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

STREETWALKING

ON A RUINED MAP

Giuliana Bruno

STREETWALKING

ON A RUINED MAP

Cultural Theory

and the City Films of

ELVIRA NOTARI

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS · PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY

Copyright © 1993 by Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street,

Princeton, New Jersey 08540

In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, Oxford

All Rights Reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bruno, Giuliana.

Streetwalking on a ruined map: cultural theory and the city films of Elvira Notari / Giuliana Bruno,

p. cm.

Filmography: p.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-691-08628-1 (alk. paper)

—ISBN 0-691-02533-9 (pbk.: alk. paper)

1. Notari, Elvira, 1875-1946—Criticism and interpretation.

2. Dora Film. 3. Motion pictures for women—Italy. 4. Women in motion pictures. 5. City and town life in motion pictures.

6. Motion pictures—Italy—History. I. Title.

PN1998.3.N68B7    1993

791.43’023’092—dc20    92-16113   CIP

eISBN: 978-1-400-84398-5

R0

AIla mia famiglia

and to Andrew

Contents

Acknowledgmentsix

Mapping Out Discourse: An Introduction3

PART I. SUPPRESSED KNOWLEDGE OF ELVIRA CODA NOTARI AND NEAPOLITAN FILM: A HISTORICAL PANORAMA

1. Questions of History and Film in Italian Culture11

2. Film Journals and Film Historiography24

PART II. FILM IN THE CITYSCAPE: A TOPOANALYSIS OF SPECTATORSHIP

3. Streetwalking around Plato’s Cave, or The Unconscious Is Housed35

4. Spectatorial Embodiments: Anatomies of the Visible and the Female Bodyscape58

PART III. MANUFACTURING FILM CULTURE

5. Dora Film: An Urban Production House79

6. Women at Work: Manufacturing Movies105

7. Dora Film of America: Women and Immigrants in the American Dream122

8. Censorship: A Cut on the Wings of Desire137

PART IV. THE METROPOLITAN TEXTURE

9. Fragments of an Analyst’s Discourse: Lacunae147

10. The Architecture of Public Melodrama: A Corporeality of the Street161

11. Between the Feast and the Law: The Carnivalization of Narration187

12. City Views: Filmic Cityscape, Artistic Perspective, and Touristic Travel201

PART V. FEMALE GEOGRAPHIES

13. Anatomy of an Analysis: The Authorial Noir233

14. Popular Cinema and Women’s Literature: The Transito of Female Discourse241

15. Medical Figures: Hysteria and the Anatomy Lesson255

16. Topographies of Dark Female Pleasures278

17. Written on the Body: Eroticism, Death, and Hagiography309

Notes329

Filmography391

List of Illustrations399

Index405

Acknowledgments

A THEORETICAL INQUIRY involved in cultural history and archival research is a collaborative effort. Over the years and in several places, many people and institutions have participated in the making of this book.

First of all, let me express my gratitude to all those who helped me shape the ideas in this book and offered critical readings of the manuscript at various stages of its conception. I would like to thank Annette Michel-son for offering detailed commentary and constructive criticism as well as long-standing support and affection. Her wide-ranging notion of the intellectual life, her passion for cognitive voyages and cross-cultural traveling, has been a source of inspiration to me. For this book, as in many other circumstances, Laura Mulvey’s input has been invaluable. The easiness of our transito of ideas has made me feel intellectually at home during my writing in an alien cultural context. I have benefited from our talks about life and work, whether, ironically, below the statue of Giordano Bruno in Rome or at New York’s Bruno bakery. I am deeply grateful to Robert Sklar for his many supportive gestures over time, and for his unique contribution of solid commentary and sane advice. Exciting discussions with Tom Gunning were one of the pleasures of working on this book. Sharing his curiositas and passion for detection deepened my interest in the erotics of knowledge of historiography and my concern for silent-film aesthetics. I am also grateful to Peter Brunette, Patrice Petro, Mary Russo, and Gaylyn Studlar for their insightful readings of the manuscript.

I would also like to thank a group of Italian feminist intellectuals, my friends, who over the years have discussed the ideas in this work with me, and sustained a sense of collectivity and a bonding of the intellectual, political, and emotional spheres: Maria Nadotti, Paola Masi, Adriana Monti, Paola Melchiori, Giovanna Grignaffini, and Lea Melandri, who also published excerpts of this study in my mother tongue in the journal Lapis. On this side of the Atlantic, a similar acknowledgment goes to Deborah Drier, who closely followed the development of this book. In the early stages of this work, she put my alien language into proper English, offering sharp readings and much more.

