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UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Los Angeles Antonio Pietrangeli, The Director of Women: Feminism, Film Theory and Practice in Postwar Italy A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in Italian by Emma Katherine Van Ness 2013 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Antonio Pietrangeli, The Director of Women: Feminism, Film Theory and Practice in Postwar Italy by Emma Katherine Van Ness Doctor of Philosophy in Italian University of California, Los Angeles, 2013 Professor Thomas J. Harrison, Chair This study will examine the work of Antonio Pietrangeli both as film theorist and as director. Critics have long considered Pietrangeli an anomaly, difficult to place into genres, since his cinema focused primarily on female protagonists. This dissertation will investigate the idea of Pietrangeli as a feminist practitioner, tying his early writings on film from the late Forties as well as his later film production from the Fifties and Sixties to feminist and film theory. While some of this theory was contemporary to Pietrangeli, what this study will show is that he was anticipating later developments in critical, feminist, and structuralist theory, in particular apparatus theory and psychoanalytic theory in film studies. Since Pietrangeli has a history of being marginalized, misunderstood, and ignored in Italian film studies, this dissertation seeks to remedy that omission by bringing his work into dialogue with other established film critics and auteurs in order to show that his unique voice, both in theory and in praxis, deserves scholarly attention and consideration. ii Claudio Fogu Lucia Re Edward F. Tuttle Thomas J. Harrison, Chair University of California, Los Angeles 2013 iii To Zoe Flaminia, the only true Roman in the family, romana de’ Roma, that she may grow up knowing that what is most interesting is often found in the margins, that the story untold is often that which deserves most to be told. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgments p. vi Vita p. vii Introduction : Antonio Pietrangeli, From Theory to Praxis, An Introduction p. 1 to Pietrangeli’s Theory of Cinema Chapter One : Maid from the Margins: Il sole negli occhi p. 29 Chapter Two : The Coming of Age of a Teenage Bride: Nata di marzo p. 65 Chapter Three : Legally Bound: Political Realism and Prostitution in p. 96 Adua e le compagne Chapter Four : Fantasmi a Roma: Sur-realism and the Time-Image p. 133 Chapter Five : Too Much Woman: Marriage, Power, and Excess in La visita p. 157 Chapter Six : The Dora Problem: La parmigiana, Piatti, Pietrangeli and Freud p. 185 Chapter Seven : Breaking Faith: Il magnifico cornuto, Envy, p. 214 and the Crisis of Vision Chapter Eight : Io la conoscevo bene... Or did I? Antonio Pietrangeli, p. 244 the Author, and the Actress Conclusion : Antonio Pietrangeli, Feminism, and Film Theory p. 269 Bibliography p. 282 Notes p. 286 v Acknowledgements This long and laborious project would not have been possible without the help and support of the following people; first and foremost, Professor Thomas J. Harrison, as well as the other members of my Ph.D. Committee, including Professor Lucia Re, Professor Claudio Fogu, and Professor Edward F. Tuttle. I must also thank Professors Danielle Hipkins and Catherine O’Rawe as well as Dr. Natalie Fullwood for their contributions and input. In addition, for facilitating my archival research and for his expertise on Pietrangeli, I owe a debt of gratitude to Antonio Maraldi, head of the Centro Cinema Cesena, as well as the rest of the staff of the Pietrangeli Archive there. Thanks as well to Paolo Pietrangeli, the director’s son, who helped generate ideas and inspire this study. Thank you to for the following copyright permissions: Reporters Associati for the photo of Pietrangeli in the mirror, Titanus Films for images related to Io la conoscevo bene, Italian Culture Journal and Maney Publishing for allowing me to reprint here a modified version of the article, “Io la conoscevo bene... or did I? Antonio Pietrangeli, the Author and the Actress, and the Archivio Pietrangeli, Centro Cinema Cesena for use of archival images. On the practical, non-academic side of things, thank you to my husband, Carmelo, and to my parents and in-laws, for the logistical and domestic support. I could not have done it without you. vi Vita Emma Katherine Van Ness is a fifth-year Ph.D. candidate in the Italian Department at UCLA. She came to UCLA after completing a Masters degree in Modern Italian literature and cinema at Middlebury College in 2005. Her Masters thesis is entitled “Il sentimento del vuoto: Una lettura ermeneutica del ruolo di Roma in Le notti di Cabiria.” Her undergraduate education includes a double BA in art history and Italian from the University of Chicago. Publications include “Io la conoscevo bene... or did I? Antonio Pietrangeli, the Author, and the Actress” in the journal, Italian Culture, “Against Sexual Moralism.” Critical edition