(Italian and Italian American Studies) Giovanna Faleschini Lerner, Maria Elena D'Amelio (Eds.) - Italian Motherhood On Screen-Palgrave Macmillan (2017)

S T U D I E S
A M E R I C A N
I T A L I A N
ITALIAN MOTHERHOOD
A N D
ON SCREEN
I T A L I A N
edited by
Giovanna Faleschini Lerner
Maria Elena D’A melio
Italian and Italian American Studies
Series editor
Stanislao G. Pugliese
Hofstra University
Hempstead, NY, USA
This series brings the latest scholarship in Italian and Italian American
history, literature, cinema, and cultural studies to a large audience of spe-
cialists, general readers, and students. Featuring works on modern Italy
(Renaissance to the present) and Italian American culture and society
by established scholars as well as new voices, it has been a longstand-
ing force in shaping the evolving fields of Italian and Italian American
Studies by re-emphasizing their connection to one another.
More information about this series at

http://www.springer.com/series/14835
Giovanna Faleschini Lerner
Maria Elena D’Amelio
Editors
Italian Motherhood
on Screen
Editors
Giovanna Faleschini Lerner Maria Elena D’Amelio
Franklin & Marshall College University of the Republic of San
Lancaster, PA, USA Marino
Montegiardino, Republic of San
Marino
Italian and Italian American Studies

ISBN 978-3-319-56674-0 ISBN 978-3-319-56675-7 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-56675-7
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Acknowledgements
“It takes a village to raise a child,” and it takes a village to edit a volume
of scholarly essays on motherhood. We have many people to thank for
being part of the community that has made the publication of this book
possible.
First of all, we are grateful to the scholars that accepted our invitation
to contribute to this volume, for setting an example of intellectual rigor,
for their professionalism in accepting our suggestions and comments on
their work, and their patience in responding to our queries about for-
matting and page references. For her excellent comments on parts of the
manuscript, we owe thanks to Elena Past (Wayne State University). Paola
Bonifazio (University of Texas at Austin) was kind enough to read our
proposal and offer some generous remarks for our back cover. The anony-
mous reviewer who read our proposal for Palgrave Macmillan was both
generous and rigorous in her/his feedback, and we hope the volume has
met the standard he/she set. We thank the editorial team at Palgrave: Tom
Rene and Camille Davies have been supportive and helpful in the final
stages of the publication process, while Brigitte Shull and Eva Hodgkin
were instrumental in leading the process at the very beginning. Finally, we
want to thank our families: our children, for keeping us grounded in the
realities of motherhood; our husbands, for sharing the responsibilities of
parenthood and being ready to take them over entirely when needed; and
our parents for nurturing and challenging us, and helping us become the
women we are. We dedicate this volume to all mothers in our lives and
their often unrepresented, or misrepresented, work.
v
Contents
1 Introduction: Italian Motherhood on Screen 1

Maria Elena D’Amelio and Giovanna Faleschini Lerner
Part I Maternal Ambivalence
2 In the Name of the Mother: From Fascist Melodrama to

the Maternal Horrific in the Films of Dario Argento 21
Marcia Landy
3 Maternal Ambivalence in Contemporary Italian Cinema 45

Bernadette Luciano and Susanna Scarparo
4 ‘A Bad Mother and a Small Heap of Bones:’ Maternal

Indifference in Alessandro Capone’s L’Amore Nascosto 71
Claudia Karagoz
Part II Lost Mothers
5 Rich Wives, Poor Mothers: Can a Matriarch

Be a Mother? 91
Giorgio Galbussera
vii
viii Contents
6 Mothers at a Loss: Identity and Mourning in La

Sconosciuta and Milyang 117
Francesco Pascuzzi
7 ‘Acquaintance with Grief’: Filmmaking as Mourning and

Recognition in Nanni Moretti’s Mia Madre 137
Stefania Benini
Part III Motherhood and the Body Politics
8 Francesca Comencini’s Single Moms and Italian Family

Law 157
Maria Letizia Bellocchio
9 Gy-neology and Genealogy of a Female Filmmaker: The

Case of Susanna Nicchiarelli’s Films 175
Silvia Carlorosi
10 Unnatural Child Birth: Naples, the Neo-Natal

Intensive Care Unit, and the Blank Space of Possibility
in Francesca Comencini’s Lo Spazio Bianco 195
Millicent Marcus
11 Liquid Maternity in Italian Migration Cinema 211

Part IV Transmedia Motherhood
12 Voicing Italian Childfree Women on New Media:

The Lunàdigas Project 235
Giusy Di Filippo
Contents ix
13 Motherhood 2.0: Una Mamma Imperfetta and the

Representation of ‘Imperfect Motherhood’
in New Media 257
Maria Elena D’Amelio
Appendix 275
Index 287
About the Editors
Giovanna Faleschini Lerner (Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania) is

Associate Professor of Italian at Franklin & Marshall College. She is the
author of The Painter as Writer: Carlo Levi’s Visual Poetics (Palgrave
2012), and of numerous essays and articles on twentieth-century and
contemporary Italian literature and cinema, which have appeared in
major Italian Studies journals. Her research interests include women’s
and gender studies, interart studies, and film and media studies. She is
currently at work on a book project on migrant cinema in Italy.
Maria Elena D’Amelio is a researcher at the University of the Republic
of San Marino. She received a Doctorate in Film History from the
University of the Republic of San Marino, and a Ph.D. in Cultural
Studies from SUNY—Stony Brook. Her areas of expertise are genre
cinema, transnational stardom, film history, and cultural studies. She is
the author of Ercole, il divo (2013), and has published articles and book
chapters on popular film genres, male stardom, film history, and mythol-
ogy and cinema, including ‘The Hybrid Star: Steve Reeves, Hercules and
the Politics of Transnational Whiteness (Journal of Italian Cinema &
Media Studies 2:2, pp. 259–277), and ‘Stardom’ (Oxford Bibliographies
Online: Cinema and Media Studies). Her current research interests are
in post-war and contemporary U.S.-European co-productions, and the
representation of gender in new media.
xi
List of Figures
Fig. 1.1 Posters from the Fertility Day campaign 2

Fig. 1.2 Poster from the Fertility Day campaign 3
xiii
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Italian Motherhood on Screen
Maria Elena D’Amelio and Giovanna Faleschini Lerner
On July 28, 2016, the Italian Ministry of Health declared September

