In this Book

  • Streetwalking on a Ruined Map: Cultural Theory and the City Films of Elvira Notari
  • Book
  • Giuliana Bruno
  • 2021
  • Published by: Princeton University Press
    • Viewed
    • View Citation
buy this book Buy This Book in Print
summary

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

restricted access Download Full Book
  1. Cover Page
  2. pp. 1-2
  3. restricted access
    • Download PDF Download
  1. Title, Copyright
  2. pp. I-iv
  3. restricted access
    • Download PDF Download
  1. Dedication Page
  2. pp. v-vi
  3. restricted access
    • Download PDF Download
  1. Contents
  2. pp. vii-viii
  3. restricted access
    • Download PDF Download
  1. Acknowledgments
  2. pp. ix-xii, 1-2
  3. restricted access
    • Download PDF Download
  1. Mapping Out Discourse: An Introduction
  2. pp. 3-8
  3. restricted access
    • Download PDF Download
  1. Part I. Suppressed Knowledge of Elvira Coda Notari and Neapolitan Film: A Historical Panorama
  1. 1. Questions of History and Film in Italian Culture
  2. pp. 11-23
  3. restricted access
    • Download PDF Download
  1. 2. Film Journals and Film Historiography
  2. pp. 24-32
  3. restricted access
    • Download PDF Download
  1. Part II. Film In The Cityscape: A Topoanalysis of Spectatorship
  1. 3. Streetwalking around Plato's Cave, or The Unconscious Is Housed
  2. pp. 35-57
  3. restricted access
    • Download PDF Download
  1. 4. Spectatorial Embodiments : Anatomies of the Visible and the Female Bodyscape
  2. pp. 58-76
  3. restricted access
    • Download PDF Download
  1. Part III. Manufacturing Film Culture
  1. 5. Dora Film: An Urban Production House
  2. pp. 79-104
  3. restricted access
    • Download PDF Download
  1. 6. Women at Work: Manufacturing Movies
  2. pp. 105-121
  3. restricted access
    • Download PDF Download
  1. 7. Dora Film of America: Women and Immigrants in the American Dream
  2. pp. 122-136
  3. restricted access
    • Download PDF Download
  1. 8. Censorship: A Cut on the Wings of Desire
  2. pp. 137-144
  3. restricted access
    • Download PDF Download
  1. Part IV. The Metropolitan Texture
  1. 9. Fragments of an Analyst's Discourse: Lacunae
  2. pp. 147-160
  3. restricted access
    • Download PDF Download
  1. 10. The Architecture of Public Melodrama: A Corporeality of the Street
  2. pp. 161-186
  3. restricted access
    • Download PDF Download
  1. 11. Between the Feast and the Law: The Carnivalization of Narration
  2. pp. 187-200
  3. restricted access
    • Download PDF Download
  1. 12. City Views: Filmic Cityscape, Artistic Perspective, and Touristic Travel
  2. pp. 201-230
  3. restricted access
    • Download PDF Download
  1. Part V. Female Geographies
  1. 13. Anatomy of an Analysis: The Authorial Noir
  2. pp. 233-240
  3. restricted access
    • Download PDF Download
  1. 14. Popular Cinema and Women's Literature: The Transito of Female Discourse
  2. pp. 241-254
  3. restricted access
    • Download PDF Download
  1. 15. Medical Figures: Hysteria and the Anatomy Lesson
  2. pp. 255-277
  3. restricted access
    • Download PDF Download
  1. 16. Topographies of Dark Female Pleasures
  2. pp. 278-308
  3. restricted access
    • Download PDF Download
  1. 17. Written on the Body: Eroticism, Death, and Hagiography
  2. pp. 309-328
  3. restricted access
    • Download PDF Download
  1. Notes
  2. pp. 329-390
  3. restricted access
    • Download PDF Download
  1. Filmography
  2. pp. 391-398
  3. restricted access
    • Download PDF Download
  1. List of Illustrations
  2. pp. 399-404
  3. restricted access
    • Download PDF Download
  1. Index
  2. pp. 405-418
  3. restricted access
    • Download PDF Download
Back To Top