have been born this morning . . . now!”29 This narcissistic misrecognition of Francesca as his own, rather than accepting her as an independent being with her own needs and desires, reveals Stefano’s fears of his inability to play the role of the overpowering father; to this purpose, the absence in his last speech just quoted of any mention of her husband is very revealing. The intensity of desire that the young man projects on Francesca and his uncontrollable need to reduce her to a mere object of his will and desire seem indeed to disclose that feeling of “impotence and entrapment” that Silverman saw in “the fantasy of the maternal voice.”30 Francesca, on her part, after accepting to be framed for one night within Stefano’s possessive desire, eventually distances herself from his enclosing narcissistic grip and tries to establish her own self in matters of desire. The woman is therefore positioned in a contradictory interplay of signification at the level of the male character’s desire. She is constructed first as the confirming, narcissistic reflection of his ego identity and later on as a threat to it. At the level of the female character, she projects herself ambivalently both as the fixed image of woman subjected to male dominance as the object of his desire and violence (tied up to a chair and subjected to his physical abuse) and, at the same time, as an individual in need of establishing herself as a separate subject. In her final conflict with Stefano, Francesca inserts herself into a contradictory discourse about female desire: Now it is not like this morning . . . now you have made me understand . . . how squalid it was between Andrea and myself . . . at home . . . It wasn’t like that before, you know . . . but then, little by little . . . it is part of life. All the mistakes, the things to be forgiven . . . also for me. Maybe I do not have any clear reason to go back there, he is perfectly all right, even without me; but I know that I will go back, I realize it now. I am just like you . . . I cannot stand seeing him walking out of the door . . . when he leaves me, I too would want to tie him down . . . I love him.31

Through this discourse, Francesca projects her desire over the image of the woman oppressed and subjected to male dominance, and thus she denies such an image through her openly voiced claim to desire—although her controversial achievement on the level of discourse provokes a tragic conflict on the level of the

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action. In fact, when left alone by Stefano, she leaves him and runs to the station to get a train back to Rome and to the one she loves. When Stefano finds her on the train and commands her to go with him, threatening her with his gun, Francesca, for the first time in her life, finds the strength to say “no!” to a male’s request. The conflict between the female voice that finds the courage to stand by her decision and her desire and the male’s antagonistic action aimed at imposing his own narcissistic control on her results in Francesca’s death. Stefano never overcomes his narcissistic misrecognition of Francesca as his own “self.” Spurred by his oedipal fear of violating the law of the father requiring from him his separation from the mother figure, he prefers to kill her rather than to admit to his own narcissistic deviation. His weapon is a gun, the phallic symbol of his male ego—and clearly a symbol cherished by him in his career as a trapshooter champion. The final conflict between male and female is solved thus through the traditional supremacy of the male, who, although he is unable to control his own self, has power—signified here by the gun—over the female, who is devoid both of power and of defense against power even if she is capable of acknowledging her own desire and identity. The film closes on a long shot of Stefano in the empty station, with his hands in his pockets, his eyes downcast, oblivious of the world outside. He is obviously projecting the image of himself as the ideal ego of the imaginary realm: “an ideal of narcissistic omnipotence constructed on the model of infantile narcissism (or investment of energy in the self) . . . in which images of “otherness” are transformed into reflections of the self.”32 This indifference to “otherness” and to the outside world, inscribed in his body posture and look, signifies Stefano’s utter solitude and introversion, which bring the film to a narrative closure with unresolved gender conflicts. The woman is the victim of the man’s narcissistic self-projection even when she has finally established her own identity and found the courage to voice her own true desire. With Scandalo segreto,33 Monica Vitti becomes a director. The film is a brilliant example of Italian feminist cinema, particularly for its concern with the “relations of power and domination in social and political structures, starting from the family . . . in order to reach definition of female identity, subjectivity, and pleasure”34 as well as in terms of women’s cinema and the contemporary theories of feminism that are concerned with it. I have in mind particularly what De Lauretis calls “the contradiction constitutive of the female subject of feminism,” which derives from the fact that “the female subject is at once inside and outside the ideology of gender, or . . . is at once woman and women. In other words, woman is inside the rectangle (or the screen), women are outside; the female subject is in both places at once. That is the contradiction.”35 Monica Vitti seems particularly aware of this contradiction in this film when she positions herself both in front of the camera—as Margherita, the character of the wife, whose husband, Paolo, a famous painter of eyes, is involved in a love affair with her best friend, Laura—and behind it, as Vitti, the director. In this way, she is at the same time both woman inside, framed by the gaze of the camera in a rectangular screen, and the historical woman who is telling the woman’s story, positioned outside. At the same time, Vitti, with her long experience as an actress who

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was unwillingly obliged by male directors to impersonate the traditional image of woman, seems to be well aware of the contradiction that constitutes female characters. Thus she has Margherita, the film protagonist who is also controlling the video camera on the screen, visually displaying such contradiction. On her birthday, Margherita receives a video camera as a present from her friend Tony. From that point on and up to, but not including, the last scenes of the film, the narrative unfolds exclusively through the eye of this video camera, of which Margherita appears to be, most of the time, the controlling eye. Indeed, when the video camera is turned off, the screen goes blank. Margherita, then, as the main character of the film, positions herself, like the director Monica Vitti, both behind and in front of the camera, playing different roles according to her positioning in the narrative. In front of the camera, she plays Margherita the wife with Paolo, Margherita the mother with her son—exclusively on the phone—and Margherita the friend with Tony and Laura. By herself, in the several scenes where she is alone inside her own home, she verbalizes her thoughts directly into the camera, playing a woman in search of her identity. When she is behind the camera, instead, she uses it as a regular filmmaker, often inserting an ironic dimension in her directing, such as when she frames the male characters of Tony and Paolo in close-ups or full-shots and comments on their physical attractiveness. In preparing the set for her encounter with Laura, she insists on camouflaging the camera in order to hide it from her friend, thus commenting on the problematic of cinema versus reality. In this double presence, both in front and behind the video camera, Margherita the character—or Vitti the actress—becomes inscribed in the contradictions of the female subject, positioned in this case in the specific social environment of the family and in the private space of her home, an environment and a space both particularly meaningful for Italian female spectators. The film shows a conscious effort to address the spectator as female by building, accordingly, narrative patterns of female representation familiar to female spectators. At the same time, the narrative subtly interweaves a more hidden network of meaning involving Margherita and the contradiction of the female subject inscribed in her character by employing strategies intended at disrupting traditional narrative.36 One of these strategies is the complexity of the cinematic gaze and particularly the double positioning of the main character in relation to the camera eye. With this positioning, the typical plot involving a marital situation is disrupted. The woman, in this case, is not always the object of the frame but often becomes the eye through which other objects are framed. Thus, while Paolo, her husband, creates pictures that are images of the eye with his paintings, Margherita becomes herself the eye of the image-creating camera. Furthermore, just as she cannot stand his painted eyes hovering over her, he cannot stand her camera eye focused upon him. If the male’s look has always been the framing eye of the traditional film narrative, in this film, the female’s look is now the framing eye at the surface level of the narrative. Sometimes, however, the eye of the video camera seems to introduce a dimension of unpredictability in the narrative, which contributes to its disruption while it undermines the main female character’s controlling influence. Another important device working disruptively within the narrative is provided by the rough quality of the visual presentation conveyed through Margherita’s inexperienced

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use of the video camera, which is limited mostly to close-ups or full-length representation of people or short pans of interiors and exteriors and is subjected to the constant interruptions imposed by the personal whims of the would-be director or by decisions external to the story. This type of disruption, not uncommon in feminist films, increases the effect of “decentering the masculinity”37 from within the narrative. It also has a stronger impact on the film strategies that address the spectator as female by undercutting the importance of cinematic smoothness and regularity to the advantage of a more feminine, emotional, and instinctive form of representation not polished for “spectacle” but kept unfurbished for everyday life. Through this subtle network of strategies, disruptive of both the narrative and the main character, the self-consciousness training process that Margherita undergoes acquires a stronger appeal for the spectator. The first stage of such a process is provided by the sequence of scenes where Margherita and Laura are facing each other as rivals. Margherita impulsively arranges this encounter as soon as she becomes aware of Paolo’s affair with Laura. The two women are framed in a series of shot/reverse shots as two different sides of femininity. On one side, Margherita seems to stand for the typical image of femininity inscribed in the patriarchal code: frail, emotional, insecure, unprofessional, and satisfied with the limiting but comforting enclosure of her marriage situation and comfortable home. Laura, instead, is positioned as opposite: strong, independent, cold, sure of herself and her charm, self-centered, and uncompromising. Margherita’s dream is to be loved and needed by Paolo—“Tell me,” she asks him, “how long could you stay away from me? . . . Please, tell me you love me . . . louder, please.”38 Laura’s relation with Paolo, instead, is purely physical—“without the shadow of a feeling.” Margherita, as to be expected, as soon as she confronts Laura, is unable to stand up to her, and, in her insecurity, she even believes she wants to become like her: “Teach me how to become like you,” she asks her rival. “I want to be able to go out when I feel like, to go and enjoy a landscape on my own, to go to the seaside, to go where I want. And not share everything always with him!”39 By the end of this encounter with Laura, Margherita, however, begins to realize that she is different and that her needs are also different, thus catching a first glimpse of her own identity: “But what does it mean not to need anyone? How can I do without people, and mostly without him? I need everyone, even you.”40 From this first realization of her own identity, she goes through a process of alternative moods, sometimes blaming herself for his unfaithfulness: “I had to love him better! Instead . . . All that talk about loving me more, loving me better. You don’t love me enough . . . I love you more . . . keep on bargaining about love as if we were at the market!”; and sometimes openly admitting that, although she still loves him, she cannot continue to live with him: “I know that I will not be able to live without you, but I leave you all the same.”41 And she does leave him without giving him any explanation that might hint at her knowing of his affair with Laura or at the anguish that it has caused her. With that final decision, Margherita’s self-realization has come full circle, from passivity, to anger, to doubts, and, eventually, to a dignified, self-respecting acceptance of herself and her limitations still in the context of that “dream of love”42

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that dominates her whole life. As long as that dream had been real for her, she had accepted the safe image of the good wife in which Paolo and all her friends had framed her for their own needs—especially those of Paolo, who needed to maintain the right home setup for his eye paintings and the comfortable family environment in which to eat well and relax. But as soon as her dream has been destroyed and she has realized the hypocrisy of the situation and the selfishness of Paolo’s intentions, she does not accept that situation any longer, even if it still greatly suits her own needs. She places herself in front of him as a new image of independence and self-assertion. The contradiction, however, inscribed in her character between woman as object, in front of the camera eye, and as subject, behind the camera, is played out dramatically in the narrative toward the end of the film when, standing in front of the video camera, Margherita accuses the camera of having been the cause of her fall from blissful ignorance to painful realization: “It’s your entire fault!” she tells the video camera. “There you stand with that black eye that stares . . . and criticizes . . . and provokes, but if you had not been there, always looking and criticizing, maybe I would not have known . . . and, even if I had known . . . and you had not been there, maybe, I would have accepted or forgotten.”43 The conflict that emerges here between the character in front of the camera and the camera eye that used to be identifiable with the character dramatizes further the process of self-consciousness that Margherita has undergone because of her position behind the camera. The most disruptive strategy in the narrative is revealed at the end of the film when the video camera ignores Margherita’s attempt at turning it off, thus uncovering the complexity of the gaze apparatus of the film. It is at this point, that we, the spectators, find out for the first time that there is another look behind Margherita’s, on the other side of the video camera—another much more ever-present look that has been controlling the camera, and most of Margherita’s operations as well, all throughout the film. It is the male look of Tony, determined to use Margherita and her life as the narrative text for his own film. Margherita becomes aware of this even later than we spectators do when she is practically on the point of death, after having ingested several sleeping pills, due to a suicide attempt. This last disruptive strategy of the film disturbingly questions the independence of the female look, while it addresses to an unusual extent the problem of male domination with such a vibrant example of man’s blatantly insensitive interference with a woman’s life. In the last scene of the film, the second one clearly outside of Margherita’s viewing control, Margherita herself throws the video camera off the balcony.44 We may now be asking ourselves, what is our female director telling us with this narrative envisioned and projected through the superimposition of a male character’s look over a female’s and, eventually, of the all-encompassing female director’s look on both of them? Is Vitti the director confirming our suspicions that the ambiguity of the woman’s story that has unfolded here, is inscribed into the codes that have controlled woman’s life for centuries and that the gift of the mechanical eye of the video camera from man to woman is another way to make us, women, tell our story just as they, men, want us to do? If this is the message, certainly the only image in which woman is to be positioned by the female director as the closing image of her film is in her act of throwing away the man’s gift.

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Yet, we cannot forget that the male character’s look was kept all the time under the supervision of the female director who controlled the accuracy of the representation while obviously sharing the contradictory positioning of the female character and the concern for whom the film addresses. Could we then infer that, for the female director, the long tribulations Margherita had to endure were actually necessary for her self-consciousness to raise and fulfill its promises and to inscribe her within the contradictory process that helped her become a female subject? And even if Tony’s male look was there seemingly to control Margherita’s look and life, it actually worked as a catalyst to Margherita’s self-realization rather than as a hindrance to it, and it was always kept safely under control through the attentive surveillance of the ever-present female director’s eye. Accordingly, Margherita’s last enraged action of throwing the camera off the balcony is her final act of selfaccomplishment. (This is also essential for her, because it physically helps her to keep active while waiting for the ambulance to come and ensure her survival!) With that action, indeed, the film closes on a very dynamic image of cathartic liberation from the control of the male’s eye, thus establishing the woman’s refusal to be the object of that eye. Through that conscious refusal, she asserts her own subjectivity. We can then close our reading by agreeing that this film’s visual representation conveys what De Lauretis calls “the contradiction constitutive of the female subject of feminism . . . the female subject (that) is in both places (inside . . . and . . . outside the rectangle of the camera eye) at once.”45 Monica Vitti has therefore come a long way from her beginning as a very talented actress, constantly framed by male directors as a sexual object of the male’s eye and desire. In her last three films, and especially in Scandalo segreto, she has succeeded as an actress as well as a scriptwriter and director in creating female characters who, even if constantly inscribed in the contradictions of the Italian patriarchal milieu, arrive, through painful awareness of their weaknesses and limitations, to the assertion of their difference and subjectivity. It should also be noticed that while, especially in contemporary cinema, we can find several male comic actors who are also directors, Monica Vitti is the only Italian female actress with a unique experience in both dramatic and comic roles who has not been afraid of directing herself in less-than-flattering, and often comic, situations. Next to Monica Vitti, other younger directors were beginning to become well known in the 1980s, such as Francesca Archibugi, Maurizio Nichetti, and Giuseppe Tornatore. Archibugi’s Mignon è partita Francesca Archibugi’s Mignon è partita (Mignon Has Come to Stay; 1988) provides a good example of women who are still playing the traditional roles of wives and mothers within a close family network. The female protagonist is Laura, the mother of five children who are a wild bunch of often-unpleasant creatures according to their sophisticated Parisian cousin, Mignon, who has come to spend some time with them, for (to Mignon) unknown family reasons.

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Laura accepts fully her role as mother. She is known as “Ma,” as everybody calls her and no longer recognizes her name as Laura. Her husband swears that his blatant unfaithfulness was caused by her exclusive dedication to her children and her total indifference to him as husband. She explains differently to her son Giorgio his unfaithfulness and her own indifference to him. In her own words, “At a certain point in time, in a married couple’s relationship, something disappears, and this thing is Eros, the erotic interest in each other.” While her husband still experiences this erotic interest for other women, one younger than the next, Laura seems completely devoid of erotic charge, even toward her brother-in-law, Aldo, who has been in love with her for a long time and has finally found the courage to express his love to her. He breaks into her bedroom to propose to her another type of life, full of passionate love and mutual appreciation. But Laura is not interested. Her motherly love is all that counts for her, as she is convinced that her children always need her. Even her son Giorgio’s harsh words against her, urging her to go away and leave them alone, do not change her mind. Her reaction to his words is one of temporary frustration. She asserts her superior, motherly position by slapping him and ordering him to shut up. Laura’s motherly role is thus in stark conflict with both her husband’s and Aldo’s desires. This positioning of herself exclusively as mother, as Giuliana had done a few decades earlier in Visconti’s L’innocente (The Innocent; 1976), also seems to suggest on Laura’s part a refusal to be an object of the desire of the two men. This refusal to play the erotic-object role that they expect from her seems to sanction her independence from them. Here is where we can see a clear attempt at “decentering the masculinity”46 even in a film where a woman faithfully accepts the traditional motherly role imposed on her by a conservative patriarchal society. By using Laura’s son, Giorgio, as the character whose voice-over comments on the events of his own life and of his family’s, the film undermines Laura’s conviction that she must exclusively play a motherly role because she believes that her children need her. From Giorgio’s voice-over we become aware of a well-known fact of life—that is, that children are much more interested in and need the company and understanding of other children rather than of their own parents. Indeed Giorgio does not attempt suicide because he has found his mother in her bedroom with Aldo, as Laura firmly believes, but because he has become aware of Mignon’s affair with his friend, Cacio, and is deeply hurt by it. The film message is therefore diversified, even if its narrative seems to be concentrated on women’s traditional role in society. Laura’s relationship with her husband and would-be lover may point to a possible transgressive attempt on her part to oppose men’s views of women exclusively as erotic objects. The film discourse, on the other hand, by voicing the children’s intolerance of their mother’s excessive attentions, encourages women to find their sense of security and worth outside motherhood and to approach their relationship with their children realistically and in terms of cooperation, honesty, and self-respect rather than in terms of emotional need. If women reach this level of communication with their children, the film seems to suggest, even women who love their motherly role will be able to face life from a position of strength and self-assurance.

