Antonio Pietrangeli, The Director of Women: Feminism and Film Theory in Postwar Italian Cinema

By Emma Katherine Van Ness

One of the founding fathers of neorealism in the postwar period in Italy, Antonio Pietrangeli went on to focus his lens upon the female subject. Eight of his ten full-length films feature female protagonists. This study seeks to better understand both his achievements and his failings as a feminist auteur as well as analyse his films by applying new critical and theoretical approaches. Pietrangeli’s representations of women struggling with questions of identity was a revolutionary act in the 1950s and 1960s. The book makes a case why we should recuperate these films today since the standards for representing women in film continue to fall behind the reality of women’s lives off-screen.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Apr 30, 2020
• ISBN: 9781785273193

Book preview

Antonio Pietrangeli, the Director of Women

Antonio Pietrangeli, the Director of Women

Feminism and Film Theory in Postwar Italian Cinema

Emma Katherine Van Ness

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2020

by ANTHEM PRESS

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or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK

and

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Copyright © Emma Katherine Van Ness 2020

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN-13: 978-1-78527-317-9 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1-78527-317-5 (Hbk)

This title is also available as an e-book.

To Zoe Flaminia,

the only true Roman in the family, romana de’ Roma, birthed alongside this book, raised among the revisions.

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Vita

Introduction: Antonio Pietrangeli, A Brief History

Chapter 1: Pietrangelian Film Theory: From Neorealism to Feminism

Chapter 2: Maid from the Margins: Il sole negli occhi

Chapter 3: The Coming of Age of a Teenage Bride: Nata di marzo

Chapter 4: Legally Bound: Political Realism and Prostitution in Adua e le compagne

Chapter 5: Fantasmi a Roma: Sur-Realism and the Time-Image

Chapter 6: The Dora Problem: La parmigiana , Piatti, Pietrangeli and Freud

Chapter 7: Too Much Woman: Marriage, Power, and Excess in La visita

Chapter 8: Breaking Faith: Il magnifico cornuto , Envy and the Crisis of Vision

Chapter 9: Io la conoscevo bene … Or did I? Antonio Pietrangeli, the Author and the Actress

Conclusion: Antonio Pietrangeli, Feminism and Film Theory

Bibliography

Index

List of Illustrations

0.1 Antonio Pietrangeli with Clara Calamai on the set of Ossessione

0.2 Antonio Pietrangeli, Carla Del Poggio and Isa Miranda sign the Manifesto in Defense of Italian Cinema (Manifesto in difesa del cinema italiano) in 1948

2.1 Irene Galter, Antonio Pietrangeli, Luchino Visconti on the set of Il sole negli occhi

2.2 With Celestina, Pietrangeli focuses on the servant class, the domestic, female proletariat

2.3 Celestina’s private moments, much like those of maid in Umberto D

2.4 Celestina awkwardly navigates the streets of Rome, derided by her fellow maids and Fernando

2.5 Celestina rejects her suitor’s advances

2.6 Fainting as symptom of unspeakable pregnancy, the sun in her eyes.

2.7 Celestina realizes she has been lied to by Fernando, moments before her suicide attempt

2.8 Celestina accepts her situation, refuses to see Fernando

2.9 A chorus of maids, an alternative to a traditional family, who take Celestina into their fold

3.1 Francesca’s marriage is just the beginning, not the happy ending, of the story

3.2 Francesca, bound in her corset and by societal pressures to fit the role of ideal wife, initially enjoys the narcissistic pleasures of consumption

3.3 Francesca and Carlo visit the Colosseus, when the film begins in medias res

3.4 Francesca’s ideal courtship with Sandro, as she states mistakenly that her ideal type is silent and strong, like a tree

