Italian cinema experienced its peak of domestic and international popularity in the years between the 'economic miracle' of the late 1950s and the social and political turmoil of the 1970s. But how did the growing development of the feminist movement in this period impact on Italian film culture? And what role did that film culture play in women's lives?
This book explores the multiple intersections between feminism and Italian cinema from the perspective of women's everyday relationship with the medium. Drawing from a feminist approach to Gramscian cultural theory, the book builds an archival counter-history of Italian cinema in which women took part as movie-goers, activists and practitioners, by means of a collective-historical agency that challenged cinema's patriarchal structures and strategies of invisibilisation.
This passionate and imaginative engagement with the 'archival turn' breathes new life into cultural history. Weaving a brilliant dialogue between a very wide range of theories and archival sources, Missero's refreshing methodological intervention demonstrates both the tenacity of male privilege and the existence of a feminist film culture as a form of precarious collectivity in postwar Italian film history.
--Danielle Hipkins, University of ExeterThis brilliant, comprehensive study of women's participation in Italian film culture through the 1960s and the 1970s fills a key gap in international feminist studies. Through an immersive approach in the fragile archives of female spectatorship and filmmaking, Missero draws a complex, fascinating picture of the impact of feminism during a pivotal phase of Italian film history.
--Monica Dall'Asta, University of Bologna