Women, Feminism and Italian Cinema

Represents the first comprehensive reconstruction of Italian women’s film cultures of the 1960s and ‘70s

• Provides an innovative, intersectional feminist methodology to cinema history, adopting stand-point theory, archival theory and addressing questions of nostalgia and anachronism
• Case studies enrich the understanding of cinema’s socio-cultural role in Italy, and addressing, in an engaging way, key concerns for feminist cinema history
• Offers an emphasis on women’s affective and active relationship with cinema offers an innovative approach to cultural production and consumption
• Investigates, for the first time, the relationship between Italian second-wave feminism and mainstream cinema, with a comparative perspective with other national contexts (US, France, Canada)

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.