Speaking Silently: Women's Voices in Early Italian Film Culture

A question we believe it is time to ask in feminist film studies is: why are women’s names so rare in the history of film theories? Until just a few years ago, women were thought to have been perfectly silent in front of the film experience for an exception-ally long period, from cinema’s early years up to the advent of Feminist Film Theory in the 1970s. Accounts and anthologies of classical film theory offer little room, if any, even to important authors such as Germaine Dulac, Esfir Shub or Maya Deren, whose names appear sporadically, with little discussion and information about their work. Despite the large amount of documents discovered across the world in the last twenty years, the canon of film theory remains basically impermeable to women’s work.