22, 2016 to be the first national Fertility Day. According to the Ministry
website, the purpose of the Fertility Day was to ‘educate young people
about their reproductive health and offer useful tools to protect their fer-
tility.’ The announcement was followed by the launch of a publicity cam-
paign aimed at encouraging healthy behaviors (as in the ‘Non mandare
gli spermatozoi in fumo’ poster, Fig. 1.1) and fertility awareness (as in
the poster claiming that ‘La bellezza non ha età, la fertilità sì’).
The campaign caused a popular outcry and was denounced as a sex-
ist, ageist, and racist echo of fascist-era natalist propaganda. The outrage
was such that the Minister of Health, Beatrice Lorenzin, withdrew the
campaign a few days after its launch. She later fired her director of com-
munication, Daniela Rodorigo, after the appearance of another ad, in
which the healthy behavior of a set of white, blond and blue-eyed people
enjoying the outdoors were juxtaposed with the unhealthy behavior of a
M.E. D’Amelio (*) 
Research Fellow, Center for International Relations, University
of the Republic of San Marino, Montegiardino, Republic of San Marino
e-mail: elena.damelio@unirsm.sm
G. Faleschini Lerner 
Franklin & Marshall College, Lancaster, USA
e-mail: glerner@fandm.edu
© The Author(s) 2017 1

G. Faleschini Lerner and M.E. D’Amelio (eds.), Italian
Motherhood on Screen, Italian and Italian American Studies,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-56675-7_1
2 M.E. D’Amelio and G. Faleschini Lerner
Fig. 1.1 Posters from the Fertility Day campaign
group of youths intent on smoking pot indoors (Fig. 1.2). Among the

dissolute set, a black man and a person with curly, natural hair are imme-
diately identifiable, suggesting, if not outright racism on the part of the
Ministry’s office of communication at least a complete unawareness of
the history of Italian colonialism and racial discrimination and of the cur-
rent ethnic diversity of Italian society. .
A coalition of progressive organizations, including the CGIL labor
union, Arci, Act, Artemisa, and Rete della Conoscenza, responded to the
campaign by organizing an alternative demonstration, called ‘Fertility
Fake.’ Participants in the Fertility Fake held hand-written signs that
read, ‘I am expecting … a job,’ ‘I am expecting … adoption rights for
same-sex couples,’ and so on. The demonstrators thus highlighted the
ways in which the ads and the Minister’s campaign neglected to address
the structural reasons that have caused Italy to achieve a negative birth-
rate. Commentators and journalists compared Italy’s situation to that
of France, which has a family-oriented welfare system, and of northern
European countries such as Sweden, whose policies include paid parental
leave for child-birth or adoption, and flexible work hours. They pointed
to the lack of affordable child care options outside the extended family
unit, the negative repercussions of pregnancy and childbirth on a wom-
an’s employment opportunities, and the overall cost of raising a child in
Italy (Panigiani 2016). These structural deficiencies are partly a function
1 INTRODUCTION: ITALIAN MOTHERHOOD ON SCREEN 3
Fig. 1.2 Poster from the Fertility Day campaign
of traditional patriarchal attitudes toward the family, which, together

with workplace discrimination and lack of child care options, have his-
torically prevented Italian women in general, and mothers in particular,
from playing an influential role in the public and economic spheres.
Roberto Saviano, writing for the daily La Repubblica, also noted how
the campaign seemed to ignore the steps taken in recent decades toward
gender equality within the family by highlighting women’s primary role
as mothers, even when lacking independence or a job: ‘Make a child,
the State is counting on you. And only if you do, will you count for the
State’ (Saviano 2016, our trans.). Indeed, changes in the labor economy
that have increased women’s participation, together with the increasing
secularization of Italian society, the growing concerns for LGBTQ rights,

and the impact of diverse migrant communities, have all contributed
to the destabilization of traditional gender and family roles. Following
Adrienne Rich’s invitation ‘to understand the power and powerlessness
embodied in motherhood in patriarchal culture’ (Rich 1976, p. 67), with
this volume we aim precisely to record and analyze these shifts, through
a series of essays that consider the specificity of experiences of the mater-
nal as projected and interrogated in recent Italian film and media.
The genesis of this volume began with two panels, ‘Figures of the
Maternal and the Paternal in Italian Cinema’, which we co-organized
at the 2013 Annual Conference of the American Association of Italian
Studies in Eugene, Oregon. The panels included papers by emerging
scholars of Italian film studies, who explored the different configura-
tions of motherhood and fatherhood in the works of directors as dis-
tant in time and style as Roberto Rossellini, Alina Marazzi, Raffaello
Matarazzo, Luca Guadagnino, and the Comencini sisters. The exchanges
that followed each panel made evident that the presentations both high-
lighted and filled a gap in the critical literature on Italian cinema, which,
despite a recent interest in gendered approaches, was still lacking a
focus on motherhood as an object of investigation for feminist scholars.
In fact, whereas in the last few years a number of studies of cinematic
masculinities have appeared (for example, Catherine O’Rawe, Stars and
Masculinities in Italian Cinema, 2014; Sergio Rigoletto, Masculinity
and Italian Cinema: Sexual Politics, Social Conflict and Male Crisis in the
1970s, 2014), no equivalent focus on motherhood and its relationship
with femininity and womanhood, heteronormative social structures, and
the construction of discourses of gender and sexuality has yet emerged
in the scholarship of Italian film studies.1 The 2013 AAIS conference
allowed us to establish a network of scholarly collaborations that have
resulted in Italian Motherhood on Screen. In selecting the essays for this
volume we have attempted to privilege approaches that consider situated
and specific experiences of the maternal, and move beyond symbolic or
abstract considerations of motherhood. We did not strive for exhaustive-
ness, but tried to represent the diversity of Italian media productions and
their attitudes toward the maternal from the post-war period to the pre-
sent, thus including works by women filmmakers (Marazzi, Comencini,
Nicchiarelli), examples from different filmic genres—from melodrama
to horror, thriller, and drama—and styles, from new auteur cinema such
as Luca Guadagnino’s Io sono l’amore to the engaged cinema of Andrea
Segre. Moreover, as we shall explain further, we included a section on