Many scholars and private archivists were helpful during the early research phase and contributed to the retrieval of the documentation. I am grateful to the late Jay Leyda for first and most enthusiastically encouraging me to pursue this project, as well as guiding its first steps. Special thanks to Vittorio Martinelli, who generously opened his private archive to me and shared his knowledge of Dora Film production. His work and input were essential to this book, as was the equally generous contribution of Aldo Bernardini and Giampiero Brunetta. Thanks also to Davide Turconi for making available his private collection and offering his expertise on early film journals; to Paolo Cherchi Usai for remembering to check for prints of Notari’s films in his archival trips around the world and always answering queries; to Riccardo Redi and the Associazione Italiana per le Ricerche di Storia del Cinema for continual assistance and contributions; to Francesco Macchia for making available his rare collection of the film magazine Varie muta; and to Giuseppe Petagna for the wonderful gift of rare pictures from his collection of nineteenth-century Neapolitan photography.

A Neapolitan connection was vital during the amassing of documentation. Thanks to Vittorio and Giuliana Troncone for opening to me their private archive of Partenope Film; to filmmaker Mario Franco and the members of the feminist collective Cooperativa Controcampo (particularly Valeria Astolfi, Anna Nappo, Nadia Nappo, and Annalisa Cerchia) for collaborating in unearthing aspects of the Notaris’ life; and to Antonio Andretta for keeping me informed of new Italian publications and sending them from his film bookstore.

Also helpful and encouraging in the early research phase was the feminist filmmaker Annabella Miscuglio, who, along with Judita Hribar and Angelika Ledge-Jaskolla, offered findings, information, and clues. The exchange of views and documents with film critic Enza Troianelli has been valuable for each of us in our work.

Over time, other friends and scholars have also made contributions to this work, offered encouragement, and sustained vital debate. Among them are Miriam Hansen, Teresa de Lauretis, Lynne Kir by, and Charles Musser. In Italy, Lino Micciché, Vito Zagarrio, Alberto Farassino, Francesco Casetti, Mino Argentieri, Romolo Runcini, Antonio Costa, Alberto Abruzzese, Achille Pisanti, Stefano Masi, and Antonia Arslan Veronese. Thanks also to Antonella Russo, Orshi Drozdick, Anne Lov-ell, Samuel Bordreuil, and Jan Avgikos. The members of the Columbia University Seminar on Cinema and Interdisciplinary Interpretation provided valuable commentary on the work in progress. I am also indebted to the intellectual community of Harvard University.

Many American and Italian institutions made my work possible and often more pleasant. Special thanks to: Cineteca Nazionale/Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome, particularly its director Guido Cincotti, Paola Castagna, Stefania Parigi, Angela Prudenzi, and Mario Musumeci; Museo Nazionale del Cinema in Turin, particularly its director Maria Adriana Prolo, Roberto Turigliatto, Giuseppe Valperga, and Roberto Radicati; Richard J. Wolfe, curator of the Rare Books and Manuscripts Collection at Harvard University’s Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, and his assistant, Déla Zitkus, for guidance in finding wonderful visual and written documents; Patrick Loughney and Paul Spehr at the Library of Congress for assisting me in the research on Dora Film of America, along with Jan-Christopher Horak of the George Eastman House, Corrinne Collett of the John E. Allen Inc. film archive, the American Italian Historical Association of New York, the Center for Migration Studies in New York, the Immigration History Research Center of the University of Minnesota, and Il Progresso Italo-Americano. Special thanks also to Gianclaudio Macchiarella, director of the Italian Cultural Institute in New York, for his essential help in obtaining permissions to print artwork from Italian museums and archives; Laura Valle of RAI (Italian television) in Rome for facilitating my work at the film archive, and RAI Corporation in New York; the staff of the Biblioteca Nazionale in Naples, the Biblioteca Nazionale in Rome, and the New York Public Library for kindly fulfilling unreasonable requests. Most helpful was Sergio Mazzini, director of periodicals at the Biblioteca Nazionale in Florence, who, performing a miracolo a Firenze, made an Italian library function efficiently not as a guardian of authentic, untouchable originals but as a vehicle of documentary circulation. Bypassing the amanuensis monk rule spared me the usual job of copying everything by hand.

The last stages of writing this book were supported by a grant from Harvard University and the Kaltenborn Foundation. I previously received various forms of support from New York University and Bard College.

At Princeton University Press, I wish to thank my editors, Joanna Hitchcock and Mary Murrell, whose support and enthusiasm made this book possible. I am also grateful to my copyeditor, Janet Wilson, to the copywriter, Linda Truilo, and to Alessandra Bocco, who supervised production.

David Caras at Harvard University and Anders Goldfarb were very helpful with photographs.

