Envisioning Our Mother’s Face

Abstract

Alina Marazzi occupies a very special place in the history of Italian women filmmakers for her experimental style and feminist approach.¹ By using found footage and home movies Alina Marazzi questions the Western representation of the “Woman” and re-visions real women’s complex interior landscapes. She pays particular attention to motherhood (either realized or unfulfilled) as a problematic condition of identity and investigates the crucial role of the mother-daughter relationship. Marazzi’s trilogy Un’ora sola ti vorrei (2002), Vogliamo anche le rose (2007), and Tutto parla di te (2012) explores the sense of displacement, failure, and inadequacy women face whether they choose to perform traditional social roles or to reject the socially validated idea of happiness. Marazzi’s work also reflects on the difficulties for women in struggling for freedom and self-fulfillment in an oppressive society.

I would feel as if I were drugged, sitting there, watching those damned dolls, thinking what a success they would have made of their lives if they had been women. Satin skin, silk hair, sawdust heart—all complete.

—Jean Rhys

The first blow against the monolithic accumulation of traditional film conventions (already undertaken by radical filmmakers) is to free the look of the camera into its materiality in time and space and the look of the audience into dialectics, passionate detachment. […] Women, whose image has continually been stolen and used for this end, cannot view the decline of the traditional film form with anything much more than sentimental regret.

—Laura Mulvey

The sorrow of the stranger might give us a different angle on happiness, not because it teaches us what it is like or must be like to be a stranger but because it might estrange us from the very happiness of the familiar.

—Sara Ahmed