ITALIAN FEMINISM AND WOMEN’S FILMMAKING: INTERSECTIONS 1975

As a wave of feminist activism gained momentum in Italy in the early 1970s, a radical consciousness began to find expression across a range of cultural production, from literature to philosophy, theater to cinema. The Italian women’s movement, like similar movements in other countries, had been reactivated by the climate of protest and dissent that spread throughout Western Europe in the wake of the events of May 1968. Connecting the various liberationist movements at the time was a broad commitment to historical materialism. Most of the members of the Italian women’s movement during this phase were active in politics of the left, practicing the “double militancy” that became one of the distinguishing characteristics of Italian feminism. Within a short time, however, the movement had achieved a momentum that transcended party associations, and thousands of women throughout many regions of Italy had become mobilized in demonstrations, protests, and consciousness-raising activities that ultimately led to important changes in legislation on issues affecting women’s lives. In the meantime, feminist writers and artists consciously set out to formulate new, historically contingent terms for a politics of the psycho-symbolic.

In the more conservative atmosphere that prevails in Italy in the mid-1990s, feminist activism no longer has the momentum it once had, and many gains have been threatened or retracted over time. Yet some of the legacies of the 1970s have survived. These are especially visible in cultural production, in the ongoing existence of feminist publishing houses, women’s bookstores, and cultural centers, for example, and in the increased visibility of work by women artists, filmmakers, writers, and philosophers. Not all women involved in cultural production wish to be perceived as feminist. Their reluctance is undoubtedly linked to the negative connotations accrued by the term femminista in the popular imagination as part of the shift towards a more conservative political climate, a shift that was signaled by the electoral successes of Alleanza Nazionale, Forza Italia, and Lega Nord in the wake of the national trauma of Tangentopoli.

In this paper I will discuss the work of the new generation of women directors who began their careers in Italian cinema since the high point of Italian feminism in the mid-1970s, in order to examine their connection with, or distance from, the feminist movement, and to evaluate what thematic, ideological, or stylistic concerns might be shared by this body of work as a whole. The position of women directors vis-à-vis the world of Italian filmmaking is particularly problematical due to the traditionally patriarchal structure of the cinema, the huge financial stakes involved in film production, and the deepening economic crisis that has affected the industry in recent years. Yet, despite the growing financial difficulties of the national film industry, a much greater number of women have emerged as directors in Italy during the past fifteen years than ever before. On the surface, this could be interpreted as evidence of the increased professional opportunities available to women as a direct result of the women’s movement. But it must also be observed that relatively few of these women directors have achieved mainstream recognition within Italy, and fewer still have had their films distributed abroad. In fact, the Italian women directors whose names are best known to international audiences are still Lina Wertmuller and Liliana Cavani, both of whom briefly enjoyed international recognition about twenty years ago.

Although their contributions to Italian filmmaking must certainly be acknowledged, I do not intend to focus on Wertmuller and Cavani in this study, since their films have already received some serious attention on the part of English-speaking critics. Both of these directors began their careers in the 1960s, when Italian art-cinema, dominated by the names of a handful of celebrated auteurs, was at the highest point of international acclaim. Following the enthusiastic response to Fellini, Antonioni, Visconti, and Pasolini on the international scene in the 1960s and early 1970s, it is hardly surprising that the first films by Cavani and Wertmuller distributed abroad found an exceptionally receptive audience. In fact, the commercial success of Wertmuller’s Swept Away (1974) and Cavani’s The Night Porter (1974) on the international scene rivaled the reception of films by some of their more famous male compatriots.^[1]Yet in Italy itself neither Cavani nor Wertmuller ever received the kind of attention enjoyed abroad during the 1970s. On the other hand, not all of the critical reception overseas has been positive. Anglophone feminists have been sharply divided in their analyses of the work of these two directors, alternating between praise and condemnation.^[2] Italian feminists, by contrast, have largely ignored both Cavani and Wertmuller, and the directors themselves have typically maintained a distance from the women’s movement, preferring to project, each in her own way, a “genderless” auteurist identity.

Connections with Italian feminist discourses are more readily apparent in the work of the subsequent generation of female directors whose intellectual formation occurred during or after the high point of the women’s movement, women who began their careers in Italian cinema when the industry was already entering a state of economic crisis, and whose films have been neglected by scholars and critics. With one or two exceptions, these filmmakers are not widely known in Italy. They include Francesca Archibugi (the most highly acclaimed of the group), Anna Brasi, Cristina Comencini, Francesca Comencini, Giovanna Gagliardo, Livia Giampalmo, Liliana Ginanneschi, Fiorella Infascelli, Wilma Labate, Francesca Romana Lombardi, Lina Mangiacapre, Emanuela Piovano, Gabriella Rosaleva, Anna Maria Tatò, and Cinzia Th. Torrini. All but Francesca Archibugi—whose Il grande cocomero competed for an Academy nomination for Best Foreign Film in 1994—are unknown in the USA.

The link between feminism and women’s filmmaking was at no time more evident than during the mid- to late-1970s, the period in which the women’s movement in Italy was still in its most intensely activist phase. The initial expression of a radical feminist consciousness in Italian cinema is found in documentary work or in short avant-garde films, created on super-8mm, 16mm, or video format, which dealt directly with issues widely discussed by feminists such as abortion, rape, and prostitution. Dacia Maraini, one of Italy’s most outspoken feminist writers, was also one of the pioneers of this trend, directing a controversial 50-minute documentary Aborto: parlano le donne (1976) in which several women recounted their personal experiences of abortion at a time in which the practice was still illegal in Italy. Other equally controversial films followed, most notably two 60-minute films directed by Anna Miscuglio, Rony Daopoulo, and a group of women colleagues. Processo per stupro (1978), the first of these films, is a provocative dramatization of a rape trial, shot on 16mm. The second, AAA Offresi (1979), is a video documentary on prostitution. The film was photographed with a hidden camera that recorded the interaction of a prostitute at work with her clients, with the woman’s prior agreement. The intended purpose of the film was to observe men’s behavior in the presence of a prostitute (Miscuglio 163n2). While the male clients did not know of the camera’s presence, their faces were not shown. The film was scheduled to be broadcast on national television in 1980, but, due to the outrage that met the announcement of its programming, it was canceled at the last minute by direct intervention of the government. The filmmakers were later arrested and tried. Although they were acquitted of criminal offense, the film was confiscated by the court in a manifestation of censorship that clearly reveals the patriarchal bias of the Italian legal system.^[3] Later, Miscuglio and Daopoulo went on to complete other work in a controversial vein, notably another 60-minute video documentary, Fantasmi del fallo (1980), on the making of a pornographic film.

