INTRODUCTION

The current economic, institutional and political crisis is generating new forms of inequality against women in social representations as well as in political and legal projects. The “neo-colonized” female body is conveyed by the transmission of stereotypes through the mass-medias, and involves a process of building mental images of masculine and feminine, using subliminal conditioning socio-cultural mechanisms. The contrast produced by images of women devoted primarily to the care of home and family, worried about their appearance and involved in roles of low prestige[1], and, on the contrary, by images of males addicted to the domination and the seduction, has affected and still affects the spectator, who identifies with traditional representations, related to a “positive” male and a “negative” feminine[2].
The principle of subordination of women is a social construction based on the field of symbolic exchanges[3]. It is therefore appropriate to refer to non-exclusionary cultural strategies that can redefine the individual and collective identities, in order to design a future founded on self-determination of women, and on the centrality of relationships and exchange. In this sense, one can not ignore the ability of cinema to construct new critical practice to reality. The film is a symbolic representation of the world, and it contributes to the “social construction of the subject, shaping its identity and the way it represents the reality[4]“. Like the real body, even on the movies the body acquires meaning only within construction processes aimed at specific historical, cultural, ideological, and institutional practices[5]. A critical point of view does not manifest itself in bringing the woman to the stereotype of an entity unable to act in the events, but return her in the role of historical agent; so we must consider those authors whose works are characterized by two fundamental characteristics. On the one hand, the fact of being “open texts”, able to create and disseminate new socio-cultural representations, offering those who watch them the opportunity to live in a “space of possibility[6]“. On the other hand, the fact of being devices which give the status of reality to achieve awareness of their own and others’ subjectivity, for the construction of concrete spaces of active citizenship.
We should therefore consider the films of Cecilia Mangini and Alina Marazzi, who in different periods have questioned the long-standing cliché of the woman considered a passive object of male gaze, showing in their films the gap between real women, their lives and their desires, and how they were represented in the film industry.
When it comes to female characters in film alternatives referenced above, in the seventies, the Feminist Film Theory, and an independent cinema, especially Anglo-American (which stand out and Ida Lupino Dorothy Arzner) can permanently break the point of view Single men, encouraging the active role of women on the big screen. Key issues, such as the emergence of a new awareness of the experience related to the representation of women in film on one hand, and the empowerment of female pleasure from the male point of view on the other hand, seem to be closely related to Feminist Film Theory. However, women’s film history can not ignore these two Italian directors, who have contributed to the recognition of full citizenship to women in male-dominated industry. Their films offer a valuable opportunity to investigate the forms of expression and representation of women, not connected to the traditional logic of the show and the star system.

WOMEN’S MOVEMENT IN ITALY

The feminist revolution in Italy between nineteenth and twentieth century coincided with the advance of modernization processes: in those years, throughout the industrialized West, women are gaining greater visibility in the public sector ad in private space.
Until the middle of the 800, women with a predetermined destiny for thousands of years, to become wife and then mother, had no access to public office because they were deemed inadequate and therefore confined to an inferior role, limited to family, child care and household chores[7].
In the second half of the nineteenth century in Europe, thanks to the industrial revolution and its continuing upheaval, women gained greater freedom of movement in social life. They began, albeit with difficulty, to be granted the right to break the economic and symbolic ties that bound them to the father or husband. The outlook on life changed where women could be regarded as thinking subjects, and they could aspire to become politically active citizens, discussing wage labor, civil rights, and right to education[8].
Thus was born the emancipationist and with it the model of the modern woman, feminine matrix of multiple identities which foreshadowed the life of women in the twentieth century with all their contradictions. No more satisfied to be considered the core of the bourgeois family, head of the first cell of a state model that had been arguing with the Risorgimento, the Italian women claimed the right to vote and participation in public life, hitherto the exclusive domain of men. Out on the streets, they make speeches, demonstrate, communicate with others, joining with other revolutions, social movements (for example, with ups and downs to the worker), to participate actively in political life and public space.
