Susanna Scarparo

MOTHERS, DAUGHTERS AND FAMILY IN GOLIARDA SAPIENZA’S L’ARTE DELLA GIOIA

Abstract This article discusses Goliarda Sapienza’s L’arte della gioia, which many Italian critics have hailed as the new Gattopardo. The novel was written over nine years, from 1967 to 1976, but for over two decades Sapienza failed to find a publisher. Two years after the author’s death in 1996, the small publisher Stampa Alternativa printed 1,000 copies of the novel. Ten year later, L’arte della gioia Gioia was published in Germany and France where it enjoyed instant success. As a result of this success abroad, Sapienza’s novel finally gained full recognition and public acclaim in Italy, where it was re-published by Einaudi in 2008. In this article, we argue that through the deconstruction of male and female gendered roles, L’arte della gioia gioia articulates an unconventional deconstruction and reconstruction of the Italian family and the role of the mother within it. In so doing, Sapienza proposes unconventional mother–daughter bonds based on the recognition of maternal authority.

Directing Terramatta;. An interview with Costanza Quatriglio

This interview with Costanza Quatriglio offers insights into the making of the documentary film Terramatta;. She answers questions about the filmic language she used to evoke the situations Vincenzo Rabito described in his autobiography and discusses links between her filmmaking and the oral tradition and the importance of understanding what Vincenzo Rabitos language meant to him. She explains how she selected the episodes from the autobiography to be included in the film and how she crafted the relationship between Rabitos story and official historiography. Finally, she discusses the significance of the archival images, the words, the music, and the landscape in this journey documentary that reinvents and reframes images, constructing new visual itineraries that propose a re-reading of Italian history through the autobiographical account of a man living on the margins who struggled to become literate in order to tell his story.

Costanza Quatriglio: In search of the invisible

ABSTRACT In this article we provide an overview of the work of the ‘invisible’ Italian film-maker Costanza Quatriglio. In Italy, the term ‘cinema invisibile [invisible cinema]’ has come to denote high-quality films that are not widely distributed. Quatriglio embraces the idea of invisibility both in reference to herself and to the subjects of her films. All her films—including her shorts, her feature film and her feature-length documentaries—are either journeys in search of marginalized and invisible subjects or psychological explorations of the invisible aspects of highly visible individuals. Her protagonists are predominantly individuals who live at the margins of society—street children from Sicily, unaccompanied minors, international adoptees or domestic workers from Cape Verde and their daughters. Her 2009 documentary about the Italian pop star Nada focuses on the invisible and private side of a public figure. In all cases, the point of view of Quatriglios investigative camera does not speak for but rather accompanies its subjects, creating a filmic space for what otherwise often remains invisible or incomprehensible.

Maternal Ambivalence in Contemporary Italian Cinema

In this chapter, Luciano and Scarparo discuss Alina Marazzi’s Tutto parla di te (All About You, 2012) and Cristina Comencini’s Quando la notte (When the Night, 2011), two films that focus on women who struggle to reconcile the expectations of motherhood with the conflicting emotions they experience as mothers. While many scholars have defined this conflict as ‘maternal ambivalence’, the Italian philosopher Adriana Cavarero, proposes an alternative notion, that of ‘maternal inclination’. While inclining or leaning over her helpless child, the mother must make the choice of whether or not to provide care. Applying Adriana Caverero’s notion to their analysis, the authors highlight how the two films’ protagonists are able to reimagine mothering through female support networks and a genealogical understanding of maternal strength.

Italian Women Filmmakers and the Gendered Screen

absence of any serious attempt by the Italian state to establish what really happened. This contributed to the failure in the negotiation of a shared memory, not only of the events of Bologna of 1977, but of the entire period of the ‘years of lead’ that were started in Piazza Fontana in Milan in 1969. As the author suggests, the state failed to resolve legally the many cases of terrorist attacks in the 1970s; the dominant media selected and omitted information, intentionally equating left-wing protesters and terrorists; and finally, from the mid-1990s, it attempted to bring about a process of national reconciliation without distinguishing between neo-Fascist indiscriminate violence, Red Brigade terrorism, and radical left protests. All this left the initiative of remembering to local communities, without which judicial investigation would have not even been opened (or re-opened), the victims’ ideals would have been forgotten and a non-dominant memory silenced.

Performing the invisible past: Costanza Quatriglio's Terramatta;

All of Costanza Quatriglios films – her shorts, feature films and feature-length documentaries – are either journeys in search of marginalized and invisible subjects or psychological explorations of the invisible aspects of visible individuals. In Terramatta; Il Novecento italiano di Vincenzo Rabito analfabeta siciliano (2012), Quatriglio continues her inquiry into invisible subjects and uses the story of an ‘invisibile’ (as she defines Rabito) to rewrite the history of Italy, not as a historian but as a filmmaker, self-reflexively drawing attention to the history and style of Italian cinema itself. In our discussion of Terramatta;, we analyse Quatriglios juxtaposition and intersection of the archival footage of official history with Rabitos personal accounts conjured on the screen through the voice of the actor Roberto Nobile, and her filmed images of contemporary landscapes inhabited by Rabitos words. We consider the ways in which the documentary creates a dialogue between public and private history, between the present and the past and between memory and language.

Back to the future: The Comencini sisters and their search for a cinematic language

Abstract As part of a larger project on contemporary Italian women directors, this article will focus on Cristina Comencinis Il più bel giorno della mia vita/The best day of my life (2002) and Francesca Comencinis Mi piace lavorare, mobbing/I like to work, mobbing (2003). We argue that these films and their modes of production challenge and reassess a traditional style of filmmaking as well as the representation of women and children in cinema. They explore the changing private and public dimensions of womens lives in contemporary Italy and the impact that this has on family relationships, in particular on the mother-daughter relationship. By approaching these films through the lens of Italian feminist philosophers and feminist film critics we will consider the representation of the mother-daughter relationship in the films as well as the cinematic implications, for both protagonists and spectators, of what it means to search for a new (cinematic) language constructed through the eyes of children and daughters.