Last but not least, I am grateful to my mother, Italia Iorio, my father, Pietro Bruno, and my brother, Pierluigi, for offering their love and support of my work over the years and facilitating a few aspects of my research across the Atlantic. Pierluigi, in particular, offered his graphic talent toward conceiving a visual design for the book. As always, I appreciate and admire his interpretive visual skills and have been especially moved by our aesthetic connection. I am also indebted to Anna Sella for her advice on graphic matters. Luisa Sartori’s friendship always sustained me, as did Elettra Barth’s. And, most of all, thanks, with love and the awareness of an impossible reparation, to Andrew Fierberg, on whom this book has made the greatest demands, and who remained present throughout, with great affection and intellectual input. Grazie.

STREETWALKING

ON A RUINED MAP

Mapping Out Discourse:

AN INTRODUCTION

STREETWALKING ON A RUINED MAP, a study in cultural theory, offers a theoretical meditation on the problems of historiography and addresses the challenge posed by feminist theory to both film history and theory. Such a meditation is conveyed through, and grounded in, a microhistorical case: the lost or forgotten work of Italy’s first and most prolific woman filmmaker, Elvira Notari (i 875-1946), the driving force of Dora Film (Naples, 1906-1930), author of approximately sixty feature films and over a hundred shorts and documentaries.

In bringing to light this hidden area of knowledge, I am especially concerned with looking differently. My historical curiosity—a desire to know mapped on the lust of the eyes¹—has resulted in a vision that combines the use of a microscopic with a telephoto lens. While dissecting the minute and the microhistorical, my study maps out epistemological paradigms. Like a filmmaker using a rack-focus, I attempt to connect the analytic detail with a panoramic vision.

The nature of my subject led me in this interpretive direction. Unearthing the documentation on Dora Film, I was confronted with a ruined and fragmentary map. Elvira Notari’s extensive production has not only been forgotten but lost to the historical archive. Only three complete feature films remain. The fragmentary textual body, and the silence surrounding this work, called for an archeological intertextual approach.

The case of Dora Film is such that, in the words of Michel de Certeau, historians can write only by combining within their practice the ‘other’ that moves and misleads them and the real that they can represent only through fiction.² Owing to the status of the documentation, the existing texts can be represented only through their fictional referents, adapted or cited. This has ultimately led to an investigation on the margin of the texts: working on lacunae, other texts have become visible.

As a result, my analysis has been designed as a palimpsest. Moving on the edge, through the archeological site of textual absences and voids, my inquiry traces overlapping textual journeys in a series of inferential walks³ through novels, paintings, photographs, and architectural sites. The filmic palimpsest is drawn across a broad cultural field at the inter-section of art history, medical discourse, architecture, photography, and literature.

In a space where fiction is not only the object of inquiry but also shapes the scene of writing, in a logic that does not separate object and form of writing, the structure of my study is itself a palimpsest. As texts in general are built on the second degree, and Notari’s narratives of excess in particular are grafted upon a field of citations and remakes, analysis redoubles this work of bricolage, a game of textual pleasures. And so in an analytic jew, the art of citing, as Walter Benjamin calls it,⁴ retraces, with a mobilized gaze, and through the transit of texts, the itinerary of narrative desire.

The state of textual remanence demanded such a method, in which the analyst’s gaze would be able to move, as does that of an anatomist, from visible traces on a surface to invisible ones inside the body of texts. In-dexical and inferential, this approach goes in depth and also traverses intertextu(r)al sites of absent presence, riding on the crest of a visible invisibility.

Such a kinetic analytic, I ultimately propose, parallels film’s own visual topography. Working on early cinema, I aim to highlight the genealogical link between film and the panoramic-anatomic space of nineteenth-century vision. Placing cinema within the experience of travel, I suggest its inscription in the kinetic (dis)embodiment of visuality.

This book is, then, marked by spatial practices and corporeal stories and forged by a topographical epistemology. In this erotics of knowledge, journeys of interpretation are conceived as travel stories, and cultural theorists, like flâneurs, stroll alongside other voyeurs or walkers. Just as one walks around the maze of vicoli (alleyways) in the ventre di Napoli (the belly of Naples),⁵ and the gaze opens on a veduta (city view), cultural traveling through the spatio-temporal density of interdisciplinary intertextuality constructs a panorama.

In this way a microhistory is mapped out. As for the specific approach to the material, a few introductory comments may offer the reader a useful orientational map of what follows. My inquiry into Elvira Notari’s production may be summarized as a gesture toward the reappropriation of geography in history, the redrawing of a cultural map as a metonymy of fragmentations, the exploration of a territory of subjugated popular knowledge, the mapping out of a scene of microhistories in the terrain of cultural studies and through the lens of cultural theory. Such a rewriting of film history highlights a woman’s tradition by underscoring the existence of a film pioneer lost in a male-dominated culture and by retracing her writing in the context of other silent women filmmakers as well as writers, paying particular attention to women’s popular literature.

