The essay aims at offering a journey within the documentary heritage of contemporary Italian women filmmakers, a survey drawing a varied map of approaches to the film medium, which take part in the redefinition process of cinema and its paradigms. The movies of these female directors deploy an exemplary commitment to (audio)visually exploring places, both central and peripheral, pointing out their nomadic vision and an itinerant gaze upon the world that is able to capture the current challenges and complexities with passion and rigour. Their works modulate in an original way the relationship between authorial intervention and social, cultural, historiographical investigation. Moreover, they propose a viewing on the most opaque and elusive sides of the contemporary realities, an observation that overall constitutes an innovation in the field of cinema as well as a change in the image of women, who are fully subjects of history, culture, and agency.
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Cinéma & Cie
Anita  Trivelli
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Gazes Upon the World of Italian Contemporary Women Filmmakers
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Gazes Upon the World of Italian Contemporary Women
Filmmakers
Anita Trivelli, Università degli Studi ‘Gabriele d’Annunzio’




Abstract

       The essay aims at offering a journey within the documentary heritage of
       contemporary Italian women filmmakers, a survey drawing a varied map of
       approaches to the film medium, which take part in the redefinition process
       of cinema and its paradigms. The movies of these female directors deploy an
       exemplary commitment to (audio)visually exploring places, both central and
       peripheral, pointing out their nomadic vision and an itinerant gaze upon the
       world that is able to capture the current challenges and complexities with passion
       and rigour. Their works modulate in an original way the relationship between
       authorial intervention and social, cultural, historiographical investigation.
       Moreover, they propose a viewing on the most opaque and elusive sides of the
       contemporary realities, an observation that overall constitutes an innovation in
       the field of cinema as well as a change in the image of women, who are fully
       subjects of history, culture, and agency.

                                                                    For Lorenza Mazzetti
                                                                        and Agnès Varda

                                                        We are sealed vessels afloat upon
                                                     what it is convenient to call reality;
                                                    at some moments, without a reason,
                                             without an effort, the sealing matter cracks;
                                                                           in flood reality.
                                                   (Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being)1


   The current presence of female film directors in Italy amounts to about 15%
of all filmmakers; within the national film industry the contingent of women
engaged in the documentary practice is even higher. A good number of these
filmmakers modulate in an original way their own relationship between authorial



1
    Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being (Orlando, FL: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985), p. 142.

                                                      Cinéma & Cie, vol. XX, no. 34, Spring 2020
                                           Anita Trivelli


intervention and social, cultural, historiographical investigation, with regard
both to national history and international current events.2
   The documentary is not only a visual testimony but also the true lifeblood of
a contemporary audiovisual context, despite being punished by distribution that
does not equal that of fictional movies. Without any pretense of being exhaustive,
what follows provides some traces for the recognition of this documentary
heritage for Italian women filmmakers. Their works draw a varied map of
approaches to the film medium, which take part in the redefinition process of
cinema and its paradigms. Moreover, they propose a viewing on the most opaque
and elusive sides of the present world, an observation that overall constitutes an
innovation in the field of cinema as well as a change in the image of women, who
are fully subjects of history, culture, and agency. As Marco Bertozzi underlines,
this cinema, the result of a ‘documentary passion’ that detaches itself from the
dominant system — is ‘practised with obstinacy and with ridiculous production
facilities’. Furthermore, Bertozzi adds that ‘whereas the film industry regulates
the relations in legal-economic terms, the best female documentary introduces
an immeasurable “freeness”. An ethic of gift, an exchange, that involves both
the individual and the community in an emotional tam-tam far from the totem
of commodification’.3
   My essay aims at offering a journey within the documentary heritage of
contemporary Italian women filmmakers by illustrating a range of films primarily
featured in the prominent international film festivals, beginning with the Venice
Film Festival. These filmmakers deploy an exemplary commitment to (audio)
visually exploring places, both central and peripheral, pointing out their nomadic
vision and an itinerant gaze upon the world that is able to capture the current
challenges and complexities with passion and rigor.4


2
  The articulation of the Italian female film production, from 2008 to 2018, is the following: 9%
feature films, 21% documentaries, 17% short films (source: Seminar on Gender Equality and
Inclusivity in the Film Industry, Venice Film Festival, 2 September 2019).
3
  Marco Bertozzi, Storia del documentario italiano. Immagini e culture dell’altro cinema (Venezia:
Marsilio, 2008), pp. 295–97. See also the interviews with women documentarians collected in Il
miraggio del reale: per una mappa del cinema documentario italiano, ed. by Marco Bertozzi, Quaderni
del CSCI, 4 (2008). A stimulating dialogue, long avoided or marginalized, between documentary
and feminist film studies is triggered in the volume Feminism and Documentarism, ed. by Diane
Waldman and Janet Walker (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), which reveals
the productivity of a mutually dynamic comparison. On the one hand, there are the challenges
posed by feminist elaborations to theory, history and documentary practices; on the other hand,
there is the enrichment that the production of documentaries has brought to the feminist theories
themselves, especially with regard to the reflections on gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity,
class and nation.
4
  The richness and variety of contributions of Italian women filmmakers to past and present
audiovisual production are the core of the following collective volumes recently published in
Italy: Storie in divenire. Le donne nel cinema italiano, ed. by Lucia Cardone, Cristina Jandelli and
Chiara Tognolotti, Quaderni del CSCI (annual review of Italian cinema), 11 (2015), and We want
cinema. Sguardi di donne nel cinema italiano, ed. by Laura Buffoni (Venezia: Marsilio, 2018). As
a mere in-progress list it is worthwhile to mention a few names of contemporary female directors

