Dr Dalila Missero

In this collaborative piece, originated from a series of conversations between the authors, we reflect on our friendship as a form of peer-to-peer mentorship and as an experience of informal collaboration. Drawing from our academic relationship, the article also makes some broader considerations on the meanings and potentials of academic friendships and how they offer an unvaluable source of mutual and self-care in the context of neoliberal academia.

This article discusses the findings of a qualitative research project exploring the memories and habits of cinema-going of an intergenerational group of Latin American women living in Barcelona and Milan. Specifically, it offers a thematic analysis of migrant cinema-memories to read broader practices of home-making, mobility, transnational relationships, and digital ecologies. The article shows that an interdisciplinary methodology, combining feminist audience studies, memory studies and migration research, represents a valuable key to understanding contemporary audience formations. Such reflexive and gendered methods emphasize the potential of migrant memory to overcome limitations of audience research, such as methodological nationalism and fragmentation. It also suggests that a sensory approach to research tools and materials offers a key to overcome the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic to fieldwork. In conclusion, the article calls for a broader exploration of migrant cinematic memory as a necessary, interdisciplinary perspective on the transnational and gendered aspects of the contemporary audience experience.

From the early 1990s onward, the theoretical reflection on gender identities and non-binary sexualities(Butler 1990; Sedgwick 1990; Koyama 2003) has increasingly challenged the assumption of hegemonic paradigms of heteronormativity as totalizing categories of gender identities and sexualities. In the last fewyears, critiques of heteronormativity have moved forward from the analysis of contemporary cultural products to the proposal of new paths of historical inquiry, which are gaining currency under the label of “queer historicism” (McCabe 2005). 

Based on these premises, this special issue of Immagine aims to assess the viability and productivity of a queer approach to the archive of Italian film history, from the origins to the 1960s, takinga chance to discover evidences that can trouble the established picture provided by traditional male andheteronormative accounts. The ambition is to contribute to the methodological reflections inspired byqueer historicism, keeping in mind that queer theory is obviously in dialogue with both postcolonial andintersectional approaches to gender, sexuality, class and ethnicity (Dominguez-Ruvalcaba 2016; Giuliani2017). In particular, a queer approach to Italian film history challenges static notions of national cinema,encouraging the adoption of transnational and transcultural perspectives (Schoonover and Galt, 2017).We welcome methodological reflections that interrogate the criticalities of queer historicism, andspecifically of the notion of “queer anachronism” (Rohy 2017): Is it reasonable to detect queerness in filmsthat were produced at a time when non-binary subjects did not identify as queer yet? How can queer historicism integrate and/or dialogue with other approaches, such as those developed in the related fields of feminist, gay and lesbian film historiographies (Gledhill and Knight 2015; Benshoff e Griffin 2006; Giori2017)? How can it help understand certain eccentric projects, born outside of the mainstream of Italianfilm styles, such as those developed by Aldo Braibanti and Carmelo Bene? And finally, to paraphrase Heather Love’s reflections (2007), what is the meaning for us, today, of a history in which queerness andisolated queer figures emerged from a film culture that fostered homophobia and stigmatized queer bodies?

This article offers a historical and textual reading of soft-core pornography in Italy by analyzing a group of men and women’s magazines, including the Italian editions of Playboy and Cosmopolitan, and the soft-core magazine for women, Libera, which was published from 1972 to 1978. As part of the ‘sexualization of western culture’ (Attwood 2009), porn produced new discourses regarding femininity, which openly challenged second-wave feminism and, at the same time, assimilated some of its aspects. Sexiness, self-care, monogamy and compulsory heterosexuality became foundational values for a new, modern, emancipated woman, one who was able to enjoy the benefits of the ‘sexual revolution’. Soft-core images also contributed to the spread of new knowledge about female sexuality, both in visual and narrative terms, and was also able to absorb some key aspects of the second-wave feminist political discourse on sexuality. In particular, the introduction of soft-core images in women’s magazines was presented as a ‘feminist move’ towards women’s empowerment. By illustrating the complex cultural function of soft-core pornography for women, this article aims to investigate the historical impact of porn in women’s lives and their relationship with popular culture.