Indeed, Dora Film was a popular production house that made a cinema of the street. Women’s stories were shot dal vero (from real life), with city views and street culture as location, in a manner foreshadowing neorealism. The narrative architecture of Notari’s dark melodramas issued from the body of urban popular culture. Local physiognomies, nonprofessional actors, and dialect intertitles spoke the urban text. A voice sensitive to women’s condition, Notari articulated a female address to the narrative. She wrote, directed, and participated in all aspects of pre- and postproduction and also trained the actors; her son Edoardo, acting since childhood, grew up on his mother’s screen; her husband, Nicola, was the cameraman. Dora’s city films were exported to America and exhibited in New York City, providing an imaginary return voyage for Italian immigrant audiences. Some of them, in turn, went so far as to sponsor financially some of Notari’s work, until its suppression by fascism and film industry changes.

My microhistorical work on Dora Film participates in a vast cross-cultural project that, theorizing history and film historiography, investigates local and regional knowledge and female discourse. Reclaiming marginality and difference, an archeology of knowledge has effectively mined the field of suppressed knowledge to reveal discontinuous, diverse, and disqualified areas. While "in the past historians wished to know only the "gestes of the kings …, [and] the sources did not tell us anything about the bricklayers⁶ of history, today savoirs mineurs and les savoirs des gens (suppressed knowledge) have claimed entrance into a history that is driven by a deeper curiosity for the knowable. This curiosity, which one senses in Carlo Ginzburg’s detective inquiry into the micro-cosmos of a fifteenth-century miller, urged me to map out the production of a woman, Elvira Notari, who operated within a Neapolitan cinematic mill, within the shadow of the Italian film industry and a history interested only in the gestes of the kings, one in which woman, accorded no space, remained out of sight.

I have tried, through the analysis of Notari’s work, to draw a cultural history and contribute some insights into the history of Italian cinema, providing the elements of a critique of some common historical assumptions, toward a rethinking of its spectatorship and a reconsideration of questions of authorship. While pointing to alternative practices within this national cinema, my work aims to cast light on its regional and popular aspects, the work of women, and to provide some retrospective illumination of neorealism. Reshaping the panorama of a national cinematography in its early stages, I argue for a collective, nomadic, and historical understanding of the Italian cinema of that period so as to reclaim an alternative history of women’s filmmaking and reception.

In the reconstruction of Dora Film production, extant films are considered in relation to filmic fragments, stills, scripts, and other writings such as novelizations. Redrawing a discourse of representation and self-representation, I have also turned to film magazines of the time, recharting both critical discourse and advertising strategies.

This documentation was assembled as a montage. Rather than remanufacturing Notari’s textual losses, invoking an authorial original form, I have aimed at leaving the gaps and making them (in)visible. I was intrigued by the movement of (in) visibility at work in the current art preservation of frescoes, a dynamic that, in turn, implies a mobile observer: viewed from afar, the overall restored picture appears seamless, yet the sites of absence, hence the (analyst’s) work of intervention, are evident, as, on closer observation, one becomes aware of the different textures of the reconstructed parts.

In mapping out a lacunar female geography, I raise the question of the spatial tension of desire and reflect on the bridge between the private and the public realms. The use of the spatial paradigm in conjunction with female discourse is not accidental and has bearing on a psychoanalytic referent, for, as Jessica Benjamin shows in her theorization of intersubjectivity, what is experientially female is the association of desire with a space.⁷ I am interested in the intersubjective mode of desire, as it offers an interesting alternative path of inquiry for feminist film theory. Models of film reading, including female spectatorship, have usually privileged symbolic representation. My study intends to foreground spatial representation and aims at inscribing desire in a spatial practice. Reading from a feminist viewpoint means to venture into that erotic geography that exists as an intersubjective site, in-between the filmic texts and the female spectator (and critic). Exploring the space of female fantasy, conceiving imaging as a topography, and enhancing the intersubjective space designed between bodies, I focus on a corporeality and its taking place.

This sense of the unconscious as housed⁸ is elaborated in parts II through V. Part II delineates a topoanalysis. Mapping out early film reception in the territory of the city, I argue for a mobile theory of spectatorship to reclaim the spectatorial pleasures of travel(ogu)ing, and include the female gaze within this erotic territory. Film genealogy, as both textual viewing space and the space of cinema, rests on the very physical threshold of spatial motion and desire, a topology that crystallizes around the female bodyscape.⁹ Street-walking around Plato’s cave, I discuss cinema’s appropriation of the panoramic and anatomical vision vis-à-vis the implantation of cinema in Naples’ city scape. There film was first housed in the architectures of transit such as the arcade and the railway, as well as in a popular theater where the main spectacle was an anatomy lesson.