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              Gazes Upon the World of Italian Contemporary Women Filmmakers


   The starting point of this voyage has a conceptual and cultural inspiration: that
is the notion of flânerie, related to the notion of nomadism, a key idea pertinent
for investigating the experiential and experimental declination exercised in the
work of Italian female directors. Flânerie is rooted in both motion and vision: it
combines looking (as well as being looked at) with moving — through spaces,
places, environments, and landscapes. It is an esthetic trope, which also indicates
a visual strategy connected to the idea of cinema itself, as a means of making
‘visible the invisible’, thanks to a gaze that is mobile and in flux.
   Neglected or completely ignored by the historians, the flâneuse asserts herself
in a different form than the flâneur: her flânerie differs from the male counterpart
both for her use of public sphere, and for her resolute proximity to the object of
attention. Moreover, it is useful to stress at the outset the conceptual evolution
of the female flânerie, whose starting point, it has been argued, was the discovery
of the department stores — with the industrial revolution and the concomitant
development of cities — and then gradually, as we will see, it moved on to the
discovery of the world.5
   On the other hand, the practice of flâneuse-filmmakers, and particularly of these
female documentarians, breaks a double cardinal rule of patriarchy related to the
spaces assigned to women as well as to their predetermined areas of pertinence.
On one side, the patriarchal tradition relegates women to the domestic sphere


whose works are not examined in my essay: Elisa Amoruso, Giulia Amati, Donatella Baglivo, Eva
Baratta, Juliane Biasi Hendel, Laura Bispuri, Cecilia Calvi, Morena Campani, Carlotta Cerquetti,
Giada Colagrande, Paola Columba, Enrica Colusso, Francesca Comencini, Cristina Comencini,
Aurora Deiana, Antonietta De Lillo, Giulia Di Battista, Nunzia Di Stefano, Alexandra D’Onofrio,
Margherita Ferri, Ilaria Freccia, Annamaria Gallone, Valeria Golino, Maria Iovine, Anna Kauber,
Wilma Labate, Letizia Lamartire, Maria Martinelli, Cristina Mazza, Francesca Mazzoleni, Daria
Menozzi, Elisa Mereghetti, Giulia Merenda, Laura Muscardin, Anna Negri, Michela Occhipinti,
Elisabetta Pandimiglio, Martina Parenti, Valentina Pedicini, Katia Pedrotti, Silvia Perra, Rosalia
Polizzi, Sara Pozzoli, Silvana Profeta, Paola Randi, Lorella Reale, Angela Ricci Lucchi, Alice
Rohrwacher, Emma Rossi Landi, Fabiana Sargentini, Lilian Sassanelli, Stella Savino, Rossella
Schillaci, Elisabetta Sgarbi, Carola Spadoni, Veronica Spedicati, Giovanna Taviani, Tekla Taidelli,
Valeria Testagrossa, Maria Tilli, Maria Sole Tognazzi, Roberta Torre, Cinzia Th. Torrini, Claudia
Tosi, Adele Tulli, Marisa Vallone, Cristina Vuolo. Some of these filmmakers are interviewed in the
debut movie of Diana Dell’Erba, Female Directors (Registe, 2014), taken from her dissertation
in sociology, while the leitmotif of the film investigation starts from the pioneer Elvira Notari
(personified by Maria De Medeiros). Twenty years ago, only Elvira Notari, Liliana Cavani, Lina
Wertmüller and Suso Cecchi D’Amico represented Italy in the volume Women Filmmakers
Encyclopedia. Women on the Other Side, ed. by Amy Unterburger (Michigan, USA: Visible Ink
Press, 1999). And, again, Notari and Wertmüller are the Italian women filmmakers mentioned in
the Cahiers du Cinema, 757 (Juillet-Août 2019) (dossier Une histoire des réalisatrices).
5
  On film, flânerie, and the modern city, see the following pivotal works: Anne Friedberg, Window
Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California
Press, 1992); Giuliana Bruno, Streetwalking on a Ruined Map: Cultural Theory and the City Films
of Elvira Notari (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992); and Cinema and the Invention of
Modern Life, ed. by Leo Charney and Vanessea R. Schwartz (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London:
University of California Press, 1995). A focal study on female flânerie in relation to literature is the
chapter, ‘The Invisible Flâneuse: Women and the Literature of Modernity’, in Feminine Sentences,
by Janet Wolff (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1990).