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Maurizio Nichetti’s Ladri di saponette As a male director, Maurizio Nichetti shows a rare sensitivity in his friendly representation of female characters and of gender relationships.47 Ladri di saponette (The Icicle Thief; 1989), starting from its very title, takes De Sica’s 1946 masterpiece, Ladri di biciclette (The Bicycle Thief; 1948), as a model. The film, however, proposes several subtle changes to the traditional representation of women found in the earlier film. In Ladri di biciclette, the character of Maria fits most faithfully with the traditional view of woman exclusively as wife and mother. In Ladri di saponette, Maria, while still playing the same role, also shows an interest for another type of life that could offer her the opportunity for achieving independence and self-esteem through a new role as provider for the family. In both films, the character of Maria disappears from the screen rather early in the narrative action. The details of this disappearance are, however, quite different in the two films. In Ladri di biciclette, Maria disappears never to be seen again on the screen. She has no narrative role in her husband’s story, as the whole action of looking for his bicycle is controlled exclusively by men. Her presence, consequently, becomes unnecessary to the development of the story. In the world of Ladri di biciclette, only men and their personal stories count. Maria and her story, thus, do not belong there. In Ladri di saponette, Maria also disappears quite early in the film but of her own choice. By humorously playing on the power of fantasizing, Maria chooses to exit from her boring, monotonous daily life, filmed in black and white, in order to step into the exciting world of television advertising, filmed in color. This world offers her all the materialistic comforts she has only dreamed of and never attained in real life. In this new fantasy world, Maria can sing and dance and feel free to transform her life into a dream-like existence where all is lively, beautiful, and easy. Maria, however, misses her family and eventually comes back to her former life with a lot of food and gifts for all. Furthermore, Maria’s stepping back into her former life is essential for the narrative action of the story, as it will prove that her disappearance had not been caused by Antonio. Contrary to the lack of narrative importance given to Maria as a woman in Ladri di biciclette, Maria’s role is essential in the action of Ladri di saponette. While in Ladri di biciclette, Maria was the only main female character, in Ladri di saponette, there are other female characters besides Maria. One of them is the beautiful, statuesque Scandinavian girl who appears mysteriously in Antonio’s life as soon as Maria disappears. With her stunning beauty, she stands for woman as object of desire, and, for Antonio’s neighbors, she is the obvious reason for Maria’s disappearance, as they believe that, in order to live with that beautiful young woman, Antonio must have killed Maria. Thus, he is suspected to have murdered his wife. Once the mystery is solved with Maria’s reappearance, this view of the man as the planner and controller of the life of the two women with whom he is involved is rapidly discarded, thus making this film a significant example of the 1980s interest for “decentering the masculine, and highlighting the feminine.”48 The real mover of the action turns out, indeed, to be Maria, who, with her

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disappearance and reappearance, has actually changed both her life and the life of her family, even if not all that happened to her and them can be fully explained in a rational way. In Nichetti’s world, women acquire an important role in society and he seems to point to a fun way of how to view and represent them in cinema, as we will see again in Chapter 9. Giuseppe Tornatore’s Nuovo cinema Paradiso Nuovo cinema Paradiso (Cinema Paradiso; 1988) tells the story of a man, Toto, fascinated by the cinema since his childhood, until he becomes an important film director in Rome. Fatherless from his early childhood, Toto grows up with his mother and a sister in a small Sicilian town, and his only male friend and mentor is Alfredo, the projectionist of the local movie theater, the Cinema Paradiso of the title. All the women portrayed in this film are cast in traditional roles, beginning with Toto’s mother, a young and beautiful woman, who, after losing her husband in World War II, dedicates her whole life to raising her two children. She, thus, fulfils the patriarchal requirements for a “good” mother in traditional terms. Her daughter, the male protagonist’s sister, has no choice but to live with her mother all her life, thus fulfilling the role required from a daughter who cannot act on her own but has to depend on her mother and identify with her “in her attempt to ensure her own survival,” as Melchiori has suggested in her work on “female identity.”49 According to Alberti, this type of woman “experiences relationships and actions through the mediation of another person, her mother. This happens because the daughter cannot become a woman herself or assume agencies that make her the subject of action, and does not dare to become an adult, as she believes that only her mother can fulfill that role.”50 Indeed, the daughter in this film is clearly avoiding all actions that could establish her as a subject on her own. Also, the young woman who is the protagonist’s first and probably only love conforms to what traditional social codes require from her. A very subjective camera exclusively connected to Toto’s look constantly focuses upon her as the object of his desire, and she passively accepts it. As soon as her father, however, becomes aware of their relationship and orders her to end it, she accepts her father’s decision, after an initial weak resistance, and disappears from her lover’s life and from the screen forever. Contrary to Nichetti and Vitti’s films, Tornatore’s films, as will become even clearer in the following chapter, usually focus their narratives on men’s stories and issues rather than on women’s. This selection of films from the 1980s has offered us a wide spectrum of both well-known and up-and-coming directors, male as well as female. Their films show a large variety of viewpoints, from a strongly patriarchal one, as clearly present in Antonioni’s Identificazione di una donna, or in Tornatore’s Nuovo cinema Paradiso, to an equally strong feminist one in Vitti’s films. All the other films analyzed offer combinations of a traditionally patriarchal outlook and of slightly more open and pro-women viewpoint, as we have noticed in Mignon è partita and Ladri di saponette. We have also noticed that the new concern for lesbianism, proposed in real life by several feminist groups in the 1980s, did not go unnoticed in Italian cinema,

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as proven by the films made in this decade by three important Italian directors: Fellini, Wertmüller, and Cavani. The Italian cinema of the 1980s keeps up, therefore, extremely well with the Italian films of previous decades, both at the level of directorial expertise, and of the sensitivity to the social concerns of the directors’ public. Some of these films also successfully display interesting and innovative narrative techniques and strategies aimed at “decentering the masculinity.”51 We have noticed this trend in the construction of gender relationships around the male characters of Snaporaz and Xavier in La città delle donne, of Oscar in Sotto, sotto, and of Antonio in Ladri di saponette. Obviously, these techniques and strategies also have the effect of highlighting the potential for female agency in the above mentioned films as well as in others, such as in Cavani’s Interno berlinese, or in Vitti’s Francesca è mia or Scandalo segreto.

9

Female Agency in the Films of the 1990s

Italian Cinema in the 1990s

C

hapter 8 has provided the essential historical information on Italy in the 1990s, so here we are addressing exclusively the Italian cinema of that time. In the 1990s, Italian male and female directors presented several films that attempt an innovative type of representation of women and of male-female relationships. The trend toward “decentering the masculinity,” and consequently toward activating a new potential for “female agency,”1 that we have noticed especially in the previous two decades seems to continue in the films of the 1990s, thanks especially to strategies that aim at ridiculing men and highlighting women’s self-awareness. Some of the best contemporary comic male actors/directors of Italian cinema, such as Benigni, Troisi, and Nichetti, become recognized as important filmmakers in this very decade, together with some very promising female directors, such as Francesca Archibugi and Cristina Comencini. Roberto Benigni’s Johnny Stecchino and Il mostro Roberto Benigni’s2 international recognition started with Johnny Stecchino (1991), a film that offers a very unusual portrayal of women with the character of Maria, the female protagonist, whose intelligent and enterprising ways of controlling her life and the lives of the men involved with her reveal a new type of woman. No longer afraid or unable to take control of her life or of the lives of the people around her, Maria, even in a very traditional Sicilian environment, cleverly undermines the deeply rooted patriarchal rules of male authoritarianism. In this context, the film also provides a formidable satire of the Italian mafioso male type with his arrogance and sexual neuroses. The main source of comedy in the film discourse is the disruption provoked by the astonishing physical resemblance between the Sicilian mafioso Johnny Stecchino and Mario, the naïve Tuscan social worker who drives a school bus for handicapped children. When Maria

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meets Mario in Florence, she immediately recognizes this resemblance and decides to exploit it, supposedly in favor of her mafioso boyfriend. Taking advantage of Mario’s infatuation with her, Maria invites the naïve young man to visit her in Sicily with the intention to show him off in Sicilian society as the real Johnny Stecchino, who had been obliged to stay hidden for years in the basement of his luxurious villa near Palermo in order to avoid being murdered by his enemies. The plan that Maria proposes to her mafioso boyfriend and his lawyer, obviously in order to gain their approval, is that as soon as his double is killed in his place, the real Johnny Stecchino would be able to escape abroad and start a new life with Maria. Maria, however, at the end, does not follow her own plan, but delivers the real Johnny Stecchino to his enemies who promptly execute him. In this way, she spares his double’s life, and Mario, for his part, is completely unaware of all the intrigues in which he is actually involved, thus increasing the comic effect of the story. The woman is here the controller and mover of the narrative action. Moreover, she also assumes an ethical mission, as she has the power to punish the evil and reward the innocent. Thus, Maria has a very important narrative function, as she keeps the film’s suspense up to the very end by never revealing her intentions or feelings to any character on the screen or to the audience. This film, thus, moves away from the traditional representation of woman as a creature totally controlled by man and moved exclusively by emotion and irrationality and replaces it with what may seem a more masculine image of a woman in control and ruled, like most men, by rationality and, possibly, by ambition and greed. Indeed, the betrayal of her mafioso boyfriend earns Maria a substantial sum of money, which establishes her as a well-to-do and respected woman in her community. We may, therefore, consider Johnny Stecchino one of those films whose purpose, according to Robin Wood, is to suggest that the only alternative for a woman who is not a “good” wife or mother is to be “duplicitous and fashionably desensitized”3 or endowed with masculine characteristics. It seems to me, however, that the discourse of this film rescues this female character from falling into Wood’s category. This film discourse in fact constantly undermines, through light satire, the mafioso male character by ridiculing his sexual inhibitions and by underlining the arrogance and the violence that he shows and perpetrates even against those who protect and take care of him, his own lawyer and Maria included. The film discourse aims also at emphasizing, on the other hand, Mario’s different type of masculinity, endowed by an endearing naïveté and especially by a kindness and sensitivity displayed not only toward his handicapped friend but also toward Maria as a woman. She, in turn, is able to learn how to appreciate him as a man, especially when compared to her mafioso boyfriend’s cruel and violent temper. Thus, even if Maria financially gains from the real Johnny Stecchino’s death, her choice is constructed as a search for a better type of life and relationship, which may also imply an ethical imperative that rescues her duplicity and recourse to violence from purely self-serving, money-oriented intentions. In constructing the character of Maria, the film discourse avoids providing her with any type of moralistic or sentimental commentaries, thus creating an objective view of this female character who never voices her own intentions, feelings, or beliefs. Thus, she must

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be judged not by what she says but exclusively by the actions she performs or leads others to perform. In this film, then, the woman does not disappear at the end or becomes the deceased victim of a patriarchal mise-en-scène. She is instead the instrument that ensures the disappearance of the man who is dangerous not only to her but also to society at large and whose death seems the just retribution for all the violence and deaths he himself had caused. Violence and crime are also the main topic of Benigni’s next film, Il mostro (The Monster; 1994), where the female character, Jessica (in the role of a policewoman), becomes here, too, the instrument that ensures the apprehension and punishment of the monster in the film—that is, the serial killer who has made a career of maiming and killing women in the city. In comparison to Maria, the female protagonist of Il mostro proposes an image of woman as a wholly positive character, an image more easily accepted by the audience, by placing her unequivocally on the side of justice and law as a policewoman. The film discourse, thus, from the very beginning endows Jessica with a social and moral dimension that Maria, as a Mafia boss’s girlfriend, obviously lacked in Johnny Stecchino until the very end when she succeeds in disposing of her boyfriend. Furthermore, by volunteering for the very risky mission of provoking the monster of the title to choose her as his next victim, Jessica acquires a heroic dimension, which in mainstream cinema is usually bestowed only on men. Furthermore, Jessica, by using her female body and voice to provoke the monster of the film, turns out to be a female figure even more transgressive than Maria vis-àvis the traditional type of women usually represented in Italian cinema. Jessica’s transgressivity is in fact extended to the code of sexual behavior recommended for women in traditional society and cinema. In order to provoke the man who is believed to be the monster so that he would turn his attention and violence against her, Jessica displays a whole array of seductive enticement tricks, which clearly set her up as an expert in sexual entertainment—hardly becoming of a regular woman in a traditional patriarchal society. The film conveys this type of transgression in a comic discourse by combining Jessica’s sexual exhibitionism with the complete unawareness on the part of the man she is trying to seduce on the assumption that he is the monster, which turns out to be the wrong assumption. This comedy of errors is also particularly effective in conjunction with the suspenseful mood that surrounds the identity of the monster. Again, in this film, we find a woman playing a remarkably unusual role—far from the traditional wife-mother role within the protective family milieu. Benigni, however, reformulates woman in traditional terms in his next film, the very successful La vita è bella (Life Is Beautiful; 2000), where Dora, the female protagonist, willingly conforms to the traditional female role of “good” wife and mother by totally accepting it and showing her exemplary devotion to her husband and son to the point of self-sacrifice. Indeed, when she realizes that her husband and son have been sent to a concentration camp because of their race, she voluntarily delivers herself to the Nazis in order to follow them there and be close to them. At this point her devotion and self-sacrifice raise her to the level of the political hero, a point to which we have seen very few other women being raised in earlier films, outside of Pina in Roma città aperta or Salomé in Film d’amore e d’anarchia. After this heroic

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resolution, Dora is, however, safely kept out of the screen and the story until the very end of the film when she reunites with her son after her husband is shot. By that time, it is her husband who has reached heroic status in the story, and Dora is now reformulated exclusively within her role as mother. In Benigni’s films, then, women are constructed in diversified roles. Even if some of his films still project women in their traditional roles as wives and mothers, others show them in innovative roles by which women are self-reliant, decision-making individuals who move the action of the film. These women, like Maria in Johnny Stecchino and Jessica in Il mostro, can change and take control of their own existence rather than passively stand by or accept being controlled by the men in their lives. Maurizio Nichetti’s Volere volare and Luna e l’altra The same interest for creating innovative roles for women is present also in the films of another brilliant Italian contemporary comic actor/director, Maurizio Nichetti. Nichetti’s films of the 1990s, to be analyzed here, are Volere volare (To Want to Fly; 1991) and Luna e l’altra (1996). Nichetti’s tendency to mix the fantasy world in color with the representation of the all-too-real and boring, hard reality of life in black and white, as noticed in his earlier Ladri di saponette (The Icicle Thief; 1989), takes a step forward in his next film Volere volare, a brilliant reinterpretation of Robert Zemeckis’s Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988). Here the male protagonist, who is in charge of providing sound effects to silent cartoon reels, is suffering of a mysterious “professional illness” that transforms him into a cartoon character. His life becomes even more troubled when he becomes involved with Martina, a very down-to-earth woman, who is frantically trying to make a living as some type of sociosexual caretaker at a financially difficult time in her life. Martina is a very unusual type of woman, deeply dedicated to her job, which she considers a social mission. Seeing herself as “a sort of social worker,” she provides assistance to disturbed human beings, obviously psychopathic, and helps them to satisfy their unusual needs. In brief, she is hired to help her charges to play out their peculiar fantasies. Martina plays the nurse for a husband and wife who fantasize each other’s death and the macabre funeral ritual that usually follows. She also accommodates a taxi driver’s obsessive desire to frighten his passengers with excessive speed and dangerous driving by pretending to be scared to death by his driving. She plays the same role with another client, who creeps behind her with a gun to scare her in order to make her believe that he is going to hurt and rob her. She also accommodates two architects, who are identical twins who pay her for parading naked in front of them. This unusual type of “social work” imposes on Martina a constant change of roles. In this way, the film allows the audience to realize the enormous potential for change and adaptability that this female character has even under the most pressing circumstances. The film discourse makes sure that the spectators appreciate Martina, even in spite of her “odd” profession, by highlighting her positive qualities as an independent,

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self-reliant, honest, and generous woman in light of another female character, her best friend, who, in her traditional makeup, represents Martina’s opposite. This friend is a very sexy woman who works as a clerk in a women’s clothing store. Her main ambition in life is to find a rich lover or husband who would make it possible for her to quit her job and who would satisfy all her financial needs, and she has no problems with her own promiscuity. Martina, instead, is not interested in rich men or in sex on a first date, even if she is aware of the sex-trade potential of her “odd” profession as a sociosexual caretaker, which she carefully keeps under strict control. In her private life, Martina, despite her profession, is looking for a meaningful relationship with a man based on affection and respect. Martina represents a well-grounded young woman who cherishes her independence and shows an intelligent and nonconformist approach to human relationships, combining generosity and self-esteem together with a keen awareness of the importance for human beings to uphold social and moral values in their relationships with other people. Martina is thus the unusual woman type that Nichetti often portrays in his films. Nichetti’s cinema is, indeed, quite different from traditional cinema. He proposes, from the very beginning of all his films, a clear break away from a realistic reconstruction of everyday life conditions and normal characters. Nichetti portrays characters that are unusual in their psychological and physical characteristics. Focusing on their problems and involved relationships, he draws the spectators’ attention to these relationships rather than to the characters themselves. The spectators’ minds thus engage in a critical evaluation of those problems and relationships rather than passively identify with the characters of the story. This technique is used to its maximum in his next film, Luna e l’altra (which can be rendered in English as “Luna and the other” or “Luna and her double”). This film concentrates on the story of a young female elementary teacher, Luna, and her shadow. Due to the sudden explosion of a magic lantern, Luna’s shadow detaches itself from her to become “the other” or her double and wants to start a life of its own totally different from Luna’s. Luna is in her thirties and is still living with and taking care of her widowed father. She is a very dependable and serious woman, afraid of any emotion—particularly of love, and she has lived a very uneventful and boring life in a small Italian provincial town. Suddenly, the explosion of a magic lantern changes her life by adding a new dimension to it through the unexpected, independent, tangible presence of her shadow. This “other,” although physically identical to Luna, is, to Luna’s great mental distress, completely different from her in her outlook on life. She is curious, anticonformist, lively, and outgoing. She is also ready for and unafraid of love. Furthermore, she is willing to experience all types of risky situations (such as life in a circus) and thoroughly enjoys life. The film focuses on this conflict of lifestyles and conceptions between Luna and her other self, highlighting the excesses that are evidenced by the differences between the two. At the end, another explosion, this time of an actual bomb in the school courtyard, provides the opportunity for eliminating the main conflict of the film. Luna is believed to be killed in the blast. At that point, all her colleagues, who had previously been very indifferent to her, in order to impress their community, hypocritically praise her and decree her a hero who sacrificed herself to save

