Streetwalking on a Ruined Map: Cultural Theory and the City Films of Elvira Notari / Edition 1

by Giuliana Bruno

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691025339
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	12/20/1992
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	436
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.25(h) x (d)

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Mapping Out Discourse: An Introduction

Pt. 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

Pt. 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

Pt. 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 Cut on the Wings of Desire

Pt. IV The Metropolitan Texture

9 Fragments of 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

Pt. 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

What People are Saying About This

Annette Michelson

In the expanding field of cinema studies, this work stands out in its rare imaginative force.
— Annette Michelson, New York University

From the Publisher

"In the expanding field of cinema studies, this work stands out in its rare imaginative force."—Annette Michelson, New York University

Editorial Reviews

"In the expanding field of cinema studies, this work stands out in its rare imaginative force."—Annette Michelson, New York University

From the Publisher