Women, Feminism and Italian Cinema

Abstract

Italian cinema experienced its peak of domestic and international popularity in the years between the ‘economic miracle’ of the late 1950s and the social and political turmoil of the 1970s. But how did the growing development of the feminist movement in this period impact on Italian film culture? And what role did that film culture play in women’s lives? This book explores the multiple intersections between feminism and Italian cinema from the perspective of women’s everyday lives and relationship with the medium. Drawing from a feminist approach to Gramscian cultural theory, the book builds an archival counter-history of Italian cinema in which women took part as movie-goers, activists and practitioners. By doing so, it reconstructs the many aspects of a collective historical agency that challenged cinema’s patriarchal structures and strategies of invisibilisation.