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as a privileged milieu for the fulfilment of the roles of wife and mother. On the
other side, it identifies the feminine with Nature, i.e. women as a repository for
what cities have cancelled or neglected, and thus as a site which confirms, under
another guise, the female function of nurturing and welcoming-care. This ‘natural’
framework is also included in the figure of ‘the woman as a muse’, which is opposed
by the flâneuse, who is instead characterized by her active role, corresponding to
her badaud (curious, eager) spirit and her desire for exploration.
   As a practice that strengthens female subjectivity, the flânerie of the female
directors is thereby a transgressive act, since it goes beyond the spatial and
environmental boundaries reserved for women, suggesting that overcoming
geographical frontiers is also a prerequisite for change.
   These motifs are related to the idea of nomadism, one to which I will shortly
return, since it permeates the documentary practice of these Italian filmmakers
in the new millennium. Their movies point out, in fact, both the possibility and
the necessity of ‘seeing closely’ and, at the same time and consequently, the need
for motion and the impulse to travel through different spaces and times. Thus
their exploration becomes the practice of a gaze upon the world that is capable
of capturing the complexities of our time, often without urging radical positions
or agenda, but with a nonetheless vigorous testimonial commitment.
   In regard to the notion of nomadism, I will outline Rosi Braidotti’s argument,
as an original rethinking of Deleuze and Guattari’s elaboration of this topic.6
For Braidotti, nomadism ‘is an intellectual form; it is therefore not so much
being homeless, as rather the ability to recreate one’s home anywhere’.7 And ‘the
nomadic consciousness’, she adds, is ‘also an epistemological position’; it is ‘a
form of political opposition to a vision of subjectivity based on hegemony and
exclusion’.8 The conquering of this space within an industry that is traditionally
male chauvinist is indeed a meaningful development; it is an ideal metaphor of
the recent Italian flânerie of women filmmakers, despite the phenomenon of the
‘autrici interrotte’ 9 (interrupted film auteuses), the scant numbers of their movies
as well as the scarce circulation and critical attention.


6
   See Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, L’Anti-Œdipe. Capitalisme et schizophrénie (Paris: Les
Éditions de Minuit, 1972); Gilles Deleuze, ‘Pensée nomade’, in Nietzsche aujourd’hui?, ed. by
Gilles Deleuze and others (Paris: Union Générale d’Edition, 1973); Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari,
‘Traité de nomadologie: la machine de guerre’, in Mille Plateaux. Capitalisme et schizophrénie 2
(Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1980).
7
  Rosi Braidotti, Soggetto nomade. Femminismo e crisi della modernità, ed. by Anna Maria Crispino
(Roma: Donzelli, 1995), p. 21.
8
  Ivi, p. 28.
9
  This expression is by Barbara Maio, Attrici e autrici. Per una mappa al femminile del cinema
italiano, in Gli invisibili. Esordi italiani del nuovo millennio, ed. by Vito Zagarrio (Torino: Lindau,
2009). In her essay Maio stresses the number of Italian female directors who, after struggling for
their debut, did not go beyond the first work, or had to wait many years before being able to
make another film. As for the term auteuse see Rosanna Maule, Her Blog: Women’s Cinema in the
Digital Age, in Contemporary Women’s Cinema, Global Scenarios and Transnational Context, ed. by
Veronica Pravadelli (Milano, Udine: Mimesis International, 2017), pp. 238–39.

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             Gazes Upon the World of Italian Contemporary Women Filmmakers