new media, from web-based video series to participatory web documen-
taries (webdocs) and blogs, which interrogates both the possibilities and
the limitations of digital platforms in creating an alternative discourse of
empowered motherhood in post-feminist Italy, and which opens up new,
gendered directions in Italian screen studies.
We see our volume as a contribution both to the scholarship and the
teaching of Italian film, media, and screen studies. Its structure provides
a useful framework for designing interdisciplinary courses on Italian
cinema and media studies, with a strong women’s and gender studies
component, at either the graduate or undergraduate levels. In particu-
lar, individual essays provide the interpretive and critical background to
help students define their own approaches to individual films, artists, and
media productions, and foster discussions that encompass Italian culture,
society, history, and film and gender representations in film and media.
To advanced graduate students and researchers, Italian Motherhood on
Screen offers a new contribution to gendered approaches to Italian film,
with an emphasis on contemporary social dynamics, practices, and expe-
riences, and with an unprecedented consideration of digital media pro-
ductions. The carefully edited appendix offers a catalog of films in which
mothers and motherhood play significant roles. The catalog is the first
survey of images of motherhood in Italian cinema after 1945, and is
meant to be a useful tool in course design and, as we hope, to foster fur-
ther research on motherhood and cinema.
An interest in the maternal is not new in film theory, which has been
interrogating motherhood on screen since the beginning of motion pic-
tures and has particularly cultivated psychoanalytic critical approaches to
film studies. Psychoanalysis and the cinema were born at the end of the
nineteenth century (Freud first used the term ‘psychoanalysis’ in 1896,
just one year after the Lumière brothers’ film screenings at the Grand
Café in Paris) (Stam 2000, p. 159). In the 1970s, psychoanalysis became
‘the key discipline called upon to explain a series of diverse concepts,
from the way the cinema functioned as an apparatus to the nature of the
screen/spectator relationship’ (Creed 1998, p. 1). The same period wit-
nessed the flourishing of feminist perspectives on film, developed in the
context of women’s liberation movements that emerged mostly in the
United States in the 1960s and 1970s, with seminal works such as Laura
Mulvey’s ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ (1975), or Elizabeth
Cowie’s ‘Woman as Sign’ (1978). Thus, it is worth underlining the
convergence of psychoanalysis, feminist theory, and screen studies, as

feminist approaches to film came about when cinema studies as a disci-
pline was in its foundational stage.
Feminist theory made motherhood on screen one of its privileged
objects of analysis, and has since then been based mostly on Jacques
Lacan’s and Julia Kristeva’s studies on the symbolic and pre-symbolic,
which have shown how the dominant patriarchal ideology of the West
and its construction of motherhood are often reproduced in cinema.
Therefore, film theory has especially raised questions about how much,
and to what extent, films reproduce the dominant patriarchal ideology
and the consequent submissive role of the mother, focusing especially on
the representation of the sacrificing mother, or what Kristeva has called
the Mater Dolorosa (1985).
The pivotal books on motherhood on screen have been E. Ann
Kaplan’s Motherhood and Representation: The Mother in Popular Culture
and Melodrama (1992), and Lucy Fischer’s Cinematernity: Film,
Motherhood, Genre (2014). Kaplan’s book traces the history of the repre-
sentation of motherhood from nineteenth-century novels to films of the
1990s, mostly discussing theories of the maternal, from Freud to Lacan
and French feminism. She uncovers three paradigms in popular films and
literary works within North America that have positioned motherhood
in relation to a white, middle-class female audience, namely the sacri-
ficing, the phallic, and the resisting mother paradigms. Kaplan’s aim is
to unravel the dominant patriarchal discourse around motherhood that
has been constructed in different historical times, and to highlight how
these discourses ‘confine and limit’ mothers across time (Podnieks 2012,
p. 10). The marginalization of the figure of the mother to patriarchal
desire is also the subject of Fischer’s important Cinematernity. Fischer’s
book employs diverse methodologies, such as psychoanalysis, anthropol-
ogy, and socio-historical research, in order to address different issues in
the representation of the maternal, such as illegitimate birth, the mother-
son relationship, hysteria around child care, and the mother-daughter
relationship. Her thoroughly-researched study discusses a wide range
of film genres, arguing that—through representations of the murderer,
the absent, the hysterical, and the ‘male’ mother—motherhood is often
treated as a site of crisis, whether social, political, or philosophical.
Fisher’s notion of crisis is particularly helpful to contextualize the
scholarly contributions included in Italian Motherhood on Screen.
Indeed, the concept of motherhood in Italy has often been rethought
and discussed in recent years, precisely in response to the perceived cri-

sis of the family, the economic crisis, and the crisis of national identity,
provoked by the forces of globalization and migration, secularization,
and the instability of labor markets. What is less clear is how we can read
these shifts cinematically; in other words, how precisely Italian cinema
represents, negotiates, and elaborates these social changes—narratively,
formally, and stylistically.
The essays included in this volume identify and highlight the tension
between nostalgia for reassuring traditional family configurations and the
embrace of the evolving contemporary experiences of womanhood and
motherhood. Working mothers, women who opt for a child-free adult-
hood, adoptive mothers, murderous mothers, single mothers, ambivalent
mothers, or imperfect mothers populate contemporary screen narratives.
These characters transcend the ideological approaches to the figure of the
mother that tended to present her as a symbol of the nation and its politi-
cal identity, as seen most famously in the neorealist film tradition or in the
construction of post-war female stardom (e.g., Anna Magnani as Pina in
Rome Open City, and Sophia Loren as Cesira in Two Women), and shift
their focus onto the concrete experience of being a mother in Italy today.
The essays included in Italian Motherhood on Screen thus share a focus on
the experiential aspect of motherhood as represented in media and film.
Through careful close readings of media narratives, the authors examine
the cinematic techniques and mediatic structures with methodological
rigor, while contextualizing them in relation to the changing social, his-
torical, and ethical dimensions of motherhood. This emphasis on experi-
ence emerges particularly in the focus on contemporary media and film
productions. The scholarly contributions in the volume investigate the
works of both independent and mainstream filmmakers, male and female
directors, from Alessandro Capone to Susanna Nicchiarelli, Francesca
Comencini, Giuseppe Tornatore, and Nanni Moretti, to name a few, in
order to give a broad sense of current cinematic discourses on mater-
nity. The essays interrogate the ways in which current and classic feminist
thinking about motherhood fits contemporary mediatic and cinematic
representations of women. Given its emphasis on the present, the volume
also includes a transnational dimension that reflects both the changes in
the Italian social landscape brought about by migratory movements and
the increasing globalization of the cinematic industry, as witnessed in
the production of Guadagnino’s Io sono l’amore and Capone’s L’amore
nascosto, for example, in the parallel concerns with loss and mourning in
Tornatore’s La sconosciuta and Chang-dong Lee’s Milyang. Finally, the