3.5 Francesca’s growing resentment of Simona and her husband’s respect for this professional woman

3.6 Francesca’s first, meager, paycheck

3.7 Confession and reconciliation between spouses does not mean a happy ending in Nata di marzo

4.1 Adua and her friends pooling their funds to make a new start after the Merlin Law

4.2 Dottor Ercoli inspects his investment

4.3 Marilina and Carletto, a unique vision of motherhood

4.4 Adua and Piero, a romance doomed by her past and his unscrupulousness

4.5 Milly and her Sardinian fiancé

4.6 Adua amidst the destruction of her dream

4.7 Da Adua : Adua and her friends moving toward a home of their own

5.1 Pietrangeli, the camera, and Roman ghosts

5.2 Pietrangeli aligns our gaze with that of the ghosts

5.3 Reginaldo, a living ghost on the rooftops of Rome

5.4 The disapproving ghosts. Reginaldo, Flora, Poldino and Fra’ Bartolomeo

5.5 Fantasmi: Sconosciuta, sei incantevole! Modern beauty and antique chivalry

5.6 Flora models for il Caparra, whose frescoes save Palazzo Roviano

5.7 Reginaldo at City Song, where he cannot believe his eyes/big reveal

5.8 Art historian pronouncing the work a Caravaggio

6.1 Dora studying the pupo siciliano

6.2 Defiant Dora and Michele, her Sicilian police officer boyfriend

6.3 Dora and Giacomo, the seminarist

6.4 Dora is pensive in a postcoital moment, while Giacomo sleeps

6.5 Scipio tempted by Dora while she sleeps

6.6 Dora and Nino on the beach

6.7 Nino’s career depends upon Dora’s powers of attraction despite his claims that she’s impossible to work with

6.8 Dora ultimately rejects Michele and the patriarchal order he represents

7.1 Pina (Sandra Milo) considers a life with Adolfo (François Périer)

7.2 Adolfo and la bella culandrona—Pina’s excessive qualities in her domestic space

7.3 Pina at work, admired by the townsfolk

7.4 Active Pina, passive Adolfo

7.5 The couple vying for control over the narrative

7.6 The population turns hostile toward a drunk Adolfo

7.7 Pina fixes Adolfo’s glasses as well as his self-awareness

7.8 The female voice embodied

7.9 Adolfo and the parrot, symbol of his loss of control and ineptitude

7.10 Lonely Pina, a vision of female autonomy

8.1 Alienation, mistrust and adultery between the couple

8.2 Skeptical Andrea does not believe his eyes

8.3 Maria Grazia, dutiful wife and sex object, shown alongside Pietrangeli’s camera

8.4 Andrea’s scopophilia over his wife’s décolletage runs headlong into his paranoiac possessivity

8.5 Andrea retreats into fantasy about his wife, leaving his wife behind, neglected

8.6 Maria Grazia, gracious hostess at the housewarming party, moments before her striptease

8.7 Maria Grazia, seductress within Andrea’s fantasy, surrounded by his friends

8.8 Pietrangeli shows how Andrea’s questioning of Maria Grazia’s fidelity is a projection of his own insecurities

9.1 Pietrangeli and Stefania Sandrelli on the set of Io la conoscevo bene

9.2 Adriana on the beach, opening sequence of the film

9.3 Fausto, the writer, who exploits Adriana for creative and sexual ends

9.4 The writer builds his discourse on Adriana’s back through the attribution of lack. He is knowing subject, she unknowing object

9.5 Adriana backstage at the boxing match, sympathizing with the beating the boxers are taking in the ring

9.6 Adriana watches as she is humiliated on-screen

9.7 Moments before her suicide, Adriana removes her wig

9.8 Adriana’s alienation, faces of comedy and tragedy

C.1 Pietrangeli’s female characters, like Adriana, demand that we take them seriously

Acknowledgments

This book would not have been possible without the help of many. Mille grazie, first and foremost, to Antonio Maraldi at the Centro Cinema Cesena, who over the span of many years provided access to the Pietrangeli Archives and facilitated my research and writing. His belief in my project and in the need to revisit Pietrangeli were inspirational as well as crucial to this project.

Thank you to Professors Thomas Harrison and Lucia Re at University of California Los Angeles as well as my entire dissertation committee. Your belief in as well as your scrutiny of this subject were invaluable.

Thank you to my family, especially to Carmelo and Zoe Ardizzone, Doug Poole and little Lila, whose love and support made it possible to continue to rethink, revise and finally to bring this project to a conclusion. This book is for all of you.

