Behind Closed Shutters: Unlocking gender through the figure of the prostitute in postwar Italian cinema (1942-1965)
Lead Research Organisation:
UNIVERSITY OF EXETER
Department Name: Modern Languages Italian
Abstract
The dominant models for interpreting the representation of men and women on screen have emerged in relation to Hollywood, but what tools do we use to look at gender representation in other national cinemas? How do we adapt the same approaches to other specific contexts? This study attempts to answer these questions, by focusing on the representation of the female prostitute in Italian cinema between 1942 and 1965. This figure has been selected because of her striking prevalence in Italian cinema in the two decades after the Second World War - a war which brought the existence of female prostitution into the spotlight in Italy. At the same time a growing awareness of women's rights drove a campaign to close Italian state-approved brothels. Resistance to this change gave rise to a prominent public debate that carried on beyond the eventual closure of the 'case chiuse' with the Merlin law in 1958 and also had a significant impact upon Italian cinema. Close textual readings of the female prostitute on film will be set in the context of the historical discourses surrounding her.
In the first part of the book I will consider approaches to the prostitute in visual culture, identifying the clash between the experience and the representation of prostitution as the key theoretical challenge. Italian culture has been inflected in specific ways in its understanding of the prostitute through literature, operatic tradition, earlier cinema, Catholicism, medical discourse, and the relationship between prostitution and the state. The notion of space governs many of these discourses, the brothel/street dichotomy being central to the regulation of prostitution. Emphasizing how the history and representation of prostitution interact, I will show how these spaces overlap with notions of cinematic space. By adapting Anglophone theories of spectatorship to the Italian context, I will suggest that historical spectators staged their desire in different spaces through the figure of the filmic prostitute, and also experienced her within the concrete spaces of Italian cinemas.
The second part of the book identifies four key moments in the representation of the female prostitute, setting the close reading of key films in the context of all Italian cinema featuring the figure in the period. In the first of these chapters, focusing on transition from dictatorship to reconstruction, I consider the ways in which the figure of the prostitute allows us to understand the gendering and nation-building processes of postwar Italian cinema and its dominant movement: Neorealism. The prostitute in the later popular melodramas of the 1950s is typically associated with a conservative cultural hegemony and the collapse of this Neorealist project. However, in the next chapter, by approaching melodramas as potential Italian 'women's films', thinking about the depiction of relations between women, and considering the neglected perspective of the female spectator, I suggest that the female prostitute serves multiple functions. In chapter five the centrality of the Merlin proposal to ideas about gender in the 1950s and 1960s will be explored through films that attempt to tackle the issue of prostitution as a political one. These later films draw upon Neorealist ethics and show how cinema became part of the public discourse about the brothel. Associations between the economic boom and prostitution are often used in Italian cinema to express nervousness about changes in women's roles. Looking at the rise of comedy in the early 1960s, chapter six explores the ways in which the figure and reminiscences about the lost brothels are used comically to reinscribe rigid gender roles.
This book challenges received wisdom about gender relations in Italian cinema of the postwar period. An innovative use of film theory, with close reference to the historical context, gives a new perspective on Italian cinematic history: as gendered in both its representations and its audiences.
In the first part of the book I will consider approaches to the prostitute in visual culture, identifying the clash between the experience and the representation of prostitution as the key theoretical challenge. Italian culture has been inflected in specific ways in its understanding of the prostitute through literature, operatic tradition, earlier cinema, Catholicism, medical discourse, and the relationship between prostitution and the state. The notion of space governs many of these discourses, the brothel/street dichotomy being central to the regulation of prostitution. Emphasizing how the history and representation of prostitution interact, I will show how these spaces overlap with notions of cinematic space. By adapting Anglophone theories of spectatorship to the Italian context, I will suggest that historical spectators staged their desire in different spaces through the figure of the filmic prostitute, and also experienced her within the concrete spaces of Italian cinemas.
The second part of the book identifies four key moments in the representation of the female prostitute, setting the close reading of key films in the context of all Italian cinema featuring the figure in the period. In the first of these chapters, focusing on transition from dictatorship to reconstruction, I consider the ways in which the figure of the prostitute allows us to understand the gendering and nation-building processes of postwar Italian cinema and its dominant movement: Neorealism. The prostitute in the later popular melodramas of the 1950s is typically associated with a conservative cultural hegemony and the collapse of this Neorealist project. However, in the next chapter, by approaching melodramas as potential Italian 'women's films', thinking about the depiction of relations between women, and considering the neglected perspective of the female spectator, I suggest that the female prostitute serves multiple functions. In chapter five the centrality of the Merlin proposal to ideas about gender in the 1950s and 1960s will be explored through films that attempt to tackle the issue of prostitution as a political one. These later films draw upon Neorealist ethics and show how cinema became part of the public discourse about the brothel. Associations between the economic boom and prostitution are often used in Italian cinema to express nervousness about changes in women's roles. Looking at the rise of comedy in the early 1960s, chapter six explores the ways in which the figure and reminiscences about the lost brothels are used comically to reinscribe rigid gender roles.
This book challenges received wisdom about gender relations in Italian cinema of the postwar period. An innovative use of film theory, with close reference to the historical context, gives a new perspective on Italian cinematic history: as gendered in both its representations and its audiences.
Organisations
People |
ORCID iD |
| Danielle Hipkins (Principal Investigator) |