volume breaks new ground in Italian screen studies by considering the
role of web-based forms of cultural production in both challenging and
reproducing social constructs of motherhood.
Thus, Italian Motherhood on Screen both fits in and distinguishes
itself from recent trends in Italian film and media scholarship. Danielle
Hipkins’ breakthrough article ‘Why Italian Film Studies Need a Second
Take on Gender’ (2008) addresses the reluctance of Italian film stud-
ies to engage with gender studies, and emphasizes the need to research
the intersection of Italian feminism, film theory, and Italian cinema in
order to provide a ‘second take’ on the Italian film industry. In the last
few years, following Hipkins’ article, a series of studies (for example,
Marga Cottino-Jones, Women, Desire, and Power in Italian Cinema,
2010, Maristella Cantini, Italian Women Filmmakers and the Gendered
Screen, 2013, and Bernadette Luciano and Giuliana Scarparo, Reframing
Italy: New Trends in Italian Women Filmmaking, 2013, among others),
have manifested a renewed interest in gendered approaches to Italian
film studies. The mother-daughter relationship is often central to these
approaches, which interpret this connection as a point of departure to
explore issues related to gender, narrative forms, creativity, or language.
The critical bond between mother and daughter and its usefulness as
an interpretive tool can be traced back to classic feminist texts and prac-
tices. Italian second-wave feminism of the 1960s and 1970s rejected the
structure of the patriarchal family and embraced instead the practice of
affidamento, which was seen as a more flexible and less hierarchical rela-
tionship between an older and a younger woman, aimed at facilitating
women’s autocoscienza, or self-awareness. Moreover, classic Italian femi-
nism embraced the practice of partire da sé, that is, using one’s own expe-
rience as a point of departure for philosophical and political reflection.
For Luisa Muraro and the philosophers who follow her leadership within
the Diotima community, women’s self-awareness is connected to the
relationship with the mother. This relationship represents the possibility
of a new symbolic order, which reverses the father’s symbolic order and
replaces his authority with the authority of the mother (Muraro 1991).
For Adriana Cavarero, too, the figure of the mother—and birth—is an
image of the relational nature of the self and of the need for community,
though she challenges Diotima’s notion of authority (Cavarero 1990).
Rosi Braidotti also discussed the conflictual mother-daughter relationship
within her analysis of feminist philosophical genealogies (Braidotti 2011).
In the Anglo-American context, pivotal works such as Rich’s Of

Woman Born (1976) have helped put motherhood at the center of femi-
nist discourse, though it is only in recent years that the field of moth-
erhood studies has carved its own independent niche in academia,
inspired by earlier studies such as Kristeva’s ‘Stabat Mater’ (1985), and
Sara Ruddick’s ‘Maternal Thinking’ (1980). Andrea O’Reilly has been
a pioneer in the field.2 Her edited volume, Maternal Theory: Essential
Readings (2015), and Samira Kawash’s (2011) ‘New Directions in
Motherhood Studies’ have recently surveyed the scholarship on mother-
hood and mothering published over the past decade in Anglo-American
academic circles.
Our volume represents this diversity of approaches within mother-
hood studies: our authors propose a variety of thematic concerns and
different theoretical methodologies, all solidly anchored in feminist
criticism and film theory. With these essays, we aim to bring together
Anglo-American and Italian feminist discourses of motherhood in order
to explore the spaces between maternal ideology and symbolic value and
maternal experience as they have been represented, interrogated, and
projected on Italian screens from the end of the Second World War to
the present.
The mother’s absence, the loss of the mother through aging and
death or emotional and physical distance, or her ambivalence toward
maternity, are all central to the notion of crisis of motherhood, and
as such they constitute the focuses of the first two sections of our vol-
ume. ‘Maternal Ambivalence’ explores the concept of the ‘bad mother’
and its aesthetic and ideological implications, both on and off screen.
The first essay, Marcia Landy’s ‘In the Name of the Mother: From
Fascist Melodrama to the Maternal Horrific in the Films of Dario
Argento,’ explores melodrama as a contentious literary and cinematic
form in Italian culture through its alignment with a politics of the body
by way of sensational affect. Bordering on—and at times metamorphos-
ing—into the horrific, the melodramatic imagination entertains scenar-
ios of murder, monstrosity and bodily mutilation perpetrated by or on
maternal figures. During the twenty years of the Fascist regime (1923–
1943)—given the Fascist emphasis on population growth—the mother
was a familiar melodramatic figure, one that continued into the post-
World War Two era. Landy argues that from the 1970s to the present,
Dario Argento’s crime detection and horror films have constituted a
dialogue with past forms of melodrama, while functioning at the same
time as critical counter-historical texts that challenge reductive attribu-

tions of misogyny in his films. Scarparo and Luciano’s essay ‘Maternal
Ambivalence in Contemporary Italian Cinema’ examines Alina Marazzi’s
Tutto parla di te (2012) and Cristina Comencini’s Quando la notte
(2011), two films that focus on women who struggle to reconcile the
expectations of motherhood with the conflicting emotions they expe-
rience as mothers. While many scholars have defined this conflict as
‘maternal ambivalence,’ Cavarero proposes an alternative notion, that of
‘maternal inclination.’ While inclining or leaning over her helpless child,
the mother must make the choice of whether or not to provide care.
Applying Cavarero’s notion to their analysis, the authors highlight how
the two films’ protagonists are able to re-imagine mothering through
female support networks and a genealogical understanding of mater-
nal strength. The ambivalence of the maternal experience is also at the
center of Claudia Karagoz’s essay ‘“A Bad Mother and a Small Heap of
Bones:” Maternal Indifference in Alessandro Capone’s L’amore nascosto
(2007).’ This chapter shows how Capone’s film grants narrative agency
to a ‘bad’ mother figure and compellingly stages her un-motherly feel-
ings, yet ultimately re-affirms the naturalness of maternal love. Engaging
with Rozsika Parker’s psychoanalytic notions of maternal ambivalence,
guilt, and shame, Karagoz contests the film’s reduction of the protago-
nist’s story to a drama of maternal ambivalence—its assumption that she
simultaneously loves and hates her daughter—which Karagoz describes
as the master narrative of L’amore nascosto. By analyzing the interplay of
devices such as framing and lighting with the film’s ambivalent narrative,
with a focus on the black and white flashbacks, Karagoz demonstrates
that L’amore nascosto instead represents a counter-narrative of maternal
indifference: a woman’s lack of interest in mothering and her inability to
love her daughter.
The second section of the volume, ‘Lost Mothers,’ conceptualizes the
feeling of loss and mourning often associated with a crisis of traditional
motherhood. Giorgio Galbussera’s essay ‘Rich Wives, Poor Mothers:
Can a Matriarch Be a Mother?’ opens the section with an analysis of
the way in which two upper class and glamorous wives are represented
as defective and distant mothers in Guadagnino’s Io sono l’amore (2009)
and Paolo Virzì’s Il capitale umano (2013). While both films show vary-
ing degrees of sympathy for the female protagonists and try to liberate
them from the patriarchal oppression of their roles, they still imply the
impossibility of conjoining effective and meaningful motherhood with
wealth and glamour. Presented as literal or metaphorical foreigners, these