The article analyzes the experiences of Italian women editors as examples of the complex interplay between modes of resistance and acceptance developed by women professionals in a male-dominant film industry. Retracing the evolution of the profession of editor from the silent era to the 1970s, the article navigates the genealogies of Italian women who worked in the cutting room. These women used their creative and professional skills to overcome obstacles imposed by a film industry that otherwise reproduced entrenched patterns of gender and class discrimination. In particular the case of Ornella Micheli, a professional editor who worked on more than sixty films between the 1950s and the 1970s, reveals a practitioner who fitted into the mechanisms of her working environment, but also developed her own personal strategies to affirm her professional status and ensure the continuity of her career.

In this article, we propose a reading of the historical relevance of Roberto Rossellini’s Roma città aperta (Rome, Open City) (Rossellini, 1945) in relation to one of the lesser-studied characters: Marina Mari (played by Maria Michi). The character of Marina has been subjected to critical negative responses centred on her narrative function, the betrayal of the Resistance movement or the ‘corrupt’ persona of the actress. We argue that Marina, in fact, embodies the convergence of a series of gender, genre, social and historic dynamics that have exceptional symbolic relevance for Italian cinematic and social history. We begin with an overview of the connection between Rome, Open City and the antifascist, re-foundational rhetoric that emerged after the Second World War, which ‘preserved’ Italian national identity by assigning culpability to the Germans alone. Following this, through a careful re-reading of her narrative function and visual representation, we demonstrate the radicalness of Marina’s sexual and social identity.

In quel torno di anni che vide l’approvazione delle due leggi sul cinema, rispettivamente del 1962 e del 1965, l’uscita di alcune commedie a episodi a firma di registi come Mauro Bolognini, Luigi Comencini, Dino Risi ed Ettore Scola fu al centro di un animato dibattito sull’oscenità del cinema italiano. L’articolo si propone di indagare tale dibattito attraverso la mediazione dello stardom femminile, inteso come luogo di negoziazione simbolica dei profondi mutamenti in atto nella percezione della moralità e dei ruoli di genere nella società italiana. Per la sua restituzione, si indagheranno rotocalchi popolari di varia collocazione ideologica, come «Famiglia Cristiana», «Epoca», «Oggi» e il settimanale femminile di sinistra «Noi donne». = 

During the Sixties, in a moment that witnessed the introduction of two new laws on cinema (1962 and 1965), the release of a group of serial comedies by directors like Mauro Bolognini, Luigi Comencini, Dino Risi and Ettore Scola were at the centre of an animated debate on obscenity in Italian cinema. This article aims, accordingly, to investigate this debate according to its mediation of female stardom, which is understood as a space for the symbolic negotiation of the deep changes at the time in the perception of morality and gender roles in Italian society. The argument draws upon several tabloids and popular publications from the time, with different ideological positions, including “Famiglia Cristiana”, “Epoca”, “Oggi” and the left-wing women’s weekly “Noi donne”.

This essay offers a feminist reading of the work of Italian film director Cecilia Mangini. Drawing on an archaeological approach, it focuses on Mangini's experience as a woman in Italian cinema and her contribution to the realization of three movies—To Arms! We're Fascists! (codirected with Lino Del Fra and Lino Micciché, 1961–62), Stalin (directed with Lino Del Fra and Franco Fortini, 1962–63), and Being Women (1963–65)—all clear examples of the counterhegemonic cinema that Mangini developed in the fissures of mainstream, male-dominated practices. In her view, nonfiction film is a tool for cultural and political struggle, and it must affect the present in order to provide democratic access to knowledge. Following the Gramscian notion of the organic intellectual, Mangini has built a specific aesthetic and a personal approach to film direction, which aims to reach the broadest audience possible and, at the same time, to develop a coherent feminist militant discourse.