Italy’s first female director made 60 features depicting the gritty squalor of early 20th-century Naples. Most were lost to Mussolini’s cens
“I think Notari had a desire to document how things actually were,” says Giuliana Bruno, whose 1992 book Streetwalking on a Ruined Map reconstructed the suppressed career and decimated work of Italy’s first and most prolific female film-maker.
“The fascists didn’t want to see films about Neapolitan society in which a son takes money from his mother, but Notari didn’t hide it. She wanted to show that Italy isn’t this perfect place of white telephones [a motif of the glamorous escapist 1930s comedies fostered by the regime], but a place that has all kinds of sexual and social deviant behaviours and where people go to jail.”
Notari directed 60 feature films, many of them hand-coloured, and hundreds of documentaries and shorts for Dora Film, the company she ran with her cameraman husband, Nicola. Thanks to fascist censorship, only three of the features – ’A Santanotte (1922), È piccerella, and Fantasia ‘e surdato (1927) – and fragments of her other films survive.
Elvira Notari: Beyond Silence is screening at the Film Forum in New York on 6 April and will tour the UK in April and May.
