Streetwalking on a Ruined Map

Description

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.