women are unable to transition from objects of erotic desire and icons
of their husbands’ financial and social success to their expected roles as
the next matriarchs of the family as a capitalist enterprise; they are thus
stuck between phantasies of escape and the logic of class preservation.
Francesco Pascuzzi’s ‘Mothers at a Loss: Identity and Mourning in La
sconosciuta and Milyang’ adopts a transnational approach in analyzing
the relationship among motherhood, mourning and identity by two film
characters who are confronted by different—yet equally devastating—
forms of loss: Irena in La sconosciuta (2006), and Shin-ae in Milyang
(2007). The chapter first establishes a comparison between the social and
cultural circumstances of the Italian economic miracle and the modern-
ization and democratization of South Korea in order to describe their
influence in the recalibration of a number of socially sanctioned expecta-
tions associated with motherhood and with womanhood at large, focus-
ing on the protagonists as two single, financially independent women
claiming motherhood as an extension of their selfhood. It then argues
that these films mobilize a portrayal of mourning as a process that not
only confronts and rationalizes a loss or a death, but more accurately
confronts and rationalizes the loss of identity as a result of that loss or
death. In ‘“Acquaintance with Grief:” Filmmaking as Mourning and
Awakening in Nanni Moretti’s Mia madre’, Stefania Benini examines a
different kind of loss and mourning: that of the adult child facing the
inevitability of the mother’s death. While he retains for himself the role
of Margherita’s brother, Giovanni, the actual caregiver to the mother,
Moretti projects the work of mourning onto the character of the female
director Margherita, who is part of a female genealogy that includes her
dying mother, Ada, and her daughter, Livia. Moretti’s stance is that of
a classical elegy, and his relationship to the mother is like her relation-
ship to the Classics, which she taught to generations of school students:
a legacy not to be lost but cherished and embraced.
The third section of the volume moves from theoretical analyses of the
filmic text to a broader engagement with the legal and social politics of
Italy. The first essay, Letizia Bellocchio’s ‘Francesca Comencini’s Single
Moms and Italian Family Law,’ analyzes the representation of the mother
figure in Francesca Comencini’s cinema in relation to the characteristics
and changes in Italian family law. Bellocchio argues that Comencini uses
her work as a filmmaker as a political platform to advance gender equal-
ity, and offers Lo spazio bianco (2009) as a case study. Silvia Carlorosi’s
‘Genealogies and Gyn-ealogies in Susanna Nicchiarelli’s Films’ utilizes a