Vita

Dr. Emma Van Ness earned her undergraduate degrees in art history and Italian from University of Chicago before going on to earn her masters in Twentieth Century Italian Culture from Middlebury College. She completed her PhD at University of California Los Angeles in 2013. She has lived, studied and worked in Italy extensively throughout the course of her life, including two years in Pisa, one year in Florence, and four years in Rome. She currently lives and works in Plymouth, New Hampshire, where she teaches Italian language and film courses at Plymouth State University. Other publications include Dixit Mater: The Significance of the Maternal Voice in Ferrante’s Neapolitan Trilogy, in The Works of Elena Ferrante, Reconfiguring the Margins, edited by Grace Bullaro and Stephanie Love (2016) and translations of Lorenzo Calogero, Quaderni di Villa Nuccia, and Nelo Risi, Dentro la sostanza, in Those Who Look Like Flies from Far Away, an English translation of Quelli che sembrano le mosche da lontano, edited by Luigi Ballerini and Giuseppe Cavatorta (2013). She enjoys baking bread, getting outside and enjoying nature, practicing yoga, spending time with her family, and working toward overthrowing the patriarchy.

Introduction: Antonio Pietrangeli, A Brief History

Figure 0.1. Antonio Pietrangeli with Clara Calamai on the set of Ossessione .

With kind permission of the Archivio Pietrangeli, Centro Cinema di Cesena.

The Director of Women but Never a Feminist

It became obvious to me that men don’t live through female characters.

—Meryl Streep in an NPR interview with Terry Gross

It may seem out of step to begin the study of a fifties and sixties Italian filmmaker with a quote from a contemporary American actress, but the point that Streep makes is key to understanding the difficulties in dealing with Antonio Pietrangeli’s films from a historical and critical point of view. The scope of this study will be to show that Pietrangeli, in both his film theory that I will touch on in this theoretical introduction to the director’s own critical writings on cinema and in his film praxis that I will discuss in the following chapters, is engaging with a wide variety of feminist and film theory ante litteram, before it became part of the mainstream discourse or moved fully into the cultural zeitgeist. This operation will shed light on the importance of Pietrangeli’s films and why they should be more widely studied and available to English-language audiences. The dearth of critical engagement with Pietrangeli’s films is partially due to the difficulty in accessing copies of his films since many, including Nata di marzo and La parmigiana, are out of print, and many others available only in Italy, with Italian subtitles. Many are poorly dubbed in English, or are simply difficult to come by, due in part to Pietrangeli’s cross-genre productions; while associated with both neorealism and commedia all’italiana (Italian-style comedy of the fifties and sixties), Pietrangeli’s cinematic theory and his films defy representational conventions when it comes to psychology and sexual difference, placing his productions at the intersections of auteur and nouvelle-vague genres as well. Consequently, Pietrangeli offers us unique opportunities as film scholars; we will be able to use his own theories of film against him in order to see to what extent his films live up to his own criticism, especially in the areas of female- and male-gendered subjectivity, the psychology of difference, spectator studies and apparatus theory. Streep’s quote serves as evidence of the fact that, still today, these remain pressing issues, especially at a moment when the #MeToo movement has sparked dialogue about the ubiquity of sexual violence from a female perspective.

During Streep’s interview, this 17-time Oscar nominated actress discusses her ability to live through male characters, to identify with them, to cross dress as a male spectator who is actively looking and absorbing the film narrative. Her experience as spectator matches that described by Laura Mulvey in her famous essay, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.

The man controls the film fantasy and also emerges as the representative of power in a further sense: as the bearer of the look of the spectator […] As the spectator identifies with the main male protagonist, he projects his look onto that of his like, his screen surrogate, so that the power of the male protagonist as he controls events coincides with the active power of the erotic look, both giving a satisfying sense of omnipotence.¹

Streep and other female spectators are able to identify with male protagonists, but the actress confirms Mulvey’s theory when she suggests that the inverse operation, for male spectators to identify with female protagonists, is more problematic. Yet this is precisely what much of Pietrangeli’s enterprise as a filmmaker was—to try and identify with the female perspective. At the end of many Pietrangeli films, the viewer is left feeling powerless, puzzled, without a mooring; his films do not offer catharsis or resolution because we are not able to access that feeling of omnipotence Mulvey explains as central to the film fantasy. As Mary Ann Doane explains, Confronted with the classical Hollywood text with a male address, the female spectator has basically two modes of entry: a narcissistic identification with the female figure as spectacle and a transvestite identification with the active male hero in his mastery.² Female protagonists drive the action in 7 of 10 full-length films directed by Pietrangeli (he also directed three episodes in collaborations with other directors and left one film, Come, quando, perché, unfinished when he unexpectedly died during shooting in 1968). All 10 feature films deal in some ways with gendered issues such as marriage, bachelorhood, promiscuity, jealousy and infidelity, so consequently, we should not find it surprising that his films can be difficult to digest. This study will focus on these seven full-length female-centered films, in order to give ample space to the theoretical ramifications they contain. We will discuss the other films briefly to show how they are thematically related, but my intention here is to fill a gap in the scholarship on Pietrangeli. There are already many excellent historical and thematic examinations of his work; I will focus on his most feminist moments. The book has been structured so that each chapter can be read as an independent essay, which may lead to some thematic repetitions; I apologize if the reader of the whole book finds this tedious, but it is my intention to emphasize Pietrangeli’s proto-feminism, despite repetitions.

