Abstract
A native of southern Italy, Cecilia Mangini (1927–2021) was Italy’s first female documentary filmmaker, yet her work is still not well known. Her 1965 documentary, Essere donne (Being Women, 28”) is a unique assessment of the reality of female labor in Italy at the end of the economic miracle era. After considering Mangini’s formation and development and her early collaboration with Pasolini, this chapter analyzes the use of images, camerawork, music, color vs. black and white, women’s voices, narrative, montage and voice-over commentary in Essere donne, and its controversial reception. Placing the documentary in its historical, cultural and political context, and looking at Mangini’s legacy today, it argues that Essere donne is one of the earliest yet unacknowledged manifestations of postwar feminism in Italy.
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Notes
- 1.
Only Sciannameo (2010) devotes considerable attention to the relevance of Mangini’s southern roots in her work, although barely touching on Essere donne.
- 2.
Underlined by Mangini in an interview in Davide Barletti and Lorenzo Conte’s Non c’era nessuna signora a quel tavolo.
- 3.
Mangini found no publisher for her first photographic reportage, Lipari 1952. Viaggio nelle cave di pietra pomice, published only in 2015.
- 4.
Mangini also wrote screenplays and was effectively assistant director in several of her husband’s films. For an extensive filmography and bibliography about Mangini, see Veronesi (2020).
- 5.
- 6.
Between 1955 and 1961, one million more workers are employed in all sectors of industry and service, amounting to 27% of the workforce (Mafai, 1997, 63).
- 7.
Partial exceptions include Antonio Pietrangeli’s film La visita (1963), which nonetheless portrays its protagonist, a single working woman employed in an agricultural cooperative in the Po valley, as desperately lonely.
- 8.
The film was restored by AAMOD—Archivio Audiovisivo del Movimento Operaio e Democratico e Cineteca di Bologna in the L’Immagine Ritrovata lab. See http://patrimonio.aamod.it/aamod-web/film/detail/IL8600001104/22/essere-donne.html?startPage=0&idFondo (Accessed May 9, 2022).
- 9.
Steimatsky (2019) reads the documentary as a poem in terms of style and visual devices and techniques, dwelling on Mangini’s engagement with poetry.
- 10.
Despite the gender wage gap being outlawed in 1960, the practice of paying men more than women by as much as 60% for the same work lasted well into the 1960s.
- 11.
The number of working women notably decreased during the economic miracle (Betti, 2010). Women abandoned agricultural work, but lack of job opportunities and inadequate social services forced them to stay home as proletarian housewives, often working piecemeal.
- 12.
The use of video, a lighter, more economical medium for filmmaking, allowed independent, longer documentaries to be made more easily again from the 1980s, though Mangini chose not to make any and never used a video camera before her collaboration with Angela Barbanente. Mangini comments in the 2013 documentary, In viaggio con Cecilia, filmed and codirected with Barbanente, that having almost no time restrictions with video changes the nature of the documentary and the filmmaker’s editing approach.
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Re, L. (2023). The Hard Work of Being Women in 1960s Italy: Cecilia Mangini and the Documentary Essere donne. In: Hecker, S., Ramsey-Portolano, C. (eds) Female Cultural Production in Modern Italy. Italian and Italian American Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-14816-3_8
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