While films such as those of Miscuglio and Daopoulo can be connected to the historical-materialist impetus of the Italian feminist struggle, other short films of the period are more indicative of the essentialist thrust that Italian feminist theory was beginning to take, in part as the result of the influence of French feminism. These films concerned themselves more specifically with an attempt to create new forms of feminine expression, and to re-envision in a feminine key myths, histories, and institutions long dominated by masculine discourse. An early pioneer of this tendency in filmmaking was the Neapolitan collective Le Nemesiache, led by Lina Mangiacapre, otherwise known as Nemesis. Originally a performance group, Le Nemesiache expressed a deep interest in their regional roots, and sought to reelaborate through their work the ancient feminine myths associated with the Neapolitan hinterland in both classical and folk culture. Working in Super-8, Le Nemesiache produced their first film, Cenerella favola psicofemminista, in 1974, the feminist retelling of a Neapolitan dialect fable. At the outset, the collective conceived of film production as an extension of their work in dance, music, poetry, painting, and performance art. One of their most interesting projects was Follia come poesia (1980), a film documenting a visit by Le Nemesiache to a mental hospital for women. The film is less interested in examining the material conditions of the women’s incarceration, or in investigating the social or familial experiences that preceded it, than in exploring their “madness” as a kind of visionary phenomenon with specific expressive power.

Although Mangiacapre has been regarded as eccentric and naive by other feminists more directly committed to politics of the left (Miscuglio 157), her contribution to an Italian feminist film culture has continued steadily through the years, extending beyond her work as a filmmaker. In 1976 she founded an annual women’s film festival—the first of its kind in Italy—within the larger venue of the International Film Festival at Sorrento, and has more recently established a prize for films by women at the Venice Film Festival. She also founded a magazine of feminist criticism, Manifesta, which she continues to produce in her distinctively idiosyncratic style. In spite of the criticism of other feminists, her ongoing efforts as writer, cultural organizer, and filmmaker still encapsulate a sense of the artisanal energy characteristic of the most radical period of Italian women’s filmmaking.

Other feminist filmmakers who made experimental films in a subjective or experimental vein in the late 1970s have subsequently moved on to more commercially viable formats or have abandoned filmmaking altogether. Dacia Maraini is perhaps the best known of the Italian feminists who adopted film as a medium of expression during this period and later relinquished it. Though she has always seen herself primarily as a writer, Maraini made several short films during the 1970s, most notably Mio padre amore mio and Giochi di latte, both shot in Super-8. These films explore the compelling bonds forged with parental figures in early childhood, and retained with some ambivalence in later life. The first film is a personal reflection on Maraini’s complex relationship with her father, who is simultaneously resented and loved, and who refuses to be banished from her consciousness. Giochi di latte, on the other hand, is a visual celebration of the maternal relationship, orchestrated around the central image of lactation. A surreal montage sequence configures the mother’s nurturing presence as a perpetual stream of milk flowing from the breast. This insistence on the centrality of the body, and particularly the bodily experiences of women, is in fact characteristic of a shift in Italian feminist consciousness that occurred toward the end of the 1970s and early 1980s, when theoretical feminism began to develop beyond the more narrowly political focus of the earlier activist phase. The feminine as female body is still a sharply contested issue for feminists, however, and theorists have struggled to defend women’s sex-specific rights and needs, while simultaneously opposing the patriarchal tendency to equate the feminine with the corporeal.^[4]

The first commercially released feature film to raise issues currently debated within the women’s movement was Sofia Scandurra’s Io sono mia (1977), an adaptation of Dacia Maraini’s novel Donna in guerra. The film draws its inspiration from the contemporary feminist struggle, and its producer, director, screenwriter, cinematographer, and editor were all women. Reminiscent of radical feminist slogans at a time when women’s right to jurisdiction over their own bodies was a major focus of debate, the title already announces a firmly polemical and oppositional stance. The narrative explores the growing need for independence of a young woman who, while on vacation on a Mediterranean island, comes to an awareness of the intolerable circumstances of her marriage. This coming to consciousness is facilitated by an encounter with several other women on the island and with a young man still devoid of the domineering characteristics that make life with her husband intolerable. Io sono mia ends with the protagonist’s return to the city, where she decides to terminate the pregnancy that her husband had tried to impose upon her and to live alone in the basement of the schoolhouse where she works. The film is clearly the product of a specific historical moment, articulating some of the dominant concerns of current debate—particularly women’s need for self-determination and their right to refuse the maternal role. It was released less than a year before abortion became legalized in Italy, and two years before the launching of a campaign for a referendum on sexual violence. Despite the relevance of the film’s thematic preoccupations to contemporary feminism, Io sono mia did not receive an unambiguously positive response from Italian feminists. Annabella Miscuglio, for example, criticized the film for its schematic construction of characters and its excessively polemical tone (160), and Dacia Maraini herself expressed disappointment in the production.^[5] On the other hand, an otherwise favorable review of Io sono mia by a male critic, which first appeared in Il corriere della sera, criticized the film for failing to articulate a feminine aesthetic (Grazzini 12–15).

