Off Screen

Women and Film in Italy: Seminar on Italian and American directions

Giuliana Bruno,Maria Nadotti

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317929116
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

This feminist anthology from Italy offers an enriching perspective on cinema studies. Focusing on women's engagement with political theory and film-making, the book never loses sight of the female experience of cinema. It examines how women have chosen to represent themselves and how they have been represented, and how they deal with the cinematic apparatus, as subjects of production, objects of representation, and spectators. A variety of approaches are offered, ranging from psychoanalysis and semiology to history. With an exhaustive filmography, this anthology of chapters by eminent theorists demonstrates the central importance of recent developments in Italy for the whole spectrum of film and feminist studies.

1 Offscreen:
an introduction

GIULIANA BRUNO AND MARIA NADOTTI

Translated by Jude Bloomfield in association with Material Word

A consideration of American publishing procedures reveals an obvious gap, particularly in the literature on cinema. In the United States over the last few years, a rich intellectual debate has taken place around the question of cinema. Substantive in content and in its historical and theoretical approaches, this debate has had limited contact with the work produced in other countries. Theory has moved within a more or less restricted framework with little space for translation of research work conducted outside an Anglo-American cultural perspective. In fact, the channels of communication have been confined to an interest almost exclusively focused on French theoretical writing, at the expense of a more open, free-flowing circulation of ideas. Little consideration has generally been given to Italian theory, about which little has been published, for example. The impact of what has been made available has been more or less confined to Italian specialists.

As regards cinema in particular, Italian historical and theoretical studies have largely been ignored. If we confine ourselves to the theoretical field, even today we can say that translations of historically significant and innovative research have still not appeared, for example work by Emilio Garroni with his semiotic perspective, Umberto Barbaro with his Marxist orientation, and the philosopher Galvano della Volpe, while only a very small part of the vast semiological contribution of Pier Paolo Pasolinihas been translated.

This book was, therefore, conceived as a contribution to the process of documenting research projects in this area. It stems from the desire to examine aspects of Italian thought and make them known to a broader audience in an attempt to stimulate deeper and more permanent cultural exchange. Our starting-point was women’s theoretical production, an area of work which particularly interests us and with which we identify. At the same time as in the United States and Britain, but largely independently, interest and studies developed in Italy which had women as their subject/object. As Italians who have been resident in New York City for several years, we were committed to disseminating to an Anglo-American audience, which was unfamiliar with it, information on the progress of research undertaken by women in Italy in an attempt to set up channels of communication and, perhaps, joint ventures.

The first step was taken in 1981. The starting-point of the project of documentation that we have undertaken, which this book is a part of, was the organization of the international conference ‘Italy and the USA: the Women’s Movement. A decade of feminist practice and theory’, held in New York in May 1981.¹ On that occasion, Italian women involved in the field of culture and politics were invited to talk about the state of political and theoretical research in the Italian feminist movement, in a comparative exchange with their American counterparts.

From this conference, the idea emerged of organizing a more narrowly defined seminar apt to tackle a particular cultural dimension of research on women: the cinema, which lies at the heart of our common concerns. In the Women’s Movement in Britain and the US over the last few years, interest in the theory of cinematic representation has developed. Problems of representation and representability of women, research on women’s cinema and its implications, theorization of narrative structures, and female spectatorship are some of the approaches taken in the United States and England, to define and shape women’s role in the process of film-textual production and analysis. By adopting, to a large degree, the analytic tools of semiotics and psychoanalysis, based on a critical rereading of Freud, Lacan, and post-structuralist thought, these studies have made a great contribution to the current development and revival of Anglo-American theory of cinema. This research has entered into the American academic world as a fully-fledged discipline.

Meanwhile in Italy, starting from a different perspective, a similar interest developed in the female gaze and the female voice in the cinematic apparatus. At the same time, women’s participation in film production was growing in Italy as it was everywhere else. The existence and nature of this theoretical interest and practice in Italy and the results it produced were not familiar to an Anglo-American audience. We therefore thought of making them known by arranging a seminar that would provide an opportunity for comparison and exchange of our respective experiences. This book originates from the seminar at which the papers published here were given.