   My analysis opens with the pioneer Cecilia Mangini (born in 1927), who has
been active as a filmmaker and screenwriter since the 1950s. In 1965 she shot
Being Women (Essere donne, 1965), a film-inquest on Italian women workers,
which denounced their conditions in the labor world in Italy during the economic
boom (it was made amongst the factories of the North and in the rural areas of
the South). At that time, the movie was censored, whereas today it has fully
found a place in the history of Italian documentarism.10
   In 2013 Mangini filmed with her colleague and fellow citizen Mariangela
Barbanente (they were both born in Mola di Bari, Apulia) My Travels with
Cecilia (In viaggio con Cecilia, 2013), a documentary that explores en route the
contemporary Apulia region and its changes after industrialization. The movie
intertwines contemporary footage with documentary excerpts from the 1960s
taken by Mangini herself, portraying two women documentarians from different
generations at the same time. The trip reaches Taranto immediately after the
seizure of the largest steel plant in Europe, ILVA, and the filmmakers show what
is happening nearby in the Apulian industry, an inquiry which is also a current
overview of the nation.
   In line with Mangini’s civil commitment are recent works by Sabina Guzzanti
and Fiorella Infascelli, with their movies Sympathy for the Lobster (Le ragioni
dell’aragosta, 2007) and Closed Fists (Pugni chiusi, 2011) respectively. These
two documentaries, shot in Sardinia, are exemplary of the political quality that
belongs to the nomadic consciousness discussed by Rosi Braidotti.
   In Sympathy for the Lobster Sabina Guzzanti focuses her gaze on the severe
lobster depopulation in Sardinia that compromised the local sea economy.
The ‘pre-text’ of a show aimed at defending the Sardinian fishermen acts as a
diegetic frame, a simulated backstage scene conceived, written and performed
by the filmmaker herself, effectively combining creativity and information. In the
form of a fake reality show, which also functions as a critique of contemporary
television, Guzzanti’s movie promotes new ways of collective participation
and mobilization. This practice was already present in her previous film Viva
Zapatero! (Sabina Guzzanti, 2005) and the apex of this tendency is her docu-
drama The State-Mafia Pact (La trattativa, 2014), which will be described later.
   Fiorella Infascelli’s Closed Fists narrates the protests of laid off workers from
the Vinyls factory located in Porto Torres, which was recognised as an industrial
pillar of excellence because it produced PVC without toxic vinyl chloride. The
filmmaker ‘shadows’ (to use Zavattini’s term) a group of workers who mobilised


10
  In 2007 the restored documentary was released on DVD (ed. by Davide Orecchio and Carlo
Ruggero, Rome: Edit. Coop.), with an additional interview with the director and an update of
her inquest, entitled Being a Woman Today (Essere donne oggi). Moreover, Cecilia Mangini is one
of the fifteen female voices collected by Concita De Gregorio and Esmeralda Calabria for their
documentary film Mother Yeast. The Girls of the Past Century (Lievito madre. Le ragazze del secolo
scorso, 2017), a passionate and vital testimonial excursus offered by the protagonists on politics,
sex, work and dreams. The film includes, among others, Luciana Castellina, Natalia Aspesi, Adele
Cambria, Piera Degli Esposti.

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                                           Anita Trivelli


in a unique way against the company’s dismantling of the labor force by
occupying the former super prison of Asinara, a highly symbolic place in recent
Italian history. In August 1985, Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, who had
received death threats, withdrew there with their families to prepare the Maxi-
trial against 460 mafiosi (held in Palermo from 1986 to 1992), whose final sentence
was of 19 life sentences and penalties of a total of 2,665 years of imprisonment
for the 346 convicts.11 Moreover, in that ‘maximum security prison’ notorious
bosses like Totò Riina were convicted. The workers’ ‘self-imprisonment’ lasted
over a year, starting from February 2009, and gained unexpected resonance on
the media via press, TV and social media.
   Itinerancy is iconic of four documentaries on the Italian 21st century, in which the
existential plane is conjugated with the historical one: Simply Beautiful (Bellissime
I, 2004; Bellissime II, 2006) by Giovanna Gagliardo, We Want Roses Too (Vogliamo
anche le rose, 2007) by Alina Marazzi, Girls... Life Is Trembling (Ragazze... la vita
trema, 2009) by Paola Sangiovanni, and Mad Earth (Terramatta, 2013) by Costanza
Quatriglio. Gagliardo, Marazzi, and Sangiovanni retrace the history of women in
light of consciousness about female roles both in the cinema and in the history
of Italy. Thus, their documentaries act on the one hand as reenactments of the
Italian women’s liberation movement, and on the other as a reminder of the
disseminating function carried out precisely by documentary practice in order
to increase women’s awareness.12 Gagliardo in Simply Beautiful favours a ‘classic’
documentation testimony that reconstructs Italian history from a feminist point of
view using archival footage and material from various sources. On the other hand,
Marazzi with We Want Roses Too is committed to articulating a search of forms,
shaping a cross-media play that is densely poetic. The third of these directors,
Sangiovanni, in Girls.... Life Is Trembling, cultivates an existential-experiential
aspect, which consists of a direct confrontation of the documentary material with
the lives of the female protagonists.13 In all three movies, female experience is
central: women are posited as the subjects, and the viewer catches the process
of this affirmation and the films’ willingness to consolidate memory as opening,
as Luisa Passerini writes, to ‘new ways to conceive the relationship between the
political and the cultural, and specifically the link between politics and daily life’.14