This movement towards the acquisition of a mature awareness and new rights in the Fascist period waned since the women were no longer seen as an organized political party. The dictatorship recognized only two kinds of women’s associations: the Fascist Women’s, who were supported and reinforced, and the catholic women, just tolerated. Therefore, the Italian emancipationist movements had to deal with the “new woman” of the First World War, learning to relate to the male hierarchy, militaristic attitudes, positions based on biological determinism as a scientific and smuggled, primarily the narrow-minded conception of motherhood functional to the policy of the regime. While not having available channels with which to express their interests or discontent, some divergent women were able to express their ideas and became protagonist, albeit limited. Thus, women of the “Ventennio” were not passive victims without hope, but the unrest, rebellion, deception, skepticism and growing awareness of their rights of women and citizens were quite common even among those who took no active part the partisan struggle.
At the end of the Second World War, and in the fifties, the Italian women experienced the opportunity to give voice to their desire for autonomy and creativity, facing up to the rest of the world. In particular, they heard how the American women lived through the newspapers, but above all through the films (which were popular then newspapers, as many women were illiterate). The distance which they felt between their world and that of American women was significant. The film has created myths, but also the goals, and targets, not only in relation to possession of a modern kitchen, a washing machine, a refrigerator and other appliances, which allow the woman to toil less and have more time to itself, but also proposing family and loving models. Not to mention the social and political rights: for example, while the American women already had the right to vote, Italian women have obtained it only after December 1945; on January 31, while Italy was divided and the north was subjected to the “Nazism occupation”, the Council of Ministers chaired by Ivanoe Bonomi issued a decree that recognized the right of women to vote[9]. In 1946, the Italian women went to the polls for the first time and, in spite of those who had predicted a low turnout of women, many of them went to vote, registering a high percentage both in local elections in the spring, and in the elections of June. It was an important moment because it was going to affect the subjective dimension: an achievement of individuality as well as citizenship. That “secret vote” meant to have of themselves and their lives outside the control of fathers, husbands and brothers.
From the fifties on, thanks to the new needs created by industrialization, urbanization and the development of capitalism, a different mentality spread than the female labor, thus promoting the mass education of girls.
These were the years of the economic miracle; a miracle, however, involves only a part of privileged population, and especially in the South the rest of people work from 13 to 15 hours a day and women are the most penalized group. Italy is a country that is still conservative and patriarchal. In the sixties the claims of feminism was accompanied by a degree of economic prosperity, and a slight renewal of costumes followed a more general process of confrontation between the generations that led young people to challenge the family and the institutions perceived as too rigid.
In the seventies feminists, particularly in the U.S., revealed that despite the achievements of civil, political and social rights and the overcoming of economic exploitation, the work of emancipation was not yet complete because they had to deep questioning about the essence, the root, which continued to keep alive the patriarchy. They identified it with discrimination in the sphere of sexual reproduction, the biological difference, which has always been transformed into the difference in the roles and social difference that relegates women in conditions of subordination. Even in Italy feminism attributed a political role to sexuality. As a place of entrenched power dynamics, sexuality becomes a battleground, and sexual liberation is understood as liberation from the rules that patriarchy and bourgeois forces to maintain male dominance. This is the time in which the Italian feminists shocked the well-meaning burning bras in the streets and urging others to discover themselves and their own bodies, as from the sexual organs, crying “I am of my own”. For the first time the feminists took to the streets separately from men: is 8 March 1972 and the event takes place in the famous Campo de Fiori in Rome, with nearly twenty thousand women from all social classes, and different generations are united by desire for change, to count, to manage one’s own body. On either side of the square there is a massive police presence that soon charges protesters and is able to clear the square. However the event will mark a milestone in the history of feminism.
The words become slogans: “Donna è bello”, “Donne non si nasce ma si diventa”, dreaming of expanding the boundaries of political and social change. Subsequently, feminism has anchored the concept of sex to identity and not to gender – emphasizing the body as a women-specific – but this did not put the concept away by its instability and its perpetual transition, exposed to the crisis of encoded models, to discover the identity as multiple and fragmented from the eighties onwards.