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the schoolchildren. Luna, instead, has actually survived the blast, thanks to her shadow, and, blending with her, she decides to start a new life and to leave behind her unhappy, lonely, and monotonous existence with its many responsibilities and unpleasantries. She begins her new life as a circus artist, as her shadow had been before, and now she enjoys life and love as she had never done before. This ending seems to communicate a profound message about female subjectivity and of what it takes to achieve it. At the end of the film, Luna has achieved a new awareness of herself and of her needs and desires. She becomes able to give up the type of woman that she felt she had to be: a responsible and dependable daughter and teacher, ashamed of accepting her own sexuality and need for independence. In Luna (before the bomb blast), we clearly see the reenactment of the daughter’s identification with her own mother, as we have noticed in the protagonist’s sister in Tornatore’s Nuovo cinema Paradiso (Cinema Paradiso; 1988), analyzed in Chapter 8. Indeed, according to Alberti, “woman, in her attempt to ensure her own survival, experiences relationships and actions only through the mediation of her mother. This happens because the daughter cannot become a woman herself and does not dare to become an adult, as she believes that only her mother can fulfill that role.”4 Since her mother is not there, the only way Luna can relate to others is by identifying completely with her mother and with what she thought was her mother’s view of how a daughter should behave, thus accepting full responsibility for her father and total dedication to her job together with her denial of her sexuality. In doing so, Luna did not constitute herself as a subject in her own right but acted as a little girl who totally identified with her mother. Only after the bomb explosion, Luna overcomes her dependency on her mother, and constitutes herself as a mature subject by assuming “agencies which make her the subject of action”5 and the controller of her own life. With this film, Nichetti clearly demonstrates his interest in creating female characters who are able to give up their traditional roles as submissive and dependent creatures and who succeed in playing a new, active role as controllers of their own lives and desires. Benigni and Nichetti both succeed, with different filmic strategies, in representing women who are ready, in the name of change and self-reliance, to challenge, with their actions and voice, the traditional codes of behavior that society has imposed on women for centuries. Massimo Troisi’s Il postino The films of Troisi, another excellent Italian comic actor-director of our time, seem to show the same interest for creating innovative, independent female characters even if they still fall within the traditional roles as wife and mother. As an example, let us consider his last film, Il postino (The Postman; 1994), which he directed together with Michael Radford while Troisi was seriously ill.6 The film tells a touching, delicate story of friendship, love, and sorrow involving Mario, a young Italian man, who does not want to be a fisherman like all the other men on his island, including his father. Mario ends up becoming the personal mail carrier of the famous poet Pablo Neruda, who, while in exile from Chile, was granted

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asylum in Italy and subsequently lived in Mario’s small island. There Neruda became a friend of Mario, whom he initiates in the quite unusual field of love poetry, as Mario has fallen in love with Beatrice, the beautiful niece of the owner of the only bar-restaurant in the village. Realizing that he has little to offer Beatrice financially and that both his personality and physical appearance would hardly win him Beatrice’s love, Mario wants to try to woo her with poetic love songs, and asks Neruda for help. Neruda eventually does help, and allows Mario to declare his love to Beatrice using his (Neruda’s) poems and making her believe that he (Mario) had written them. The beauty and power of poetry perform the miracle, and Beatrice falls in love with Mario and agrees to marry him in spite of her aunt’s strong opposition. Beatrice, then, even if constantly framed (with extremely close-up shots, especially of her bosom) as a beautiful object of male desire, and not only of Mario’s, is actually constructed throughout the film as a strong, self-reliant, resisting woman. She does not hesitate to oppose the traditional codes of patriarchal society that expect young women to passively accept the will of their family for all that concerns their private life, and especially their desire and marriage. Troisi cast in her role the beautiful Maria Grazia Cucinotta, who became instantly idolized by film audiences as a contemporary diva. Beatrice’s strength and self-reliance are also demonstrated during Pablo Neruda’s return to their village several years later and after Mario’s tragic death during a political rally in Rome where he had been invited to read a poem in favor of political resistance against the antidemocratic policies of the Italian government. Beatrice shows a very deep understanding of the situation and especially of Mario’s role in the demonstration, as he felt that, by participating and reading a political poem there, he was finally doing something that would have made Pablo Neruda proud of him. Thus Beatrice makes sure that Neruda is aware of his dead friend’s dedication and admiration for him. In this way, the film ends Mario’s story with Beatrice’s voice proclaiming the importance of friendship and love, even after death. In this way, the director highlights the woman’s role as essential, even in a story focused on a man’s intellectual and spiritual growth, inasmuch as she is the witness of his growth and the faithful keeper of his memory. This view of woman as essential in a man’s story seems hardly to be an innovation in relation to what we have witnessed in traditional Italian cinema up to this point. Yet, the narrative strategies used to present this situation here point to a new perspective that underlines the woman’s self-awareness and determination rather than her acceptance and passivity. Indeed, in the little village where she and Mario lived, Mario’s participation in the political demonstration in Rome was deemed a foolish and useless gesture that revealed his naïveté and lack of responsibility toward his wife and son. Beatrice, then, also in this case, shows her opposition to the traditional codes of behavior formulated by a materialistic society unable to conceive of life in terms of political, moral, or social commitments. In her defense of Mario and of his political and human commitments, Beatrice shows an unusual awareness and determination to stand on her own and “assume agencies which make her the subject of action”7 rather than a passive acceptance of the behavioral codes of a traditional mentality.

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Also among contemporary Italian male directors we notice then that the most innovative portrayals of women are within films of the comic genre, where openminded male directors are very keen to highlight and ridicule the traditional ways in which Italian society still views women and their relationships within and outside of the family system. Benigni, Nichetti, and Troisi are very good examples of such a critical comic attitude. We have found real innovation in the representation of women in their films. On the other hand, other contemporary Italian male directors, such as Tornatore or Salvatores, who are also well known in the United States because they have been awarded an Oscar for their films, do not seem to be as innovative. They do not offer any portrayal of women that could be viewed as resisting the traditional formulation of woman in Italian cinema, as we will find out next in our analyses of Tornatore’s Stanno tutti bene (Everybody’s Fine; 1990) and Salvatores’s Mediterraneo (1991). Giuseppe Tornatore’s Stanno tutti bene and Gabriele Salvatores’s Mediterraneo A very authoritarian father’s control over his children and his expectations of them turn tragic for the family in Tornatore’s film Stanno tutti bene. The film shows the difficulties facing all the grown-up children of a very controlling and demanding Sicilian father. The three sons and two daughters struggle to live up to their father’s expectations. The film shows how their search for self-determination is constantly frustrated and impaired by their inability to free themselves from the guilt that they constantly feel because of their inability to fulfill those expectations. Lying and denial therefore become the only means they can use to communicate with their father. By underlying so vividly and desperately the problems of communication that family relationships endure in contemporary society, Tornatore concentrates here on the danger that a father’s authoritarianism represents for both adult male and female children, thus agreeing with his female director-colleagues in their denunciation of the perils of the traditional uncommunicative and authoritarian family system. While the female directors analyzed in Chapter 8 and here try to point out ways to change and improve communication within such a system, Tornatore limits himself only to highlighting the dangers of such a system for both women and men affected by it. Another well-known contemporary Italian director is Gabriele Salvatores, whose very popular film Mediterraneo tries to show the importance of love in the life of all people, even under the very hard conditions of World War II. The narrative action of the film takes place on a Greek island that a small squad of Italian soldiers occupies during World War II. Being a war film, an audience would not expect love to be the focus of the film narrative, and yet from the beginning, the depth of human understanding and the interest in communication and collaboration, shown by both the Italian lieutenant who commands the squad and the Greek priest of the village, the two authority figures that represent, respectively, the Italians and the Greeks alert the film audience that this film is not interested in the violence of war but in the need for love and communication present in the human hearts. Indeed, villagers and soldiers get along incredibly well, and, given

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the young age of all the soldiers, their needs for sex is also satisfactorily fulfilled in different ways, by different female characters. One of these female characters with whom several of the Italian soldiers become involved is Vassilissa, the female protagonist of the story who vociferously proclaims that she is a prostitute and she needs to practice her profession. For the lieutenant’s orderly, the young, idealistic Farina, Vassilissa represents something other than a mere opportunity for sex; she actually inspires love to him and, through love, he brings about a change in her life and an abrupt end to her profession. The other soldiers, in spite of the inconvenience they experience at such a drastic change in Vassilissa’s sexual weekly schedule, show an understanding and friendly attitude toward Farina and his love for Vassilissa. With the lieutenant’s assistance and the friendly collaboration of all of his comrades and of the Greek priest, Farina marries Vassilissa and the two of them decide to build their life on the island. When the war ends and all soldiers are ordered to return to Italy, Farina refuses to obey the order and wants to stay on the island with Vassilissa to help her fulfill her dream of starting a boardinghouse/ restaurant on the island. Both the lieutenant and the sergeant of the squad support his choice, cover up for him, and leave him there, in an exceptional show of friendship and understanding from two military men. Eventually, several years later, they both go back to the island to visit Farina in his boardinghouse/restaurant, after Vassilissa’s death. Farina’s love for his dead wife is still as strong as before, just like the friendly love that still unites the three men. At the end of the film, a small inscription states, “This film is dedicated to those who run away.” Whatever the dedication of the film is, the film concentrates on stressing the power that love and understanding have in human life away from the expected traditional boundaries that moral and social rules create in a patriarchal male dominated society. The choice of a female and a male character like Vassilissa and Farina clearly helps in furthering the message of the film. Vassilissa’s diametrically opposite roles as prostitute first and faithful wife later fit equally well within the representation of women to be found in traditional Italian cinema. At the same time, her courage in accepting herself without recriminations and her enterprising initiative toward making a better life for herself and the man she loves disclose a new type of woman rarely portrayed in traditional Italian cinema. Farina, then, in his acceptance of Vassilissa’s past, in his support of her and her initiative, and with his total love and dedication to her, stands for a type of kind and open modern man who is not afraid of a sexy woman or of showing his feelings for her. He acts in all his relationships (and not only with Vassilissa) with honesty, respect, and love, without self-conceit or arrogance, so that men also respond to him with friendliness and respect, as if to imply that any individual acting like Farina can improve his community with his example and the reactions he induces. Francesca Archibugi’s L’albero Delle Pere The choice of contemporary female directors for this study is limited. I have selected for discussion in this chapter the only two female directors who are also

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known internationally and whose films may be found in videotapes in North America: Francesca Archibugi and Cristina Comencini. We have already mentioned Francesca Archibugi’s Mignon è partita (Mignon Has Come to Stay; 1988) that provides, with the character of Laura, a good example of women who are willingly playing the traditional roles of mothers within a close family network. The message of that film seemed to encourage women to find their sense of security and worth outside motherhood and to realistically approach the motherchild relationship in terms of cooperation, honesty, and self-respect rather than in terms of emotional needs. This topic is also central in Archibugi’s next films. Verso sera (Toward evening; 1990) deals with a young, widowed mother’s difficult relationship with her fatherin-law, especially their disagreements on how to raise her daughter. Con gli occhi chiusi (With closed eyes; 1994) is a controversial love story where family and class connections play a significant role, as they also do in L’Albero delle pere (The Pear Tree; 1998), which seems, to me, the most worthy of a brief analysis here. In this film, Archibugi addresses again the topic of family life, in this case with separated parents (a drug-addicted mother and an absent father) and their two children. The film portrays, in very negative light, married men and women who sacrifice their children for their personal interests. The mother, especially, is here constructed as an irresponsible and weak person and as the main cause of the children’s painful experience with drugs and the consequences of drug abuse. The younger girl pricks herself inadvertently with the syringe that the mother has just used, and the older child tries repeatedly to get her medical treatment without compromising their mother. The film’s insistence on the endless procedure that the children have to endure in the impersonal, bureaucratic, public health institutions of a large industrial city harps on the woman’s unfitness as mother. Also in this film as in the earlier Mignon è partita, the narrative point of view is that of the older male child. His behavior and actions in such tragic circumstances are a powerful commentary on parental shortcomings, especially of the mother’s, whom he, however, always tries to protect as she is depicted as a weak and irresponsible, but fundamentally good and loving, person. Here the traditional role of the parents as protectors of their children is definitely overturned, even if the evident goal of the film is not to propose a change in the traditional representation of women as mothers. In Mignon è partita! the older son, Giorgio, had actually expressed the wish of shaking away the burden of parental overprotectiveness. The story narrated in L’albero delle pere seems to propose the parent-child relationship from a different angle by criticizing parents, and especially mothers, for their self-indulgence and lack of responsible behavior toward their children. The discourse of the film seems to share the strong criticism of irresponsible motherhood voiced by some of the masters of Italian cinema, such as De Sica in I bambini ci guardano (The Children Are Watching Us; 1942) or Visconti in Gruppo di famiglia in un interno (Conversation Piece; 1974), and it promotes a very negative view of the mother by giving abundant space to explicitly unfavorable opinions formulated about her by

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several characters in the films and to clearly negative images of her as a weak, selfcentered, and insecure woman. It will be interesting to watch which path Archibugi will follow next. Will she stand for a change in the traditional family system or for maintaining the system completely founded on traditional motherhood without drastic changes? Her next films will tell us. Cristina Comencini’s Va’ dove ti porta il cuore, Matrimoni, and Il più bel giorno della mia vita Cristina Comencini, a very competent young director, daughter of Luigi Comencini, one of the best comedy-Italian-style directors, seems to suggest in most of her films an interest for working from within the traditional family system in order to implement some important changes to improve the relationships that form the traditional family nucleus. In most of her films, the feminine viewpoint prevails, and women, although still predominantly playing the traditional roles of wives and mothers, are given a voice to tell their stories. Indeed, her films tell only women’s stories, while their male partners’ stories are left untold. This interest in women’s stories is already present in Comencini’s Va’ dove ti porta il cuore (Follow Your Heart; 1996), the film that gave her public and critical acclaim, popular success, and notoriety in Italy and abroad. The action of the film is subtly woven around an old woman, whose life story involves her daughter and granddaughter. The film faithfully follows the homonymous successful novel by the Italian female novelist Susanna Tamaro. The story is told through the old woman’s diary with her voice-overs. She leaves the diary for her granddaughter (and, consequently, also for us spectators) to know and understand, through a series of flashbacks, her apparently normal life story, which was instead tormented by misunderstanding, conflict, and even tragedy. The troublesome relationship with her own daughter dominates her life. In the diary, she does not hesitate to confess what might still be viewed as an unacceptable and unnatural motherly behavior—that is, her lack of interest in, and even resentment of, her daughter as a newborn baby when she was trying to cope emotionally and physically with the tragic death of her lover, who was also the baby’s natural father. The old woman also acknowledges her rigid and uncommunicative approach to her daughter at the time when the daughter was an emotionally frail, insecure young woman and a single mother. She also recognizes her own responsibility in the tragic accident that caused her daughter’s death: at that time the daughter was going through a very difficult period, financially as well as emotionally, and, in spite of her psychological conditions, the mother chose that particular time to reveal to her, in an insensitive way, the truth of her birth. In her emotional distress, the daughter drove her car off the road and died in the accident. The story continues with the old woman’s relationship with her granddaughter, a relationship much more open and affectionate than the one she had with her daughter but also marked by misunderstanding and resentment. In the diary narrated by the old woman, practically no attention is paid to the husband’s or lover’s

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story outside of the few details needed to explain her own story. The female voiceover represents a significant cinematic innovation, as it proves the importance given here to the female voice, contrary to its importance in mainstream cinema. Comencini’s courage, as a new type of Italian director interested in representing women differently, is also shown in the choice she made of directing a film on what has been called “the highly noncommercial subject of old age.”8 Indeed, the sad story of an old woman, living alone and tormented by remorse and by the ghosts of her past, ends in a lonely death on a gray and windy autumn day. Such a story may unpleasantly affect the spectators who are accustomed to the traditional happy ending of mainstream cinema. The final sequences of the film, however, move away from old age, solitude, and death, and frame the granddaughter as she is starting her much-anticipated bicycle tour in a serene natural background on a beautiful sunny day. This ending suggests that, even if old age and death are sad events to be expected in life, there will always be youth and natural beauty to sooth the pain and loss caused by old age, death, and separation. Comencini’s next film, Matrimoni (Marriages; 1998), focuses specifically on married people, and it deals with them in a comic handling of characters and situations with an often biting satirical representation of marriage as a dangerous institution, thus showing a close tie with comedy-Italian-style films. The film discourse develops around the marital relationships of Giulia, Sandra, and Sergio, the three middle-aged children of a rather unusual couple of parents, who were separated for several years but are still meeting in clandestine rendezvous unknown even to their children. With this unusual arrangement, they are trying to preserve the sexual appeal for each other, which had practically disappeared while they were officially married. Their children seem all to agree on that well-known popular saying that “marriage is the death of love” even without consciously admitting it, until Giulia, the most responsible and reliable of the three, does the unthinkable: on Christmas Eve, after preparing the perfect Christmas dinner for her family, she suddenly disappears without informing anyone of her whereabouts. This event triggers a series of reactions that bring to the surface the problems and dullness of marital life for all concerned, including Paolo, Giulia’s husband. Sandra, a divorcee, admits that she is only sexually attracted to married men because, with her, those men feel relieved and free to show their erotic energies that had been totally suffocated in their married life. Next to Sandra, Paolo also feels free to express his frustrations at having to control his sexual exploits with Giulia, who was always afraid of being heard by their children, and thus would put a pillow on his head in order to suffocate all the possible noises he would make in their love making. Obviously, Paolo ends up in bed with Sandra; while Giulia makes love to her old boyfriend Fausto, who, with his telephone call, had triggered her sudden marital crisis. There is another couple that becomes involved with Giulia’s unexpected disappearance, her brother Sergio and his wife Lucia. Sergio has had a lover for quite some time and everyone seemed to know about it, yet no one had ever talked of it or done anything about it. Inspired by Giulia’s sudden departure, Lucia finds the courage to confront Sergio and voice to him her intention to leave him and go back to Canada to her family as soon as the children are a little older. At his