11
   Six years later Fiorella Infascelli returned to these locations to narrate in her movie Once in
Summer (Era d’estate, 2015) the stay of the two Sicilian magistrates in the Asinara.
12
   On this specific point see Bernadette Luciano, Susanna Scarparo, ‘Tra storia e memoria. Il
movimento femminista nel nuovo documentario femminile’, in Filmare il femminismo. Studi sulle
donne nel cinema e nei media, ed. by Lucia Cardone and Sara Filippelli (Pisa: ETS, 2015). On
the history of the Italian feminist movement see also Lorella Reale’s movie History of Feminist
Movement in Italy (La storia del movimento femminista in Italia, 2006), made with the exclusive
use of archival materials.
13
   In her last documentary, The Sea of Our History (Il mare della nostra storia, 2018), Gagliardo
explores the relationship between Italy and its former Libian colony, retracing the turbulent history
of the Mediterranean Country through archival footage and current testimonials and images.
14
   Luisa Passerini, ‘Afterword’, in Memory. Histories, Theories, Debates, ed. by Susannah Radstone
and Bill Schwarz, (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), p. 460. Gender and cinema

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             Gazes Upon the World of Italian Contemporary Women Filmmakers


    This theme also innervates Mad Earth: The Italian Twentieth Century of
Vincenzo Rabito Sicilian Illiterate (Terramatta: Il Novecento italiano di Vincenzo
Rabito analfabeta siciliano, Nastro d’argento2013/Silver Ribbon Award 2013
for Best Documentary) by Costanza Quatriglio, taken from Vincenzo Rabito’s
autobiographical novel, which has been called a ‘popular Gattopardo’ (the
famous novel by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, 1956-1958). Vincenzo
Rabito (Chiaramonte Gulfi, Sicily, 1899-ivi 1981) defined himself as ‘inalfabeto’
(‘illiterate’). He obtained his primary school license at the age of 35, and for 7
years secretly wrote his life story, full of tribulations and adventures, but also rich
with rewarding achievements, such as his writing, through which he reworks the
Italian history in the 20th century from poverty through the economic boom,
using the unprecedented viewpoint of a wretch. His language is a private argot,
neither dialect nor Italian, ‘a made-up language’ born out of listening, hence out
of an oral tradition — Quatriglio explains — which dates back to the work of
Sicilian puppets and of the cunto. Much like the three previous documentaries,
Mad Earth intermingles multi-media materials (Rabito’s typewritten pages,
photographs, TV images, archival and musical material, and so on), passing
through the personal journey of the ‘ballad-singer’ Rabito, as well as through the
salient parts of the Italian twentieth century: the century that ferried Italy out of
poverty and into the economic boom.
    Within Quatriglio’s strong documentary background (she is also the artistic
director of the Sicilian branch of the Experimental Center of Cinematography
dedicated to documentary cinema), at least another three of her documentaries
should be mentioned: The World on Their Shoulders (Il mondo addosso, 2006),
87 Hours. The Last Days of Francesco Mastrogiovanni, (87 ore. Gli ultimi giorni di
Francesco Mastrogiovanni, 2015) and Triangle (2014), in addition to her medium-
length docudrama Bated Breath (Con il fiato sospeso, 2013). The World on Their
Shoulders describes the stories of four young Afghan refugees, who arrive in Italy
to escape war and persecution (they are of Hazara origin, an ethnic group that
has been subject to genocide for more than a hundred years in Afghanistan).15
87 Hours. The Last Days of Francesco Mastrogiovanni recounts an absurd and
tragic experience of medical malpractice, occurred in 2009, which was still
under trial when the film was released (the final verdict was issued in 2018).
Triangle (which won the Nastro d’argento 2015/Silver Ribbon Award 2015 for


studies have propulsively pushed the surveys on memory (memory studies), a field of inquiry with a
complex genealogy emerged in the 1970s, which poses strong historical questions, such as the role
of the Holocaust in the 20th century and in the present. For updated reference studies see Alice
Cati, Gli strumenti del ricordo. I media e la memoria (Milano: Editrice La Scuola, 2016), and The
Past in Visual Culture. Essays on Memory, Nostalgia and the Media, ed. by Jilly Byoce Kay, Vathy
Mahoney and Caitlin Shaw (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2017).
15
   This documentary inspired Costanza Quatriglio’s docudrama Just Like My Son (Sembra mio
figlio, 2018), which reconstructs the events of one of the four young immigrants, Mohammad Jan
Azad (played by the Hazara poet and journalist Basir Ahang), who was co-writer of the film along
with Doriana Leondeff and the director herself.

