Women, Feminism and Italian Cinema - by Dalila Missero (Hardcover)

About the Book

Represents the first comprehensive reconstruction of Italian women's film cultures of the 1960s and '70s.

Book Synopsis

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.

From the Back Cover

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. Dalila Missero is post-doctoral research fellow in Film studies at the School of Arts, Oxford Brookes University.

Review Quotes

This brilliant, comprehensive study of women's participation in Italian film culture through the 1960s and the 1970s fills a key gap in international feminist studies. Through an immersive approach in the fragile archives of female spectatorship and filmmaking, Missero draws a complex, fascinating picture of the impact of feminism during a pivotal phase of Italian film history.

--Monica Dall'Asta, University of Bologna

This passionate and imaginative engagement with the 'archival turn' breathes new life into cultural history. Weaving a brilliant dialogue between a very wide range of theories and archival sources, Missero's refreshing methodological intervention demonstrates both the tenacity of male privilege and the existence of a feminist film culture as a form of precarious collectivity in postwar Italian film history.

--Danielle Hipkins, University of Exeter

About the Author

Dr Dalila Missero is post-doctoral research fellow in Film Studies at the School of Arts, Oxford Brookes University