Women Film Pioneers in Early Twentieth-Century Italy

For at least a decade, new research carried out by scholars involved in the Women Film Pioneers Project has worked to challenge this view. Through their effort to recover surviving documentation on women’s contributions to the development of world’s film industries in the silent period, researchers have retraced the biographies of dozens of previously unrecorded women directors, producers, screenwriters, editors, decorators and so on. The surprising number of never aforementioned figures that have surfaced during investigation is only the most apparent in a series of encouraging results. Next and beyond the appraisal of the artistic outcomes of women in film, this approach is meant to recognize the social import of women’s professional involvement in the industrial environment of the early twentieth century. As Lauren Rabinovitz has observed, this new feminist film historiography ‘builds upon the very foundations of women’s history in the 1970s and 1980s that taught us the centrality of considering intimate, personal, sexual issues as well as the sphere of the everyday’, and worked to produce knowledge on ‘subjects who may have lesser status within their cultures’. In other words, the focus is no longer on celebrity or cultural status, but on women’s positioning within the contradictory tensions of the public sphere, as defined by Miriam Hansen. Researching Italian silent cinema in this perspective has helped shed some light on a number of forgotten figures, whose recovery urges us to change our view, not just of the role of women in the film industry, but more generally, of women in early twentieth-century Italian society. Besides a questioning of the foundational criteria upon which the film canon is written – with particular regard to the notion of authorship – new studies have also addressed the field of reception, interrogating the meaning of gender composition in period audiences.