In Part III, I discuss the economic structure of urban film manufacture, comparing it with other forms of urban labor that employed women, such as the sweatshop. Considering aspects of libidinal economy, I question the connection between the private and the public, and the function of the maternal. For Notari, the head of a film production house, the maternal space and that of the home extended into a public function and became a professional role. As her films migrated to New York, this raises considerations about mobility including the cultural passages that cinema conveys, especially in its address to emerging immigrant and female spectators.

A mapping of intertextuality, in parts IV and V, explores the spaces of the gaze, as narrative topoi to be inhabited, accessed, traversed, or trespassed. It focuses on female geographies and/in the urban site, investigating, on a specific textual terrain, the epistemological topography, in the form of a grand panorama, that was laid out for the reader, on the genealogical terrain, in Part II.

Part IV, in particular, concerns metropolitan desire. A narratological study drafts the geography of eroticism as urban circulation. Intertextual journeys, taken across the visual arts, explore the architecture of a popular, realistic diegesis and chart the inscription of the panoramic vision and of spatial topographies. Along the way, filmic realism is redefined. This re-vision speaks of realism as the physical textuality of the urban body, the force of the social text(ure), the materiality of writing, and the physiognomic impact of bodily signs. A topography of pleasure marks the workings of popular culture.

A theorization of authorship, in Part V, relies on intersubjective spatiality. Questioning both critical necrophilia and the death of the author, I seek an alternative mise-en-scène of analysis to account for the scenario of passion in female authorial studies. Anatomies of the visible, also analyzed here, include female madness as seen, the geography of death and female sexuality, female pleasures on the edge of the paternal house, erotic and dark fantasies in hagiography, and the corporeality of an anatomy lesson, the subject of one of Notari’s city films.

Thus, tracing Notari’s palimpsest, an erotics of passion is written on the metropolitan body. Female desire informs the metropolis at a fantasmatic level. Metropolis itself carries with it an etymological pregnancy of meaning: meter-polis, from the Greek mother-city. A maternal trace, an imprint, is left on the urban signifier. The space of the city is marked by a female geography, one that Pier Paolo Pasolini visualized in his film about a streetwalker and condensed in its very title, Mamma Roma (1962). In such a way, Naples, a (plebeian) mother-city appears as the scene of Elvira Notari’s lost or forgotten cinema. Let us now streetwalk through this ruined map.

PART I

SUPPRESSED KNOWLEDGE OF ELVIRA CODA NOTARI AND NEAPOLITAN FILM: A HISTORICAL PANORAMA

CHAPTER 1

Questions of History and Film in Italian Culture

Fragmentation is to be found all over … Italy…. A historian who has studied [it] … uses the expression vertical history.—FERNAND BRAUDEL

THE LINKAGE of geography and history is particularly appropriate when approaching aspects of Italian culture. Although it may be said that every nation is divided, every country is based, and thrives, on difference, this is particularly true of Italy.¹ Italy has been a nation only since 1861, a rather short period of time, considering the long history of its city-states, provincial and regional governments, and diverse cultural identities. The belated conception and ideal of a nation brought forth insufficient roots or ground for authentic affirmation. Italy is a country without a real organic national identity, as it lacks a founding myth and well-defined autochthonous aspects to sustain a monolithic unity and centralization. Within the Italian territory is a conglomerate of diverse regional and local forces that express differences in language as well as in history and culture. The national scene of Italy is better described as one of metonymic and self-referential microhistories.

Confronting this cultural situation, one is led to map out diversity while acknowledging the forces that attempt to unify. This is not to praise regionalism but rather to recognize the function of difference. By revisiting the scene of Elvira Notari’s cinema, rethinking the panorama of an Italian national cinema, in view of different productions based on local, regional, and popular practices, I propose to approach national identity through difference. As I enter this territory, I am reminded of Fernand Braudel’s description of panorama:

For us geography will be above all a way of re-reading, re-estimating and re-interpreting…. As it happens, geography readily lends itself to such an approach. Landscapes and panoramas are not simply realities of the present but also, in large measure, survivals from the past. Long-lost horizons are redrawn and recreated for us through what we see…. The value of geographical observation lies in the depth, the duration and the abundance of densely-packed realities…. At once immediate and retrospective, geography has a particular light to shed, helping to explain links between past and present.²

THE REMANENCE OF ITALIAN SILENT CINEMA

While the contribution to film history of such silent women filmmakers as Alice Guy Blaché, Germaine Dulac, Lois Weber, and Esther Shub has attracted attention,³ the very name of Elvira Notari remains largely obscure in the Anglo-American literature on women and film, where she is ignored. Although the first and most prolific Italian woman director is also usually absent from Anglo-American studies of Italian film history, an exception is found in the history of Italian film by Mira Liehm, in which Notari is said to challenge the acceptance of man as supreme judge, offer excellent examples of filmmaking with a unique handling of social themes … [and] emerge as a director of exceptional talent, confirming the originality of the Neapolitan school.⁴

The retrieval and organization of documentation on Dora Film, an archival research conducted in Italy and the United States, have encountered difficulties. Blanketed in silence, it has been archeologically investigated to recover a lost panorama. The configuration of discourses in this ruined map reveals various levels of suppression: the long scholarly neglect of Italian silent cinema; the disregard within this period of the regional, local, and differential Neapolitan production, grounded in a popular culture; and the suppression of the work of Elvira Notari, who reclaimed a (corpo)reality in film. Let us look into this configuration.