The problem of Pietrangeli’s stylistic difference continues in the language certain film historians use to marginalize his films, calling them feminine and delicate, and specify that he is particularly gifted in female portraiture.³ For example, in their genealogical map of Italian comedy, Tullio Masoni and Paolo Vecchi make no reference to Pietrangeli, even though they give him a brief nod in their accompanying article Degeneri e scostumati: commedia, satira, e farsa nel cinema sonoro italiano, in the volume Commedia all’italiana: Angolazioni controcampi. They write that his film La visita (1963) demystifies white collar, hypocritical marriage.⁴ These sorts of symbolic nods to Pietrangeli’s work, which neglect to delve into analysis of the films, have come to characterize the critical attention he has received until recently. Pietrangeli may deserve his own branch on the genealogical map of Italian cinema. This study imagines that branch as a distinctly feminist one.

Pietrangeli’s feminism should not surprise us since his political engagement and his commitment to realism were a foundational part of his philosophy of cinema. Pietrangeli was a key player in creating the cultural environment that fostered neorealist cinema. As Rondolino writes, "All one has to do is flip through the pages of Cinema, and in part, Bianco e nero, from the first years of the war, between 1940 and 1942, to run into articles by young men such as Giuseppe De Santis and Mario Alicata, Gianni Puccini and Massimo Mida, Antonio Pietrangeli and Carlo Lizzani, who systemically dealt with the theme of realism as the primary source of inspiration for a new Italian cinema."⁵ In the following years, during his work with neorealists such as Rossellini and Visconti, he became part of the larger cultural debate about the role of culture in a post-Fascist Italy. After the war, in 1948, Pietrangeli runs for sottosegretario dello spettacolo (undersecretary of entertainment), against the formidable figure of Giulio Andreotti, the Christian Democrat who would dominate Italian politics for the second half of the twentieth century following World War II. In many ways, Pietrangeli was the anti-Andreotti; as an early neorealist, he lobbied for politically and socially engaged Italian filmmaking from 1940 onward; rather than hide Italy’s dirty laundry in their homes, as Andreotti famously requested filmmakers do, Pietrangeli called for a larger exposition of this so-called cultural dirty laundry. In hindsight, given his affinity for female stories and perspectives, it seems telling that laundry and its hanging is largely women’s work, another theme in Pietrangeli’s filmography, where we see him exploring the intersections of gender and labor in unique and unprecedented ways. Alongside other leftist and Communist intellectuals associated with the Centro Sperimentale in Rome, Pietrangeli fights for a film industry in Italy that could be competitive on an international level, producing quality films that were works of art, not merely commercial fluff. Their success was partial; as Brunetta writes, the alliance between the industry, its producers and Andreotti proved stronger than the party’s attempt to produce a new, politically engaged cinema industry in post-Fascist Italy. Producers more and more openly asked the Honorable Andreotti for support […] and they asked to reduce the power of the partisan commission on cinematography, instituted in 1945 and made up of Camerini, Barbaro, Pietrangeli, Vernocchi, which sought to protect and help quality filmmaking.⁶ In the battle for a new Italian cinema, Pietrangeli is on the front line, leading the charge.⁷ Yet in the years following the initial critical successes of neorealism, Andreotti’s censorial presence, along with the financial support he represents, loomed large over the Italian film industry.

