Streetwalking on a ruined map : cultural theory and the city films of Elvira Notari / Giuliana Bruno.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Bruno, Giuliana, author.

Contributor:

American Council of Learned Societies.

Series:

ACLS Humanities E-Book.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Motion pictures--Italy--History.

Motion pictures.

Motion pictures for women--Italy.

Motion pictures for women.

Women in motion pictures.

City and town life in motion pictures.

Notari, Elvira, 1875-1946--Criticism and interpretation.

Notari, Elvira.

Dora Film.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xii, 416 p. ) ill. ;

Place of Publication:

Princeton, New Jersey : Princeton University Press, [1993]

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Emphasizing the importance of cultural theory for film history, Giuliana Bruno enriches our understanding of early Italian film as she guides us on a series of "inferential walks" through Italian culture in the first decades of this century. This innovative approach---the interweaving of examples of cinema with architecture, art history, medical discourse, photography, and literature--addresses the challenge posed by feminism to film study while calling attention to marginalized artists. An object of this critical remapping is Elvira Notari (1875-1946), Italy's first and most prolific woman filmmaker, whose documentary-style work on street life in Naples, a forerunner of neorealism, was popularly acclaimed in Italy and the United States until its suppression during the Fascist regime. Since only fragments of Notari's films exist today, Bruno illuminates the filmmaker's contributions to early Italian cinematography by evoking the cultural terrain in which she operated. What emerges is an intertextual montage of urban film culture highlighting a woman's view on love, violence, poverty, desire, and death. This panorama ranges from the city's exteriors to the body's interiors. Reclaiming an alternative history of women's filmmaking and reception, Bruno draws a cultural history that persuasively argues for a spatial, corporal interpretation of film language.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Acknowledgments

Mapping Out Discourse: An Introduction

PART I. SUPPRESSED KNOWLEDGE OF ELVIRA CODA NOTARI AND NEAPOLITAN FILM: A HISTORICAL PANORAMA

1. Questions of History and Film in Italian Culture

2. Film Journals and Film Historiography

PART II. FILM IN THE CITYSCAPE: A TOPOANALYSIS OF SPECTATORSHIP

3. Streetwalking around Plato's Cave, or The Unconscious Is Housed

4. Spectatorial Embodiments: Anatomies of the Visible and the Female Bodyscape

PART III. MANUFACTURING FILM CULTURE

5. Dora Film: An Urban Production House

6. Women at Work: Manufacturing Movies

7. Dora Film of America: Women and Immigrants in the American Dream

8. Censorship: A Cuton the Wings of Desire

PART IV. THE METROPOLITAN TEXTURE

9. Fragments o f an Analyst's Discourse: Lacunae

10. The Architecture of Public Melodrama: A Corporeality of the Street

11. Between the Feast and the Law: The Carnivalization of Narration

12. City Views: Filmic Cityscape, Artistic Perspective, and Touristic Travel

PART V. FEMALE GEOGRAPHIES

13. Anatomy of an Analysis: The Authorial Noir

14. Popular Cinema and Women's Literature: The Transito of Female Discourse

15. Medical Figures: Hysteria and the Anatomy Lesson

16. Topographies of Dark Female Pleasures

17. Written on the Body: Eroticism, Death, and Hagiography

Notes

Filmography

List of Illustrations

Index

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9781400843985

1400843987

OCLC:

1255232765