Giovanna Gagliardo’s first feature Maternale (1978) was met with a more enthusiastic reception from Italian feminist communities. Although not widely distributed, the film was quickly recognized as an important text of Italian feminism. Gagliardo’s screenplay was published in book form by the recently created feminist press Edizioni delle donne, and thus entered the field of theoretical debate. The volume includes a reflection on the film by Gagliardo, as well as an essay entitled “L’una non sogna senza l’altra” by Luce Irigaray, a theorist whose influence on Italian feminism has been substantial.

Maternale explores the experience of motherhood within patriarchy as one of narcissistic ambivalence and grudging resignation. The overall mood of the film is lyrical rather than polemical, however, and the narrative evolves in a subjective, dream-like sequence, with extremely fluid camera movements and an unconventional use of music. Gagliardo’s formal virtuosity can be linked to the influence of the Hungarian director Miklós Jancsó—well known for his sweeping camera movements—with whom she had had extensive experience as assistant director and scriptwriter. In Maternale, Gagliardo’s fine control of timing and gesture very successfully conveys the troubled, introspective mood of the protagonist, a bourgeois mother and housewife. The film provides one of the most interesting and lyrical meditations of the unspoken tensions of the bonds between women in a patriarchal system, focusing in particular on the complexities of a mother’s relationship with her daughter. Although the director herself has denied a conscious attempt to create specifically feminine imagery (Gagliardo 106), Maternale articulates a dynamic exploration of female identity and subjectivity.

Exposing the daughter’s muteness, hysterical symptoms, and relationship to food as symptomatic of the tensions in the mother-daughter relationship, Maternale is clearly influenced by psychoanalysis and feminist theory. Irigaray’s essay “L’una non sogna senza l’altra” attempts to supply the words unspoken by the daughter in this film, simultaneously theorizing the sense of estrangement and exile from the mother experienced by daughters in a world where all relationships are ultimately mediated by men. The essay, which was translated by Luisa Muraro, became one of the texts discussed within the feminist philosophical community in northern Italy. Muraro also translated several major works by the French theorist that were disseminated among Italian feminists during this period, and that influenced the elaboration of the theory of sexual difference. The category of difference has been central to writings by members of the Milan Bookstore Collective and the philosophical community Diotima, as well as to works written individually by Muraro and Adriana Cavarero, writings that not only insist on the difference between men and women but also lead to the consideration of differences among women, and to the theorization of a maternal symbolic order.^[6]

By the early 1980s the period of cinematic experimentation by women filmmakers in non-conventional formats was virtually over. Some filmmakers abandoned avant-garde practices for regular work in television. Others, like Dacia Maraini, ceased to make films but turned briefly to screenwriting.^[7] By this time the politically activist phase of the Italian women’s movement itself had given way to a period dominated by the development of theoretical discourses. The focus had shifted from a preoccupation with what had to be changed in patriarchal society to a new interest in developing a specifically feminine philosophy and culture, or, as it was later called, a social-symbolic practice. It was during this period that the gap between theoretical feminism and the work of women filmmakers began to widen inexorably.

The majority of films made by women directors in the 1980s and early 1990s continues to explore themes considered vital to Italian feminist discourse of an earlier phase, including women’s experience of family relationships; sexual discovery and development; and the difficulties encountered in the home, the workplace, and society at large. Francesca Comencini’s autobiographically-inspired first feature Pianoforte (1983), for example, offers a study of drug addiction and obsessive love. Produced by Italian television, the film charts the descent of a talented young woman into a state of physical and emotional devastation. It includes a brief portrait of mother/daughter alienation, which is thematically aligned with the protagonist’s drug dependency, but the focus of the story is on the young woman’s emotional attachment to her drug-addicted boyfriend. The film constructs the anguish caused by addiction with great candor, although the decisiveness with which the protagonist eventually recovers from her own drug addiction in order to resume her studies in music seems somewhat forced. While the film’s conclusion reiterates one of the canons of 1970s feminism—the necessity for independence and self-determination—the conventional codes of cinematic melodrama through which the narrative is articulated tend to blunt its subversive edge.

Cristina Comencini’s first feature Zoo (1988) is part ecological fable, part female coming-of-age story, and is set in the Roman Zoo (at a time when many activists including Dacia Maraini were campaigning for its closure).^[8] The story allegorically links the loneliness of a motherless young girl, a runaway gypsy boy with whom she forges a friendship, and the incarcerated animals. The film concludes on a fantastical note with the triumphant “escape” of the two children on an elephant’s back. Despite the potentially “feminist” direction suggested by this debut, Comencini subsequently went on to make two more commercially oriented films, aimed at a broader, mainstream audience: the 1990 costume drama, Divertimenti della vita privata, and a neo-noir made in 1992, La fine è nota, complete with a heartless femme fatale.

Problems that are specific to women’s experience of the contemporary urban scene are usually central to the work of the new generation of women directors. The misadventures of a middle-aged housewife who becomes addicted to gambling in an attempt to escape the drudgery of her domestic life are constructed with sympathy and power in Cinzia Th. Torrini’s Giocare d’azzardo (1981), starring Piera degli Esposti as the harried protagonist. Adriana Monti’s Gentili signore (1988), by contrast, examines the difficulties of a group of women in the workplace. The film is set in a textile-design cooperative in a northern industrial city, and provides one of the most probing studies of the tensions and ambiguities of female friendships, relationships that often compete with or are mediated by the demands of husbands and families. Female friendships are also at the center of Anna Brasi’s Angela come te (1987) and Liliana Ginanneschi’s Faccia di lepre (1991). These come closest to the subgenre described as the female buddy film that has begun to gain popularity in American cinema over the past ten years. Ginanneschi’s film provides a particularly complex study of a relationship between a young woman and a homeless, older woman who becomes her mentor and companion. As often happens in female buddy films (more typically made by male directors), the women’s friendship ends in death, as though the narrative were unconsciously driven to punish the characters for their intimacy and mutual affection.