                                                                                               93
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Best Documentary) juxtaposes two tragedies involving women workers: the
first being the tragic Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in NYC in 1913, which
caused the death of 150 women, mostly immigrant workers; and the second,
a century later, in Barletta (Apulia), in 2011, in which another group of female
textile workers were crushed when their illegal factory collapsed. Bated Breath
is instead inspired by the diary of Emanuele Patanè, who received his doctorate
in Pharmacy at the University of Catania and who died of lung cancer in 2003,
five years before the chemistry labs were closed due to their pollution. Quatriglio
inserted in her reconstruction of these events both Emanuele’s father’s testimony
and the accusations of the young man himself (voice over by Michele Riondino)
regarding the lack of oversight and precautions in his workplace.
    A similar docudrama vein is characterized in the works of Marina Spada, Serena
Nono, Federica Di Giacomo, and once again Sabrina Guzzanti. Marina Spada
dedicates Poetry That Looks at Me (Poesia che mi guardi, 2009) to the Milanese
poet Antonia Pozzi, who belonged to a prestigious family from Lombardy (her
father was a lawyer appreciated by the Mussolini regime, her mother a highly
cultivated countess), and who committed suicide in 1938, at the age of twenty-
six. The movie’s title is borrowed from her verses, and following the writings and
the places frequented by her protagonist, the filmmaker amalgamates current
images and images from the past (found footage, family home movies, photos
with and of Antonia Pozzi herself), composing a fascinating portrait of a young
woman who was both vital and talented, however unsuited to her time and
environment. After her suicide, her parents censored her poetic works, but they
were rediscovered many years later.
    The Venetian painter Serena Nono, Luigi Nono’s daughter and Arnold
Schönberg’s grandchild, stages in her movie The Way of the Cross (Via della
Croce, 2009) an original Passion of Christ with the homeless people of La Casa
dell’Ospitalità di Sant’Alvise in Venice. Shot in the alleys of a scarcely known area
of Venice, the movie blends christological tableaux vivants with the protagonists’
declarations about the Gospels and their own hardships. With this choral
happening of a marginalized humanity, the filmmaker celebrates ‘hospitality as
a cultural value’.16
    Rich in humanity and anthropological tension is Set Me Free (Liberami,
2016, Orizzonti Award for Best Film at the Venice Film Festival) by Federica
Di Giacomo, a documentary dealing with the phenomenon of exorcism, which
indirectly shows the film as a work in progress. During the filming of Set Me
Free, the filmmaker approached the world of possession and exorcism, gradually
shedding her prejudices on the subject, and penetrating it with a rigorous
participant observation. The movie promotes critical thinking about and a real


16
  An ulterior multi-ethnic and multi-lingual work by Serena Nono, again from a workshop made
with La Casa dell’Ospitalità is her costume drama Venice Saved (Venezia salva, 2013), on the failed
sacking of Venice in 1618 by the Spanish Crown, following the tragedy after the same title of
Simone Weil (1943).

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             Gazes Upon the World of Italian Contemporary Women Filmmakers


knowledge of the explored situations. The phenomenon under investigation,
which we tend loosely to associate with the Middle Ages, has recently made a
comeback in quite a number of Western countries, a return which a few years
ago would have been regarded as highly unlikely, and that forced the Vatican into
multiplying the recruitment of exorcists by their bishops. In Italy the regions that
have the highest number of recruits are Lombardy and Sicily, where Di Giacomo
carried out her research for the film for three years. There is indeed a church
school for the priests willing to dedicate themselves to this kind of activity, a
school in which they also study the various fields of psychology. In the selection
process that characterized the filmmaker’s research, the inadequacy of any
discourse that was not based on the lived experience of the characters became
evident through the observational use of the camera.
   On the other hand, Sabina Guzzanti took four years to make The State-Mafia
Pact, a vehement cinematic pamphlet on the deal between State and Mafia, which
has recently (re)emerged on the Italian judicial stage, casting many shadows on
the leading personalities of the current political landscape. The movie mixes
cabaret, journalistic fiction and investigative-film as well as archival footage
and ad hoc interviews, effectively combining the fictional component with
documentary elements.
   Memory is once again the explicit core theme of another quartet of
documentaries made by Italian women filmmakers in 2001, within the series The
Sacher Diaries (I diari della Sacher), promoted by Nanni Moretti in collaboration
with the Archivio Diaristico Nazionale (National Diary Archive). Two of them
are tales of existential redemption: this is the case for the ex-convict protagonist
of In the Name of the Italian People (Nel nome del popolo italiano, 2001) by Valia
Santella, as well as for the story of the female protagonist of Luisa’s Notebooks (I
quaderni di Luisa, 2001) by Isabella Sandri, who confesses her marital unhappiness
and her resistance for ‘the good of the children and the family’ only in her diary.
   The other two film directors dealing with the memory theme, Mara Chiaretti
and Susanna Nicchiarelli, concentrate instead on the experiences of war with
their respective documentaries, Davai Bistré!-Forward! Quick March (Davai
Bistré!-Avanti! Presto! by Mara Chiaretti) and Cra Cri Do Bo (by Susanna
Nicchiarelli). Davai Bistré! does so through the indelible memories of a survivor
of Mussolini Russian Campaign, while Cra Cri Do Bo considers war through the
softened memories of three bourgeoise young girls, alert and intelligent but still
protected from war’s horrors.17
   In addition to focusing on themes of voyage and itinerancy, recent documentaries
by women offer a valuable observatory of excruciating contemporary issues and
global emergencies. Thus, Giuliana Gamba travels across Iraq and Armenia
to talk about the Kurds’ plight in her Hard Life in Kurdistan (In Kurdistan è


17
  Another documentary by Susanna Nicchiarelli, For Life (Per tutta la vita, 2014), made of archival
footage and home movies, focuses on the definitive introduction of divorce in Italy (1974) and on
the significance of this conquest in the process of women’s self-awareness.