In what Brunetta calls the Turning Point of April 18 1948, the crisis of Italian cinema comes to a head with Communists and Catholics battling for control over the industry and the political role that cinema would play under the newly drafted Italian Constitution. Pietrangeli, Communist Party candidate for undersecretary of entertainment, found himself face to face with a catastrophic situation so that ‘defend Italian cinema’ becomes the slogan that cuts across groups of critics, filmmakers, producers, and politicians.⁸ Recently elected president of the Italian Federation of Cinema Clubs,⁹ the Manifesto for the Defense of Italian Cinema outlines Pietrangeli’s platform for a politically engaged cinema. Cosulich describes it as follows: "It did not limit itself to promoting the cause of a culture that was ‘free and democratic’ and a school ‘without privileges,’ like the Alliance for Cultural Defense (Alleanza per la difesa della cultura) required, but it asked for the support for a national cinema, whose survival was threatened by the dumping represented by Hollywood products."¹⁰ The cultural campaign was waged on political grounds, with both the Catholic Church and Hollywood funding opposition to Pietrangeli and the Communist Party by backing Andreotti and the Christian Democrats, using both Hollywood stars and anti-Communist propaganda as fuel for their fight. Ultimately, da buoni italiani, as good Italians, the voters choose Christian conservatism over Marxist revolution, however, and Pietrangeli loses the election to Andreotti.

His victory over Pietrangeli allows the Christian Democrat Andreotti to consolidate his power over the film industry, which takes the form of screen quotas, preproduction censorship and policing of content, signifying, in many ways, the defeat of neorealism as representative of the politically engaged new Italian cinema. Shortly after their defeat in these elections, members of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) would find themselves purged from the government. Pietrangeli, his hopes of institutionalizing a new Italian cinema in a new Italy dashed, formally abandons politics in favor of working entirely within in the film industry. Given Pietrangeli’s leftist political leanings and his experiences in fighting for a politically engaged cinema, we should not be surprised by Pietrangeli’s focus on panni sporchi, the dirty rags of neorealism that Andreotti famously criticized. This study will look at those dirty rags from a feminist perspective and attempt to show how his films focus on those who use them, wear them and wash them—working women, domestic servants, housewives and mothers.

Because of our cultural appreciation of difference, Pietrangeli has started to garner more critical interest as of late. In 2015, the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) hosted a retrospective of his films. Recent works that discuss Pietrangeli’s contributions include Natalie Fullwood’s 2010 article Commedie al femminile: The Gendering of Space in Three Films by Antonio Pietrangeli and Luca Barattoni’s 2012 publication, Italian Post-Neorealist Cinema. While Barattoni recontextualizes Pietrangeli in the postwar period, his examination focuses more on the film historical elements of the postwar and chooses to analyze only Pietrangeli’s masterpiece, Io la conoscevo bene, in any real depth. What this study will seek to remedy is the past methodological and critical loopholes, the gaps in past studies on Pietrangeli, that, while naming him and mentioning his affinity for representing on-screen the postwar Italian woman, do little to explain how and why he did so and moreover why he deserves the title Barattoni bestows upon him as "a feminist ante litteram with visionary filmmaking."¹¹

Andrea Bini parenthetically mentions Pietrangeli in his chapter entitled Horror Cinema: The Emancipation of Women and Urban Anxiety in Popular Italian Cinema: Culture and Politics in a Postwar Society, writing that even in the Italian-style comedy, which duly captured the changing dynamics of Italian culture, rarely brought up issues of women’s emancipation (although there were exceptions, such as the films of Antonio Pietrangeli).¹² This tendency to reference Pietrangeli as an exception to the rule indicates exactly how much work is left to be done in examining the director’s films, particularly regarding the feminist and theoretical implications of Pietrangeli’s oeuvre. In Male Anxiety and Psychopathy in Film: Comedy Italian Style, Bini explicitly refers to the work there remains to be done on Pietrangeli when he states that "Pietrangeli switches commedia all’italiana’s point of view by putting to the foreground its female characters, victims of a sexist society only apparently democratic and egalitarian […] [commedia all’italiana’s] female characters deserve a specific investigation that goes beyond the scope of this book."¹³ This study intends to do just that; examine Pietrangeli’s female characters from a theoretical perspective in order to better understand how Pietrangeli’s films represent difference, both within the films themselves and historically, as documents representing gender. His status as exception begs the question, do his representations of women’s issues justify the title of feminist? Can Pietrangeli’s films be classified as feminist works?

Figure 0.2. Antonio Pietrangeli, Carla Del Poggio and Isa Miranda sign the Manifesto in Defense of Italian Cinema (Manifesto in difesa del cinema italiano) in 1948.

