Streetwalking on a Ruined Map : : Cultural Theory and the City Films of Elvira Notari / / Giuliana Bruno.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Princeton University Press eBook-Package Archive 1927-1999
• VerfasserIn: Bruno, Giuliana,
• Place / Publishing House: Princeton, NJ : : Princeton University Press, , [2021]; ©1993
• Year of Publication: 2021
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (436 p.)

Emphasizing the importance of cultural theory for film history, Giuliana Bruno enriches our understanding of early Italian film as she guides us on a series of "inferential walks" through Italian culture in the first decades of this century. This innovative approach---the interweaving of examples of cinema with architecture, art history, medical discourse, photography, and literature--addresses the challenge posed by feminism to film study while calling attention to marginalized artists. An object of this critical remapping is Elvira Notari (1875-1946), Italy's first and most prolific woman filmmaker, whose documentary-style work on street life in Naples, a forerunner of neorealism, was popularly acclaimed in Italy and the United States until its suppression during the Fascist regime. Since only fragments of Notari's films exist today, Bruno illuminates the filmmaker's contributions to early Italian cinematography by evoking the cultural terrain in which she operated. What emerges is an intertextual montage of urban film culture highlighting a woman's view on love, violence, poverty, desire, and death. This panorama ranges from the city's exteriors to the body's interiors. Reclaiming an alternative history of women's filmmaking and reception, Bruno draws a cultural history that persuasively argues for a spatial, corporal interpretation of film language.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Mapping Out Discourse: An Introduction -- PART I. SUPPRESSED KNOWLEDGE OF ELVIRA CODA NOTARI AND NEAPOLITAN FILM: A HISTORICAL PANORAMA -- 1. Questions of History and Film in Italian Culture -- 2. Film Journals and Film Historiography -- PART II. FILM IN THE CITYSCAPE: A TOPOANALYSIS OF SPECTATORSHIP -- 3. Streetwalking around Plato's Cave, or The Unconscious Is Housed -- 4. Spectatorial Embodiments: Anatomies of the Visible and the Female Bodyscape -- PART III. MANUFACTURING FILM CULTURE -- 5. Dora Film: An Urban Production House -- 6. Women at Work: Manufacturing Movies -- 7. Dora Film of America: Women and Immigrants in the American Dream -- 8. Censorship: A Cuton the Wings of Desire -- PART IV. THE METROPOLITAN TEXTURE -- 9. Fragments o f an Analyst's Discourse: Lacunae -- 10. The Architecture of Public Melodrama: A Corporeality of the Street -- 11. Between the Feast and the Law: The Carnivalization of Narration -- 12. City Views: Filmic Cityscape, Artistic Perspective, and Touristic Travel -- PART V. FEMALE GEOGRAPHIES -- 13. Anatomy of an Analysis: The Authorial Noir -- 14. Popular Cinema and Women's Literature: The Transito of Female Discourse -- 15. Medical Figures: Hysteria and the Anatomy Lesson -- 16. Topographies of Dark Female Pleasures -- 17. Written on the Body: Eroticism, Death, and Hagiography -- Notes -- Filmography -- List of Illustrations -- Index