First, analyzing the eclipse of Notari’s work, one must note that, until the 1980s, little attention had been given in general to the Italian silent screen.⁵ By 1980, however, the critical indifference to our early national production was openly denounced as an act of repression, for a silence on the silence has covered Italian ‘silent’ cinema with a double strata … for the last thirty years.⁶ Writing on the subject at about the same time, film historian Giampiero Brunetta uncovered a phenomenon that cultural anthropologists call suppression of social memory. The memory of a whole huge production … has been transmitted only through a very limited number of exemplary texts, never analyzed in their specificity, through appropriate selection, or as representative of a coherent system. The image that we have of Italian cinema is linked to a series of historical stereotypes, to authors’ childhood memories, or to casual encounters with films that rarely go beyond the number of ten.⁷

This longstanding configuration of discourses, challenged by contemporary historians, must be taken into consideration when investigating Elvira Notari. It is a fact that she was not included in those few exemplary texts, which stood for over thirty years as the image of Italian cinema in historiography. The lack of available documentation must also be considered, as only an extremely small part of Italian silent production has survived destruction, loss, or oblivion. Discourse does not accidentally remain in the field of memory as a casual or fortunate prolongation of a momentary state. As Michel Foucault shows, speaking of discursive remanence,⁸ it remains in existence by virtue of the support of an apparatus, which includes institutions of knowledge, material techniques, and statutory modalities. The film scholar Lino Micciche sees an institutional silence at the root of the quasi-zero degree of remanence of Italian silent cinema:

The most serious practical consequence of a pluri-generational silence on the subject is that Italian silent cinema does not exist anymore. At least in the sense of assembling all the films that we can find in Italy, and the ones that are in Wiesbaden, Moscow, Paris, London, Buenos Aires, Madrid, etc., we do not even have as little as five percent of the complete filmography of Italian silent cinema.⁹

Facing the fact that ninety-five percent of Italian silent cinema has disappeared from historical memory, the analyst proceeds by following the texts through their sleep… to discover what mode of existence may characterize statements, independently of their enunciation, in the density of time in which … they are used, … and possibly even destroyed.¹⁰

THE REMANENCE OF ELVIRA NOTARI’S PRODUCTION

Against this background, the eclipse of a filmography such as Elvira Notari’s assumes its specificity in relation to what was a general gesture of oblivion and is now a limited remanence. Analyzing this situation, we must not be concerned with what was not said but rather with the configuration of discourse produced by what was said. We find that whatever minimal part of the production survived, with the aid of critical discourse, has assumed a special meaning. In the administration of scarce resources, rare statements assume a specific value. This value is not defined by the truth of the statement but rather by its position in the economics of discourse in relation to its place, capacity for circulation and exchange, and possibility of transformation. In the case of Italian silent cinema, only a few discoursive formations were in existence, and, instead of producing more discourse, they created reiterations of the same extremely arbitrary image. One of the most widely disseminated statements, which by the force of its circulation has assumed the value of truth, is that Italian silent production consisted of a series of super-spectacles. The producer George Kleine, the most prominent distributor of Italian silent films in the United States, deliberately selected big productions, almost exclusively historical and literary epics.¹¹ This is the image of Italian cinema that, to date, is too often projected and circulated in the United States.¹² The super-spectacles have become representative of the entire silent filmography of Italy, and their remanence has obscured productions such as Elvira Notari’s.

The fixation on historical and literary epics, praised as Italy’s great contribution to early cinema while excluding other discoursive forms, is a function of the politics of discourse. It is a sign of the institutionalization and legitimation of the art of cinema and its increasingly bourgeois public. An entire production that operated along different lines, and to which the work of Notari belongs, has been thereby effaced or disqualified. While the historical and literary super-spectacle drew upon the sources of high culture, providing cinema with an aura, Notari’s practice represented a differential vision, exposing the values of local, regional, and popular culture and utilizing dialect. In opposition to the logic of the industry, Notari worked for her own independent firm, which functioned in an artisanal manner. Contrary to the dominant studio and star system, Dora Film’s street films were shot on location. Not divas but nonprofessional actors and local types were employed.