Livia Giampalmo’s Evelina e i suoi figli (1989) and Giovanna Gagliardo’s Caldo soffocante (1991), though different in mood and style, both examine the difficulties of divorced mothers struggling to achieve a sense of personal balance and fulfillment in the hostile and sometimes misogynist environment of contemporary urban Italy. Evelina e i suoi figli, which could be described as a family melodrama, is Giampalmo’s first feature, and stars the highly acclaimed Stefania Sandrelli in the role of a woman who believes she must chose between the demands of her teenage sons and her own need for new relationships. Caldo soffocante, on the other hand, has elements of the detective genre, with a plot that takes the protagonist—a divorced French expatriate with two small children—into the seedy underbelly of the capital in order to help an African woman whom she has never met. The film is set during the 1990 World Cup semi-finals, highlighting the woman’s indifference to the competitive event that absorbs most of the city’s population. Caldo soffocante shows Gagliardo’s ability to craft a work aimed at a broad commercial audience. The limitations imposed by working within the format of a mainstream filmmaking, however, makes the film less fresh and interesting than the director’s earlier work.

Emanuela Piovano’s first feature Le rose blu (1990) focuses on the experiences of a group of incarcerated women, a subject that until then had been unexplored in Italian feature films. Shooting on location in Le Vallette, a women’s prison in Turin, Piovano mixes documentary and dramatic elements. There are cameo appearances by Laura Betti and Ninetto Davoli, but the cast consists mainly of actual female prisoners in roles that were inspired by their personal stories. In a bleak, yet ironic examination of painful realities, the film’s politically provocative approach is reminiscent of some of the more explicitly activist films made by feminists in the late 1970s.

Female coming-of-age stories are extremely rare in Italian cinema. Zuppa di pesce, perhaps the most outstanding of these, was directed by Fiorella Infascelli in 1992, and provides a thinly disguised autobiographical account of the director’s upbringing in a highly unconventional but still stoutly patriarchal family. Zuppa di pesce is structured around a series of family vacations taken at the seaside villa of a temperamental film producer over a span of approximately twenty years. The producer, played by Philippe Noiret, is clearly modeled on the director’s father, Carlo Infascelli, a well-known figure in the world of B-movies during the 1950s and 1960s. Hence the film is filled with allusions to and quotations from Italian cinema of that period. At the center of the story is the young protagonist’s struggle with her father, as she attempts to assert her sexual independence and to fulfill her desire to work in a kind of cinema production quite different from the model presented by her father. Zuppa di pesce offers a complex representation of a girl’s coming of age in an environment virtually dominated by the moving image, and suggests how her early encounter with cinema and popular music shapes her imaginative world. Significantly, the film’s initial close-up, introduced just after the title sequence, shows the flicker of moving images reflected on the young girl’s face, thus consciously inscribing the discourse of female spectatorship in the film’s diegetic development.

In contrast to the films discussed above, which are all bound to a greater or lesser degree to the conventions of cinematic realism, the mythic-baroque style of Lina Mangiacapre pursues a different path. Her recent features—Didone non è morta (1986) and Faust Fausta (1991)—are not concerned with social realities, but recuperate in a feminist key mythological or literary figures from the past. Her visionary invocation of Dido of Carthage takes place on two different but overlapping chronological planes, the present and the ancient past. It is a celebration of a woman’s warrior spirit, enacted on the coastal landscape near Naples, a location that is imbued with archaic associations. Faust Fausta, which is based on a novel written by the director, is shot in similar locations, though most of the film takes place in an extraordinary rococo palace. Deploying an aesthetics of excess, with highly stylized performances, the film retells the story of Faust in a modern, gender-bending key. Faust Fausta’s exploration of shifting gender positions and polymorphous sexuality suggests that Lina Mangiacapre has moved beyond her radical-feminist aesthetics to embrace a more androgynous vision of human identities and possibilities.

If Lina Mangiacapre’s work occupies the experimental, anti-commercial, independent pole in the repertoire of films by contemporary women filmmakers, Francesca Archibugi, the most prominent of this generation of female directors, surely occupies the other. Archibugi has made four commercially successful features to date, all well received by critics in Italy and abroad. The first three films—Mignon è partita (1988), Verso sera (1991) and Il grande cocomero (1993)—are set in Rome in the present or recent past. They could be loosely described as a social trilogy, since, as a group, they offer a critique of several strata of Italian society. This critique is constructed, at least in part, through the fictional perspective of adolescents or very young children. Stylistically, the films are rather conventional, harking back to established cinematic traditions such as the commedia all’italiana, a fact that seems to have enhanced Archibugi’s success with audiences in Italy.

Though still a teenager in the late 1970s, Francesca Archibugi was at that time a political activist and self-described feminist, practicing the “double militancy” that was not uncommon among the daughters of privileged intellectual families committed to left politics. Despite these feminist credentials, her film narratives do not appear to privilege female experience. In fact, all of her first three films have a male protagonist who also provides some voice-over narration. Her fourth film, the 1994 adaptation of Federico Tozzi’s novel Con gli occhi chiusi, also focuses on a male protagonist, and seems to invoke the “authority” of the male novelist’s words in the film’s final scene. Yet all four films also present a disturbed young girl, manifesting symptoms of obvious distress, whose unhappy state reflects her awareness of the larger malaise of the society she has been born into. Because of Archibugi’s centrality to contemporary women’s cinema and her apparent divergence from thematic emphases common to most women directors, I shall examine her work in some detail.

Mignon è partita, her debut feature, is a male coming-of-age story. Its central character is the adolescent Giorgio who becomes smitten with unrequited love for his slightly older French cousin, Mignon, an aloof teenage girl who comes to live with Giorgio’s family in Rome after her father is imprisoned for dishonest business practices. It is through the experience of these young characters that the film’s critique of the contemporary environment is gradually articulated. The use of children to provide an innocent foil against which difficult social realities or irresponsible adult behavior are to be assessed has been a popular strategy in Italian cinema since De Sica’s I bambini ci guardano (1944), Ladri di biciclette (1946), and Sciuscià (1948). Rossellini briefly used children to similar effect in his postwar trilogy, and it is hardly a coincidence that Giorgio refers to Rossellini in Mignon è partita, just before he makes a staged suicide attempt.

