Introduction

Abstract

The above quotation is from Monica Vitti,¹ a well-known “diva” of Italian cinema whose acting and directorial expertise I greatly admire, and it succinctly provides a good explanation of the roles that women are supposed to play in Italian cinema, thus preparing the readers for the main topic of this book. This type of research, according to Christine Gledhill, has already been undertaken in the United States with results that seem to validate Monica Vitti’s statement, as they uphold the view that in film, women “do not have a voice, that the female point of view is not heard.”² To my knowledge, this type of research has not yet been undertaken in Italy in book form, and it is the goal of this book to raise more interest for this topic. For several years, while teaching and doing research on Italian film and gender studies as a professor of Italian at the University of California at Los Angeles, I thought of combining these two areas of study in a book that would collect my observations on the representation of women in Italian cinema. Women’s presence in Italian cinema is indeed paramount, as most Italian films seem to weave their narrative plots around beautiful women and their love relationships with men. The film discourse, however, seems to limit the relevance of the female protagonists’ role vis-à-vis the male protagonists’ role, and consequently the film spectators, faced with fascinating images of beautiful but powerless women on the screen, find themselves constantly confronted with what Nancy Chodorov calls “the intertwining of sexuality, gender, inequality and power.”³

It is incredible how very few Italian directors and scriptwriters are seriously interested in what a woman thinks or by what a woman is moved… In cinema, when they write a script, nobody writes for women characters. How many times a scriptwriter has told me: “My dear Monica, how can I write cinema stories for you? You are a woman and what does a woman do? She does not go to war; she has no profession… What can I have you do? Only a love story can I make you do; that you have children, suffer, he leaves you, you are desperate …” You see, this is the only function they give me.

—Monica Vitti