With kind permission of the Archivio Pietrangeli, Centro Cinema di Cesena.

The focus on gender and psychology in Pietrangeli’s unique cinema has been noted by numerous scholars; yet, to speak of Pietrangeli as a feminist has seemed a point of contention for many. The recent volume, Antonio Pietrangeli, The Director Who Loved Women, opens with the line that Antonio Pietrangeli is considered one of the great Italian directors of the ‘60s. Critics now consider some of his films […] on the same level as the successes of Antonioni, Fellini, and Visconti.¹⁴ Richard Peña, who mounted the 2015 retrospective on Pietrangeli at the Lincoln Center, in this same volume, goes on to characterize Pietrangeli as lying outside of the traditional definition of auteur, instead classifying him as a genius of the system, a term he borrows from Sarris. Having seen 9 of Pietrangeli’s 13 films, Peña states that watching Pietrangeli’s films, one can witness a director who is progressively falling in love with the camera and its powers.¹⁵ Yet despite the general positive valuation of Pietrangeli’s films and the general critical esteem in which he is held, Lorenzo Pellizari states that

his filmography has unique and unmistakable characteristics (in its thematics, poetics, and praxis of realization), with the following advantage that it warrants a specific treatment and the other evident advantage of having undergone—at that time and afterwards—a flattening of critical judgment both in terms of the agreeing evaluations and the lack of stimulus to revise these evaluations.¹⁶

As evidenced by this quote, Pellizari suggests that scholars have backed away from Pietrangeli’s films, neglecting to consider them in the light of new theoretical perspectives. Despite Piera Detassis’s obvious affinity for Pietrangeli, in her article A Castelluccio non ci torno più. Storie di donne nell’Italia di Pietrangeli," she discusses the gendered conflicts at the core of Pietrangeli’s films, yet she dismisses the idea of a Pietrangeli femminista outright. In discussing his female characters, Detassis states that it is the laceration that actually interests the director, and not emancipation […] and even though his gaze on the male world is without the wink of an eye—implacable as is rarely found in our cinema—, notwithstanding this, to speak of ‘feminism’ would be misleading.¹⁷ This study will argue that Pietrangeli’s attempts to understand this female laceration, both economically, socially and psychologically, are inherently feminist. Not coincidentally, the internal laceration of women is the basis of foundational feminist works such as The Second Sex and The Feminine Mystique, both texts contemporary to Pietrangeli’s own productions. When De Beauvoir writes of French women that their civil liberties remain abstract if there is no corresponding economic autonomy; the kept woman—wife or mistress—is not freed from the male just because she has a ballot paper in her hands […] work alone can guarantee her freedom,¹⁸ she is speaking of Pietrangeli’s women as well, who struggle with achieving the freedom that they have been guaranteed in a democratic, postwar Italy. Not coincidentally, economic independence and work are bound up and interfere with the personal relationships of most of Pietrangeli’s female characters.

Natalie Fullwood’s Cinema, Gender, and Everyday Space presents a choral vision of comedy, Italian style, commedia all’italiana, and she gives specific attention to Pietrangeli’s particular contribution to that chorus. In a thematic discussion of the Economic Miracle, its products, spaces and their effect on Italians, Fullwood’s study reveals the paradox of freedom in an era of consumerism and reevaluation of social roles. In defining the genre, she states that comedy, Italian style was not exclusively male. Antonio Pietrangeli in particular made several films with female protagonists.¹⁹ Later, in a note, Fullwood writes that there is a small body of scholarship that has addressed the comedies’ representation of gender […] However, these authors tend not to draw on wider theoretical debates concerning gender or its representations in cinema. She goes on to say that this is to some extent typical of Italian film studies, where the use of feminist film theory has lagged behind developments in studies of, for example, Hollywood or French film.²⁰ This is precisely the operation this study will undertake with Pietrangeli’s films, applying feminist film theory to the films in order to breathe new life into them and demonstrate the important contributions Pietrangeli made toward mainstreaming feminist issues surrounding sex and relationships, gender roles and women’s work in the decades following World War II.