feminist framework to propose that mother-daughter genealogical con-
flict functions as a gynealogical opportunity for women to grow and gain
strength from each other, and an instrument through which the direc-
tor proposes alternate readings of Italian national history. In ‘Unnatural
Child Birth: Naples, the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, and the Blank
Space of Possibility in Francesca Comencini’s Lo spazio bianco,’ Millicent
Marcus analyzes Lo spazio bianco‚ as an adaptation of Valeria Parrella’s
eponymous novel (2008), as a subversion of the topos of Naples as
a place of triumphant procreativity (enshrined in neorealist films), as a
rejection of conventional romantic plot structure, and as an experiment
in a new cinematic language adequate to the experience of the ‘inside-
out’ pregnancy made possible by the technology of artificial gestation.
The essay explores the notion of the white space as the space of pos-
sibility opened up by the protagonist’s willingness to free herself from
certain social and psychological restrictions during the interval between
her baby’s premature birth and the child’s release from the high-tech
womb of the neonatal intensive care unit. Finally, Giovanna Faleschini
Lerner takes a postcolonial- and migration-studies approach in ‘Liquid
Maternity in Italian Migration Cinema,’ where she considers the roles
of migrant mothers in four Italian fiction films that make women key
narrative players: Segre’s Io sono Li (2011), Federico Bondi’s Mar Nero
(2008), Terraferma by Emanuele Crialese (2011), and Io, l’altro by
Mohsen Melliti (2007). The mothers in these films share a liquid experi-
ence of maternity and are associated visually with water as a metaphor for
the instability of migrant lives in the postmodern era, thus foregrounding
the question of what it means to be a mother in an age of transnational
mobility and feminization of migration.
In film and media studies, several books, such as Elizabeth Podnieks’
Mediating Moms: Mothers in Popular Culture (2012), and Rebecca
Feasey’s From Happy Homemaker to Desperate Housewives: Motherhood
and Popular Television (2012), have analyzed the representation of moth-
ers and motherhood in contemporary popular culture. These volumes
understand the contemporary interest in mothers, motherhood, and
mothering in the movie and television industry in the context of post-
feminist culture, manifest in the recent release of several Hollywood
‘momcoms’ such as Bad Moms (2016) and Bridget Jones’s Baby (2016),
and celebrity reality shows centered on pregnant bodies and maternity,
like ‘Teen Moms’ on MTV or ‘Pretty Wicked Moms’ on Lifetime. Kelly
Oliver discusses the genre of the ‘momcom’ in her Knock Me Up, Knock
Me Down: Images of Pregnancy in Hollywood Films (2012). Oliver argues
that ultimately the momcom co-opts the language of reproductive rights
in order to reinforce the traditional idea that a woman finds realization in
motherhood. As Moira Weigel further observes in her review of one such
momcom, Bridget Jones’s Baby (2016), the genre proposes a post-feminist
ideal of the woman who ‘has it all,’ which actually means ‘does everything.
The ideal expressed by the momcom exploits women, while claiming to
empower them’ (Weigel 2016). Thus, the momcom as a genre needs to
be understood within the context of post-feminist discourses. It is note-
worthy that, as O’Rawe observes (2014), Italian popular cinema tends
to privilege the figure of the father over that of the mother, as perhaps
most evident in Le chiavi di casa (2004), Il padre e lo straniero (2010),
or La nostra vita (2010). In each of these films, the male protagonist is
faced with a challenge to his sense of masculine self and needs to redefine
it through ownership of his own fatherhood in the face of the mother’s
absence. Can this absence—and the crises it generates—be understood as
a culture-specific form through which post-feminist frameworks reassert
the primacy of traditional motherhood as essential to the functioning of
Italian body politics? And could web-based media perhaps fill the void
in cinematic productions, opening up spaces of feminist resistance and
female solidarity within a participatory framework?
In trying to answer these questions, we close the volume with a sec-
tion on new media, such as webzines, blogs, and online chat groups,
asking whether these new forms of communication and representation
challenge traditional portrayals of women’s roles in the family and society
or rather reinforce them. Are new media technologies contributing to a
rethinking of what it means to be a mother, and creating novel spaces
of motherhood, or are they actually projecting and reinforcing gender
stereotypes on new screens? ‘Transmedia Motherhood’ explores how
issues of maternal representation are analyzed and negotiated by new
media such as blogs, forums, and web series. Giusy Di Filippo’s chap-
ter, ‘Voicing Italian Childfree Women on New Media: The Lunàdigas
Project,’ investigates the role that new media play in the construction of
discourses of femininity that are distinct from the idea of motherhood.
Focusing on a website called Lunàdigas, curated by Nicoletta Nesler
and Marilisa Piga, and particularly on a webdoc that is part of the web-
site, this contribution shows how the two authors interactively open up
a ‘potential space/place’ on the Internet that gives a voice to Italian
childfree women. Beyond the specific case study of Lunàdigas, this essay
also explores the implications of a web-based rhetorical place where
authors, interviewees and other users can find themselves part of a shared
communal identity.
In her essay ‘Motherhood 2.0. Una mamma imperfetta and the rep-
resentation of “imperfect motherhood” in new media,’ Maria Elena
D’Amelio focuses on how Ivan Cotroneo’s web series, Una mamma
imperfetta (2013), addresses the discourse of hyper-maternity in Italian
society, centering its critique on the deconstruction and parodic vision
of the perfect mom through its opposite, the imperfect mother. Drawing
on feminist media studies, cultural studies, and film and media history,
the chapter seeks to explore how Una mamma imperfetta aims to chal-
lenge preconceived notions of traditional motherhood representation in
the Italian media landscape, and uncovers why the series is only partial
successful in negotiating the representation of new models of mother-
hood for both online and TV consumption.
Though, as D’Amelio argues, new media productions do not neces-
sarily escape the pervasiveness of post-feminist ideology, we would like to
conclude with a hopeful example of a participatory, feminist media pro-
ject: the webdoc Tutto parla di voi, curated by Ornella Costanzo and
Fabrizio Giardina Papa. The webdoc showcases the potential that trans-
media projects possess to create discursive spaces where feminist art, criti-
cism, and experience come together to precipitate a change in mentality
and social practices. Tutto parla di voi is a follow up to Marazzi’s 2012
film, Tutto parla di te. It is co-produced by Mir cinematografica—Ventura
film—Rsi Radio Televisione Svizzera, in collaboration with Il Fatto
Quotidiano and Bim Distribution. In addition to Italian, the webdoc has
language options in German, English, and French, reflecting both the
international nature of this co-production and the need to reach beyond
national borders to create transnational networks of female solidarity. The
webdoc is organized in two parts: a narrative one and an interactive one
that allows users to share personal material and experiences of parenthood
in all its different forms. The narrative section includes interviews with
medical personnel involved in pregnancy care, childbirth and pediatric
care, as well as psychologists and educators, emphasizing the plurality of
approaches and philosophies of maternity. The strength of Tutto parla di
voi lies precisely in its participatory nature, which involves all users in the
making of the webdoc’s meaning and its voicing of the diversity of experi-
ences of the maternal. Indeed, it explicitly aims to involve the audience in
a conversation about motherhood as a point of departure for the growth

and development of a new collective culture (http://tuttoparladivoi.ilfat-
toquotidiano.it). As the creators of Tutto parla di voi, with our volume
we, too, hope to contribute to the construction of a critical culture that
crosses disciplinary borders and perspectives to generate new scholarly
interest in motherhood in all its on-screen manifestations.
Notes
1 It is important to recognize that a renewed interest in the changing con-
structs of motherhood has emerged in other fields of Italian studies. In
2012 Penny Morris, at the University of Glasgow, and Perry Willson, at
the University of Dundee, initiated a research network, funded by the
AHRC, on ‘La Mamma Italiana: Interrogating a National Stereotype,’ and
organized a series of workshops exploring the concept of Italian maternal
figures (cfr. https://lamammaitaliana.wordpress.com/). The network has
operated primarily within a cultural studies perspective, engaging in a lively
dialogue around the historian Marina D’Amelia’s thesis, in her La mamma
(2005), that the stereotype of the Italian mother was an ‘invented tradi-
tion’ that followed the crises of WWII. Penny Morris’s edited book Women
in Italy 1945–1960 dedicates several chapters to post-war Italian cinema
and motherhood, namely Réka Buckley’s “Marriage, Motherhood, and
the Italian Film Stars of the 1950s,” Donatella Fischer’s “Strong Women
and Non-traditional Mothers:The Female Figures in Napoli Milionaria!
and Filumena Marturano by Eduardo de Filippo”, and Lesley Caldwell’s
“What Do Mothers Want? Takes on Motherhood in Bellissima, Il Grido,
and Mamma Roma.” Laura Lazzari (Franklin University, Switzerland) and
Joy Charnley (independent researcher) have also recently edited a special
issue of intervalla, entitled To Be or Not to Be a Mother: Choice, Refusal,
Reluctance and Conflict. Motherhood and Female Identity in Italian
Literature and Culture, which includes an essay by one of our authors,
Giusy Di Filippo.
2 O’Reilly founded the Association for Research on Mothering at York
University (Canada), which was active from 1998 to 2010, and cur-
rently leads the Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community
Involvement, an organization that combines research and activism. Her
group is also responsible for the Journal of the Motherhood Initiative and
has a partnership with Demeter Press, an independent feminist press that
publishes peer-reviewed scholarly works as well as fiction, poetry, and non-
fiction on mothering, sexuality, reproduction, and family.
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Hollywood Films (New York: Columbia University Press).
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Filmography
Amelio, G., dir. (2004). Le chiavi di casa (The Keys to the House). Italy, Germany,
and France: Jean Vigo Italia.
Bondi, F., dir. (2008). Mar Nero. Italy, Romania, France: Film Kairòs.
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Belgium: Cristaldi Film, Soho Films, Tarantula, and Umedia.
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and Rai Cinema.
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toparladivoi.ilfattoquotidiano.it, Accessed November 1, 2016.
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spettacoli/una-mamma-imperfetta, Accessed May 30, 2013.
———., dir. Una mamma imperfetta. (2013). TV Series. RCS, Indigo Film, Rai
Fiction, La 21. Rai 2.
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Guadagnino, L., dir. (2009). Io sono l’amore (I Am Love). Italy: Mikado Films
and First Sun.
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Cinema Service, and Pine House Film.
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Mir Cinematografica and Ventura Films.
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Sacher Film, Fandango, Le Pacte, Arte/WDR Film Boutique.
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Italy: Kiné.
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Films and Aeternam Films.
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Italy: Ager 3.
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Films and Manigold Films.
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Authors’ Biography
Maria Elena D’Amelio (Ph.D., State University of New York – Stony Brook)
is Research Fellow at the Center for International Relations of the University of
the Republic of San Marino. She is the author of Ercole, il divo (AIEP 2013),
and of essays and peer-reviewed articles on genre cinema, male stardom, and film
history, including ‘The Hybrid Star: Steve Reeves, Hercules and the Politics of
Transnational Whiteness’ (Journal of Italian Cinema & Media Studies 2:2, pp.
259–277), and ‘Stardom’ (Oxford Bibliographies Online: Cinema and Media
Studies). Her current research interests include transnational studies, media
archaeology, and gender representations in film and media.
Giovanna Faleschini Lerner (Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania) is Associate