Notari’s cinema constitutes a force opposed to the move toward linguistic and cultural unification, an impulse to nationalization and standardization that, at the time, was set in motion by hegemonic classes through the cinematic medium as well as other means. Insofar as Notari’s cinema was local, marginal, and differential, it was subjugated. The reasons for this repression are to be found at the specific historical juncture at which production emerged and ended.

1.1. Partenope Films, a studio on the streets of Naples.

1.2. Leda Gys in Napoli è una canzone (Naples Is a Song, 1927), produced by Lombardo Films, Naples, and directed by Eugenio Perego.

NEAPOLITAN REGIONALISM AND THE NATIONAL QUESTION

Spanning the years 1906 to 1930, Notari’s production began during the years of Giovanni Giolitti’s political leadership and managed to remain in existence through the first decade of the fascist dictatorship. Giolitti favored a national politics. Between 1901 and 1910, new technologies and industries were encouraged, ushering in a period of economic progress for the nation. The name of a Milanese film magazine founded in 1907, Rivista fono-cinematografica e degli automatici, istrumenti pneumatici ed affini (Review of phono-cinematographic, automatic machinery, pneumatic instruments and the like), exemplifies the range of industrial activity, which linked the electrical, mechanical, automobile, and film industries. However, standardization, nationalization, and unification were carried out at the expense of a part of the nation—the South. When, for example, statistics triumphantly proclaimed that economic progress between the years 1901 and 1910, was higher in Italy than anywhere else in Europe, this signified that the disparity between North and South was greater than ever. The good news was very partial, as the industries were concentrated in the North, leading to further impoverishment of the South, repression, retrocession, and emigration. The subjugation of the South to the North was inscribed in the long process leading to national affirmation.

National politics, therefore, held a particular connotation in economic as well as ideological terms. Given that the concept of the nation is not indigenous to the linguistic, historical, and cultural configuration of Italy, there were, as Antonio Gramsci recognized, at least two Italys, the North and the South, both (still divided) containing further breakdowns.¹³ Gramsci’s writings emphasize the regional configuration of Italy and show an understanding of its diversity. From a Marxist viewpoint, he perceived the problems relating to the split and was particularly concerned with the questione meridionale, the southern issue, as it related to matters of political and cultural hegemony. From his reading of Italian culture, Gramsci declared that the Italian national movement had failed to be a popular movement. His position, therefore, points to the regional complexity of a national-popular politics and culture.

Throughout the years of the fascist dictatorship, however, the dominant politics kept nationalization and centralization in sight, recasting and often subjugating regional and popular cultures when they were not simply equated with traditional values. Language became an issue, as the regime was aware of its function in the structure of hegemony. Italian, the national language, was, in fact, the dialect of medieval Florence, adopted on the basis of its cultural prestige as a written language in the thirteenth century, and it was used as a hegemonic force to suppress differences. A progressive Italianization denied the existence of centrifugal forces and marginalized those who spoke in dialects. Subaltern classes were excluded from the institutional, cultural, and official uses of Italian, as only a small percentage could speak it. In the process of effacing regionalism, schools and the mass media were important tools. Although, as recent scholarship has effectively shown,¹⁴ cultural life was not completely monopolized under fascism, and the ideology of fascist films was neither uni-directional nor one-dimensional nor by any means devoid of popular aspects, it cannot be denied that an edge of fascism strove to promote a national culture. First the radio and then the cinema became vehicles for the dissemination of a national identity—an Italy cleansed of regionalism and rid of the crude local scenes of poverty and violence.¹⁵

Deviating from this image during the difficult 1920s, Notari was censored and increasingly forced to show outside of Italy. Her cinema emigrated to America, thus sustaining displaced southern cultures—the majority of Italian immigrants—in their transition to a new territorial identity.¹⁶

NEAPOLITAN POPULAR CINEMA AND HEGEMONIC CINEMATIC PRACTICES

Against this background, the eclipse of Elvira Notari takes shape as an act of subjugation vis-à-vis the hegemonic culture and, in filmic terms, vis-à-vis the dominant historical and literary epics and the national film industry—forces that became instrumental in the formation of a particular aspect of fascist cinema.¹⁷ As opposed to Neapolitan film, the cinema of the super-spectacle required and promoted a centralized system of production, oriented toward industrialization and a standardized process of filmmaking that was based on studio production and the beginnings of a star system, divismo. The historical epics provided a founding myth for the establishment of the nation. With the legitimation provided by literary texts, grandiose sets, many actors and extras, a spectacular history of unity was traced back to the Roman Empire. The cultural aura supplied by references to the Roman Empire was also instrumental in popularizing Italian cinema abroad and achieving international hegemony. The image of heroic strength was circulated in adventure and acrobatic films starring characters such as Maciste or Sansone, popular versions of Nietzschean superhumans, and complex examples of the merging of the codes of dominant and mass culture.¹⁸