In Fullwood’s exceptional article on Pietrangeli’s female triptych of La visita (1963), La parmigiana (1963) and Io la conoscevo bene (1965), he shies away from claiming Pietrangeli’s films for feminism. Pietrangeli’s films also contain several images and sequences which not only represent ‘common forms of representation in commodity culture’ but expose the way in which these forms work to sexualise and objectify women’s bodies. Pietrangeli’s films are metacinematic in that they expose the functioning of commodity fetishism in cinema, but, for Fullwood, this is not enough to excuse Pietrangeli’s use of this commodity form. She rightly points out that there is thus an ambiguity here between the exposure of the objectifying way in which Italian men look at women’s bodies and the replication of this type of looking.²¹ Yet the tension between Pietrangeli’s use of the female body and his exposure of cinema’s use of the female body offers to the feminist a space in which to work. His use of the body can be exploitative in certain contexts, but it is almost always qualified by his manipulation of the scene of exploitation for narrative or didactic ends that illuminate feminist discourse. This disruption in the fabric of male bourgeois cinema within the text of the film²² begs for a feminist reading of Pietrangeli’s works, which are then seen to adhere to the definition of feminist film put forth by Teresa De Lauretis in Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema.

What one may make, as a feminist filmmaker, are films working on a problem, in Heath’s words. Such must be, provisionally, the task of critical discourse as well: to oppose the simply totalizing discourse of final statements […] to seek out contradictions, heterogeneity, ruptures in the fabric of representation so thinly stretched—if powerful—to contain excess, division, difference, resistance; to open up critical spaces in the seamless narrative space constructed by dominant cinema and by dominant discourses […] finally, to displace those discourses that obliterate the claims of other social instances and erase the agency of practice in history.²³

By comparing this quote to a statement made by Pietrangeli, one can detect the similarities of the interests in showing division, difference, resistance, and in dissecting a discursive process, whether it be cinema or other commodity forms, that presents woman as the pioneer of a societal revolution against oppressive, patriarchal structures. This interest in the female moral, ethical and political perspective, what I will call Pietrangeli’s difference, his brand of cinematic feminism, is problematic when one considers, as Fullwood mentions above, Pietrangeli’s use of the female body as fetish object. This use of female body notwithstanding, Pietrangeli declares openly his interest in the female experience when he states in a 1967 interview with Bianco e nero,

It is not that I am Celestina from Il sole negli occhi or Adriana from Io la conoscevo bene or Pina from La visita like, you’ll excuse me the comparison, Flaubert was Emma Bovary. Rather, it is that in the process of social transformation that we have witnessed for twenty years or so in Italy, women are undeniably playing the role of the protagonist […] And it isn’t only a change in manners but instead a radical, profound interior revolution: a process that is still going on now and that is perhaps anticipating a wider evolution of Italian society, since it is true that often it is the legal institutions themselves that seek to hold it back. This is the reason, perhaps, why a woman is often at the center of the stories of my films […] Indeed, they are women who fight against society and at the end, succumb to it. But the truth is almost all of them are able to achieve what they wanted and therefore they are only defeated in a certain sense.²⁴

By identifying with but not transforming himself into his female protagonists, Pietrangeli is addressing major feminist concerns that can also be assimilated to those laid out by Adriana Cavarero in Il pensiero femminista. Un approccio teoretrico.²⁵ This Italian feminist speaks of three primary objectives of feminist theory: a criticism of patriarchy, the issue of equality and the question of subjectivity. By showing on-screen the process of this interior, female revolution, the psychological changes of his characters as well as the evolution of society as a whole, and in particular the legal institutions of Italian society, Pietrangeli shows that he shares these same critical approaches in his films. His cinema has a political and moral charge throughout, even when he is dealing with sex, family and marriage. The object of this study is to show how Pietrangeli’s cinema engages with questions of psychology and of sexual difference by problematizing cinematic conventions, especially gendered cinematic conventions, and issues of femininity in particular.

Pietrangeli, a doctor, a politician, was also a film critic, a screenwriter and occasional actor involved in neorealist circles from the inception of Italian postwar cinema. He was among the first and helped to theorize what an Italian national cinema would look like. Pietrangeli’s Italy was decidedly female. His critical writings, completed between 1940 and 1952, give voice to feminist concerns under the guise of realism. Called the most implacable pen, of Italian cinema by director Alessandro Blasetti, Pietrangeli’s harsh film reviews and foundational theoretical writings called for a return to realism as Italian national tradition and built the foundations for a renewed Italian cinema in the wake of World War II. In Pietrangeli’s writing exist parallels to issues that later feminists have with classical cinema: namely, a criticism of Hollywood and the studio system conventions, an interest in the role of the spectator, opprobrium over how Hollywood used psychoanalysis in film form and narrative and attention to the portrayal of women and female characters by male filmmakers. Let us turn to these issues one by one in Pietrangeli’s writings, beginning with the evidence of his feminist allegiance. Before delving into the director’s films in subsequent chapters, let us revisit Pietrangeli’s own theory of film.