Professor of Italian at Franklin & Marshall College. She is the author of The
Painter as Writer: Carlo Levi’s Visual Poetics (Palgrave 2012) and of numerous
essays and articles on twentieth-century and contemporary Italian literature and
cinema, which have appeared in major Italian Studies journals. Her research inter-
ests include women’s and gender studies, interart studies, and film and media
studies. She is currently at work on a book project on migrant cinema in Italy.
PART I
Maternal Ambivalence
CHAPTER 2
In the Name of the Mother: From Fascist

Melodrama to the Maternal Horrific in the
Films of Dario Argento
Marcia Landy
Melodrama is a literary and cinematic form in Italian literary and

cinematic culture, with a contentious life. In its identification with vio-
lence, the family, social class, gender, political power, and theatricality,
its excessive forms of expression are aligned with a type of politics of the
body. The melodramatic imagination borders on—even metamorphoses
into—the horrific, through scenarios of murder, monstrosity and bodily
mutilation, aligned to attempts to expose and punish the perpetrators of
crimes. Crime and horror depictions rely on stylization, ritual, and myth
to hover between actual and virtual reality, and one of their most unset-
tling figurations and mysteries is the maternal body, a topic that has been
less critically examined than more general forms of domestic melodrama
(Fischer 1996, p. 10).
I begin this essay with a discussion of the cinema under Fascism to
examine select maternal melodramas during the Fascist era and in post-
World War Two cinema, and end with a discussion of Dario Argento’s
M. Landy (*) 
University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA
e-mail: mlandy@pitt.edu

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-56675-7_2
22 M. Landy
films in their self-conscious examinations of the myths of the mother. His

films that involve the maternal figure are engaged in exploring Italian
history, memory, vision, and trauma through the lens of crime and the
supernatural. From a perspective of the sublime they address a world
where the real and illusory have lost their clarity, to produce ‘an intensity
that dazzles or annihilates our organic being, strikes terror into it, but
arouses a thinking faculty’ (Deleuze 1986, p. 53) that challenges clichés
about the family, and especially the mother.
In the cinema prior to Fascism, motherhood is rarely treated.
However, during the twenty years of the Fascist regime (the Ventennio,
1923–1943),—given the Fascist emphasis on population—the mother
emerged as a prominent figure of melodrama. In the post-World War
Two era, maternal melodramas in which the dilemmas of mother-
hood were featured became popular in the 1950s and continued until
the 1970s, particularly through the productions directed by Raffaello
Matarazzo. The controversial films of Argento, from the 1970s to recent
years, offer unsettling figurations of the maternal body, ritual, and folk-
lore that hover between actual and virtual reality. Through a focus on
specific Argento films such as Profondo rosso (1975), Suspiria (1977),
Inferno (1980), Fenomena (1985), Trauma (1992), and La terza madre
(2007), I assess how this treatment of the horrific mother constitutes a
dialogue with constitutes a dialogue with past forms of melodrama that
function as counter-historical and counter cinematic.
Fascism, Maternity, and the Nation

During the era of Italian divismo in the late teens and 1920s, the hey-
day of the theatrical prima donna, the silent cinema produced one of the
most eloquent maternal melodramas, Cenere (Ashes, Febo Mari, 1917),
starring Eleonora Duse as a mother of an out-of-wedlock child. Rejected
by the natural father, her grown son and his wife, Rosalia experiences
abjection as a dishonored mother, doomed to suffer for her sin and to
perish over time, incarnating the ‘mater dolorosa’ (Dalle Vacche 2008,
pp. 138–139). Duse’s acting eschews the glamour of the femme fatale
but her suffering elevates her to the spiritual intensity of melodrama
characteristic of divismo. In contrast to the era of the diva as ‘an embodi-
ment of women’s struggle to reinvent themselves between the old and
the new,’ Mussolini’s Fascism blocked women’s march toward emancipa-
tion (Dalle Vacche 2008, p. 254).
2 IN THE NAME OF THE MOTHER: FROM FASCIST MELODRAMA … 23
The rise of the Fascists to the government in 1922 saw hopes ended
for women’s emancipation when Mussolini went so far as to tell a wom-
en’s delegation, ‘Go back home and tell the women I need births, many
births’ (De Grazia 1992, p. 41). The emphasis on reproduction served
several objectives beyond increasing the number of future fascists: enlarg-
ing the male population for military service, boosting imperial aspira-
tions, and creating a citizenry to inhabit and rule the future colonies.
Further steps to stimulate population growth included legislation to
remove illicit sex from the public gaze, proscribe abortion, and reinforce
marriage and procreation through state-established maternity benefits
(De Grazia 1992, pp. 40–46).
With the development of L’Unione Cinematografica Educativa
(LUCE), an organization created for the cinema as a major propaganda
instrument for the Fascist regime through the creation of newsreels and
documentary film, the battle for births was promoted through film. The
growing commercial film industry also began to produce feature films
that emphasized the mother’s importance to the family through biologi-
cal reproduction and to the promotion of national pride.
In Terra Madre (Mother Earth, Blasetti, 1931), Daisy, a modern city
woman, attempts to lure Marco (Sandro Salvini), a landowner, away from
the country. A fire demolishes the estate and Marco, with the support of
a young peasant woman, Emilia (Leda Gloria), saves the land. He mar-
ries her, and through her fecundity and industriousness, they and their
children become the responsible leaders of his family and community.1
In Luis Trenker’s Italian-German historical epic Condottieri (1931),
Giovanni delle Bande Nere becomes the savior of Italy from foreign
marauders.2 He is credited with unifying church and country through his
military exploits and through his marriage to Maria Salviati (Carla Sveva).
Maria, analogous to the maternal figure in Terra Madre, is identified with
the earth and also with the Roman church. Thus, Giovanni’s image is
constructed and reinforced through ‘a populist epic of unity of the people,
the soldiers, and the land’ (Ricci 2008, p. 94) and through the mother.
In T’amerò sempre (I’ll Love You Always, Camerini, 1933) a working-
class young woman, Adriana (Elsa Di Giorgi), gives birth to an out-of
wedlock child and is abandoned by her aristocratic lover. A shot of a
maternity ward with rows of babies in cribs would have reminded the
Italian audience of LUCE documentaries reinforcing the regime’s pop-
ulation policy. To care for herself and the child, Adriana finds various
forms of work in a hospital, on a farm, and later in an office. She accepts
24 M. Landy
an invitation from a co-worker, Mario Fabbrini (Nino Besozzi), to meet