The young characters in Archibugi’s first three features observe a society where traditional family structures are in crisis, and where fathers have lost their authority or abandoned their parental responsibility. Giorgio has no reliable male role models. His father—a self-styled poet who came of age in the 1960s—is involved in a sexual liaison with a much younger woman, a fact that is tacitly observed by the entire family. In the meantime, a married but childless uncle is attempting to seduce Giorgio’s mother. Another uncle, Mignon’s father (who is never seen in the film), has betrayed his own parental role by his involvement in dishonest business activities resulting in large-scale human tragedy.

The absence of adequate paternal figures is a theme that is frequently found in contemporary Italian cinema,^[9] and it is especially pervasive in Archibugi’s work. There is a brief scene that occurs early in Mignon è partita that recurs in different guises in her later films: the misrecognition or misappropriation of a father-figure by a young female character. As a tearful Mignon tries to escape from her cousins’ unwanted hospitality, she collides in the darkness with her uncle, Giorgio’s father, whom she imagines to be her own father, until he tells her that she has made a mistake. Mignon’s need to reconstitute the absent father is re-echoed in Verso sera and Il grande cocomero where other young women, with greater deliberation than Mignon, claim as their fathers men whom they have temporarily chosen to fulfill a paternal role.

The contemporary Roman family constructed by Archibugi’s first film seems virtually untouched by the change in social consciousness brought about by the feminist movement in Italy, and the narrative does not offer any reassuring portrayals of strong female characters (unless one includes Giorgio’s Latin teacher who dies in the course of the film). Giorgio’s mother, the generous, long-suffering Laura (Stefania Sandrelli) shows a stoic tolerance for her children’s demands and her husband’s infidelities. Having faltered briefly in the face of her brother-in-law’s declaration of love, she subsequently rejects his courtship and recommits herself to the difficult circumstances of her marriage without knowing how to satisfy her own needs for affection and nurture. The much younger Mignon, despite her intelligence, is similarly unable to meet her emotional needs. Though she is a much sought-after object of desire, no one tries very hard to decipher her troubled spirit. After a brief sexual relationship with the rough-mannered Cacio, Mignon pretends to be pregnant, thus creating a pretext for her immediate return to France. While this departure does not promise any real solution for Mignon’s difficulties, it provides the circumstances for Giorgio’s assessment of his own maturity.

Mignon è partita is very much a male story, since the women closest to protagonist, his mother, his teacher, and Mignon—all of them victims—suffer, die, or depart from the scene in ways that have less to do the logical development of their characters, than with the necessity to illustrate the boy’s evolving maturation, his sentimental education. Giorgio’s attainment of maturity is signaled in the film’s penultimate scene where Mignon leaves for the airport. As he attempts to run after the departing Mignon he discovers that he has grown to the extent that he can no longer slip through the bars of the gate as he had done some months earlier. In the subsequent, concluding scene, set in the present tense of the film’s narration, the fifteen-year-old Giorgio looks back on the experience of Mignon’s visit and imagines that if he had been more aggressive in courting his cousin he might have succeeded in capturing her affection. This is conveyed visually in his fantasy of returning to an earlier, unexploited opportunity to caress Mignon, whom he now reaches out to touch with assurance. Thus the film suggests that Giorgio, in abandoning the hesitant sensitivity of his adolescence, promises to follow the more aggressive example of other males in his environment. In Giorgio’s fantasy of the alternative scenario, Mignon yields to his touch, smiling sweetly back at him. It is with this image of Mignon, not as subject, but as cooperative fantasy of the boy’s desire, that the film ends.

The elision of Mignon’s subjectivity by the film is perhaps understandable if one takes into account the cinematic antecedents for Giorgio’s character. When Archibugi invokes the filmmakers whose treatment of children she admires (and Truffaut is high on the list), she mentions the work of directors who have generally constructed male, not female, children. Despite their highly sympathetic aspects, Archibugi’s child characters in this film are purely cinematic constructions, having been inspired chiefly by other cinematic children, creatures impossibly wise and knowing for their years and exceptionally observant of the world around them.

Verso sera, Archibugi’s next film, introduces a more centrally positioned female character. It also moves away from the narrow focus of a single family environment, attempting a broader perspective on Italian society, which is nonetheless still viewed from the confines of a domestic setting. Set in an upper-middle class Roman villa in the turbulent Italy of 1977, just prior to the assassination of Aldo Moro by the Red Brigades, the film pays tribute to the contrasting influences of Archibugi’s intellectual formation, influences that are still relevant to an understanding of contemporary Italian culture. The protagonist is the aging Professor Bruschi, a bourgeois Marxist and the repository of intellectual values and certainties that are about to crumble. The film recounts his experiences with two people who briefly change his life. These are his granddaughter, the six-year-old Papere who claims to have a dual personality, and the child’s mother, the rebellious and critical Stella. The atmosphere of protest and rebellion that led to the violence of the late 1970s is mainly in the background, though the narrative attempts to prepare its audience for Stella’s eventual involvement in these events, and her simultaneous abandonment of her aging mentor, the professor who cannot give up his desire to teach her, change her, and domesticate her energies.

The film evokes a variety of the cultural idiosyncrasies characteristic of the period, and in so doing, lapses occasionally into caricature, especially in the construction of such minor characters as the director of a trendy experimental theater who tries to lure Stella away, the stammering son of Professor Bruschi who lives in a commune near Rome, and the self-styled radical psychologist/philosopher Canguro. The relationship between Stella and the professor is more convincingly crafted. The young woman rejects Bruschi’s paternalistic attitude, repeatedly challenging him, his rigidity, his inhuman sense of order. Implicitly her critique is directed at his entire generation.