The seminar was held in New York in December 1984 under the title ‘Italian and American directions: women’s film theory and practice’.² We invited several Italian women involved in various capacities in the cinema world – as directors, critics or lecturers, or even just as avid and attentive spectators – to exchange opinions and research proposals with US women who were active in the same fields. It took the form of a seminar not a conference, and was conceived as a four-day workshop, centred on woman as subject/object and cinema. It seemed important to us to limit the number of participants in order to create a practical, flexible structure such as to make a genuine exchange of ideas possible. It had to work at the level which feminist practice and thought had taught us to pay particular attention to, that is the personal. We hoped to minimize the frustration that great international conferences sometimes cause by disseminating information but not providing a forum for discussion. The frequency of this kind of event had induced us to call into question the logic of the market and supermarket that lies behind the ‘convention style’ of some large conferences. We sought, instead, to create an open format: a workshop where differences and similarities could find expression. We wanted to promote mutual exchange between speaker and listener, giving spectatorship the active, participatory function which we were positing in theory. Such a ‘dialectical’ desire, so to speak, forced us to deepen our awareness of ourselves as individual and collective subjects and of the cinema-object by a meeting and comparison of our respective cultures. Therefore, we encouraged participants to present work-in-progress papers because we were interested in tracing the lines and directions of thought and the process of thinking as such, rather than in setting out results as a finished product. Seeking to enter into the process of production of a discourse and analysing the logic of its structure also meant seeking to define and examine the relationship between film theory and practice. As well as considering women’s theoretical work on cinema, recent and forthcoming examples of Italian and US film productions were shown. The four days were organized in the following way: the mornings were devoted to presentation and discussion of theoretical research, the afternoons and evenings to presentation and discussion of film and video.

In the theoretical papers we tried to touch on the complex and fundamental issues on which women have worked, to compare the theoretical orientation of Anglo-American research with that of the Italian. Despite our differences and obvious cultural and practical communication difficulties, we discovered common ground and shared methodological approaches and tools of analysis. Psychoanalysis has represented, for both sides, a fertile field of research and an important reference point in women’s discourse. Interest in textual analysis and the means of representation in ‘classical’ Hollywood cinema compared with the ‘alternative’ model proposed by women’s cinema proved to be another meeting-point in the discourse which has developed independently on both sides of the Atlantic. Likewise, the analysis of narrative articulation in relation to the spectator, integral to the notion of a cinematic apparatus, and the creation of subjectivity and identification, turned out to be further points of convergence.

The seminar tried to define and develop these methods and aims. Judith Mayne reviewed and analysed the key concepts proposed by Anglo-American feminist theory of cinema. Paola Melchiori, Giulia Alberti, and Adriana Monti explained the work they had carried out individually and collectively in Milan in the ‘150Hours Courses’. They dealt with the various aspects of an experiment composed of theoretical and didactic work, methodological research, and film production. Laura Mulvey spoke on the development of narrative theory. She traced the theoretical advances of her position, starting from, and going beyond, the text which has become a milestone in Anglo-American discourse, ‘Visual pleasure in narrative cinema’ (1975).

Mary Ann Doane, Giovanna Grignaffini, and Piera Detassis gave an account of their research in progress on female spectatorship. Doane approached it from a psychoanalytic viewpoint, looking at American cinema in the 1940s, and Grignaffini and Detassis reappropriated tools of historical analysis for their studies of Italian cinema of the 1950s. Patrizia Violi dealt with semiotic discourse in the analysis of the feminine in a contribution on language and the female subject. Lea Melandri, Lucilla Albano, and Janet Bergstrom dealt with the different aspects of psychoanalytically based research. Melandri, whose intense, theoretical research stands as a landmark in the Italian feminist movement, has played an active part in the cinema research group founded as part of the ‘Training support courses for “150 Hours” teachers’ in Milan. At the seminar, she set out part of her work on Sibilla Aleramo, the Italian writer whom she has rediscovered. Albano gave an example of textual analysis, inspired by a psychoanalytic model which departs from the usual reading of Freud and Lacan given in Anglo-American feminist theory. Her reading derives from Ignacio Matte Blanco’s psychoanalytic theory which is based on mathematical logic. In discussing recent developments in science-fiction films, Bergstrom dealt with the problematic nature of identity and with the construction of an androgynous model. Annette Michelson examined the relationship between history, theory, and the female body in a discussion on ‘The Eve of the Future’ and the genealogy of the cinema. Constance Penley made a critique of the theory of the cinematic apparatus from a feminist point of view.

The seminar considered some of the aesthetic and theoretical problems and practical aspects of women’s film production. We invited Shirley Clarke, Yvonne Rainer, and Susan Seidelman – three American film-makers of different generations, working in different production set-ups and with different codes – to discuss the films they were working on. They also showed us parts of their forthcoming productions.³ The sessions devoted to showing Italian films and videos which had never been distributed in the USA, and recent films by British and US directors, were open to the public. Among the videos shown were those produced on the ‘Training support courses for “150 Hours” teachers’ in Milan by Paola Melchiori, Giulia Alberti, and Adriana Monti, ‘compilations’ that remixed and edited sequences taken from ‘classical’ Hollywood cinema and from films by directors like Chantal Akerman and Marguerite Duras. These deconstructed and reconstructed the complexities of female spectator fascination and the genesis of narrative desire. The video made by Annabella Miscuglio, Rony Daopoulo, and Maria Grazia Belmonti, I fantasmi del fallo (1980), takes up the argument of female pleasure again. This ‘meta-film’ consists of shooting the making of a pornographic film, superimposing, interchanging, and replacing the eye of the film-maker with that of the pornographer.