and translation of Italo Tavolato’s “Contro la morale sessuale” in Graphite, and “(No) Queer Futurism: Politics, Pink Poets, and Prostitutes in Italian Futurism,” in Carte Italiane. vii ANTONIO PIETRANGELI, FROM THEORY TO PRAXIS: AN INTRODUCTION TO PIETRANGELI’S THEORY OF CINEMA THE DIRECTOR OF WOMEN BUT NEVER A FEMINIST “It became obvious to me that men don’t live through female characters.” -Meryl Streep in a recent NPR interview with Terry Gross It may seem out of step to begin the study of a Fifties and Sixties Italian filmmaker with a quote from a contemporary American actress, but the point that Streep makes is key to understanding the difficulties in dealing with Antonio Pietrangeli’s films from a historical and critical point of view. The scope of this study will be to show that Pietrangeli, in both his film theory, which I will touch on in this theoretical introduction to the director’s own critical writings on cinema, and in his films which I will discuss in the following chapters, is engaging with a wide variety of feminist and film theory ante litteram. This operation will shed light, in turn, on the importance of Pietrangeli’s films and why they should not be forgotten or marginalized as simply “women’s films.” Pietrangeli’s cinematic theory and his films themselves seek to overcome representational conventions when it comes to psychology and sexual difference. What is interesting and unique is the opportunity that Pietrangeli offers us; we will be able to use his own theories of film against him in order to see to what extent his films live up to his own criticism, especially in the areas of female and male “gendered” subjectivity, psychology, concern with the spectator, and apparatus theory. Streep’s quote serves as evidence of the fact that, still today, these remain pressing issues. During Streep’s interview, this seventeen-time Oscar nominated actress discusses her ability to live through male characters, to identify with them, to “cross dress” as a male spectator 1 who is actively looking and absorbing the film narrative. Her spectatorial experience matches that described by Laura Mulvey in her famous essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” The man controls the film fantasy and also emerges as the representative of power in a further sense: as the bearer of the look of the spectator... As the spectator identifies with the main male protagonist, he projects his look onto that of his like, his screen surrogate, so that the power of the male protagonist as he controls events coincides with the active power of the erotic look, both giving a satisfying sense of omnipotence.1 Streep and other female spectators are able to identify with male protagonists, but the actress confirms Mulvey’s theory when she suggests that the inverse operation, for male spectators to identify with female protagonists, is more problematic. As Mary Ann Doane explains, “confronted with the classical Hollywood text with a male address, the female spectator has basically two modes of entry: a narcissistic identification with the female figure as spectacle and a transvestite identification with the active male hero in his mastery.”2 Given that of Pietrangeli’s ten full-length films seven have female protagonists and all ten deal in some ways with gendered issues such as marriage, bachelorhood, jealousy, and infidelity, we should not find it surprising that some critics thought his films difficult to digest. This problem continues as film historians continually marginalize his films, calling them “feminine” and “delicate,” and specify that he is “particularly gifted in female portraiture.”3 On their genealogical map of Italian comedy, Tullio Masoni and Paolo Vecchi make no reference to Pietrangeli, even though they give him a brief nod in their accompanying article “Degeneri e scostumati: commedia, satira, e farsa nel cinema sonoro italiano,” in the volume Commedia all’italiana: Angolazioni controcampi. They write that his film La visita (1963) “demystifies white collar, hypocritical marriage.”4 These sorts of feminizing nods to Pietrangeli’s work, which do not delve into the deeper issues behind it, have come to characterize the critical attention he has received until recently. Pietrangeli may deserve 2 his own branch on the genealogical map of Italian cinema, but critics have been remiss in sketching out what form that branch might take. The fact that his films have provoked little serious study and even less theoretical interest, is at least partially attributable to the fact that many male film scholars were uncomfortable or unable to deal with the “dark continent” of the female protagonist that Pietrangeli’s films explore. This critical absence when it comes to responding to Pietrangeli is partially due to the difficulty in accessing copies of his films since many, including Nata di marzo and La parmigiana, are out of print, and many others available only in Italy, with Italian subtitles, are poorly dubbed in English, or are simply difficult to come by.