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question, “Why don’t you leave me now?” she does not hesitate to admit that her only interest is in being a good mother and does not want to hurt their children by taking them away from their father at such an early age. But she also admits that she can change if he shows an erotic interest in her rather than in his lover. Several of these themes recur also in Comencini’s latest film, Il più bel giorno della mia vita (The Best Day of My Life; 2002), where an old woman is again one of the main characters, but the stories told concern her three children, two daughters and a son, and their families. One of the points of view in the film, as suggested by the title, is that of the youngest of the grandchildren, a little girl of approximately ten years old, who is commenting about her family life and especially about the special day of her first communion. There are several important female voices in this film, such as those of the two daughters and their mother. An interesting, new transgressive voice is provided also by the gay son, revealing his tormented relationship with his mother. In this family, too, the mother has problems communicating with and showing love and understanding to her children. They, in turn, feel intimidated by her and by her insistent demand that they keep up a strong, middle-class moralistic faćade in order to save the traditional family values that she cherishes. She is aware that her older daughter has already transgressed these values, as this daughter is divorced and is raising her teenage son on her own while working full time. And yet this untraditional female behavior does not seem to have raised in the daughter a deep awareness of her own identity as an independent and self-assured woman, as she still seems deeply affected by the traditional requirements of her upbringing. To her sister, she voices her fears concerning her son and her inability to understand what she calls his obsessive interest for boats and exclusively male companionship. Indeed, she seems to share her mother’s homophobic fears toward her gay brother and his potentially deviant influence on her son. The brother’s story is one of tormented and often-frustrated attempts to get away from his family, especially his mother, whose rigid moralistic position he both fears and resents. His is the voice of another victim of the rigid conservatism that controls traditional family and gender relationships. The younger daughter’s voice has the strongest feminist impact in the film, as she is in the middle of a marital crisis, torn between a passionate and completely dedicated lover and a self-centered, workaholic, well-to-do husband, who takes her for granted and ignores her needs for recognition, devotion, and sexual satisfaction. Their little girl feels the tension between her parents and tries desperately to keep them together. Their older daughter’s teenage sexual restlessness goes unnoticed by the mother but finds a happy ending with the love of a “good” boy, who is her male cousin’s best friend. The end of the younger daughter’s story is left untold, as the film does not show whether she decides to leave her husband and go away with her lover or to stay with her husband and accept her role within a traditional family system, as her own mother would expect her to do. The old woman’s story here is shown through the focusing of the camera on several family photographs from an old album and on old family movies, where she rediscovers herself and her family members in roles and positions that foretell their present situations. The final sequences at her house where they all celebrate the first communion of the youngest family member conveys well the tension of a

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family reunion, where what is not being said undermines whatever type of communication the characters try to establish among each other. This film, which was met with a very favorable public and critical response, provides a convincing representation of the fragility undermining traditional family relationships, a fragility that is revealed particularly by the voices of the female characters, whose stories are at once those of attempted transgression (with the goal of creating new family relationships based on sincerity, love, and acceptance of difference), and of painful reconsideration of the traditional values of family life, which are still very influential in their own daily lives. Archibugi’s and Comencini’s films then, clearly convey a point of view closely concentrated on women’s stories and interests, which one would expect from female directors and which we have already found in Vitti’s films in the 1980s. The general impression one gets from the representation of women in the films made by these innovative directors and by some of their male colleagues, mostly between the 1980s and the beginning of the second millennium, is one of greater diversity and of a sharper awareness of women’s roles and opportunities in contemporary society. Next to emancipated, independent types of women, we still find women playing the traditional roles of wives and mothers within a close family network. Yet, these roles are often presented through a feminine point of view that rescues from a purely traditional type of narrative closure women who willfully accept their motherly role and are consciously hesitant to renounce their children’s love and closeness and their own dominant position in their children’s life. Most of these female characters seem to be fully aware of the constrictions that the traditional family system has imposed on them for centuries. Women in these films are trying to find new ways to understand their own frustrations and needs and also to engage men in their attempts at self-realization in order to build a better type of relationship with them and, together, to create a more satisfying family life also for their children. This approach seems to be closer to what De Lauretis was indicating as the road to feminism consisting in “the practice of selfconsciousness, that particular kind of ideological analysis which begins from and always refers back to the experience of gender and its construction of subjectivity.”9 Contemporary Italian directors seem thus to suggest that women are ready to “assume agencies” and, consequently, to be actively involved in proposing drastic changes of their roles in the Italian cinema and society of the second millennium.

Conclusion

W

omen, Desire, and Power in Italian Cinema has focused on the representation of the roles that women have played in twentieth-century Italian cinema. The choice of this topic has been dictated by the realization that women are essential characters in the plots of Italian films, even if their roles are usually limited to their traditional social function as wives and mothers. Italian cinema is indeed prevailingly concerned with gender relationships and especially with those within the family system, where women as wives and mothers are the primary influential factor. This study has sketched a chronological outline of how women have been represented in Italian cinema from its origins to the end of the 1990s and, rather than claiming to have exhausted the topic, it has just provided an initial general overview of it, which I hope will inspire several more specific and critically valid later studies. I felt that it was significant to underline the connection between the films I analyze and the social Italian reality where they are rooted, because Italian cinema fully captures and clearly demonstrates a basic understanding of the particular approach to male-female relationships that Italian society has used throughout its history. My analyses of the films of the great masters of Italian cinema, such as Antonioni, Bertolucci, De Sica, Fellini, Pasolini, Rossellini, and Visconti, aim at highlighting their specific ways of representing female characters in their films rather than discussing their overall achievements as film directors. These limitations in my approach do not, however, intend to minimize in any way the powerful influence that these talented Italian film masters have had on the development of Italian and international cinema. I have also tried to offer a representative analysis of Italian female directors’ films. These analyses have shown that female directors are also influenced, in their representation of women and of male-female relationships, by the same male-oriented ideologies, such as patriarchy and Catholicism, that have been embedded in Italian life and culture for centuries. I hope that my readers have enjoyed the analyses of the films chosen for discussion and have gained a better perspective of Italian culture and especially of the often-biased methods utilized by Italian filmmakers in presenting and filming women as nearly exclusively dependent on men. The overall results of this study demonstrate that the representation of women provided by Italian filmmakers throughout the twentieth century seems to be quite traditional. At the same time, in its search for examples of a more unbiased and objective representation of women, this study has also pointed out how some films

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belonging to the comic genre, and several among those made between the 1970s and the 1990s, have succeeded in proposing new types of female and male characters. These female characters, with the assistance of their unusually understanding male partners, are more self-reliant and more aware of their own condition as women living in a still very male-oriented culture and seem also interested in and capable of producing change in their personal situations and in the circumstances surrounding them even if they are still mostly within a family milieu. For sure, cultural trends are difficult to change, especially in a society strongly rooted in male-centered ideologies, which formulate couples’ love relationships through a strict polarity based on a strong, all-powerful male in control of the couples’ lives and desires and a submissive and controlled female. As I have tried to highlight in my analyses, these ideologies have caused the constant power struggle that affects male-female relationships as well as the complicit behavior that women seem to feel is necessary for them to adopt in order to have a peaceful and pleasant life with their men. I am sure that the role of wife and mother that most Italian women often choose in real life and in films is a perfectly acceptable role as long as it is consciously chosen by a woman without coercion and outside of the power struggle that seems to be unavoidable in a couple’s life. By closely considering the narrative strategies of all the films chosen for critical analysis, Women, Desire, and Power in Italian Cinema has also tried to highlight the signifying strategies that each film has used to convey an overall traditional message about the role that women play in Italian cinema and society. We did notice, however, that some films made in the last two decades of the twentieth century have tried to represent more independent types of women and, consequently, to convey a less traditional message to their audiences. By giving women a voice of their own to express their desire and a strong gaze to influence people and situations around them, these films have shown women endowed with “female agencies”1 that help in constituting them as subjects on their own.2 It is my hope that the cinema of the new millennium will continue this progressive representation of Italian women as subjects standing on their own and in control of their own lives and desires, which could reflect a real change in the Italian society of the 2000s by which women will not be viewed any longer as “other,” “different,” or “deviant.”3

Notes

Introduction 1. In an interview with a journalist of the magazine Bianco e Nero 30, no. 1–2 (1972): 1–112. The translation is mine. 2. As stated by Cristine Gledhill in “Recent Developments in Feminist Criticism,” in Film, Theory and Criticism, ed. Gerald Mast, Marshall Cohen, and Leo Braudy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 93. Marcia Landy also considers the phenomenon of stardom in the chapter “The Folklore of Femininity and Stardom” in her book Italian Film (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 261–308. 3. Nancy Chodorov, “Gender as Personal and Cultural,” in The Second Signs Reader: Feminist Scholarship 1983–1996, ed. Ruth-Ellen B. Joeres and Barbara Laslett (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 216–44. 4. According to Teresa De Lauretis in Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1982), in cinema, as well as in traditional written narrative, woman-as-spectacle stands as obstacle to the narrative action, which is activated exclusively by the male protagonist in his quest to conquer the woman he loves. As clearly explained by Laura Mulvey in Visual and Other Pleasures (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1989), “woman, as object of the male’s desire and gaze, becomes spectacle. As such, she interrupts the flow of the narrative action in cinema, while the eye of the camera, together with the eye of the male hero(s) on the screen and of the male spectators off screen (who identify with the hero on the screen), linger on her as spectacle” (21). This visual process affecting the narrative action of films is clearly formulated in Italian films, where the active role of the male protagonists confirms the sexual objectification of the female characters they pursue. This process is clearly displayed in most of the silent films discussed in Chapter 2, as well as in several of the later sound films 5. “Sofia” is the Italian spelling that I am using in this book. The American spelling is “Sophia.” 6. Maggiorata fisica means “exceptionally physically endowed,” referring to a woman’s physical beauty, and it was an expression used by Vittorio De Sica as an actor in an episode of Altri Tempi (Other Times; 1951), a film by Blasetti, where he plays a lawyer and uses this expression to refer to Gina Lollobrigida. 7. For a more detailed discussion of the origins of cinema, see my “The Origins of Italian Cinema,” in Carlo Celli and Marga Cottino-Jones, A New Guide to Italian Cinema, 3rd ed. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 9–10. 8. Patriarchy as a system is founded upon the family and the importance it has in society, centered as it is upon a strong, all-powerful male figure, the father, or pater in Latin, and a submissive, nurturing yet powerless female figure, the mother. This view has been strongly supported by Christian ideology from the time of Genesis and its

228 NOTES

9.

10.

11.

12

13. 14. 15.

16. 17. 18.

interpreters, starting with St. Paul and the first fathers of the church. Indeed, according to St. Paul, “Women should be subject to their men . . . Woman’s authority is nil; let her in all things be subject to man. Adam was beguiled by Eve, not she by him. It is right that he, whom woman led to wrong doing, should have her under his direction, so that he may not fail a second time through female levity.” History of Ideas on Woman, ed. Rosemary Agonito (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1977), 69–72. In the last few decades, psychoanalysis has proposed interesting perspectives on the role that women, and especially mothers, play in society. Consult Chris Weedon’s Feminist Practice and Poststructuralist Theory (New York: Blackwell, 1987); E. Ann Kaplan’s Motherhood and Representation (London: Routledge, 1992); and Julia Kristeva’s Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980). Contemporary Italian feminist thought adds an interesting variant to such views based on careful analysis of the everyday experiences of Italian women and formulated according to a different consideration of the effects upon young girls of the pre-Oedipal phase and of the Oedipal complex. Consult Giuliana Bruno’s’ collection of essays in Off-Screen: Women and Film in Italy (London: Routledge, 1988). Psychoanalytical theories, especially Lacan’s, share this Christian view of women as dangerous to men, and both Freud and Lacan, while upholding the importance of motherhood in family and social life, at the same time, support the concept of “difference” on which male-female relationships are founded. When I mention a film for the first time per chapter, I first give the Italian title, followed by the official English (U.S.) title in parentheses, italicized, and capitalized. When necessary, I give an English literal translation in parentheses, lowercased and not italicized. After that first mention, I only give the Italian title. Capitalization in titles is different, as Italian titles capitalize only the first word and proper names, while formal titles in English capitalize most words. If the film’s title is the same in Italian and in English, capitalization will be the only way to differentiate between the two; that is, La dolce vita is the Italian title, while La Dolce Vita is the English/American title. As already mentioned, this condition was clearly proposed by the church fathers of early Medieval times, as it was by St. Paul, who, around 150 BC, wrote in 1 Corinthians, “The head of every man is Christ, and the head of every woman is man . . .” or still, “The man is not of the woman, but the woman of the man. Neither was the man created for the woman, but the woman for the man” in History of Ideas on Woman, 69–72. As suggested by Kaplan, Motherhood and Representation, 46–48. Ibid., 125–26. Jackie Byars performs similar analyses in her essay “Gazes/Voices/Power: Expanding Psychoanalysis for Feminist Film and Television Theory,” in Female Spectators, Looking at Film And Television, ed. E. Deidre Pribiam (London: Verso, 1992), 110–31. For an exhaustive discussion of this topic, see Christian Metz’s The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and Cinema (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1982). For a discussion of this expression, see the introduction to the collection Stardom: Industry of Desire, ed. Christine Gledhill (New York: Routledge, 1991), xiii–xx. Desire, therefore, as the driving force behind pleasure in cinema, is indeed constantly connected with the visual and, more specifically, with looking, an activity that usually proposes a binary opposition between the one who looks and what or who is being looked at. Feminist film theory emphasizes the importance of visualization in cinema and particularly the importance of the look that is often connected with the control of the narrative action in films. Indeed, feminist film critics have substantially demonstrated that the one who does the looking is usually the male protagonist, who is also

NOTES 229

19. 20.

21. 22

23.

24. 25.

26. 27.

28. 29.

30.

31.

the character who controls the narrative action, as Teresa De Lauretis clearly demonstrates in her groundbreaking book, Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema, especially in the chapter “Desire in Narrative,” 103–57. Jonathan Rosenbaum, Movies as Politics (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997), 3. This term has been used by Dorothy Dinnerstein in the introduction to her book, The Mermaid and the Minotaur: Sexual Arrangements and Human Malaise (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), 2–3, where she states, “The most potent sources of sexual conservatism are buried in the dark, silent layers of our mental life. This burial keeps them potent. To articulate them openly, to see them in the light of full awareness, is a necessary condition for growth—away . . . from tightly, coercively predefined modes of feelings and action.” Ibid. Although, I am fully aware that feminist criticism has been the most successful critical theory that has highlighted the social unfairness that women constantly face even in contemporary society. Readers interested in this approach may consult also the collection of articles in Feminism and Materialism: Women and Modes of Production, ed. Annette Kuhn and Ann Marie Wolpe (London: Routledge, 1978) and Marcia Landy’s book, Film, Politics, and Gramsci (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1995). See Timothy Corrigan, A Short Guide to Writing about FILM (New York: Longman, 1997), 88. I am aware that there is a very large body of important, critical, published studies on cinema and on male-female relationships. I hope that Women, Desire, and Power in Italian Cinema will offer its readers an insight into Italian culture. In Il Corriere della sera, of Milan, Italy, December 9, 2002. If my readers need more background information, they can consult the last edition of my History of Italian Cinema that I have reedited with my colleague Carlo Celli and that has been published by Palgrave Macmillan with the title A New Guide to Italian Cinema. In that book, I give ample reference to other scholars in the field who have worked on Italian films in the United States and abroad and to primary works by directors and authors that shed more light on their filmic experience. Celli and Cottino-Jones, A New Guide to Italian Cinema. As the political and economic history of the 1980s and 1990s is interconnected, I have provided in Chapter 8 the historical information that is essential for the 1990s, and consequently the beginning of Chapter 9 provides only some general information about Italian cultural life in the 1990s. As Yvonne Rainer suggests in her “Some Ruminations around Cinematic Antidotes to the Oedipal Net(les) while Playing with DeLauraedipus Mulvey, or He May Be Off Screen, but . . . ,” The Independent, April 1986, 20–29. As discussed by Giulia Alberti in her essay “Conditions of Illusion,” in Off-Screen, Women and Film in Italy, 36–54.

Chapter 1 1. A very popular American version of Quo vadis was directed in 1951 by Merryn LeRoy, starring Robert Taylor and Deborah Kerr. 2. On Cabiria and the Italian silent film, see the excellent studies of Gian Piero Brunetta and Gianni Rondolino, respectively in Cent’anni di Cinema Italiano, 2 vols. (Bari:

230 NOTES

3.

4.

5. 6.

Laterza, 1995) and Storia del Cinema (Torino, Italy: UTET, 2001). According to Rondolino, “Cabiria influenced also David W. Griffith, who used it as his model for the composition of Intolerance.” Ibid., 89. Specifically on Cabiria, see the study by Gianni Rondolino, I giorni di Cabiria (Torino, Italy: Lindrau, 1993). That is, the combination of emotional solicitations that trigger the compassionate reaction of the audience. We will consider these again, especially in the following chapter. Maciste, indeed, conquered the popular imagination of the audience and prompted the creation of a long series of films named after him and centered on him as protagonist. This series amounted to approximately fifteen films, made between 1915 and 1926, in a ten-year span: Some of these films were Maciste (Marvelous Maciste; 1915) and Maciste alpino (Maciste in the Alps; 1916) by Giovanni Pastrone, Maciste poliziotto (Maciste in the police force; 1918) by Roberto. Luigi Roberti, Maciste innamorato (Maciste in love; 1919) and Maciste salvato dalle acque (Maciste rescued from the waters; 1921) by Luigi Romano Borgnetto, and Maciste all’inferno (Maciste in Hell; 1925) and Maciste nella gabbia dei leoni (Maciste in the lion’s cage; 1926) by Guido Brignone. Mary Ann Doane has exhaustively discussed this topic in her book Femmes Fatales (New York, Routledge, 1991). I was present when the film was projected in Los Angeles at the County Museum in the early 1980s, just after it had been restored in Italy, and I was impressed by the successful reception it received by the crowd present in the theater and by the critical acclaim bestowed on it.