Stella appears to be familiar with feminist encounter groups, and in one of the most humorous scenes in the film she calls a consciousness-raising session with her daughter and Bruschi’s housekeeper. Stella begins to inveigh against the professor, against men, against the practice of penetration, and is echoed by the six-year-old Papere and the illiterate housekeeper. Although the phrases repeated in the scene are reminiscent of the discourses of the gruppi di autocoscienza organized within the Italian women’s movement, the episode is clearly a parody of certain feminist practices. Ultimately the film accords more dignity and sympathy to the self-centered professor than to Stella, who, since she is intended to encapsulate types of female behavior in a specific historical moment, remains somewhat hollow and schematic. The characterization of Papere is also stylized, since the child is, once again, impossibly wise for her years. Following criticisms of the uneven portrayal of characters in this film, Archibugi chose to abandon the practice of collaborative screenwriting, and embarked on the script for her next film on her own.

Il grande cocomero is a thematically ambitious film, focusing on a specific social problem: the deficiencies of state-provided psychiatric care for mentally-ill children. This shift to a clearly social focus is in line with Archibugi’s increasing awareness of the potential function of filmmakers as teachers, critics, and intellectual leaders (Siciliani de Cunis), as indeed has long been the attitude of filmmakers in the Gramscian tradition. The film is set in an understaffed, underfunded Roman hospital, where the children’s psychiatric ward is directed by a sympathetic doctor named Arturo. This character is based on the writings and practices of Marco Lombardo Radice, a young, pioneering practitioner of child psychiatry who is now deceased, and to whose memory the film is dedicated. Lombardo Radice came of age in the intensely questioning atmosphere of late-60s radicalism, and was deeply marked by that experience, transforming it into an innovative approach to child psychiatry. If Verso sera parodies some of the aspects of Italian radicalism, then Il grande cocomero carefully considers its potentially positive legacies.

The narrative focuses on Arturo’s relationship with a twelve-year-old epileptic girl Valentina, nicknamed Pippi. The doctor rightly hypothesizes that the causes of the child’s illness are psychosomatic, and are rooted in a troubled family environment. In order to overcome Valentina’s hostility and resistance to treatment, he introduces her to the Peanuts comic strip that tells the tale of the Great Pumpkin (translated by Schulz’s Italian translator as “Il grande cocomero”), a kind of cosmic Santa Claus that provides a reason for living and waiting. Suspicious of drug therapy and the “talking cure,” both of which preserve intact a traditional hierarchical power structure, Arturo has a complex sense of his own position and that of his patients within a shifting field of forces. In his dismissal of traditional institutional boundaries, Arturo is hardly a conventional doctor. He allows his patient Valentina to “treat” a gravely-ill child. Later he encourages another patient, a teenage boy too old to remain in the juvenile psychiatric ward, to become a psychiatric nurse. He also accommodates the complex territorial demands of a young schizophrenic, allows Valentina to bring her dog with her to the hospital, and colludes with his young patients in their brief “escape” into the neighborhood streets, reassuring the police that he had sanctioned their outing.^[10]

The narrative suggests that the roots of childhood neurosis can be traced to the dynamics of a dysfunctional family. Arturo knows that something illicit is going on behind the newly-rich veneer of Valentina’s family home. He challenges Valentina’s father on the source of his livelihood, never articulating precisely what his suspicions are, but pointing out to the child’s parents that “one cannot hide anything from children.” The corruption hidden under a facade of caregiving (in the family and in the medical system) can be read as a metaphor for the condition of Italian society at the time. Significantly, the film was completed just before the explosive revelations of Tangentopoli began to convulse the Italian nation.

Arturo is one of the most convincingly constructed characters in the director’s work, although his patient, Valentina, like all of Archibugi’s children, seems a little too astute. It is Valentina who reveals Arturo’s incapacity to have satisfying personal relationships, and who identifies his work as a kind of escape that prevents him from scrutinizing himself too closely. She also provokes him into acknowledging the memory of his painful past: a marriage that ended as the result of his insisting that his wife should have an abortion. This revelation nonetheless brings to the fore the particularly ambivalent status of the feminine within the text of Il grande cocomero.

Arturo is feminized in his work through his abdication of hierarchical power, which makes him more attractive, human, and “maternal.” But one must also consider how this character is positioned in relation to “real” women in the narrative. At the fashionable soiree Arturo briefly attends, an attractive woman poet attempts to charm him. His dismissal is abrupt, even cruel. He appears, on the other hand, to have greater patience and compassion for the older, overworked nurse at the hospital, who eventually collapses under the strain of her own frustration and resentment. The details of his relationship with his wife are sketchy, apart from the revelation of his demand that she have an abortion, and his ongoing pain in the wake of their separation. His only “real” relationship with a female is with Valentina, and this is perhaps the reason that American audiences found the scene where he rests in bed alongside the young girl so disturbing. But it is precisely here that he confesses to her the exact nature of his love for her: she is his inspiration and source of motivation, his reason for getting up in the mornings, someone he had been seeking for many years. His need for a child to nurture rather than an adult with whom to share his life could not be more clearly stated. In the film’s penultimate scene, where Valentina menstruates for the first time, the stage is set for her departure from Arturo’s life. According to the logic of Arturo’s character, once Valentina passes into womanhood, she will no longer be the focus of his intense concern. Only up to the threshold of her entry into mature femininity will Valentina function as the medium of Arturo’s personal transformation and fulfillment.

Like other nurturing male protagonists in contemporary Italian cinema (the carabiniere in Amelio’s I ladri di bambini and the teacher in Wertmuller’s Io speriamo che me la cavo, for example) Arturo proves more “maternal” than the actual mothers of his young charges. But this gain in the ability of men to nurture seems to be accompanied by a lack of desire or ability to form relationships of companionship and equality with adult women. It is significant that few adult women are found in leading roles in contemporary Italian cinema. Instead, females tend to appear in supporting roles, either as mothers (“good” and “bad”) or as children. And it is here perhaps that Archibugi’s film is unconsciously complicit with thematic emphases that pervade contemporary representation as part of the backlash to the feminist movement.^[11]

Archibugi’s most recent feature, an adaptation of Federico Tozzi’s Con gli occhi chiusi, offers a more condemning critique of patriarchy than any of her previous films. The narrative foregrounds the brutality of a peasant patriarch in the Tuscan countryside at the turn of the century, charting its effects on the man’s delicate, shortsighted son. Central to the development of the film is a scene where the padrone orders several animals to be castrated, an episode that is observed by his farmhands and his son Pietro. The scene has a striking visual intensity, and suggests a symbolic castration carried out by the patriarch on all other males in his environment, especially the hesitant and weak-willed Pietro, a boy who cannot and will not become a padrone.