Since the 70′s commitment to identify cultural experiences, as individual and collective, and the rise of a free female subjectivity, including through cultural facilities in the struggle for women’s citizenship rights, contribute to the affirmation of a thinking of otherness and interpreter of the contemporary world of emergencies in film: many directors, screenwriters, producers and performers embody the thought of difference, causing a scandal or consensus, however, by arguing.
In the eighties, however, with the demystification of current ideologies, the need for a real attention to the problems of women has set. In a historical sense, identifying the traditions that have led and organized the female exclusion and implemented practices to address this exclusion; and in a theoretical sense, making the difference a value with which to orient in the crisis of traditional values presented itself with the postmodern.
This produced not only political and social results, but also some effects in the field of knowledge, who are institutionalized or at least mentioned with the term of “feminist studies”, “women’s studies”, “female studies”, or “gender studies”. Women Studies have given priority to the theme of the centrality of gendered subjects in the construction of knowledge, highlighting the ways in which these are communicated and transmitted – and their subsequent rethinking of the methods of investigation, collection of sources and their interpretation.

ESSERE DONNE

The filmmaker, photographer and writer Cecilia Mangini realizes in 1965 Essere donne, pioneering documentary on the plight of Italian workers, in which women’s history becomes an integral part of contemporary life. For the first time in Italian cinema, the long-time ignored lives of working women are investigated in view of an indisputable and indispensable contribution to the socio-economic growth of the country. Essere donne offers the opportunity to reflect on the past understood as a valuable asset to interpret this. In the documentary of the fifties and sixties the woman considered as an active worker never appears. Filming working women was considered a difficult task, breaking the taboos, undermining the stereotype conveyed by the commercial cinema, gratified by female characters based on their role of wives and mothers. However, addressing workers of the factories and the countryside has allowed Cecilia Mangini to establish a picture surprisingly rich, in which the traditional image of women relegated to a marginal condition, “functional” to the figures of fathers, husbands and children gave way to that of a world of characters able to reconcile family responsibilities and ambitions of emancipation. The need to reflect on the condition of working women of the industries of Milan and the countryside of Puglia was fueled by the crucial support of the Communist Party of those years. But it is fair to say that, for the director, the pressure to analyze the ways in which the Italian woman trying to assert their autonomy in the half of the sixties, contributing decisively, despite persistent discrimination and cultural norms, the so-called economic boom, came from the desire to reflect on herself and on her role of a director and screenwriter in the fifties and sixties. Wondering what it meant to be women in factories and farms during the economic miracle, therefore, manifested the need to inquire about being a woman and make films in that same historical period.
Here emerges the stimulating aspect of the documentary, which incorporates the gestures of daily life of workers and laborers of those years and shows the distortion, put into practice by the economic system, of the boundaries between public and private sectors of Italian women. Essere donne shows the experience of working women in the factories of the North, with the assembly, and the fragmentation, and in the rural South, still widely referred to the phenomenon of illegal hiring. It is an anti-theatrical documentary, which as “poor, small-scale, ill-suited to transition to the market or industry” implies a “reduction to the essentials of cinema: the body and the machine[10]“. The woman in the documentary by Cecilia Mangini is the one who is not doing the actress by trade; on the contrary, she plays effectively the role of workers and peasants.
The protagonists are women sharing a common pride and dignity. Even the testimony of the tobacco’s laborers shows they are not passive victims, but individual women wishing to express their autonomy. So, the respect to those authorities most often indifferent to the new forms of claims by the female gender goes along with the demand for greater protection of labor rights, and implementation of social policies in defense of the working mothers. And the strike becomes a channel through which express, even at a high price sometimes, the now widespread intolerance against a system that a continuing effort to ensure the interests of employers rather than the essential forms of social assistance (pre-schools nest) continues to feed a female model (accepted by the majority of women themselves) condescending and reassuring. The images of the female manifestation repressed by the police represent the will of Cecilia Mangini to reflect on the “denial” status of women, and the consequent need for change. The doubts and worries of respondents on the one hand, and the determination and awareness of their rights on the other hand are reflected in the meta-analytic and reflective gaze of the director, who questions reasons of dissatisfaction on women, originated from a system which is difficult to change. To film workers’ sacrifices in the industry of the economic boom meant to reflect on their difficulties in conquering space usability professional in the film industry.