Chapter 2 1. Brunetta deals with the topic of divismo in “Cantami o diva,” Chapter 6 of his Cent’anni di cinema italiano (Bari, Italy: Laterza, 1995), 97–118. See also Pietro Bianchi, La Bertini e le dive del cinema muto (Torino, Italy: UTET, 1969). 2. Francesca Bertini and Eleonora Duse, who was also Gabriele D’Annunzio’s longtime lover, were actually the two best-known stage actresses of their times admired as famous stage dive both in Italy and abroad. While Bertini became also a very famous cinema diva, Duse did not pursue a film career after her first cinema experience with Cenere. 3. As correctly suggested by Mary Ann Doane. In her words, “The feminine body is insistently allegorized and mythicized as excess in art, literature and philosophy.” Femmes Fatales, Feminisms, Film Theory, and Psychoanaslysis (London: Routledge, 1991), 2. 4. Thus, fitting Laura Mulvey’s definition of scopophilia, or pleasure in looking, given in her Visual and Other Pleasures (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1989), 25. 5. According especially to G. Rondolino’s view in his Storia del Cinema (Torino, Italy: UTET, 2001), 91–92. 6. The eighteenth-century philosophical gender view of the conflict between the city (equating culture, progress, and activity with the male) and the country (equating the natural and the conservative with the female) is here cleverly overturned with a misogynist intent by connecting the woman with the city and the man with the country. Indeed, while she stands for the city and its cultural sophistication and technological advances, the woman and all the elements connected with her are projected in a negative light aimed at disrupting and eventually destroying the serenity and tranquility

NOTES 231

7.

8.

9.

10. 11. 12.

13.

14.

15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20. 21.

of the young countryman who has aroused her sexual desire. This young man, on the other hand, stands for all the positive elements of country life, and, because of his goodness and inexperience, he falls for the sophisticated charm of the city woman who becomes the erotic object of his desire. The owl plays a very symbolic role in this story, as it is constantly connected with the woman poet in more ways than through her owl-shaped hat. She mentions this connection in the letter she writes to the naïve countryman, in which she compares herself to an owl that will fly to his country house at night to grasp him with her powerful claws and take him away with her to her castle, which is called the owl castle, where several live owls are constantly framed on the walls and towers. At the end, when the young painter comes back to his simple country life and complains that he cannot paint any longer; the only picture he repeatedly tries to draw is the owl-castle towers with an enormous overpowering owl figure dominating the white canvas. Verismo, meaning “representation of the true aspects of life,” was a literary movement of the late nineteenth century influenced by the similar French literary movement called naturalismo. Most of Verga’s novels and short stories deal with low-class characters and their hard, everyday existence. His works highlight the injustice of class difference in Italy, especially in the south. His novel, Tigre reale, belongs, however, to his pre-verismo period, influenced by the sentimental view of life and love typical of nineteenth-century Romantic literature. As quoted in Victor Burgin’s “Perverse Space,” in Sexuality and Space, Princeton Papers on Architecture, ed. Beatriz Colomina (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 214–40. As discussed by Mary Anne Doane in several chapters of her book Femmes Fatales. That is, with a sfregio, or a knife-cut, the typical southern Italian way of vendetta, or revenge. Contemporary research has indeed disclosed that Francesca Bertini was actively involved in the direction of the film. G. Rondolino gives both Serena and Bertini’s names under the film’s direction in his fundamental Storia del Cinema, 94. Thomas Elsaesser describes the major characters of melodrama “in terms which denote passivity and impotence” in “Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on the Family Melodrama,” Monogram 4 (1972): 2–15. See also Mary Ann Doane’s “The Moving Image: Pathos and the Maternal,” in The Desire to Desire: The Woman’s Film of the 1940s (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1987), 70–122. According to Doane, pathos is often “related to a certain construction of temporality in which communication or recognition take place, but are mistimed. Moving narratives manifest an unrelenting linearity, which allows the slippage between what is and what should have been to become visible. What the narratives demonstrate above all is the irreversibility of time.” Ibid., 85. Ibid. As Violetta’s first act aria, “Sempre libera degg’Io, trasvolar di gioia in gioia” (I wish I’d be free to fly from one pleasure to another), clearly conveys. These terms are used to highlight the importance of the male authority in the context of family relationships, especially those between fathers and their children. In his essay “Film, Emotion, and Genre,” in Passionate Views; Film Cognition, and Emotion, eds. Karl Plantinga and Greg M. Smith (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 21–47. Doane, Desire to Desire, 73. Ibid., 74. See Noel Carroll’s “Film, Emotion, and Genre,” 36.

232 NOTES 22. In the sense of joyous completeness typical of the relationship that can exist between mother and child, according to Julia Kristeva. See especially her Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980). 23. De Sica’s I bambini ci guardano will be analyzed in Chapter 3 to point out the several deviations that it offers from a typically fascist ideological production. Here we briefly consider it for how it stands within the maternal melodrama subgenre. The film tells the story of a well-to-do couple and their young son in fascist Italy of the 1930s, focusing particularly on Nina, the female protagonist who refuses her role as wife and mother in order to go and live with her lover. Because of her behavior, Nina is judged by bourgeois society as an unfit mother. The character of Nina deviates, then, from the traditional codification of woman as “good” mother, thus highlighting her resisting position within a patriarchal society, where she, as a mother, is expected to focus her desire exclusively on her child. Nina, instead, focuses her desire outside of the family and away from her son, obviously showing a need to think independently and to ignore the pressures and constrictions of patriarchal family life. 24. See Carroll, “Film, Emotion, and Genre,” 36.

Chapter 3 1. Two later films represent very effectively this particular historical and social situation: Lina Wertmüller’s Film d’amore e anarchia (Love and Anarchy; 1973) and Ettore Scola’s Una giornata particolare (A Special Day; 1977). I will analyze them in Chapter 7. 2. For more information about the use of documentaries in fascist times, see the chapter titled “LUCE/Cinema/Shadows” in James Hay’s Popular Film Culture in Fascist Italy: The Passing of the Rex (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1987), 201–32; and Chapter 11, “La fascistizzazione imperfetta,” in G. Brunetta’s Cent’anni di cinema italiano (Bari, Italy: Laterza, 1995), 1: 179–90. 3. See Lucia Re’s study “Fascist Theories of ‘Woman’ and the Construction of Gender,” in Mothers of Invention: Women, Italian Fascism, and Culture, ed. Robin Pickering-Iazzi (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 76–100. 4. For an exhaustive discussion of this topic see Steven Ricci’s Cinema and Fascism: Italian Film and Society, 1922–1943 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2008) and Marcia Landy’s Fascism in Film: The Italian Commercial Cinema 1931–1943 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986). 5. Mussolini himself liked to have his picture taken in different poses that would portray him looking like a popular hero of the times. He especially liked to be compared to Maciste, the popular hero of the film Cabiria. 6. For an exhaustive discussion of Notari’s films, see Giuliana Bruno’s Streetwalking on a Ruined Map: Cultural Theory and the City Films of Elvira Notari (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993). 7. Mikhail Bakhtin, L’oeuvre de Francois Rabelais et la culture populaire au Moyen Age et sous la Renaissance (Potier, France: Gallimard, 1970). 8. See Ruby Rich’s “In the Name of Feminist Film Criticism,” in Issues in Feminist Film Criticism, ed. by Patricia Erens (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1990), 268–87. 9. Visconti was advised to make a film about Cain’s novel by Jean Renoir, the very famous French director with whom he had worked in France in the early 1930s. Visconti’s film

NOTES 233

was not released in the United States until 1975, because of some legal misunderstanding. Cain’s novel was filmed two more times in later years, in the United States. One version was directed by Tay Garnett in 1946, with Lana Turner playing the female protagonist. Another one was directed by Bob Rafelson in 1981, starring Jack Nicholson and Jessica Lange.

Chapter 4 1. Readers interested in learning more about the neorealist movement in Italian film, may find more exhaustive information in the following studies in English: Roy Armes, Patterns of Realism. A Study of Italian Neorealist Cinema (Cranbury, NJ: A. S. Barnes, 1971); Peter Bondanella, Italian Cinema from Neorealism to the Present (New York: Ungar, 1990); Ben Lawton, “Italian Neorealism: A Mirror Construction of Reality,” Film Criticism 3 (1979): 8–20; and Millicent Marcus, Italian Film in the Light of Neorealism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986). 2. For a comprehensive study of Rossellini in English, see Peter Brunette, Roberto Rossellini (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1987). 3. On Anna Magnani, see the few, but very insightful pages dedicated to her by Gian Piero Brunetta in Chapter 5 of his Cent’anni di Cinema Italiano (Bari, Italy: Laterza, 1995), 2: 95–109. 4. As explained by Paola Melchiori in her essay “Women’s Cinema: A Look at Female Identity,” in Bruno, Giuliana, and Maria Nadotti, eds., Off-Screen: Women and film in Italy (London: Routledge, 1988), 25–35. 5. As Fellini himself explains in his Fare un film (Torino, Italy: Einaudi, 1980), 14–15. 6. Melchiori, “Women’s Cinema,” 31. 7. Some of the scholars who have commented on this trend are Peter Brooks in The Melodrama Imagination (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1976); Griselda Pollock, Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, and Stephen Heath in “Dossier on Melodrama,” Screen 18, no.2 (1977): pp.105–19; and E. Ann Kaplan in Motherhood and Representation (London: Routledge, 1992), 59–123. 8. We will notice the same process in Visconti’s Bellissima, where Anna Magnani is again cast to play Maddalena, the female protagonist of the film, in Chapter 5.This process will also be visible in the female protagonists of several of Lina Wertmüller’s films in Chapters 7 and 8. 9. For a more detailed presentation of the De Sica-Zavattini collaboration, see Carlo Celli’s essay “Ladri di biciclette, in The Cinema of Italy, ed. Giorgio Bertellini (London: Wallflower, 2004), 43–50. 10. From Zavattini’s “Thesis on Neorealism” in Springtime in Italy: A Reader on Neorealism, ed. David Overby (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1979), 67–78. 11. Notice the difference in the English title of the film, Bicycle Thief, that proposes a singular form of the noun “thief,” thus ignoring the plural form used by the Italian title “Ladri.” In so doing, the English title also ignores the social criticism that the Italian title conveys by calling attention to the fact that, once pressed by social injustice, even an honest man like Antonio is reduced to a thief in order to survive. 12. For a thorough discussion of the film, See André Bazin’s groundbreaking study, What is Cinema? Essays Selected and Translated by Hugh Grey (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1972), 60. 13. See especially Millicent Marcus’s study on the argument: Italian Film in the Light of Neorealism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986).

234 NOTES 14. For more detailed information on Antonioni and his films, see The Architecture of Vision, Writings and Interviews on Cinema by Michelangelo Antonioni, ed. M. CottinoJones, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 15. For a more exhaustive discussion of De Santis and his films, see Antonio Vitti’s Giuseppe De Santis and Postwar Italian Cinema (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996). Vitti’s study of Riso amaro is available also in G. Bertellini’s The Cinema of Italy (London: Wallflower, 2004), 53–62. 16. As Noel Carroll has noticed in his essay, “Film, Emotion, and Genre,” in Passionate Views: Film, Cognition, and Emotion, ed. Karl Plantinga and Greg M. Smith (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 21–47.

Chapter 5 1. For more historical information about Italy, see Carlo Celli’s and M. Cottino-Jones’s New Guide to Italian Cinema (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). 2. According to the term used by De Sica in Altri tempi, to describe physically wellendowed women like Gina Lollobrigida. 3. I am thinking of his Europa ’51 and La paura. 4. In Antonioni’s early film, La signora senza camelie (1953), where he cast again in the female protagonist’s role Lucia Bosè, as he had done for Cronaca di un amore, the protagonist is a woman who uses her beauty and seductiveness to become a successful film actress. In this film, women’s frailty and dependency on men are emphasized rather than their potential for becoming independent individuals. This representation is repeated and multiplied in Tra donne sole (The Girlfriends; 1955), where several women are shown again as victims of their own frailty and emotional dependence on men. 5. In this role, Antonioni cast a very popular Italian actress, Alida Valli, who had just played the protagonist’s role in Visconti’s Senso and had again displayed her potential as a very successful diva of Italian cinema, as she had often displayed from the 1930s on. 6. For an enlightening discussion of Anna Magnani as an exceptional diva, see Millicent Marcus’s chapter titled “Luchino Visconti’s Bellissima: The Diva, the Mirror, and the Screen,” in her latest book, After Fellini: National Cinema in the Postmodern Age (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 39–58. 7. As quoted from his “Letter to a Marxist Critic,” published in La Strada, ed. Peter Bondanella and Manuela Gieri (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987), 211–14. 8. This axiom was formulated first in contemporary feminist criticism by Kate Millet in her book Sexual Politics (New York: Doubleday, 1970). 9. Peter Bondanella, The Cinema of Federico Fellini (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 213. 10. Ibid. 11. Fellini, “Letter to a Marxist Critic,” 121–22. 12. In Bondanella and Gieri, eds., La strada, 217. 13. A dissolve is a transitional device for connecting shots by combining the fade-out of an outgoing shot with the fade-in of an incoming one. 14. As explained by Paola Melchiori in her essay “Women’s Cinema: A Look at Female Identity,” in Off-Screen: Women and film in Italy, ed. G. Bruno (London: Routledge, 1988), 25–35.

NOTES 235

15. Fellini, “Letter to a Marxist Critic,” 218. 16. See A. Aprà’s Raffaello Matarazzo (Savona, Italy: Quaderno del Noire Club, 1976). 17. See Ruby Rich’s “In the Name of Feminist Film Criticism,” in Issues in Feminist Film Criticism, ed. Patricia Erens (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1990), 268–87. 18. Sordi is the phenomenal comic actor whose career has spanned several decades of Italian cinema, well into the 1990s, and has been constantly considered the king of Italian comedy. 19. Rich, “In the Name of Feminist Film Criticism,” 282.

Chapter 6 1. Here, let us briefly summarize some of the main characteristics of human behavior according to patriarchy: masculine behavior is codified as direct, commanding, and physically powerful. It is also characterized by the holding of the gaze and the mastering of desire, voice, and language. Through gaze and language control, men usually control the space around them. Women’s behavior, instead, is codified as reserved, submissive, and physically weak. Woman is thus projected as the object of the male’s gaze and desire; thus, she is hardly the holder of the gaze or the controller of space. She is also usually devoid of voice or control. 2. For a thorough discussion of the use of veiling in connection with femininity, see Mary Ann Doane’s chapter “Veiling over Desire: Close-ups of the Woman” in her book: Femmes Fatales: Feminisms, Film Theory, and Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1991), 44–75. 3. This handling of Silvia in this film reminds us of Laura Mulvey’s discussion of women’s representation in traditional films in her “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Visual and Other Pleasures (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1984), 14–26. “The film opens with the woman as object of the combined gaze of spectators and all the male protagonists in the film. She is isolated, glamorous, sexualized. But as the narrative progresses she falls in love with the main male protagonist and becomes his property, losing her outward glamorous characteristics, her generalized sexuality, her show-girl connotations; her eroticism is subjected to the male star alone” (21). 4. Teresa De Lauretis, “Fellini 9 ?,” in Technologies of Gender, Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1987), 95–106. 5. That is, literal doubling: Suzy, the high class prostitute living next door to Juliet, and Fanny, the circus beauty with whom Juliet’s grandfather runs away, are played by the same actress Sandra Milo; pairing by similarity: the two maids, the little twin girls, younger sister and mother; or pairing by contrast: Juliet and the sisters/mother; Juliet and Suzy; Juliet and Fanny); and so on. 6. De Lauretis, “Fellini’s 9 ?,” 104. 7. See “The Long Interview, Tullio Kezich and Federico Fellini” in Federico Fellini’s New Masterpiece, Juliet of the Spirits, ed. T. Kezich (New York: Ballantine Books, 1965), 17–64. 8. As clearly analyzed by Paola Melchiori in her “Women’s Cinema: A Look at Female Identity,” in Off-Screen: Women and Film in Italy, ed. Giuliana Bruno and Maria Nadotti (London: Routledge, 1988), 31. 9. In Antonioni’s early film, La signora senza camelie (1953), where he cast again in the female protagonist’s role Lucia Bosè as he had done for Cronaca di un amore, the protagonist is a woman who uses her beauty and seductiveness to become a successful

236 NOTES

10.

11. 12. 13.

14. 15.

16.

17. 18. 19.

20. 21.

22.

film actress. In this film, women’s frailty and dependency on men are emphasized rather than their potential for becoming independent individuals. This representation is repeated and multiplied in Tra donne sole (The Girlfriends; 1955), where several women are shown again as victims of their own frailty and emotional dependence on men. In M. Cottino-Jones, ed., Michelangelo Antonioni: The Architecture of Vision: Writings & Interviews on Cinema by Michelangelo Antonioni (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 270. Carlo Biarese and Aldo Tassone, I film di Michelangelo Antonioni (Roma, Italy: Gremese, 1985), 45. Judith Mayne, The Woman at the Keyhole: Feminism and Women’s Cinema (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1982), 17. So that, in De Lauretis’s words, “the look of the camera, the look of the spectator and the look of each character within the film intersect in a complex system which structures vision and meaning,” and in so doing “governs its representation of woman.” De Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t, Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1984), 138. Ibid., 140. Next to Monica Vitti, who by now had achieved international stardom, Antonioni cast the very popular French actor Alain Delon in Piero’s role. This couple of greatly admired and very sensitive performers brought great luster to the film. Antonioni had already applied another winning formula in his earlier film La notte, the second film of his Trilogy of Solitude, by casting the Italian divo Marcello Mastroianni as the male protagonist and a very respected French diva, Jeanne Moreau, as the female protagonist, while Monica Vitti was cast in a supportive role. In Il deserto rosso, he again cast Monica Vitti as the female protagonist, Giuliana, but his choice for the male protagonists of the film was limited to little-known Italian and foreign actors, such as Carlo Chionetti as Ugo, her husband, and Richard Harris as Corrado, Ugo’s friend. For a more exhaustive consideration on Antonioni’s filmmaking activity, see the American edition of the collection of critical essays edited by M. Cottino-Jones: Michelangelo Antonioni: The Architecture of Vision: Writings & Interviews on Cinema by Michelangelo Antonioni (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). In this film, Anna Magnani plays the protagonist’s role as a Roman mother painfully suffering from the early demise and death of her only son. La ciociara means a woman from Ciociaria, an Italian region close to Rome. For this film, Visconti chose a powerful group of popular national and foreign divi and dive that helped in making the film a great success. Burt Lancaster played the prince, the Leopard of the title, while Alain Delon was irresistible as the handsome Tancredi. For the female characters, Claudia Cardinale was perfectly cast as the coarsely beautiful Angelica, while the former stage diva Rina Morelli played a very convincing, religious, and emotionally frail princess. By law, in Italy, at that time, a pregnant woman could not be jailed as jail was not viewed as an appropriate place to raise children. For a more thorough discussion of this topic, see Enrico Giacovelli’s La commedia all’italiana (Rome, Italy: Gremese, 1990), or Jean A. Gili’s Arrivano I mostri: I volti della commedia italiana (Bologna, Italy: Cappelli, 1980). Divorce only became legal in Italy in 1974, when a popular referendum upheld the divorce law passed by the Parliament in 1970. In 1975, a new family law was passed that offered the opportunity for women to improve their position in the family as

NOTES 237

23.

