The reconstruction of the screenplay evolution of Mario Soldati’ La donna del fiume offers a classic example of the process of mediation between authorial, productive and cultural instances from which the film script originates. In particular, the analysis shows the results of the censorial pressure concerning the staging of women on his film and, more generally, on the definition of a new model of female star. Even when apparently exercised on other elements of the film, the interventions reveal a containment of the female character, granting a larger diegetic space while respecting the visual (and cultural) standard of representation of women.

Following the ‘popular’ thread, the essay investigates the complex relationship between female identity and cultural and media consumption. The analysis of the episode films made in the 1960s shows the fundamental importance of the mediatic diet in the definition of the image and role of women. It also reveals their deep ambiguity: a sign of modernization, epitome of the ‘new times’, but also a ballast, which binds women to the traditional models (familiar and social), describing the leave of the norm as ‘deviation’. The broad repertoire of the examined films also allows a first breakthrough in a fundamental genre of the national film productions in the Second Postwar.

The symbolic overabundance of the female character finds its emblematic confirmation in the analysis of the character of Emanuelle, the protagonist of the homonymous and successful erotic films series of the 1970s. The series restates the gender standards, bringing on the scene an active woman, master of her own destiny, also offering herself to the look and pleasure of men. Emanuelle ‘virtuously’ embodies the mediation between a model of emancipated femininity and a more traditional, patriarchal one, which contemplates the submission of women to male desire.

Faced with the task of representing women, the contemporary Italian ‘auteur’ cinema does not seem to be able to find a third way between relying on a stereotype or recognizing the unfathomability of women, even when there is a woman behind the camera. Through the analysis of four films, two by Emanuele Crialese and two by Francesca Comencini, the essay suggests the persistent difficulties of cinema in dealing with women.

The text tries to dissolve the interlacement between the system of social talks on women and the debate on cinema. The analysis of the contributions on the seventh Art produced in the feminist circles between the 1970s and 1990s (with a quick foray in the most recent production) allows to grasp the specificity of the relationship which consolidates in Italy between feminism and the production of and on the cinema.

The essay investigates the cultural and political function assigned to the cinema by the Movimento Italiano Femminile, an organization of fascist origin established during the Second Postwar. This field of analysis is normally neglected by the historical reconnaissance, which focused on relations between cinema and political central and left-wing movements; it is also a tile to be added to the variegated mosaic of female film experience in the years following the conflict.

The text reconstructs the Magisterium of the Church on women under the pontificate of Paul VI. Through the detailed collection and the reading of all documents dealing with the question of women, the text illustrates the complexity of the position of the Church with regard to the role and functions of women and gives insight into the importance of the cultural dimension, understood as an indication of the change happening and instrument for the achievement of a model of full and complete femininity, inspired by the Marian ideal.