The desire of the author to identify with the working women during the olive harvest in Puglia, or with those who had to control the frames in the North creates a genuine political counter-investigation, able to examine the folds of Italian society. Why shoot the “other” does not mean necessarily to lock him up in the stereotyped patterns of the model, which inhibit the emancipation of the beholder. Instead, look for diversity as an object of analysis lead to reconsider the meaning of reality. On the subject of the origins of the identity of the Italian working women in the early sixties, it is essential to emphasize the historical and cultural humus of those years. Divided between the centripetal forces of tradition and the centrifugal desire for independence, the protagonists are women managed to combine two jobs (and family audience) because of their fierce dignity, the result of a past never static or homogenous. On their way to emancipation, the background of women of 1965 formed by feminist associations sprang up at the end of the Second World War – among which the UDI – Union of Italian Women, founded in 1944 by the experience of the resistance civil and military defense groups of women, stood out for its commitment in 1946 for the right to vote and stand, and then, from 1956 to 1968, in the struggles for the recognition of equal pay, the work of farmers, and social services such as childcare centers. And of course, a profound anti-fascist spirit united hundreds of thousands who gathered in the Italian association during the two decades following the end of World War II. A spirit also fueled by the memory of the Fascist laws that tended to discriminate against women who worked.
Discrimination implemented by fascism in the field of women’s work returned in a much more widespread practice of control. Especially the law of 3 April 1926, which prohibited strikes and lockouts, and the establishment of the Labour Court, eventually damaged the interests of workers in general, to the benefit of the employers. The most affected were women, however, since the fascist policy was explicitly designed to support reproductive function. Fits into this context, an article titled Donna e macchina appeared on August 31, 1934 “Popolo d’Italia”, in which Mussolini said that women’s work “masculinized woman, caused man unemployment, fostered independence and a fashion contrary to the birth that would lead to population decline, deprived the man not only of labor but also of dignity[11]“. On the other hand, precisely because of its realism, the regime knew he could not do without women, which is why many times it assumed contradictory positions for them. Some studies show about that on the ambiguous nature of the fascist policies against a female world in constant evolution[12], and argue that the results of a national women’s fascist activism went beyond the intentions of the regime itself. Others, however, bear out the theory of a repressive regime[13] on the work of emancipation, and unable to protect that same right to motherhood that, at first exalted, was later denied by the Second World War[14].
The effects of the fascist contradictions manifested themselves, since 1940, with the entry into the war. As already happened in the past, therefore, the war accelerated the process now underway to transform the role of women in Italian society. The most productive and versatile it was, needless to say, labor in the factories and the sharecropping sector, whose needs and problems were considered fiercely flexible at first by the emergency of war, and later by the urgency of reconstruction.
About the relationship between women and the square, Cecilia Mangini recalled during a recent debate the influence that had on her fascist forms of collective life, emphasizing the importance of regime ceremonies – “on those occasions we could go out and learn different forms of participation by those traditionally proposed by the Church” – by which Mussolini mobilized the masses in general, and female ones in particular. These practices conveyed a real desire for emancipation of women, even regimented, which – like the men themselves – under the dictatorship, took part in the collective life of the country, establishing a sense of autonomy and their drive toward emancipation[15].