24. 25. 26.

daughters, wives, and mothers. It was not until 1981 that a similar referendum upheld the abortion law of 1978. As Ruby Rich has suggested in his article “In the Name of Feminist Film Criticism,” in Issues in Feminist Film Criticism, ed. P. Erens (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1990), 268–87. As she states in “Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema,” in Visual and Other Pleasures Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1989), 14–26. Indeed, they all intend to take advantage of another Italian law that binds a woman in marriage to any man who kidnaps her. Rich, “In the Name of Feminist Film Criticism,” 282.

Chapter 7 1. The most important Italian feminist organization, l’Unione delle Donne Italiane UDI (The Union of Italian Women), was founded immediately after World War II within the framework of the political Left, with the main goal to fight for better conditions of life for women, regardless of their political affiliation. Most of the other feminist groups came into being in the 1970s, such as the Rivolta Femminile group in Rome and Milan (February 1970), the Lotta Femminista Collectives in Padua and Milan (March 1970), the Movimento di Liberazione della donna (MLD; May 1970), the Fronte Italiano per la Liberazione Femminile (FILF; 1971), and the Movimento Femminista Romano (MFR; 1972). In 1973 and 1974, special self-help groups, practice of the unconscious groups, and feminist groups for women’s health were set up all over Italy. 2. In Morte a Venezia, the film Visconti made just before the two aforementioned ones, no woman plays a significant role, even if the young boy who is the center of the attention of Professor Aschenbach, the male protagonist of the film, is often seen with his younger sisters, his governess, and his mother. This mother figure, although played by the well-known diva Silvana Mangano, is neither framed in close-up shots nor given an effective voice. The few times we hear her, she speaks an unknown language. Furthermore, most of the time she is obscured by her attire, such as large hats with veils that cover her to the neck hiding her face and facial expressions. 3. For this film, Visconti assembled another imposing group of Italian and foreign divi, starting with Silvana Mangano in the Marchioness’s role, Burt Lancaster in the professor’s, and Helmet Berger in Konrad’s. 4. Also for this film, Visconti’s selection of actors was very impressive: for the protagonist’s role, he chose one of the most popular Italian divi of the 1970s, Giancarlo Giannini; for the two main women protagonists, he cast the beautiful foreign diva Jennifer O’Neil as Teresa Ruffo, Tullio’s lover, and the gorgeous Italian diva Laura Antonelli in Giuliana’s role, as Tullio’s wife. 5. See René Girard’s study, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965). 6. Indeed in 1972, one year after Pasolini’s Decameron was released, we find on the market five such films by different directors: Decameron n.2 by M. Guerrini, Decameron 300 by M. Stefani, Decameron nero by F. Martinelli, and two very explicit pornographic renditions, one by the same Martinelli called Decameron proibitissimo and one by P. G. Ferretti called Decameroticus. 7. In both these films, Bertolucci made sure to cast well-known Italian and foreign divi and dive to ensure the popular success of the films: In Il conformista, he cast the French

238 NOTES

8.

9.

10.

11. 12.

13.

14.

15.

16. 17. 18. 19.

20. 21.

22.

divo Jean-Louis Trintignant as the protagonist, Marcello Clerici, and two very popular dive in the female protagonists’ roles: Stefania Sandrelli as Giulia, Marcello’s wife, and Dominique Sanda as Anna Quadri. Bertolucci will cast the same actresses also in Novecento: Stefania Sandrelli as Anita, Olmo’s wife, and Dominique Sanda as Ada, Alfredo’s wife, together with Laura Betti as a superb Regina, while for four of the main male actors, Bertolucci resorts again to foreign divi, such as Gerard Depardieu for Olmo, Robert De Niro for Alfredo, Donald Sutherland for Attila, and Burt Lancaster for Alfredo’s grandfather. Interesting examples of critical consideration of Wertmüller’s production are the following: D. Grossvogel, “Lina Wertmüller and the Failure of Criticism,” Yale Italian Studies 1 (Spring 1976): 171–83; and E. Servi Burgess, “Towards a Popular Feminist Cinema,” Women and Film 1, nos. 5–6 (1974): 6–10. Wertmüller casts practically always the same actor and actress as the male and female protagonists of her films: Giancarlo Giannini and Mariangela Melato, who owe to her their success as Italian stars. See Millicent Marcus’s chapter titled “Wertmüller’s Love and Anarchy: The High Price of Commitment,” in her book Italian Film in the Light of Neorealism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 313–58. Probably Scola’s Passione d’amore (Fosca) is the only Italian film that handles with great sensitivity the representation of an ugly woman. For an exhaustive study of Cavani’s work, see Gaetana Marrone Puglia’s book, The Gaze and the Labyrinth: The Cinema of Liliana Cavani (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). For her films, Cavani, as most Italian directors have done, usually casts an impressive group of popular Italian and foreign dive and divi, such as Dirk Bogarde as Max, Charlotte Rampling as Lucia, and Isa Miranda and Gabriele Ferzetti in supportive roles for Portiere di notte. As noticed by Scott L. Montgomery in his essay, “What Kind of Memory? Reflections on Images of the Holocaust,” in Contention: Debates on Society, Culture and Science 5, no. 1 (1995): 79–103. This reading of Portiere di notte, is an elaboration of my short commentary to the previously quoted Montgomery essay, also published in Contention: Debates on Society, Culture and Science 5, no. 1 (1995): 105–11. See Montgomery, “What Kind of Memory?” As quoted in ibid., 16–17. Ibid. This expression is used by Scott L. Montgomery, quoted previously, about “the fascination that contemporary society has with ‘kitsch’ that is, the neutralization of extreme situations, particularly death, by turning them into sentimental idyll.” This film is known in English under two different titles: Beyond Obsession and Beyond the Door. Cavani’s choice of actors for this film includes the Italian divo, Marcello Mastroianni for Enrico, the male protagonist; the less well-known Italian actress Eleanora Giorgi for Nina, the female protagonist; and the foreign actor Tom Berenger, for Matthew. This complex combination of perverted love and romantic cover-up so expertly displayed in gender relationships by the protagonists of Cavani’s films seems to be shared also by a black comedy that was released at approximately the same time, Profumo di donna (The Scent of a Woman; 1975) by Dino Risi. This film deals, in a much simpler

NOTES 239

23.

24.

25.

26.

way, with a type of sexual power game between a man and a woman, which better fits the patriarchal view of heterosexual relationships (the male character representing one extreme of selfish, authoritarian love and the female character representing the selfsacrificing, romanticized type of loving dedication). In this film, Germi cast a popular American divo like Dustin Hoffman in the male protagonist’s role next to one of the best Italian diva of the times, Stefania Sandrelli, who plaid the role of Mariarosa. In this role, Monicelli cast a very popular divo, Michele Placido, another icon of Italian sexy masculinity, hardly ever seen in a comedy film, thus adding to the suspenseful mood of the story. For two of his male protagonists, Scola chose important Italian divi like Vittorio Gassman in the role of Gianni and Nino Manfredi as Antonio, and he even cast the still very popular Aldo Fabrizi in the supportive role of Gianni’s father-in-law. The lesserknown actor, Stefano Satta Flores, played Nicola. Vittorio De Sica, Federico Fellini, and Marcello Mastroianni play themselves in short cameo roles in this film, which pays tribute to the neorealism movement and to Italian cinema in general. Scola chose equally important Italian dive to play the female protagonist role in the film: Stefania Sandrelli played Luciana, and Giovanna Ralli played Elide.

Chapter 8 1. From the Italian word tangenti, which means “bribes.” 2. Some of the most important of these centers were Centro documentazione e studi sul Femminismo (Feminist Resources and Study Center), Rome, 1978; Centro Documentazione Donna (Women’s Resource Center), Pisa 1982; and Centro di documentazione sulla salute delle donne Simonetta Tosi (Simonetta Tosi Center for Women’s Health), Torino, 1985. 3. A few of the new groups founded in the 1980s are the following: Phoenix (Milan, 1981); Linea Lesbica (Florence, 1981); and CLI, or Coordinamento Lesbiche Italiane (Union of Italian Lesbians), Turin, 1981. Some of the most important conferences that took place in these decades were the International Conference on Lesbianism (Turin, April 1981) and the First National Conference of Feminist Lesbians (Rome, June 1981)—the second conference took place in Rome in December 1981 and practically every other year after that. For more specific information on Italian women’s groups and organizations, see the work edited by Paola Bono and Sandra Kemp, Italian Feminist Thought: A Reader (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991). 4. As Yvonne Rainer suggests in her “Some Ruminations around Cinematic Antidotes to the Oedipal; Net (les) while Playing with DeLauraedipus Mulvey, or He May Be Off Screen, but . . . ,” Independent (1986): 20–27. 5. Tania Modleski, The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory (New York: Methuen, 1988), 61. 6. As Ruby Rich has suggested in “In the Name of Feminist Film Criticism,” in Issues in Feminist Film Criticism, ed. Patricia Erens (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1990), 268–87. 7. It seems normal to ask such a question, even if Antonioni has often denied such a possibility. See his reply to such a question in the interview called “il metodo,” published in the collection of interviews with Antonioni, Fare un film é per me vivere, Scritti sul cinema, eds. C. Di Carlo and G. Tinazzi (Venezia, Italy: Marsilio, 1994), 326.

240 NOTES 8. And especially, as we have noticed in Chapter 6, at the end of L’eclissi, where, just as the male protagonist is not on the screen, neither is the woman. 9. In both Portiere di notte and Al di là del bene e del male, as we have seen in Chapter 7. 10. The section dedicated to Monica Vitti in this chapter is a brief elaboration of my essay “Monica Vitti: The Image and the Word,” in Women in Italy from the Renaissance to Our Times, ed. M. Marotti (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 315–56. 11. As Vitti herself explains in an interview with a journalist of the magazine Bianco e Nero. 12. As according to Rich, “In the Name of Feminist Film Criticism,” 282. 13. I want to take this opportunity to thank Monica Vitti for providing me with the scripts of these three films and a videocassette of Scandalo segreto and for her cordial encouragement of my scholarly undertaking. 14. Giuliana Bruno and Maria Nadotti, ed., Off-Screen: Women and Film in Italy (London: Routledge, 1988), xii. 15. As T. De Lauretis comments in her Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1987), 114. 16. Ibid. 17. Ibid. 18. As quoted in L. Delli Colli’s book, Monica Vitti (Rome, Italy: Gremese, 1987), 41. 19. In this conscious manipulation of desire, the text addresses its spectators in a contradictory way, as it does not “repel (the) woman’s gaze . . . or (the) feminist understanding of the female subject’s history, of . . . contradiction and self-subverting coherence.” De Lauretis, Technologies of Gender, 124. 20. Flirt, script by Monica Vitti and Roberto Russo, 225. 21. Introduction to Bruno’s Off-Screen, 13. 22. In her book Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1984), 155. 23. In her two chapters “The Fantasy of the Maternal Voice: Paranoia and Compensation” and “The Fantasy of the Maternal Voice: Female subjectivity and the Negative Oedipus Complex,” in The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1988), 72–140. 24. Ibid., 75. 25. See Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), 1–7. 26. Ibid. 27. From the script Francesca è mia, 150–51. 28. Ibid. 29. Ibid. 30. See the chapter “The Fantasy of the Maternal Voice: Female Subjectivity and the Negative Oedipus Complex” in The Acoustic Mirror, 101–40. 31. From the script Francesca è mia, 150–51. 32. For a very clear discussion of the Lacanian theory of the imaginary as applicable to film criticism, see R. Stam, R. Burgoyne, and S. Flitterman-Lewis, New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics: Structuralism, Post-Structuralism, and Beyond (London: Routledge, 1992). 33. Also for this film, Monica is responsible, together with Roberto Russo, for the subject and the script, while all dialogues were rewritten by her to conform to the film direction, thus introducing several important changes and elisions. One of the most important is the elimination of the romantic ending that involved Margherita and her friend, Tony. 34. Bruno, Off-Screen, 10.

NOTES 241

35. De Lauretis, Technologies of Gender, 114. 36. Yvonne Rainer speaks of narrative strategies to be consciously deployed by feminist films in order to disrupt cinematic narrative, and suggests specifically changing the “glossy surface and homogeneous look of ‘professional cinematography by means of optically degenerated shots, refilming, blown-up 8 and video transfers.” Yvonne Rainer, “Some Ruminations,” 20–27. 37. Ibid. 38. From Scandalo segreto, dialogues by Monica Vitti, 53. 39. Ibid., 62. 40. Ibid. 41. Ibid., 71 42. As Giulia Alberti calls it in her “Conditions of Illusion,” in Off-Screen. 43. Ibid., 86. 44. The other scene is the one where Tony and his assistants are framed in their trailer while filming Margherita’s last attempt to turn off the video camera that they control. This scene for the first time reveals to the spectators who is actually in control of Margherita’s video camera. 45. De Lauretis, Technologies of Gender, 114. 46. Rainer, “Some Ruminations.” 47. I would like to take this opportunity to thank also Maurizio Nichetti for having kindly provided me with the videocassettes of all his films as soon as he heard that I could not find them here in California. 48. Rainer, “Some Ruminations.” 49. Paola Melchiori calls it in “A Look at Female Identity,” in Off-Screen, 25–35. 50. As discussed in Giulia Alberti’s “Conditions of Illusion,” in Off-Screen, 36–54. 51. Rainer, “Some Ruminations.”

Chapter 9 1. As Giulia Alberti has suggested for women to do in order to become subjects on their own, in her “Conditions of Illusion,” in Off-Screen: Women and Film in Italy, ed. Giuliana Bruno and Maria Nadotti (London: Routledge, 1988), 47. 2. For an exhaustive study of Benigni and his films, see Carlo Celli’s important book The Divine Comic: The Cinema of Roberto Benigni New York: Scarecrow, 2001). 3. Robin Wood, “Images and Women,” in Issues in Feminist Film Criticism, ed. Patricia Erens (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1990), 340. 4. As suggested by Alberti in “Conditions of Illusion,” 46–47. 5. As suggested by Alberti in ibid., 47 6. Troisi died the day after filming was completed. 7. As suggested by Alberti in “Conditions of Illusion,” 46–47. 8. Wood, “Images and Women,” 340. 9. In Teresa De Lauretis, Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1987), 121.

242 NOTES

Conclusion 1. As Giulia Alberti has explained in her “Conditions of Illusion,” in Off-Screen, Women and Film in Italy, ed. Giuliana Bruno and Maria Nadotti (London: Routledge, 1988), 36–54. 2. For more information on this topic, consult Kathi Weeks, Constituting Feminist Subjects (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998). 3. See Ann Brooks, Postfeminism: Feminism, Cultural Theory, and Cultural Forms (London: Routledge, 1997), 174.

Selected Bibliography

Agonito, Rosemary, ed. History of Ideas on Woman. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1977. Alberti, Giulia. “Conditions of Illusion.” In Off-Screen: Women and Film in Italy, edited by Giuliana Bruno and Maria Nadotti, 36–54. London: Routledge, 1988. Aprà, Aldo. Raffaello Matarazzo. Savona, Italy: Quaderno del Noire Club, 1976. Armes, Roy. Patterns of Realism: A Study of Italian Neorealist Cinema. Cranbury, NJ: A. S. Barnes, 1971. Bakhtin, Michael. L’oeuvre de Francois Rabelais et la culture populaire au Moyen Age et sous la Renaissance. Potier, France: Gallimard, 1970. Bazin, André. What Is Cinema? Essays Selected and Translated by Hugh Gray. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1972. Bertellini, Giorgio, ed. The Cinema of Italy. London: Wallflower, 2004. Bianchi, Pietro. La Bertini e le dive del cinema muto. Torino, Italy: UTET, 1969. Biarese, Carlo, and Antonio Tassone. I Film di Michelangelo Antonioni. Rome, Italy: Gremese, 1985. Bondanella, Peter. The Cinema of Federico Fellini. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992. ———. Italian Cinema from Neorealism to the Present. New York: Ungar, 1990. Bondanella, Peter, and Manuela Gieri, eds. La Strada. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987. Bono, Paola, and Sandra Kemp, eds. Italian Feminist Thought: A Reader. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991. Brooks, Peter. The Melodramatic Imagination. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1976. Brunetta, Gian Piero. Cent’anni di cinema italiano. 2 vols. Bari, Italy: Laterza, 1995. Brunette, Peter. Roberto Rossellini. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. Bruno, Giuliana. Streetwalking on a Ruined Map: Cultural Theory and the City Films of Elvira Notari. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993. Bruno, Giuliana, and Maria Nadotti, eds. Off-Screen: Women and Film in Italy. London: Routledge, 1988. Burgin, Victor, “Perverse Space.” In Sexuality and Space: Princeton Papers on Architecture, edited by Beatriz Colomina, 214–40. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992. Byars, J. “Gazes/Voices/Power: Expanding Psychoanalysis for Feminist Film and Television Theory.” In Female Spectators, Looking at Film And Television, edited by English Deidre Pribiam, 110–31. London: Verso, 1992. Carroll, Noel. “Film, Emotion, and Genre.” In Passionate Views, Film Cognition, and Emotion, edited by Karl Plantinga and Greg M. Smith, 21–47. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990. Celli, Carlo. The Divine Comic: The Cinema of Roberto Benigni. New York: Scarecrow, 2001. ———. Gillo Pontecorvo: From Resistance to Terrorism. New York: Scarecrow, 2005.