The impulse toward centralization and the standardization process was a factor in the creation in 1919 of a trust, the Unione Cinematografica Italiana (Italian Cinematographic Union). The UCI united eleven major production houses, including Cines and Pasquali, and established two laboratories for developing prints, one in Rome and another in Turin. The establishment of UCI further privileged the production axis of Rome-Turin and shifted the industry’s focus to the capital. The southern cities, excluded from the trust, were further marginalized. All the most important directors, cameramen, and crew members joined UCI,¹⁹ as did many divas and male stars, supporting the trust with a star system.²⁰ The monopolistic ambition of UCI ultimately had a destructive effect on the Italian cinema of the 1920s. The trust survived until 1926, the year film entrepreneur and distributor Stefano Pittaluga absorbed its basic components into his company. A major force in the reorganization of the Italian film industry during the 1920s, he furthered centralization, supporting it with private capital.

The birth of a nation and of a national cinema overlapped and continued into the fascist era. Although the panorama of fascist ideology and aesthetics is complex and contradictory, the image of force, the mythology of heroism, petit-bourgeois ideals of unity, projections of national stability, and an interclass cohesion and harmony were present in its filmic efforts geared to create consent. And centralization, of which an early force was the state-controlled LUCE Institute,²¹ was an ongoing process.

There was little room in such a world view for regional, differential, and artisanal cinematic modes, or for the use of dialect in film. Whole segments of southern cinema, including that of Notari, were therefore effectively marginalized. Italian silent cinema has come to mean cinema generated in the North, in the center of national and systematizing power. What has long been known as Italian silent cinema is, in reality, the cinema of Rome, Turin, and Milan.

This does not mean that other modes of filmmaking did not exist elsewhere in Italy. Naples, a city with a distinct, fast-moving metropolitan flavor, a city with a prominent public dimension, was a fertile ground for the rise of a cinematographic industry of its own. Acknowledging its role as a primary film center, Giampiero Brunetta writes that Naples, even before Rome, Milan and Turin, is a city where cinema found the best conditions for its genesis and growth as an industry, at all levels a profitable one.²² Aldo Bernardini states that the first experiences of film distribution occurred in the late 1890s and early 1900 in particular in Rome and Naples, where there was no real gap between the experiments of 1896 and the initiation of steady exhibition. In the North cinematographic activities were much more irregular and restricted.²³ Neapolitan cinema, which developed about 1905, preserved its own character and managed to retain a market even during the time of crisis for national production in the 1920s.

The three most prominent film companies were Dora Film, Partenope Film, and Lombardo Film, all of which were family enterprises.²⁴ Notari’s Dora Film was the most popular of the three. Partenope Film was run by Roberto Troncone, an ex-lawyer, and his brothers Vincenzo and Guglielmo, an actor. Lombardo Film was a husband-wife collaboration between Gustavo Lombardo and Leda Gys, the star of all their films. Like Troncone, Lombardo was a member of the middle class; after becoming involved in socialist politics, he rejected his bourgeois upbringing and joined the new (ad) venture of filmmaking.

1.3. Roberto Troncone (far right) and the staff of Partenope Films, Naples.

Comparing the development of Neapolitan cinema with the early trajectory of national cinema, clear differences emerge. Neapolitan cinema played an important role in establishing a realistic mode of representation. This trend, a cultural and ideological manifestation, was grounded in the economics of production: poverty of means led to imaginative use of the city’s natural resources. Three principal areas of distinction emerge in Neapolitan cinema vis-à-vis the national production:

(1) The preoccupation with giving synesthetic values to the image, making it speak.

(2) The capacity to create and keep its own audience…. Though topoi and narrative techniques are stable for a number of years, these films, more so than in the central-northern productions, have the mark of a contemporary historicity.

(3) Reality occupies a space that exceeds that of a background, or a casual or interchangeable context for the story.²⁵

1.4. Partenope Films, on location in Naples.

The Neapolitan popular aesthetics—the urban landscape, on-location shooting, use of nonprofessional actors, portrayals of common people and the underclass—anticipate some aspects of the neorealist movement. While this approach would be developed primarily through the work of Elvira Notari, who mastered it with particular skill, it was not her exclusive domain. In Neapolitan cinema in general the urban sites are made protagonists in a collective history of the Neapolitan people. Violence, love, and the physicality of desire are represented in all their immediacy and brutality and expressed in the mode of excess. In a lively criticism of institutions, there are no allusions or symbols but rather a harsh treatment of social conditions, including poverty, illness, and death.

1.5. A publicity still of Partenope Films.

The Neapolitan cinema was effectively ended by fascist censorship and the difficulties arising from the advent of sound and the industry’s consolidation. Lombardo survived by moving to Rome in 1932