Such reflection does not need to reconsider the ideological position (avowedly anti-fascist) of the director, but rather to avert the danger of creating a rift between the present and the past of those years. Cecilia Mangini was well aware of the specific nature of the events in the Fascist period. Emilio Gentile wrote that the man in fascism is not a subject with an identity (personal or collective, as in the case of the worker), but a cellular element of the crowd; his condition, in fact, turns out to be intimately linked to the reduction of “the spectacle of mass political participation[16].” For her part, Simonetta Falasca Zamponi notes that the regime’s refusal to grant a mass independent political subjectivity was the result of his association with the proletariat[17]. It was this, a balance of Mussolini’s policy, which in keeping with the ritual construction of his legend established the necessary detachment to the people. In particular, one of the causes that justified the rejection of the masses was their feminine essence, to which the fascist regime contrasted the image of a male leader. Just as female, the masses were “ruled with enthusiasm rather than with interest”, and “it was necessary to take account of their mystical side[18]“. In this sense, the LUCE reports show the great meetings in Piazza Venezia with the usual pattern characterized by high / vertical (the leader) and low / horizontal (the crowd).
Thanks to the great experience on Neorealist cinema, which stands on ruins of II World War, Essere donne reversed this pattern, giving voice to female subjectivities. This film has fostered the emergence of a new historical consciousness, and has broken established taboos and stereotypes, giving visibility to female configurations that can, despite the difficult socio-cultural trends, carve out specific spaces of active citizenship.

VOGLIAMO ANCHE LE ROSE

In Italy, the women’s revolution was more symbolic than factual; however a revolution for this can not be said to be less considerable. Alina Marazzi tells us very well this way of emancipation of Italian women from the late sixties until the end of the seventies in her documentary Vogliamo anche le rose, (Italy, 2007): a montage of archival footage and private diary fragments, but also a research documentary full of emotions, sensations and colours. A personal elaboration that allows the audience to trace the history of that decade full of changes and transformations of the society and the family, such as changing roles, life cycles, myths, fashions, disease, but also the transformation of women’s identities and women’s bodies, myths. The twentieth century was the century of women’s achievements, both in law and in the transformation of the cultural achievements, laboriously achieved through public and private battles, sometimes with very high costs on a personal level. In fact, thanks to them the life experience of women has changed significantly, so that it can not be called only in terms of discrimination, subjugation and marginalization. Yet these gains are not irreversible, we must be careful and vigilant. Hence the need to tell and produce memory, since the consolidation of the position of women in society and culture, depends on the value acquired by the thought of women[19].
Alina’s successful attempt is also that to remedy those “lapses of memory” – as Annarita Buttafuoco has shrewdly appealed – which resulted in the removal of a movement that for more than sixty years had occupied a place in the debate of liberal culture[20].
Above all, the film tells the need for change in relation to the collective political and social experience of women, but also to the most intimate and private experiences of individual women.
The awareness of the female subject passes through a self-locked and non-dogmatic comparison with other women who have started the same process of self-transformation: it is from her own biography that every woman has access to the “right”, its specificity, to experiment their mobility and break the divide between discourse and experience, specialized knowledge and relational attitudes, intellectual work and political urgency.
In enhancing the experience and the female subjectivity, the work of Alina addresses the issue of women’s language and narrative device which makes the affirmation and expression of identity, the legitimacy of female subjectivity through their story, faced to overcome the gap that still exists between women’s subjective experience and symbolic structure adequate to represent and signify. In Vogliamo anche le rose the ability of introspection plays with the voices of others, with the diaries that give away the existential projects, the desires and the motivations of our ancestors. With a skilful editing the director picks up some items; existential testimonies taken in particular by three diaries from the Archive of Pieve Santo Stefano, whose authors, Anita, Teresa and Valentina, write their memoirs in 1967, ’75 and ’79. The diaries are reworked in collaboration with the writer Silvia Balestra.
All three united in the experience of living in Rome, the protagonists are paradigmatic of different and equal conditions at the same time. Anita is from a middle class family with a Catholic upbringing overwhelming that comes from parents and enrols at the university just as the explosion of ’68; Teresa comes to Rome from a village in the province of Bari to undergo illegal abortion; Valentina, is a politically active woman who frequents the collective Via del Governo Vecchio. For these women, writing is the custodian of authentic, leading them in their own revolution.