244 SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY ———. “Ladri di biciclette.” In The Cinema of Italy, ed. Giorgio Bertellini, 43–50. London: Wallflower, 2004. Chodorov, Nancy. “Gender as Personal and Cultural.” In The Second Signs Reader: Feminist Scholarship 1983–1996, edited by Ruth-Ellen B. Joeres and Barbara Laslett, 216–44. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. ———. The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1978. Colomina, Beatriz, ed. Sexuality and Space: Princeton Papers on Architecture. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992. Corrigan, T. A Short Guide to Writing about FILM. New York: Longman, 1997. Cottino-Jones, Marga, ed. The Architecture of Vision, Writings and Interviews on Cinema by Michelangelo Antonioni. New York: Marsilio, 1996. ———. “Cabiria, a Masterpiece of Italian Silent Cinema: Cherchez Les Femmes!” Italian Quarterly 43, nos. 169–70 (2006): 17–24. ———. “Commentary to Montgomery’s Essay.” Contention: Debates on Society, Culture and Science (1995): 105–11. ———. “Monica Vitti: The Image and the Word.” In Women in Italy from the Renaissance to our Times, edited by Maria Marotti, 315–56. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Cottino-Jones, Marga, and Carlo Celli. New Guide to Italian Cinema. New York: PalgraveMacmillan, 2007. Cowie, Elizabeth. Representing the Woman: Cinema and Psychoanalysis. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. De Grazia, Victoria. How Fascism Ruled Women, 1922–1945. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1961. De Lauretis, Teresa. Alice Doesn’t, Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1984. ———. Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film and Fiction. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1987. Delli Colli, Laura., Monica Vitti. Rome: Gremese Editore, 1987. Di Carlo, Carlo, and Giorgio Tinazzi, eds. Fare un film é per me vivere, Scritti sul cinema, Interviews with Antonioni. Venezia, Italy: Marsilio, 1994. Dinnerstein, D. The Mermaid and the Minotaur: Sexual Arrangements and Human Malaise. New York: Harper & Row, 1976. Doane, Mary Ann. Desire to Desire: The Woman’s Film of the 1940s. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1987. ———. “Film and the Masquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator.” Screen 23 (1982): 3–4, 74–88. ———. Femmes Fatales, Feminisms, Film Theory, and Psychoanalysis. New York: Routledge, 1991. Dolan, Joan. The Feminist Spectator as Critic. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1988. Elsaesser, Thomas. “Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on the Family Melodrama.” Monogram 4 (1972): 2–15. Engels, Frederich. The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State. Chicago: C. H. Kerr, 1902. Erens, Patricia, ed. Issues in Feminist Film Criticism. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1990. Fava, C. I film di Federico Fellini. Rome, Italy: Gremese, 1981.

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Fellini, Federico. Fare un film. Torino, Italy: Einaudi, 1980. ———. Fellini’s New Masterpiece, Juliet of the Spirits. New York: Ballantine, 1965. Freud, Sigmund. Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis. New York: Norton, 1977. Giacovelli, Enrico. La commedia all’italiana. Rome, Italy: Gremese Editore, 1990. Gieri, Manuela. Contemporary Italian Filmmaking: Strategies of Subversion, Pirandello, Fellini, Scola, and the Directors of the New Generation. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995. Gili, Jean. Arrivano I mostri: I volti della commedia italiana. Bologna, Italy: Cappelli Editore, 1980. Girard, René. Deceit, Desire, and the Novel. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965. Gledhill, Christine. “Recent Developments in Feminist Criticism.” In Film, Theory & Criticism, edited by Gerald Mast, Marshall Cohen, and Leo Braudy, 93–114. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. ———, ed. Stardom: Industry of Desire. New York: Routledge, 1991. Grossvogel, David. “Lina Wertmüller and the Failure of Criticism.” Yale Italian Studies 1 (1976): 171–83. Hay, James. Popular Film Culture in Fascist Italy: the Passing of the Rex. Bloomington, IN: University Press, 1987. Joeres, R. B., and B. Laslett, eds. The Second Signs Reader: Feminist Scholarship 1983–1996. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Kaplan, E. Ann. Motherhood and Representation. London: Routledge, 1992. ———. Women in Film: Both Sides of the Camera. London: Methuen, 1983. Kuhn, A., and A. M. Wolpe, eds. Feminism and Materialism: Women & Modes of Production. London: Routledge, 1978. Kristeva, Julia. Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 1980. Lacan, Jean. Ecrits: A Selection. New York: Norton, 1997. Landy, Marcia. Fascism in Film: The Italian Commercial Cinema 1931–1943. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986. ———. Film, Politics, and Gramsci. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1995. ———. Italian Film. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Lawton, B. “Italian Neorealism: A Mirror Construction of Reality.” Film Criticism 3 (1979): 8–23. Marcus, Millicent. After Fellini: National Cinema in the Postmodern Age. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. ———. Filmmaking by the Book: Italian Cinema and Literary Adaptations. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993. ———. Italian Film in the Light of Neorealism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986. Marcuse, H. Counter Revolution and Revolt. Boston: Beacon Press, 1972. Marotti, Maria, ed. Women in Italy from the Renaissance to our Times. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Marrone Puglia, Gaetana. The Gaze and the Labyrinth: The Cinema Of Liliana Cavani. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000. Mast, Gerald, Marshall Cohen, and Leo Braudy, eds. Film, Theory & Criticism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. Mayne, Judith. Cinema and Spectatorship. London: Routledge, 1993.

246 SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY ———. The Woman at the Keyhole: Feminism, and Women’s Cinema. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1990. Melchiori, Paola. “Women’s Cinema: A Look at Female Identity.” In Off-Screen: Women and Film in Italy, edited by Giuliana Bruno and Maria Nadotti, 25–35. London: Routledge, 1988. Metz, Christian. The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1982. Millet, Kate. Sexual Politics. New York: Doubleday, 1970. Modleski, Tania. The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory. New York: Methuen, 1988. Montgomery, Scott L. “What Kind of Memory? Reflections on Images of the Holocaust.” Contention: Debates on Society, Culture and Science (1995): 1–19. Mulvey, Laura. “Afterthoughts on ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,’ inspired by Duel in the Sun.” Framework 10 (1979): 3–10. ———. Visual and Other Pleasures. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1989. Pickering-Iazzi, Robin, ed. Mothers of Invention: Women, Italian Fascism, and Culture. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1995. Plantinga, Karl, and Greg M. Smith, eds. Passionate Views: Film Cognition, and Emotion. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990. Pollock, G., G. Nowell-Smith, and S. Heath. “Dossier on Melodrama.” Screen 18, no. 2 (1977): 105–19. Pribiam, E. D., ed. Female Spectators: Looking at Film And Television. London: Verso, 1992. Rainer, Yvonne. “Some Ruminations around Cinematic Antidotes to the Oedipal Net(les) while Playing with DeLauraedipus Mulvey, or He May Be Off Screen, but . . .” Independent (April 1986): 20–27. Re, Lucia. “Fascist Theories of ‘Woman’ and the Construction of Gender.” In Mothers of Invention: Women, Italian Fascism, and Culture, edited by Robin Pickering-Iazzi, 76–100. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1995. Ricci, Steven. Cinema and Fascism: Italian Film and Society, 1922–1943. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2008 Rich, Ruby. “In the Name of Feminist Film Criticism.” In Issues in Feminist Film Criticism, edited by Patricia Erens, 268–87. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1990. Rondolino, Gianni. I giorni di Cabiria. Torino, Italy: Lindsdrau, 1993. ———. Storia del cinema. Torino, Italy: UTET, 2001. Rosenbaum, John. Movies as Politics. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997. Silverman, Kaja. The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1988. Stam, Robert, Robert Burgoyne, and Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, eds. New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics. London: Routledge, 1992. Tassone, Aldo. I film di Michelangelo Antonioni. Rome, Italy: Gremese, 1985. Vitti, Antonio. Giuseppe De Santis and Postwar Italian Cinema. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996. ———. “Riso Amaro.” In The Cinema of Italy, edited by G. Bertellini, 53–62. London: Wallflower, 2004. Weedon, Carol. Feminist Practice and Poststructuralist Theory. New York: Blackwell, 1987. Weitz, Robin. The Politics of Women’s Bodies: Sexuality, Appearance, and Behavior. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. “Women in Cinema.” Bianco e Nero 43, no. 1–2 (1972): 1–112. Wood, Robin. “Images and Women.” In Issues in Feminist Film Criticism, edited by Patricia Erens, 337–52. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1990.

Index of Films

Accattone (Accattone!; 1961; Pasolini), 4, 106, 126–27, 130, 138, 149 Age of the Medici, The (1972; Rossellini), 81 Albero delle pere (The Pear Tree; 1998; Archibugi), 5, 219, 220 Al di là del bene e del male (Beyond Good and Evil; 1972; Cavani), 172–73, 186, 240 Alfredo, Alfredo (Alfredo, Alfredo; 1972; Germi), 131, 173–75, 185, 186 Altri tempi (Other Times; 1951; Blasetti), 234 Amore mio, aiutami! (Help Me, My Love!; 1969; Scola), 137, 138, 196 Angelo bianco (White Angel; 1955; Matarazzo), 100 Assunta Spina (1915; Serena), 6, 20, 29–30, 35 Assunta Spina (1948; Mattoli), 3, 64–65 L’avventura (The Adventure; 1959; Antonioni), 3, 76, 119–21, 122, 124, 125, 196 bambini ci guardano, I (The Children Are Watching Us; 1942; De Sica), 3, 4, 35, 47–49, 51, 67, 143, 145, 220, 232 Bellissima (Very Beautiful; 1951; Visconti), 4, 76, 84, 86, 104, 233, 234 Blow-Up (Blowup; 1966; Antonioni), 119, 124 Bravissimo (Very Good; 1955; D’Amico), 103 breve vacanza, Una (A Brief Vacation; 1973; De Sica), 4, 5, 9, 10, 78, 142, 143, 144–45, 185 Cabiria (1914; Pastrone), 8, 11–18, 39, 40 Caccia Tragica (The Tragic Hunt; 1946; De Santis), 72

caduta degli dei, La (The Damned, 1969; Visconti), 4, 106, 129–30, 138, 145, 146 Casablanca (1942; Curtiz), 193 casanova di Federico Fellini, Il (Fellini’s Casanova; 1976; Fellini), 119, 155, 177–78 Catene (Chains; 1950; Matarazzo), 100 Cenere (Ashes; 1916; Mari), 9, 33–34, 35 C’eravamo tanto amati (We All Loved Each Other So Much; 1974; Scola), 5, 67, 158, 179, 185, 186 Chiarina, la modista (Little Claire, the Milliner; 1919; Notari), 42 Ciociara, La (Two Women; 1961; De Sica), 8, 106, 130, 138, 143 città delle Donne, La (City of Women; 1980; Fellini), 188–91, 192, 194, 210 conformista, Il (The Conformist; 1972; Bertolucci), 125, 150–53, 185, 239n Con gli occhi chiusi (With closed eyes; 1994; Archibugi), 220 Cronaca di un amore (Story of a Love Affair; 1950; Antonioni), 54, 70–71, 74, 234, 235 Decameron, Il (The Decameron; 1971; Pasolini), 126, 149–50, 237 Decameron n.2 (1972; Guerrini), 237 Decameron nero (1972; Martinelli), 237 Decameron proibitissimo (1972; Martinelli), 237 Decameron 300 (1972; Stefani), 237 Decameroticus (1972; Ferretti), 237 deserto rosso, Il (Red Desert; 1964; Antonioni), 5, 106, 122–25, 130, 138, 162, 196 Desiderio (Desire; 1943; Rossellini), 49, 50, 51

248

INDEX OF FILMS

Divorzio all’italiana (Divorce Italian Style; 1961; Germi), 131–34, 138, 142, 164, 174, 175 dolce vita, La (La Dolce Vita; 1959; Fellini), 3, 4, 81, 88, 106–16, 119, 130, 139

Grido, Il (The Cry; 1957; Antonioni), 76, 81–83, 104, 122, 124 Gruppo di famiglia in un interno (Conversation Piece; 1974; Visconti), 4, 141, 145–46, 185, 220

L’eclissi (Eclipse; 1962; Antonioni), 119, 121, 122, 125, 130, 138, 192, 196, 240 Edipo re (Oedipus Rex; 1967; Pasolini), 140 Ettore Fieramosca (Ettore Fieramosca; 1938; Blasetti), 9, 38, 41–42, 51 Europa ’51 (No Greater Love; 1950; Rossellini), 4, 76, 79–80, 104, 234

Identificazione di una donna (Identification of a Woman; 1982; Antonioni), 191–92, 125, 209 Ieri, oggi, domani (Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow; 1964; De Sica), 104, 130–31, 138 India (1958; Rossellini), 81 L’innocente (The Innocent; 1975; Visconti), 4, 142, 145, 146–49, 185, 207 Interno berlinese (The Berlin Affair; 1985; Cavani), 188, 194–96 Io ballo da sola (Stealing Beauty; 1996; Bertolucci), 150

La famiglia (The family; 1987; Scola), 184 Fatto di sangue . . . (Blood Feud; 1978; Wertmüller), 10, 160, 167–68, 169, 185 figli di nessuno, I (Nobody’s Children; 1951; Matarazzo), 100–101, 104 Film d’amore e anarchia (Love and Anarchy; 1973; Wertmüller), 158, 160–62, 167, 168, 169, 185, 186, 213, 232 Flirt (1983; Vitti), 195, 196, 197–98, 240 fortuna di essere donna, La (Lucky to Be a Woman; 1955; Blasetti), 103 Francesca è mia (Francesca Is Mine; 1986; Vitti), 195, 196, 197, 198–202, 210, 240 fuoco, Il (The Fire; 1915; Pastrone), 8, 20, 23–26, 31, 35 gattopardo, Il (The Leopard; 1963; Visconti), 4, 128–29, 130, 149 generale Della Rovere, Il (General della Rovere; 1960; Rossellini), 81 giardino dei Finzi-Contini, Il (TheGarden of the Finzi-Contini; 1970; De Sica), 143–44, 185 giornata particolare, Una (A Special Day; 1977; Scola), 157–58, 179, 182, 185, 232 Giovanna d’Arco (Joan of Arc; 1954; Rossellini), 81 Giulietta degli spiriti (Juliet of the Spirits; 1965; Fellini), 4, 5, 81, 106, 116–19, 122, 130, 137, 138 grandi magazzini, I (Department Store; 1939; Camerini), 4, 38, 42, 45–46, 51

Johnny Stecchino (Johnny Stecchino; 1991; Benigni), 5, 211–13, 214 Ladri di biciclette (The Bicycle Thief; 1948; De Sica), 4, 54, 66, 67–69, 73, 208, 233 Ladri di saponette (The Icicle Thieves; 1989; Nichetti), 5, 208–9, 210, 214 Louis XIV (1966; Rossellini), 81 Luna e l’altra (Luna and The Other; 1996; Nichetti), 5, 214, 215–16 Maciste (Marvelous Maciste; 1915; Pastrone), 230 Maciste all’inferno (Maciste in Hell; 1925; Brignone), 230 Maciste alpino (Maciste in the Alps; 1916; Pastrone), 230 Maciste innamorato (Maciste in love; 1919; Borgnetto), 230 Maciste nella gabbia dei leoni (Maciste in the lion’s cage, 1926; Brignone), 230 Maciste poliziotto (Maciste in the police force; 1918; Roberto), 230 Maciste Salvato dalle acque (Maciste rescued from the waters; 1921; Borgnetto), 230 Mafioso (Mafioso; 1962; Lattuada), 103 Ma l’amor mio non muore (Love Everlasting; 1913; Caserini), 20, 21–23, 31

INDEX OF FILMS

Mamma Roma (Mother Rome; 1962; Pasolini), 126 Matrimoni (Marriages; 1998; C. Comencini), 5, 221, 222–23 Medea (Medea; 1969; Pasolini), 149 Mediterraneo (1991; Salvatores), 218–19 Messiah, The (1975; Rossellini), 81 Mignon è partita (Mignon Has Come to Stay; 1988; Archibugi), 4, 5, 206–7, 209, 220 mille e una notte, Le (The Arabian Nights; 1973; Pasolini), 149, 150 Mimi metallurgico (The Seduction of Mimi; 1971; Wertmüller), 158, 159, 165 Mio dio come sono caduta in basso! (Untill Marriage Do Us Part; 1974; L. Comencini), 4, 175–79, 185 Miracolo, Il (The Miracle; 1948; Rossellini), 5, 50, 62, 63–64, 78 Miracolo a Milano (Miracle in Milan; 1951; De Sica), 67, 69 Morte a Venezia (Death in Venice; 1971; Visconti), 145, 149, 237 mostro, Il (The Monster; 1994; Benigni), 5, 211, 213, 214 mostri, I (The monsters; 1963; Risi), 211 Noi donne siamo fatte cosi (This is the way we, women, are; 1971; Risi), 196 Non c’è pace fra gli ulivi (No Peace under the Olive Tree; 1950; De Santis), 72 notte, La (The Night [UK]; 1960; Antonioni, 106, 119, 121–22, 124, 130 notti di Cabiria, Le (Nights of Cabiria; 1957; Fellini), 76, 87, 92–100, 104, 106, 116, 160 Novecento (1900; 1976; Bertolucci), 125, 150, 153, 157, 185, 238 nuovi mostri, I (The New Monsters; 1977; Scola), 179, 182–84 Nuovo cinema Paradiso (Cinema Paradiso; 1988; Tornatore), 209, 216 L’onorevole Angelina (Angelina: Member of Parliament; 1947; Zampa), 4, 66, 74 L’oro di Napoli (The Gold of Naples; 1954), 103 Ossessione (Obsession; 1943; Visconti), 49–50, 51, 71, 84, 85, 87, 149