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difficile, 2004); Laura Angiulli explores the Bosnian territory battered by the war
in what was formerly Yugoslavia, working with the mothers of Srebrenica in her
Towards East (Verso est, 2008); and Barbara Cupisti describes in Mothers (Madri,
2007, David of Donatello Award in 2008) the experience of some Israeli and
Palestinian mothers who lost their children in the endless war between the two
peoples. These mothers further reacted to their pain by founding the association
Parents Circle, which helps families to contend with their mourning, starting
with the recognition of a common suffering and continuing by advancing new
paths for dialogue and mutual understanding.
   These movies are excellent examples of the manifold ‘nomadic’ view that
inspires them, visions testifying to the ‘epistemological positions’ of these
auteuses counterpoised against forms of hegemony and exclusion. Moreover,
they represent the voyage, often through uneasy and unsafe places, as the
essential prerogative for exploring the chosen subject matter, together with the
anthropological tension of participant observation of these filmmakers.
   Following the methodological work of Mothers, Cupisti shot Womanity (2018),
which relates vigorous female stories. First there is the Egyptian Sisa, awarded as
‘ideal mother’ (in her twenties, widowed and pregnant, she has been disguising
herself as a man for over forty years to be able to work as a shoeshine and so raise
her daughter); next are Geeta and Ritu from India, at the forefront in defence
of women (against the outrage of feminicides, of attacks with acids, of killings of
baby girls and female foetuses); and finally there is the American Jonnie, a truck
driver in an oil area of North Dakota mostly inhabited by men and suffering a
high rate of violence and prostitution (she strives to overcome her complexes as
an overweight woman and form a friendship with her few female peers there).
   Barbara Cupisti also authors of I am. Stories of Slavery (Io sono. Storie di
schiavitù, 2011) on the burning issue of migrants, in particular of those who came
to Italy to seek refuge from wars and misery. In order to pay back stratospheric
debts (from 4 to 12 thousand euros) to crime organizations, these people undergo
exploitation with the black market for labor as well as prostitution, sinking into
an invisible ‘underworld’ bereft of rights. They are modern-day slaves, victims
of human trafficking, which is a violation of fundamental Human Rights. The
profit of this silent ‘underworld’ is gigantic: migrant smuggling is the third large
source of income for organised crime, second only to arms and drugs. In 2015
Cupisti deals again with this epochal issue of immigration from countries at
war, making Exiles (Esuli), a three-part documentary filmed in refugee camps in
Kenya, Jordan and Turkey, as well as among Tibetan exiles in India and climate
refugees from Brazil and California.
   The aftermath of war is the core of Ward 54 (2010), directed by Monica
Maggioni, an international war reporter and former president of RAI (the
Italian State Television). Ward 54 deals with the post-traumatic stress syndrome
that affects 20% of American veterans from Iraq. As the only Italian journalist
embedded in the US military campaign during the second war in Iraq, Maggioni
had the opportunity to closely follow the Iraqi Freedom mission and subsequently

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its side effects on the soldiers’ lives after returning home. In Ward 54, these
young soldiers (all born in the early 1980s), haunted from ‘survivor’s guilt’, live
on the brink of the abyss without being adequately assisted, while their families
are powerless and abandoned to themselves. According to data from the Army
Times, the US military magazine, 18 veterans commit suicide every month, for
a total number that (just until 2009) exceeded that of those killed in the war.18
   The Iraqi war through children’s eyes has been recounted by the freelance
documentarian and reporter Francesca Mannocchi in her film Isis, Tomorrow.
The Lost Souls of Mosul (2018). Mannocchi, who collaborates with Italian
broadcasters (RAI 3, La7, Sky TG24) as well as with Italian and international
magazines (L’Espresso, Al Jazeera, Middle East Eye, and Focus), deals with
migration (see her reports from Tunisia, Calais, the Balkans and Libya), and
was awarded the Giustolisi Prize for her inquest Missione impossibile (Mission
impossible), on migrant smuggling and Libyan prisons. The children in her
Isis, Tomorrow are the children of the Isis militants, educated and trained for
violence.
   Another Italian journalist, Paola Piacenza, conveys a similar professional
intensity in her documentary Shadows from the Deep (Ombre dal fondo, 2016),
centering on the work of her colleague Domenico Quirico, a correspondent for
the newspaper La Stampa, who was kidnapped in Syria on April 8 2013 and
freed after 152 days of captivity. That ordeal was indeed explicitly the base of
the conception of the movie highlighting Quirico’s professional ethics and his
methods of investigative journalism (‘an investigator of the human condition’,
as Piacenza defines him). The journalist’s reflections are accompanied by images
of his return to the area where he was kidnapped, together with his passage
through the Russian-Ukrainian front and his patient waiting for the authorities’
permission to enter Syria. ‘The return is not to home, the return is to here’,
Quirico says at the end, showing how much the work of the correspondent can
be profound, complex, questioning and extremely human: far from the glamour
that all too often is associated with the journalist profession.
   And after these journalist-filmmakers, it is worthwhile to mention other
Italian women reporters who were, and some of them still are, in the forefront
of international war scenarios: from veteran Lilli Gruber to Tiziana Ferrario,
Giovanna Botteri, Maria Cuffaro, Lucia Goracci, Liliana Mistretta, to name a
few. Above all, I would like to commemorate two young Italian journalists killed
while carrying out their nomadic work with passion and competence: Ilaria Alpi,