Spectatorship and psychoanalytic discourse were related in the video by Fiorella Infascelli Ritratto di donna distesa (1980) which gives a full-length reconstruction of a psychoanalytic session. The following were also shown: Giovanna Gagliardo’s film Maternale (1978) which inspired a piece of Luce Irigaray’s work; films and videos by Gabriella Rosaleva including Processo a Cate-rina Ross (1982) which reconstructs the last trial for witchcraft in Europe, and Ancora una corsa (1981) by Cinzia Torrini, a young director who has forced her way into big-budget film production. The Italian films and videos were compared with a range of recent independent productions from England and the US, including films by Bette Gordon, Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, Jackie Raynal, and Lynne Tillman and Sheila McLaughlin.⁴

The work presented in the field of film theory and practice prompted suggestions for the development of future research. We were confronted with the current assumption of a negative aesthetic and we discussed possible ways of overcoming it. The question of female identity as other, as the negative pole, was raised; also the definition of female specificity through the metaphor of absence, lack and non-being, and the construction of the female subject through a work of deconstruction of dominant, phallogocentric discourse. We discussed how the negative aesthetic and theory could be developed, or whether it was necessary to abandon it, and, if so, how. It was pointed out that feminist practice has long focused on the question of the representation and image of woman in the cinema. This work, as it has gone beyond the phase of iconography, has pointed to the need to look at the female body as the phantasmatic ground of cinema itself. Interest was reawakened in investigating the narrative and spectator devices with new means, trying to arrive at a definition of the ‘contemplative gaze’ in cinema. A hypothetical return to a pre-Oedipal phase was proposed as a means of interpreting female spectator fascination, and a hypothesis on the androgyny of the spectator was formulated. Concepts were put forward to enhance feminist film theory, going beyond semiotics and psychoanalysis to focus on film history and the problem of its theorization.

We both believed that ‘verba volant, scripta manent’ (‘while the spoken word flies, the written word remains’). The various voices which asked us to record the experience of the seminar in some way, to make the research work of Italian women available to those who were not there, and offer contributors the opportunity to sum up and draw some conclusions, were in agreement with us. This anthology is the outcome. It brings together the Italian contributions to the seminar, sets them in context, and adds hitherto unpublished material and information about the activities of women in Italy who are involved in film and video. It is aimed at English-language readers with an interest in cinema, women’s issues, and contemporary Italian culture.

In order to clarify further the context where the texts here published were produced, it may be useful, at this point, to place them within the political and theoretical framework of Italian feminism. In the following pages, we will attempt to outline and analyse some points of similarity and difference between the Anglo-American and the Italian experience. We will stress the strong political edge of Italian feminist research and its very particular interpretation of psychoanalysis, towards a definition of a ‘political unconscious’.

Throughout the 1970s Italy witnessed an explosive growth and proliferation of collective practice and experimentation. Feminism played a prominent part in this process, which sought to establish new forms of political practice and knowledge. A central principle for these ‘movements’ was that political practice is a form of knowledge and that the act of knowing, as well as its theorization, implies a political positioning. The traditional language of political discourse was called into question. In order to convey new meanings, new structures and forms were sought.

Italian feminism was experimenting with a political practice closely linked to a female experience of knowledge, both individual and collective. It grew within a logic, the centre of which was the small group. With the help of psychoanalysis, feminism developed a political group practice of continual analysis and self-analysis, questioning subjectivity, identity, sexual difference, and pleasure. Such was the premise of many consciousness-raising groups and of the gruppi dell’inconscio. The gruppi dell ’incon-scio were groups specifically aimed at exploring the working of the unconscious – members’ dreams and fantasies.

The political experience of knowledge and self-knowledge carried through in the form of the small group resisted centralization. The small group is a ‘centrifugal centre’ of dissemination of discourse, where knowledge and self-knowledge are articulated and realized in the form of political commitment and experience. Such experiences were varied and multi-faceted, full of nuances, highly specific and individual in character, and in a state of continual progress and flux. They confront History with both the strength and the weakness of the insurgence of micro-histories, of ‘savoirs mineurs’, of local knowledges, of specific and repressed voices in which sexuality and the unconscious emerge in all their ‘differance’, distinctiveness, and diversity. It was rarely possible or desirable to capitalize on the wealth and subtlety of achievements and discoveries that are often visible and comprehensible only to the direct participants, to make them visible outward, permanent or even simply to put them on record.

Therein lies the peculiarity of the Italian situation. In Italy, the Women’s Movement, just like the mode of discourse it has produced, has not engaged in a struggle to carve out a space for itself in the given institutions of knowledge. It has travelled through more uneven and uncertain paths, in a constant state of questioning, ambivalence towards gaining power and status, and acquiring recognition. In the subtle play between power and knowledge, Italian feminism was strengthened by the force of the inventiveness of its deviant, oppositional discourse, which seemed to make separation preferable to confrontation, negotiation with the institution, and possible compromise. By the same token, it was weakened by its own con...