249

Paisà (Paisan; 1946; Rossellini), 54, 59–62, 74 Pane, amore e . . . (Bread, Love, and . . . ; 1955; Risi), 102–3, 104 Pane, amore e fantasia (Bread, Love and Dreams; 1954; Camerini), 102 Pane, amore e gelosia (Bread, Love, and Jealousy; 1954; Camerini), 102 Pasqualino settebellezze (Seven Beauties; 1975; Wertmüller), 158, 164–67, 169, 186 Passione d’amore (Passion of Love; 1981; Scola), 179, 184–85, 238 paura, La (Fear; 1954; Rossellini), 80, 234 Peccato che sia una canaglia (Too Bad She’s Bad; 1954; Blasetti), 103 più bel giorno della mia vita, Il (The Best Day of My Life, 2002; C. Comencini), 5, 221, 223–24 portiere di notte, Il (The Night Porter; 1974; Cavani), 169–72, 173, 194, 195, 196, 238, 240 postino, Il (The Postman; 1994; Troisi), 216–17 Professione Reporter (The Passenger; 1975; Antonioni), 125 Profumo di donna (The Scent of a Woman; 1975; Risi), 238 Quo vadis? (Where are you going?; 1913; Guazzoni), 11 Racconti di Canterbury (The Canterbury Tales; 1972; Pasolini), 130, 149 ragazza con la pistola, La (The Girl with a Gun; 1968; Monicelli), 5, 136–37, 138, 196 Riso amaro (Bitter Rice; 1949; De Santis), 54, 71–74 Rocco e I suoi fratelli (Rocco and His Brothers; 1960; Visconti), 3, 4, 76, 84, 86–87, 104, 146 Roma città aperta (Open City; 1945; Rossellini), 54–59, 62, 73, 74, 213 Saló, o le 120 giornate di Sodoma (Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom; 1975; Pasolini), 150 Scandalo segreto (Secret Scandal; 1992; Vitti), 195, 196, 197, 202–6, 210, 240, 241

250

INDEX OF FILMS

scapolo, Lo (The Bachelor; 1955; Pietrangeli), 103 Scipione l’Africano (Scipio Africanus; 1937; Gallone), 38, 39–41, 51 Sciuscià (Shoeshine; 1946; De Sica), 67 Sedotta e abbandonata (Seduced and Abandoned; 1963; Germi), 4, 5, 131, 134–36, 138, 164, 173 segretaria privata, La (The Private Secretary; 1931; Alessandrini), 4, 38, 42, 43 Senso (Sensuality; 1951; Visconti), 84–85, 87, 104, 146, 149, 234 Siamo donne (We, the Women; 1952; Franciolini and Guarini), 80 signora dalle camelie, La (The Lady of the Camellias; 1915; Serena), 30, 31–33, 35 Signora senza camelie, La (The Lady Without Camelias; 1953; Antonioni), 234, 235 Signor Max, Il (Mister Max; 1937; Camerini), 38, 42, 44–45, 51 Socrates (1970; Rossellini), 81 Sotto . . . sotto (Beneath the surface; 1984; Wertmüller), 188, 192–94, 210 Stanno tutti bene (Everybody’s Fine; 1990; Tornatore), 218 strada, La (The Road; 1954; Fellini), 76, 87, 88–92, 104, 106, 116, 234 Strategia del ragno (The Spider’s Strategy; 1969; Bertolucci), 5, 125, 130, 150, 154 Stromboli terra di Dio (Stromboli; 1949; Rossellini), 5, 76–79, 80, 104 terra trema, La (The Earth Trembles; 1948; Visconti), 54 Tigre reale (Royal Tigress; 1916; Pastrone), 20, 23, 26–29, 31, 35

Tormento (Torment; 1952; Matarazzo), 100 Tra donne sole (The Girlfriends; 1955; Antonioni), 234 Travolti da un insolito destino . . . (Swept Away . . . ; 1974; Wertmüller), 142, 158, 162–64, 168, 186 Trilogy of Solitude (Antonioni), 119 ultimi giorni di Pompei, Gli (The Last Days of Pompei; 1908; Caserini), 11, 12 Ultimo tango a Parigi (Last Tango in Paris; 1972; Bertolucci), 150 Umberto D. (1952; De Sica), 54, 67, 69–70, 74 uomini, che mascalzoni, Gli (What Scoundrels Men Are!; 1932; Camerini), 38, 42, 43–44, 51 Va’ dove ti porta il cuore (Follow Your Heart; 1996; C. Comencini), 5, 221–22 vangelo secondo San Matteo, Il (The Gospel According to St. Matthew; 1964; Pasolini), 149 Verso sera (Toward evening; 1990; Archibugi), 220 Viaggio in Italia (Journal to Italy; 1952; Rossellini), 80 vita è bella, La (Life Is Beautiful; 2000; Benigni), 213–14 voce umana, Una (A human’s voice; 1947; Rossellini), 3, 50, 62–63, 83 Volere volare (To Want to Fly; 1991; Nichetti), 5, 214–15 Vortice (Vortex; 1954; Matarazzo), 100 Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988; Zemeckis), 214

Index of Names and Topics Note: Topics appear in bold.

abortion law and referendum, 142 Adenauer, Konrad, 75 Age (Agenore Incrocci), 182 Agonito, Rosemary, 228 Aimèe, Anouk, 107 Alberoni, Francesco, 7 Alberti, Giulia, 209, 216, 229, 241, 242 Alessandrini, Goffredo, 38, 42, 43 Allasio, Marisa, 2 anni di piombo, gli (“the leaden years”), 141 Antonelli, Laura, 2, 147, 175, 237 Antonioni, Michelangelo, 2, 3, 5, 9, 54, 70, 71, 76, 79, 81, 83, 104, 106, 119, 130, 137, 138, 162, 191, 192, 196, 197, 209, 225, 234, 235, 237, 236, 239, 241 Aprà, Aldo, 235 Archibugi, Francesca, 4, 5, 9, 206, 211, 219, 220, 221, 224 Armes, Roy, 233 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 46, 232 Barthes, Roland, 26 Basehart, Richard, 88 Bassani, Giorgio, 143 Bazin, André, 67, 233 Bellucci, Monica, 2 Benigni, Roberto, 2, 5, 9, 137, 211, 213, 214, 216, 218, 241 Berenger, Tom, 238 Berger, Helmet, 237 Bergman, Ingrid, 2, 62, 77, 81, 193 Bertellini, Giorgio, 233, 234 Bertini, Francesca, 1, 2, 9, 20, 21, 29, 30, 31, 64, 230, 231

Bertolucci, Bernardo, 5, 9, 79, 106, 125, 126, 130, 142, 150, 152, 153, 154, 156, 157, 169, 225, 237–38 Betti, Laura, 238 Bianchi, Pietro, 230 Bianco e Nero, 227, 240 Biarese, Carlo, 236 Black Order, 187 Blasetti, Alessandro, 38, 41, 103, 227 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 149, 150 Bogarde, Dirk, 238 Bogart, Humphrey, 193 Bondanella, Peter, 233, 234 Bono, Paola, 239 Borelli, Lyda, 2, 9, 20, 21 Borgnetto, Luigi Romano, 230 Borsellino, Paolo, 187 Bosé, Lucia, 2, 70, 72 Braudy, Leo, 227 Brignone, Guido, 230 Brooks, Ann, 242 Brooks, Peter, 233 Brunetta, Gian Piero, 229, 230, 232, 233 Brunette, Peter, 233 Bruno, Giuliana, 228, 232, 233, 234, 235, 240, 241, 242 Burgin, Victor, 231 Burgoyne, R., 240 Byars, Jackie, 228 Cain, James, 49, 50, 232, 233 Camerini, Mario, 38, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 102, 103 Cardinale, Claudia, 2, 236 Carroll, Noel, 33, 34, 232

252

INDEX OF NAMES AND TOPICS

Caserini, Mario, 11, 20, 21 Cavani, Liliana, 9, 10, 143, 169, 188, 192, 194, 195, 196, 209, 210, 238 Celli, Carlo, 227, 229, 233, 234, 241 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 130 Chionetti, Carlo, 236 Chodorov, Nancy, 1, 227 Cocteau, Jean, 62 Cohen, Marshall, 227 Cold War, 75 Colomina, Beatriz, 231 Colossals, 8, 11–12 comedy-Italian-style, 131, 173 Comencini, Cristina, 4, 5, 9, 211, 220, 221, 222, 223, 224 Comencini, Luigi, 5, 9, 131, 175, 179, 221 compromesso storico (historical compromise), 141 Corinthians, 228 Corriere della sera, Il, 229 Corrigan, Timothy, 7, 229 Cottino-Jones, Marga, 227, 229, 234, 236 Craxi, Bettino, 187, 188 Cucinotta, Maria Grazia, 2, 217 D’Amico, Luigi Filippo, 103 D’Annunzio, Gabriele, 12, 19, 23, 146, 147, 149, 178, 230 Dalla Chiesa, Carlo Alberto, 187 Decadentismo (Decadentist), 19, 20, 178 De Gasperi, Alcide, 75 De Gaulle, Charles, 75 Deledda, Grazia, 34 De Lauretis, Teresa, 116, 120, 198, 202, 206, 224, 227, 229, 235, 236, 240, 241 Del Colle, Ubaldo Maria, 100 Delli Colli, Laura, 240 Delon, Alain, 236 De Niro, Robert, 238 Depardieu, Gerard, 238 De Santis, Giuseppe, 54, 71, 72, 73, 234 De Sica, Vittorio, 2, 3, 4, 5, 9, 35, 44, 45, 47, 54, 66, 67, 70, 71, 102, 103, 106, 127, 128, 130, 138, 142, 143, 208, 220, 225, 227, 232, 233, 234, 239 Di Carlo, Carlo, 239 Di Giacomo, Salvatore, 29 Dinnerstein, Dorothy, 229 divismo (star idolatry), 1, 2–3, 6–7, 9, 20, 35 divorce law and referendum, 142, 236

Doane, Mary Ann, 31, 230, 231, 235 documentary genre, 38 Donizetti, Gaetano, 31 dramma passionale, 9, 19–20 dramma passionale films, 21–30 Duse, Eleonora, 1, 9, 34, 230 Eckberg, Anita, 107, 112 Elsaesser, Thomas, 231 Erens, Patricia, 232, 235, 237, 239, 241 Fabrizi, Aldo, 239 Falcone, Giovanni, 187 fascism, 37–38 Fellini, 2, 3, 4, 5, 9, 63, 70, 75, 79, 81, 87, 88, 90, 92, 94, 99, 100, 104, 105, 106, 107, 116, 117, 119, 130, 137, 138, 158, 160, 188, 190, 191, 192, 194, 209, 225, 233, 234, 235, 239 feminist activism, 142, 169–70, 188, 213–14, 239, 240, 241, 242 Ferretti, P. G., 237 Flitterman-Lewis, S., 240 forerunners of neorealism, 9, 47–51 Freud, Sigmund, 228 Furneaux, Yvonne, 107 Gallone, Carmine, 38 Garnett, Tay, 233 Gassman, Vittorio, 182, 239 Germi, Pietro, 4, 5, 9, 131, 132, 134, 137, 138, 142, 164, 173, 174, 175, 184, 239 Giacovelli, Enrico, 236 Giannini, Giancarlo, 2, 159, 160, 162, 237, 238 Gieri, Manuela, 234 Gili, Jean A., 236 Giorgi, Eleanora, 238 Girard, René, 146, 237 Girotti, Massimo, 84 Gledhill, Christin, 1, 227, 228 Granger, Farley, 84 Griffith, David W., 230 Grossvogel, David, 238 Guazzoni, Enrico, 11 Guerrini, M., 237 Harris, Richard, 236 Hay, James, 232 Heath, Stephen, 233

INDEX OF NAMES AND TOPICS

historical films, 9, 39–42 Hoffman, Dustin, 239 Italy’s economic miracle, 75, 105, 133 Joeres, Ruth-Ellen B., 227 John Paul II (pope), 187 Kaplan, E. Ann, 7, 8, 228, 233 Kemp, Sandra, 239 Kerr, Deborah, 229 Kezich, Tullio, 235 Kristeva, Julia, 170, 232 Kuhn, Annette, 229 Lacan, Jean, 228, 240 Lancaster, Burt, 236, 237, 238 Landy, Marcia, 227, 229, 232 Lange, Jessica, 233 Laslett, Barbara, 227 Lattuada, Alberto, 53, 103 Lawton, Ben, 233 LeRoy, Merryn, 229 “light comedy” films, 42–47 Lollobrigida, Gina, 2, 76, 102, 103, 227, 234 Loren, Sofia, 2, 76, 103, 128, 130, 157, 167, 239 Lumière, Louis, 3, 11 Maciste, 230, 232 Magnani, Anna, 2, 30, 55, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 86, 233, 234, 236 Manfredi, Nino, 2, 239 Mangano, Silvana, 2, 72, 73, 76, 237 Marcus, Millicent, 233, 234, 238 Marotti, Maria, 240 Marrone Puglia, Gaetana, 238 Marshall Plan, 75 Martinelli, F., 237 Masina, Giulietta, 2, 88, 92, 106, 116 Mast, Gerald, 227 Mastroianni, Marcello, 2, 107, 130, 131, 132, 157, 167, 188, 191, 236, 238, 239 Matarazzo, Raffaele, 100, 235 maternal melodrama, 9, 33–35 Mattoli, Mario, 64 Mayne, Judith, 236 Melato, Mariangela, 3, 159, 160, 162, 238 Melchiori, Paola, 209, 233, 234, 235, 241

253

melodrama, 9, 30–31 melodrama films, 30–35, 100–102 Menichelli, Pina, 2, 9, 20, 21, 23, 26 Metastasio, Pietro, 30 Metz, Christian, 228 Millet, Kate, 234 Miranda, Isa, 238 Modleski, Tania, 191, 239 Monicelli, Mario, 5, 9, 131, 136, 137, 138, 173, 179, 182, 196, 239 Monteverdi, Claudio, 30 Montgomery, Scott L., 171, 238 Moravia, Alberto, 150 Moreau, Jeanne, 119, 236 Morelli, Rina, 236 Moro, Aldo, 141 motherhood, 33 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 170 Mulvey, Laura, 134, 196, 198, 227, 230, 235, 239 musical melodramas, 30–31 Mussolini, Benito, 37, 38, 39, 40, 53, 160, 232 Nadotti, Maria, 233, 235, 240, 241, 242 Nazzari, Amedeo, 92 neorealism, 9, 53–54, 67 “Neorealist Manifesto,” 53 Neruda, Pablo, 216, 217 Nichetti, Maurizio, 5, 9, 137, 206, 208, 209, 211, 214, 215, 216, 218, 241 Nicholson, Jack, 233 Noris, Assia, 45 Notari, Elvira, 42, 232 Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey, 233n O’Neil, Jennifer, 237 Overby, David, 233 Pampanini, Silvana, 2 Pasolini, 9, 106, 125, 126, 128, 130, 138, 149, 150, 179, 225, 237 Pastrone, Giovanni, 12, 20, 21, 23, 26, 39, 40, 64, 230 patriarchy, 3–4, 227 Petacci, Claretta, 39 Petri, Elio, 182 Pickering-Iazzi, Robin, 232 Pietrangeli, Antonio, 103 Pizzetti, Ildebrando, 12

254

INDEX OF NAMES AND TOPICS

Placido, Michele, 239 Plantinga, Karl, 231n, 234 Pollock, Griselda, 233 Pribiam, E. Deidre, 228 Puccini, Giacomo, 31 Quinn, Anthony, 88 Radford, Michael, 216 Rafelson, Bob, 233 Rainer, Yvonne, 229n, 239, 241 Ralli, Giovanna, 239 Rampling, Charlotte, 238 Re, Lucia, 232 Red Brigades, 141, 187 Renoir, Jean, 232 Ricci, Steven, 232 Rich, Ruby, 46, 102, 104, 232, 235, 237, 239, 240 Risi, Dino, 9, 102, 131, 173, 179, 182, 196, 238 Roberti, Roberto Luigi, 230 Rondolino, Gianni, 10, 229, 230, 231 Rosenbaum, Jonathan, 6, 229 Rossellini, Roberto, 2, 3, 4, 5, 9, 30, 49, 50, 53, 54, 55, 59, 60, 62, 63, 64, 66, 75, 76, 77, 79, 80, 81, 104, 130, 225, 233 Rossini, Gioachino, 31 Russo, Roberto, 197, 240 St. Paul, 228 Salvatores, Gabriele, 218 Sanda, Dominique, 238 Sandrelli, Stefania, 2, 131, 135, 238, 239 Satta Flores, Stefano, 239 Scarpelli, Furio, 182 Scola, Ettore, 5, 9, 67, 131, 157, 158, 173, 179, 182, 184, 185, 196, 232n, 238, 239 Serena, Gustavo, 20, 29, 31, 231 Servi Burgess, E., 238 sexual conservatism, 7, 228 Silverman, Kaja, 199, 201 Smith, Greg M., 231, 234 Sordi, Alberto, 2, 9, 137, 138, 173, 182, 196, 235 Stam, Robert, 240

Stefani, M., 237 Sutherland, Donald, 238 Tamaro, Susanna, 221 Tangentopoli, 187 Tassone, Aldo, 236 Taylor Robert, 229 Tinazzi, Giorgio, 239 Tognazzi, Ugo, 182 Tomasi di Lampedusa, Giuseppe, 128 Tornatore, Giuseppe, 206, 209, 216, 218 Trintignant, Jean-Louis, 238 Troisi, Massimo, 9, 137, 211, 216, 217, 218, 241 Turner, Lana, 233 Valli, Alida, 2, 84, 125, 235 Verdi, Giuseppe, 31 Verga, Giovanni, 26, 231 verismo, 26, 231 Visconti, Luchino, 3, 4, 9, 49, 54, 70, 71, 76, 79, 84, 86, 87, 104, 106, 128, 138, 141, 142, 146, 148, 149, 207, 220, 225, 232, 233, 234, 236, 237 Vitti, Antonio, 234 Vitti, Monica, 1, 2, 5, 9, 119, 121, 136, 137, 196, 197, 198, 202, 203, 205, 206, 209, 210, 224, 236, 240, 241 Wagner, Richard, 165 Weedon, Chris, 228 Weeks, Kathi, 242 Wertmüller, Lina, 9, 10, 142, 143, 158, 159, 160, 162, 164, 165, 167, 168, 188, 192, 193, 194, 196, 209, 232, 233, 238 Wolpe, Ann Marie, 229 woman as femme fatale, 8, 9, 13, 15–16, 20–21, 22–23 woman as slave, 8, 13 woman-as-spectacle, 20, 113 Wood, Robin, 212, 241 Zampa, Luigi, 4, 66 Zemeckis, Robert, 214 Zavattini, Cesare, 47, 53, 54, 66, 67, 70, 71, 72, 233