Conclusion

Abstract

Women, Desire, and Power in Italian Cinema has focused on the representation of the roles that women have played in twentieth-century Italian cinema. The choice of this topic has been dictated by the realization that women are essential characters in the plots of Italian films, even if their roles are usually limited to their traditional social function as wives and mothers. Italian cinema is indeed prevailingly concerned with gender relationships and especially with those within the family system, where women as wives and mothers are the primary influential factor. This study has sketched a chronological outline of how women have been represented in Italian cinema from its origins to the end of the 1990s and, rather than claiming to have exhausted the topic, it has just provided an initial general overview of it, which I hope will inspire several more specific and critically valid later studies.