Both males and females are victims of the patriarch’s abuse, but clearly women suffer more. The narrative evokes the complicity of women within this system, each surviving as best she can manage. Pietro’s mother whispers: “Tesoro, mi distruggi” as she submits to her husband’s rough embrace. A farm-hand’s wife passively surrenders to the padrone’s vindictive rape. And Ghisola, the love of Pietro’s life, having abandoned an attempt to trick Pietro into marrying her in order to provide support for her child, decides to recommit herself to a life of prostitution.

The film explores childhood cruelty and sexuality, class relationships among children, and the fate of a boy who is unable to follow his father’s example. While the narrative is certainly most sympathetic toward the male protagonist Pietro, it also draws attention to the predicament of the impoverished Ghisola, while eliding her subjectivity. This is particularly evident in the film’s final scene, which implies that Pietro finally reaches manhood at the moment he ceases to love Ghisola. Here, the sight of the girl’s pregnant abdomen causes the young man to faint, and the concluding frame freezes on his unconscious body. The film ends with the information that, upon his return to consciousness, Pietro finally “did not love her any longer.” These words, which are taken verbatim from the conclusion of Tozzi’s novel, are superimposed upon the image of the young man as he lies unconscious on the floor. Archibugi’s decision to import these words—and only these words—from Tozzi’s text suggests a certain ironic distance from their content. The implication that masculine maturity is acquired through a cessation of affection is bracketed (as written information rather than visual image) from the remainder of the narration, creating a sense of rupture and transgression, and highlighting the fact that this is after all Pietro’s story. Once Ghisola has been eliminated from the young man’s obsessions, and hence from his narrative, she simply ceases to exist. Here, as elsewhere in Archibugi’s work, the director’s feminist insights must be sought in textual gaps and ruptures, rather than in explicit emphases.

The fact that Archibugi’s work is not perceived as explicitly “feminist” in its thematic preoccupations has no doubt facilitated her success with mainstream audiences. Yet, while her films do not articulate specific themes that have dominated Italian feminist theory in recent years, they nonetheless reverberate with awarenesses that have come about as the result of the women’s movement. Archibugi refuses to participate in the kind of cinema that is ultimately made for television (a compromise pursued by many women directors of her generation), and, although she is aware that Italians who still choose to view films on the large screen constitute a dwindling elite, she consciously aspires to the difficult goal of luring popular audiences back to the cinema. Many of Archibugi’s public statements highlight her commitment to left politics rather than to feminism. She claims, for example, that “to be an Italian communist doesn’t simply mean having an ideology. It also means having feelings, having a commitment first of all to life itself, and then to politics” (Fusco 17). But this valorization of “feelings” over “politics” is reminiscent of a tradition established in the 1970s by Italian political feminists who, in the practice of “double militancy,” acknowledged their need to develop an emotional dimension, a self-awareness achieved through dialogue with other women, as the prerequisite for political action. Although Archibugi does not prioritize the cinematic representation of women’s experience, her films, like those of other contemporary female directors in Italy, implicitly participate in the ongoing debate on the construction of gender and power relations, and the difficulties of women’s access to language and the symbolic. These are issues urgently requiring further attention in the current climate of “postfeminist” resentment and reactionary nostalgia.

Works Cited

Cavarero, Adriana. “L’elaborazione della differenza sessuale.” La ricerca delle donne. Ed. Maria Cristina Marcuzzo and Anna Rossi-Doria. Turin: Rosenberg and Sellier, 1987. 173–87.

___. Nonostante Platone. Rome: Riuniti, 1990.

de Lauretis, Teresa. “The Practice of Sexual Difference and Feminist Thought in Italy: An Introductory Essay.” The Milan Women’s Bookstore Collective, Sexual Difference: A Theory of Social Symbolic Practice. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1990. 1–21.

___. “The Essence of the Triangle, or, Taking the Risk of Essentialism Seriously: Feminist Theory in Italy, the U.S. and Britain.” Differences 1 (1989): 3–38.

Diotima. Diotima: Il pensiero della differenza sessuale. Milan: La Tartaruga, 1987.

___. Mettere al mondo il mondo. Oggetto e oggettività alla luce della differenza sessuale. Milan: La Tartaruga, 1990.

Fischer, Lucy. Shot/Countershot: Film Tradition and Women’s Cinema. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1989.

Fusco, Maria Pia. “Alla ricerca della Archibugi.” Francesca Archibugi. Ed. Carla Proto. Rome: Script/ Leuto, 1995. 16–18.

Gagliardo, Giovanna. Maternale. Milan: Edizioni delle donne, 1978.

Golo Stone, Mirto. “The Feminist Critic and Salome: On Cavani’s The Night Porter.” Romance Languages Annual 1989. Vol. 1. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue Research Foundation, 1990. 41–44.

Grazzini, Giovanni. Cinema ’78. Bari: Laterza, 1979.

Holub, Renate. “Italian Difference Theory: A New Canon?” Italian Women Writers from the Renaissance to the Present: Rewriting the Canon. Ed. Maria Marot-ti. University Park: Penn State P, forthcoming 1996.

Irigaray, Luce. “L’una non sogna senza l’altra.” Trans. Luisa Muraro. Gagliardo 115–26.

Libreria delle donne di Milano. Non credere di avere dei diritti: La generazione della libertà femminile nell’idea e nelle vicende di un gruppo di donne. Turin: Rosenberg and Sellier, 1987.

___. “More Women Than Men.” Italian Feminist Thought: A Reader. Ed. Paola Bono and Sandra Kemp. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991. 110–23.