The texts of the three main characters, assigned to the items off of the actresses Anita Caprioli, Teresa Saponangelo and Valentina Carnelutti, were mounted with visual materials from super8 or experimental film, conversations, pictures of the time, magazines and picture stories, film footage (Teche Rai, various Film archives, etc.) and private funds. Resistance of women in that crucial decade is shown both in relation to the cultural market, both in relation to traditional household tasks of women – who are told in their “inside”, recovering the memory of a past far from being sweetened. By the documentary women learn the forms of association, and political movements of opinion that, in the diversity of contexts of mental, cultural and religious paradigms, have accompanied the configurations of the feminine in our country. The document provides the tools to reflect on their history through a focus of identity of the private and the sexuality. The faces on the screen are those of girls of the time but the voices, the images and the fragments of lives, damage to the private shadows that became collective experience, and need for revolution and conscience: shadows with which each woman compares in her unique becoming to regain possession of intimate events, to integrate past and present, to emphasize her uniqueness.
The story of the plot between the complex history and histories is very interesting: we are under the impression that it is a “normal” strength and dignity grown at high risk for loneliness, but always aimed towards a genuine and profound communication of its difference. The feeling of exclusion and the desire to belong, the reason of otherness, both biographical and ideological, far from being an effective element of exclusion or marginalization of cultural purchase, gain, in the feminist discourse as in that of Alina Marazzi, a great evocative power.
The social and cultural differences, the current difficulties for the affirmation of civil rights for women and for recognition of their self-determination, the ways in which over the years the work is organized and the income is distributed within families, show as there still are considerable differences in everyday life. Of course, it is necessary to renew our commitment to acquire a status in the family and society, which respects the equality and, at the same time, guarantees the development of female characteristics. Therefore, in the sharing of our time, a changing time, which breaks down the barriers between East and West, between South and North, in the reshuffle as a prelude to meet new people and full of meaning for women and their relations, the study of subjectivity in social relations, needs, instincts and emotions in daily time plays an important role.
The film’s title, Alina Marazzi explains in his director’s notes, takes up the famous slogan “We want bread, but roses too”, with which in 1912 the textile workers defined their participation in a strike of weeks in Massachusetts: the bread is what is needed, fundamental rights, what is now taken for granted. But women have fought for a world that also gave space to the poetry of roses and often time does not coincide with the hopes of the time in history. And, as pointed out by Alina, is a battle that requires, more than ever, confrontation with contradictory aspects. On the one hand the pulsion to self-determination and, secondly, a desire for dependence, the desire of the relation: the need for affective which some women claim to have passed, but it fails again.
The oppression of women is not exclusively linked to socio-economic condition[21]; their subordination can not be reduced solely to that set of rules and social prejudices that define her in stereotypical roles, which would be dismantled until the final liberation. The question is played at a deeper level: it invests the structuring of the subject woman, the size of the unconscious, the problem of the imaginary, the symbolic identifications, and the language. It should be added however, that even at a collective level, the change should not be taken for granted: at the end of the film the director shows the key dates of the liberation (from the referendum for abortion to the liberalization of contraception).
The richness of women is, therefore, in all its variety and complexity, always hovering between internalizations, representations, knowledge and social practices, creating emotions and narratives that produce a different culture, more open to differences with which constantly come to terms. The movie gives voice and soul to different women, often alone, resisting against a power without a face for their right to life and health; these Italians do not give up for their own growth, contrasting oppressive and insane families, coercive relationships, reactionary environments in which gossip and slander are the only purpose of existence. They are rebels, sometimes with humour, and even with joy, sometimes leading to extremes their subversive plan. In this perspective, the female practice of citizenship shows its presence to other women in the world, and even to themselves to become citizens of the world, healing the rift between the planetary state and civil society, building on ties woven with oneself, with others, with work, with their environment, but also on the experiences and desires.

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