Pleasure of Writing: Critical Essays on Dacia Maraini

Toward a Poor Feminist Cinema: The Experimental Films of Dacia Maraini

Aine O'Healy Toward a Poor Feminist Cinema The Experimental Films of Dacia Maraini . Though Dacia Maraini is known primarily as a writer, she has produced a small body of work in film, most of which was completed during the 1970s. Maraini's directorial debut was the 1970 feature-length adaptation ofAlberto Moravia's novel L'amore coniugale (Conjugal love). This film, which met with neither criti~al nor financial success, was her only experience as director in mainstream cinema.1 Some years later, as the result of her growing commitment to the feminist movement, she became associated with a group of activist filmmakers, and directed a handful of documentary films' in 16mm on issues relating to women.2 Finally, between 1976 and 1979, following a period of intensive work in feminist theater, she made three low-budget, exp'erimental films in super-8, which she scripted, directed, shot, and edited almo~t entirely on her own. Though critically neglected and rarely screened, these short films are among the most interesting experimental works produced by feminist filmmakers in Italy at the time. Moreover, as visual texts, entirely devoid of dialogue, they are unique within the canon of Maraini's creative output. Maraini's shift from documentary or activist filmmaking in 16nim in the mid-1970s to formal experimentation in super-8 in the late 1970s is consistent with the trajectory of feminist self-expression during the course of the 1970s in Italy and other Western countries. In her seminal essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," published in 1975, Laura Mulvey distinguished two successive moments in feminist filmmaking at the time. The first was inspired by the consciousness-raising thrust of the women's movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and was marked by the effort to alter the content of films. The 246 Toward a Poor Feminist Cinema second phase, by contrast, was characterized by a concern with the ideological power of the cinematic process itself, and a shift by feminist filmmakers to formal experimentation in an attempt to appropriate the means of signification. Maraini's documentary work clearly corresponds to what Mulvey designates as the initial moment of feminist filmmaking , though Mulvey was describing a phenomenon she had observed within the context ofAnglophone feminism. Maraini made her first documentary, Aborto: parIano Ie donne (Abortion : women speak out), in 1976. The project was directly inspired by her participation in the campaign to legalize abortion in Italy and by her desire to raise public awareness regarding the real conditions of women's lives. In shooting this controversial film, she interviewed dozens of women ofdifferent ages in lower-income neighborhoods, all of whom had undergone the risky experience of illegal abortion. Her three-part documentary series on African women entitled Ritratti di donne africane (Portraits of African women), shot soon afterward, was much less controversial but it too was prompted by her concern with women's lives and her desire to engage others in similar reflection.·Taking a respectful, almost ethnographic, distance from their subject, these films-Le donne Lobi, Le donne Fanti, and Le donne Abidji-explore women's day-to-day existence in three tribal nations of West Africa, quietly articulating" a criticism of the problems that are specific to women's position within those communities. In her voiceover commentary to Le donne Lobi, for example, Maraini briefly discusses men's devaluation of female labor, and the plight of women without dowries in a society where marriages are still predicated on economic exchange. Meanwhile, the visual track pays close attention to the daily rituals of the women, their pleasures, and their toil, neither idealizing nor judging them. While these documentary films provide a fascinating picture ofthe conditions ofwomen's lives in a different part ofthe world, they aim at an excessively "objective" mode of address, a problem that Maraini herself soon acknowledged. The cautious distance employed by Maraini in her approach to documentary filmmaking was, she soon realized, a function of her relationship to the cinematic apparatus itself. Still uncomfortable with the camera, she felt that her task as filmmak~r 247 Aine O'Healy was to "say" things in an expressive medium that still seemed alien to her ("Tema" 62-63). Her subsequent'assumption of a different cinematic language was articulated through a kind of filmmaking that finally afforded her "the pleasure of looking, touching, and understanding" the image in her own terms (63). This...