Lombardo Radice, Marco. Una concretissima utopia: Lavoro psichiatrico e politico. Milan: Linea D’Ombra, 1991.

Mangiacapre, Lina. Faust Fausta. Florence: Firenze Libri, 1990.

Maraini, Dacia. Donna in guerra. Turin: Einaudi, 1976.

Mayne, Judith. The Woman at the Keyhole: Feminism and Women’s Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1990.

Miscuglio, Annabella. “An Affectionate and Irreverent Account of Eighty Years of Women’s Cinema in Italy.” Off Screen: Women and Film in Italy. Ed. Giuliana Bruno and Maria Nadotti. New York: Routledge, 1988. 151–64.

Modleski, Tania. Feminism Without Women: Culture and Criticism in a “Postfeminist” Age. New York: Routledge, 1992.

___. “Swept Away by the Usual Destiny.” Jump Cut 10–11 (Summer 1976): 1–18.

Muraro, Luisa. L’ordine simbolico della madre. Rome: Riuniti, 1992.

Nadeau, Chantal. “Girls on a Wired Screen: Cavani’s Cinema and Lesbian S/M.” Sexy Bodies: The Strange Carnalities of Feminism. Ed. Elizabeth Grosz and Elspeth Probyn. New York: Routledge, 1995. 211–30.

O’Healy, Áine. “Filming Female ‘Autobiography’: Ferreri, Maraini, and Piera’s Own Story.” Feminine Feminists: Cultural Practices in Italy. Ed. Giovanna Miceli
Jeffries. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1994. 190–206.

Siciliani de Cumis, Nicola. “Un Cocomero per Orlando tra cinema ed educazione.” Cinema nuovo 42.2 (1993): 2–5.

Silverman, Kaja. The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1988.

Tozzi, Federico. Con gli occhi chiusi. 1919. Milan: Feltrinelli, 1994.

Waller, Marguerite. “‘You Cannot Make the Revolution on Film’: Wertmuller’s Performative Feminism in Mimi metallurgico, ferito nell’amore.” Women and Performance 16.2 (1993): 11–25.

___. “Signifying the Holocaust: Liliana Cavani’s Portiere di notte.” Feminisms in the Cinema. Ed. Laura Pietropaolo and Ada Testaferri. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1995. 206–19.

^[1]By invoking Cavani and Wertmuller together here, I do not wish to suggest that there are important affinities between these very different directors. Both have enjoyed international acclaim, but responses to their work follow diverging patterns. While several of Wertmuller’s films were enthusiastically received by US critics and audiences, Cavani’s only commercial triumph was The Night Porter, which, despite its success with audiences, was negatively reviewed at the time.

^[2]In the introduction to her volume The Woman at the Keyhole, Judith Mayne places Wertmuller along with Leni Riefensthal in the category of “directors whom many feminists would just as soon forget” (2). This judgment tends to typify the evaluation of Wertmuller’s work by English-speaking feminists. See also Modleski (“Swept Away by the Visual Destiny”) and Fischer (250–60). However, in a recent recuperative rerereading of one of the director’s films, Waller makes a case for what she describes as Wertmuller’s “performative feminism” (“You Cannot Make the Revolution on Film”). Feminist appraisals of Cavani, which are for the most part limited to analyses of only one or two of her films, tend to be more appreciative (Silverman; Waller, “Signifying the Holocaust”; and Nadeau), although there have also been some sharply critical interventions (Golo Stone). A monograph by Gaetana Marrone Puglia with the working title “The Cinema of Liliana Cavani” will be published by Princeton UP in 1997.

^[3]According to sources close to the filmmakers, the suppression of AAA Offresi was initiated through the intervention of some influential public figures, who believed that they might have been caught on camera in the contentious film.

^[4]In their acknowledgment of bodily difference as relevant to the theory of sexual difference, Italian feminists have shown themselves less fearful of accusations of essentialism than has been true of US feminists. See de Lauretis, “The Essence of the Triangle.”

^[5]Personal communication with Dacia Maraini, July 1991.

^[6]For a discussion of the theory of sexual difference see de Lauretis and Holub.

^[7]Maraini and Piera degli Esposti co-scripted Storia di Piera and Il futuro è donna for Marco Ferreri in 1981 and 1984. Both films explore issues of maternity and sexual difference, but it is the first of these films, inspired by the circumstances of degli Esposti’s own family upbringing, that resonates most clearly with the discourses of late 1970s feminism. In Storia di Piera, the themes of mother/daughter desire, estrangement, hysteria, and silence are explored within the context of a family memoir. For an analysis of Storia di Piera see my 1994 essay “Filming Female ‘Autobiography.’”

^[8]Cristina and Francesca Comencini are the daughters of Luigi Comencini, one of the best-known directors of the commedia all’italiana. Francesca, the younger of the two, now lives and works in France.

^[9]Some of the most obvious examples are Giuseppe Tornatore’s Nuovo Cinema Paradiso (1989), Gianni Amelio’s Il ladro di bambini (1991), and Mario Martone’s L’amore molesto (1995). The figure of the inadequate father-provider is parodied in Maurizio Nichetti’s Ladri di saponette (1989), which serves to remind us that absent or inadequate fathers were also part of the cast of characters in neorealist cinema.

^[10]Lombardo Radice’s writings cast further light on Archibugi’s construction of Arturo: “In many cases the only aspect of treatment that is significantly and constantly linked with results is the amount of affection, attention, care, and even time that the patient has received. This is not to say that the technical aspect is unimportant, or to claim that ‘love can heal/cure’: on the contrary when love and time are improperly used they can lead to catastrophe. It means however that we must redefine the technical aspect of treatment, which at a certain point seems to be summed up in a precise awareness of the dynamics of your relationship with the patient” (98–99).

^[11]For an extensive critique of “postfeminism” in American culture and cinema, see Modleski, Feminism Without Women. So far, there have been no studies of a parallel phenomenon in recent Italian representation.