Notes

1 Laura Mulvey, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, in Visual and Other Pleasures (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 20–21.

2 Mary Ann Doane, The Desire to Desire: The Woman’s Film of the 1940s (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 19.

3 Lino Micciché, Cinema italiano: gli anni ‘60 e oltre (Venezia: Marsilio, 2002), 110.

4 Tullio Masoni e Paolo Vecchi, " Degeneri e scostumati: commedia, satira, e farsa nel cinema sonoro italiano," in Commedia all’italiana: Angolazioni controcampi , ed. Riccardo Napolitano (Roma: Gangemi Editori, 1986), 81.

5 Gianni Rondolino, Il cinema italiano e il dibattito culturale, A cura di Ernesto G. Laura (Roma-Venezia: Marsilio Edizioni di Bianco e Nero, 2002), 492.

6 Gian Piero Brunetta, Il cinema neorealista italiano: Storia economica, politica e culturale (Roma: Edizioni Laterza, 2009), 39.

7 For more on Pietrangeli’s involvement in the Centro Sperimentale and his early neorealist formation, writing and involvement, see Adriano Aprà, Storie di guerra, De Robertiis e Rossellini, e Formalismo e il suo oltre; Bruno Torri, "Il caso Ossessione ; Patrizia Pistagnesi Le attrici e i modelli femminili; Ernesto Laura, Alida Valli, Anni ‘40, Da ‘fidanzata d’Italia,’ ad attrice; Mino Argentieri, Il cinema e antiseminismo; Callisto Cosulich, Venezia: le ‘mostre di guerra; Gianni Rondolino, Il cinema italiano e il dibattito culturale; Claudio Bisoni, Il cinema italiano nelle riviste e nei settimanali popolari," in Storia del cinema italiano, Vol VI 1940/1945 , A cura di Ernesto G. Laura (Roma-Venezia: Marsilio Edizioni di Bianco e Nero, 2002).

8 Brunetta, Il cinema neorealista italiano , 2009, 133.

9 For more on the Federazione Italiana dei Circoli del Cinema (FICC), see Virgilio Tosi, L’organizzazione della cultura cinematografica, in Storia del cinema italiano 1945/1948 , vol. VII (Venezia-Roma: Marsilio-Edizioni di Bianco & Nero, 2002), 497–518.

10 Callisto Cosulich, I conti con la realtà, in Storia del cinema italiano 1945/1948 , vol. VII (Venezia-Roma: Marsilio-Edizioni di Bianco & Nero, 2002), 26.

11 Luca Barattoni, Italian Post-Neorealist Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press), 4.

12 Andrea Bini, Horror Cinema: The Emancipation of Women and Urban Anxiety, in Popular Italian Cinema: Culture and Politics in a Postwar Society , ed. Flavia Brizio-Skov (London: I. B. Tauris, 2011), 53.

13 Andrea Bini, Male Anxiety and Psychopathy in Film: Comedy Italian Style (New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2015), 203.

14 Piera Detassis, Emiliano Morreale and Mario Sesti, Introduction, in Antonio Pietrangeli, the Director Who Loved Women (Rome: Edizioni Sabinae, 2015), 7.

15 Richard Pena, On Pietrangeli, in Antonio Pietrangeli, the Director Who Loved Women (Rome: Edizioni Sabinae, 2015), 15.

16 Lorenzo Pellizzari, Antonio Pietrangeli e la critica, in Il cinema di Antonio Pietrangeli , eds. Piera Detassis et al. (Venezia: Marsilio Editori, 1987), 55.

17 Piera Detassis, A Castelluccio non ci torno più. Storie di donne nell’Italia di Pietrangeli," in Il cinema di Antonio Pietrangeli , eds. Piera Detassis et al. (Venezia: Marsilio Editori, 1987), 47.

18 Simone De Beauvoir,