18
  Maggioni filmed also Out of Tehran (four stories) (2011), on the stories of four Iranian expatriates,
opposing the Teheran regime, who faced the vicissitudes of clandestine escapes. Conceived during
a trip between Asia and Europe that lasted one year, her second documentary shadows’ some
Iranian exiles, forced to flee their homeland, then under the regime of Ahmadinejad, where ‘those
who think are in danger’. Their stories are linked by the voice of a young woman, whose silhouette
in half-light is sometimes seen. In the end the audience discovers that she is the daughter of a close
collaborator of Ahmadinejad, and that she is herself a filmmaker, who had to leave Iran for having
made a documentary on torture and human rights.

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a RAI reporter killed in Somalia in 1994 with her cameraman Miran Hrovatin
because she had discovered an international traffic in weapons and toxic waste in
this African Country; and Maria Grazia Cutuli, Corriere della sera reporter, killed
in Afghanistan in 2001 together with three other non-Italian journalists. Her last
article in the newspaper, published the same day of her killing, is titled A gas
depot nervine in Osama’s base. These are unforgettable, beautiful minds curious
about the life and the world: with a passion ‘vigilant and disarmed’, to put it
in Cesare Zavattini’s words, to witness and document the complexities of the
present — and with a brilliant and rigorous gaze, which celebrates an irreducibly
civil and humanistic audiovisual practice.
   As a conclusion, I would also highlight two significant experiences of female
protagonists within the current Italian audiovisual scenario, MAUDE and ADA,
which were presented in 2011 in the program The Strenght of Truth (La forza
del vero by the Laboratorio Immagine Donna (Laboratory Image Woman), the
historic international Women’s Film Festival of Florence, born in 1975, the
oldest festival devoted to female directors in Europe.19 MAUDE, based in Rome,
is formed by media activists and cinema professionals in all film roles, and in
Florence it proposed an example of flash-movies for discussing female issues and
activism campaigning. ADA is formed by a group of women documentarians from
Tuscany — ADA stands for Associazione Documentaristi Anonimi (Anonymous
Documentarians Society) — which is committed to disseminating documentary
culture through educational workshops, documentary screenings, and so forth,
as well as being committed to serving as a reference point for those who work or
want to work in the documentary field, as a place for the exchange of ideas and
for structural support.
   Far from directionless wandering, these audiovisual works aim at a clear goal:
to be at once part of a place and to be on the outside, in order to find a proper
observational range. Their essential characteristic is their rootedness in the
present. This filmmaking has ‘the courage to be anchored to our present’ and
‘in the world’, to quote Giona Nazzaro: ‘(it) is able to think the present in order
to imagine the future’.20 These films are ‘the result of situations that saw them
coming alive. They come from specific places that go towards the world’.21
   Ultimately, the audiovisual survey considered here deploys the conceptual
duet flânerie — nomadism with which this essay began. Far more than a purely
academic formula, this dyad summarizes the core points of the documentary
practice of numerous contemporary Italian women filmmakers: liberation from
the confinement traditionally assigned to women combined with a militant civil


19
   Excerpts from the ADA manifesto are provided by the website of the Laboratorio Immagine
Donna di Firenze.
20
   Giona A. Nazzaro, For a Cinema of Today, Catalogo della 34. Settimana internazionale della
critica, 76. Mostra Internazionale d’Arte Cinematografica, la Biennale di Venezia 2019 – SNCCI,
p. 11.
21
   Ibidem.

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commitment, understood in its deepest meaning as fostering an active citizenship,
one which fully participates in the construction of the common good.
   These key points are achieved through the exploration of what we do not yet
know, thanks to a gaze focused on unknown realities, a gesture that affirms —
through cinema — our ethical curiosity as fully human beings. Therefore, these
audiovisual practices bear witness to the professional advancement of women in
a notoriously male-dominated field. They make publicly visible both the cultural
and political status of the female agency. In so doing, they experiment with
a variety of unexplored narrative possibilities, outside of the ones offered by
established fictional or non-fictional structures and formats.




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