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 ad- dresses 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 (1875-1946), 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 eyes”*—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. Unearth ing 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 sur- rounding 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.”* 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 inguiry traces overlapping textual journeys in a series of “inferential walks”? through novels, paintings, photographs, and architectural sites. The filmic palimpsest is drawn across a broad cultural field at the inter-4 INTRODUCTION section of art history, medical discourse, architecture, photography, and literature. Ina 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 gen eral are built on “the second degree,” and Notari’s narratives of excess in particular are grafted upon a field of citations and remakes, analysis re- doubles this work of bricolage, a game of textual pleasures. And so in an analytic jeu, “the art of citing,” as Walter Benjamin calls it,‘ retraces, with a mobilized gaze, and through the transit of texts, the itinerary of narra~ tive 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 gocs in depth and also traverses intertextu(t)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 gene- alogical link between film and the panoramic-anatomic space of nine teenth-century vision. Placing cinema within the experience of travel, 1 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 knowl- edge, journeys of interpretation are conceived as travel stories, and cul- tural theorists, like fldneurs, 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), ’ and the gaze opens on a veduta (city view), cultural traveling through the spatio-temporal density of interdisciplin- ary 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 usc- ful 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 exis~ tence of a film pioneer lost in a male-dominated culture and by retracingMAPPING OUT DISCOURSE $s 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 cin~ ema “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 fas- cism and film industry changes. My microhistorical work on Dora Film participates in a vast cross- cultural project that, theorizing history and film historiography, investi gates 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, di- verse, 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 bricklayers” of history, today savoirs mineurs and les savoirs des gens (suppressed knowledge) have claimed entrance into a his- tory 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 fifteenth-century miller, urged me to map out the production ofa woman, Elvira Notari, who operated within a Neapolitan cinematic “mill,” within the shadow of the Italian film industry and a history inter- ested only in the gestes of the kings, one in which “woman,” accorded no space, remained out of sight. Thave 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 assump- tions, 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 popu- lar aspects, the work of women, and to provide some retrospective illu-6 INTRODUCTION mination of neorealism. Reshaping the panorama of a national cinema- tography in its early stages, I argue for a collective, nomadic, and histori- cal 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 consid~ ered in relation to filmic fragments, stills, scripts, and other writings such as novelizations. Redrawing a discourse of representation and self-repre- sentation, 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 remanu- facturing Notari’s textual losses, invoking an authorial original form, I have aimed at leaving the gaps and making them (in)visible. I was in- trigued by the movement of (in)visibility at work in the current art pres~ ervation 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 intersubjec- tivity, “what is experientially female is the association of desire with a space.”” 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 repre- sentation 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 de- signed between bodies, I focus on a corporeality and its “taking place.” This sense of “the unconscious as housed”* is elaborated in parts II through V. Part II delineates a topoanalysis. Mapping out early film re ception in the territory of the city, I argue for a mobile theory of specta- torship to reclaim the spectatorial pleasures of travel(ogu)ing, and include the female gaze within this erotic territory. Film genealogy, as both tex-MAPPING OUT DISCOURSE 7 tual 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. Street-walking around Plato’s cave, I discuss cin ema’s appropriation of the panoramic and anatomical vision vis-a-vis the implantation of cinema in Naples’ cityscape. 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 Il, 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 ques- tion 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 fe- male 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 tres passed. It focuses on female geographies and/in the urban site, investigat- ing, on a specific textual terrain, the epistemological topography, in the form of a grand panorama, that was laid out for the reader, on the gene- alogical 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 pop- ular, 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 spa- tiality. Questioning both critical necrophilia and “the death of the au- thor,” I seek an alternative mise-en-scéne 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.8 INTRODUCTION Thus, tracing Notari’s palimpsest, an erotics of passion is written on the metropolitan body. Female desire informs the metropolis at a fantas- matic 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.