La prima serie degli «Annali» ha via via raccolto i contributi scientifici promossi dalla Scuola Superiore delle Comunicazioni Sociali dell’Università Cattolica. Questa seconda serie intende proseguire l’impegno della prima con una periodicità più stretta e con la più ampia disponibilità a quanto la ricerca scientifica, anche al di fuori della Scuola, va elaborando in ordine alla Comunicazione Sociale.

Numero due del 2007 della rivista "Comunicazioni Sociali"

The essay traces the most recent developments in Feminist Film Theory from the new psychoanalytic approaches (such as Trauma Studies) to the historical work on Early Cinema and, finally, the convergence between gender and globalization studies. The essay offers an extremely articulated picture and provides a key for a heuristic interpretation of the main cultural and social processes affecting the contemporary world.

The essay describes the interlacement between the feminist movement and practices and the film theory in Italy.It is not a chronological path, but the tale of a trip, which begins from the corporeal being, the memory of the body, and reaches to the concept of Mother, as fundamental space of the thought of difference. A space – as Deleuze says – of ‘intensive emotions’, which opens new approaches for the film analysis and new positions for male and female spectators.

The bond which has been tied between cinema and visual arts in the first decades of the last century finds its paradigmatic expression in the ways of representing women. The comparison between the woman-owl interpreted by Pina Menichelli and Marchesa Casati’s pictures immortalized by Boldini’s brush highlight the strong and lively exchange among expressive forms and give back an idea of unconventional and eccentric femininity. This model meets the need of the cinema to accredit itself as a new form of art (highlighting the closeness with painting and literature, evidence of that complex system of referrals among ‘media’ which will consolidate in the following decades), more than the intention of conveying a different, more modern concept of woman.

Starting from the analysis of Gaby’s character in La signora di tutti (Ophuls, 1943), the essay identifies the origin of female characters populating the comedy of regime. Despite their diversity, these models are the product of the different narrative frames in which they are set behind a common process of mediation between Modernity and Tradition. This mediation gently leads the woman within the perimeter of her family, offsetting the renunciation to an independent life with the conquest of true love.

It is easy to envisage a correlation between Zampa’s film, L’onorevole Angelina, and the inclusion (at least formal) of women in the Country’s political life in the Second postwar period. Yet in addition to reflecting a social transformation (supported by the declared realism of the film), the work responds to a purely cinematographic logic. Angelina’s character perfectly adheres to the figure of Mrs. Magnani, emphasizing her best known features and underlining the point of her star like parable. Perhaps more than representing the reflection of a new prototype of woman, both Angelina, and Mrs. Magnani work as models of aspiration in a reality in which freedom and equality of rights are still far from being reached.