his family, who welcome her as a suitable partner for him. Having with-
held the information about her fatherless child, she resists his invitation
to an intimate relationship, but finally succumbs, and the family incor-
porates her and the child without recrimination or stain to become
the basis of a new family, in which the mother, according to Maria
Macciocchi, was ‘imprisoned in the iron-ring of an eternal mother-image
to the point of extinction’ (1979, p. 73).
In another Camerini film, Come le foglie (Like the Leaves, 1938),
Giulia (Mimi Aylmer) is the frivolous bourgeois mother of a spendthrift
and spoiled son, Tommy (Cesare Bettarini). Her morally responsible
daughter, Nennele (Isa Miranda), seeks to undo the mother’s indiffer-
ent behavior toward the inept and passive father, Giovanni (Ernesto
Sabbatini). While the disintegration of the family is attributed to the
mother, its rehabilitation is attributed to the daughter’s adherence to
family and to her fiancé Massimo (Nino Besozzi), emblematic of the
industrious ‘new man’ of Fascism.3
In melodramas of the 1940s, the maternal is increasingly portrayed
as a destructive force, more rarely as redemptive. In De Sica’s I bambini
ci guardano (1943), an urban melodrama, Isa Pola as Nina portrays a
mother bored with her husband Andrea (Emilio Cigoli). She has been
carrying on a torrid affair with Roberto (Adriano Rimoldi) and neglect-
ing her young child Pricò (Luciano De Ambrosis). After her attempts to
conform to domesticity for the sake of the child fail, she succumbs to
her lover, abandoning husband and son. The father places the child in
a military academy and commits suicide, and the mother’s attempt to
reestablish contact with the child is rebuffed, as Pricò abandons her and
exits with a priest. The film foreshadows the melodramas of the 1950s,
in which the maternal figure serves as a pretext to expose the mythology
underpinning the family romance, namely the conflicted desires of and
for the mother, the weakness of the father, and the vulnerability of the
children, in which the Church plays a pivotal role in loco parentis.4
Neorealism, Dark Melodramas,

and Suffering Mothers
Neorealism was a form of filmmaking predicated on the aesthetic and

ethical dimensions of realism, critical of Fascism, of commercial genre
narratives and its stardom, and identified with an Italy critical of but
cleansed of its fascist past. The critical writings and films of the post-
World War Two era gave rise to a cinema of auteurs associated with
Luchino Visconti, Roberto Rossellini, Federico Fellini, Vittorio De Sica,
and Giuseppe De Santis. One of the most celebrated icons of this cinema
was a maternal figure identified with a martyred nation: Anna Magnani
in Roma, città aperta (Rome, Open City, Rossellini, 1945).5
With neorealism excoriated in the 1950s as a travesty of Italian cul-
ture, the Italian cinema industry turned to more familiar, popular, and
commercially profitable forms such as melodrama, comedy, romance,
crime. One form of neorealism was identified as ‘pink’ in comedies,
involving social inequities resolved through reconciliation of conflict, as
in Pane, amore e fantasia (Luigi Comencini, Bread, Love and Dreams,
1953); Ieri, oggi, domani (Vittorio De Sica, Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow,
1962), which features Sophia Loren as a mother who keeps having
babies to avert the law; and Fellini in I vitelloni (1953), focused on a
critical dimension of Italian mother and son relations, with Alberto Sordi
enacting an Italian inetto, a ‘mammone,’ attached to his mother.
Another form of melodrama was ‘black’ neorealism that dealt with
social problems often connected to crime, gangsterism, the black mar-
ket, and the Mafia, reacting against the demolition of communal values
(Mary P. Wood 2005, pp. 100–104). One of the most popular, Il ban-
dito (Lattuada 1946), starring Amedeo Nazzari, is characteristic of a cin-
ema in search of a new language. This cinema is motivated by desire for
change but also expresses “traditional values, such as protecting the fam-
ily, and looking after the family’s honour and name” (Wood 2005, 101–
102). As Margaret Günsberg puts it, ‘Gender representation in post-war
melodrama from 1949 to 1955, the golden era of the genre, is shaped by
a preoccupation with the patriarchal families, especially with motherhood
and childhood’ (Günsberg 2005, p. 39).
A key figure in this form of melodrama was Raffaello Matarazzo,
director of a number of popular comedies and melodramas during the
Fascist era, whose career boasts some of the most successful melodramas
of the late 1940s and 1950s: Catene (Chains 1947), Tormento (1950),
I figli di nessuno (Nobody’s Children 1951), Torna (1954), L’angelo
bianco (1955), and Malinconico autunno (1958). Matarazzo’s maternal
melodramas can be traced to the abject position of the young mother,
as in Catene. The maternal figuration ‘fulfills the stereotype of moth-
erhood-as-suffering, portrayed as subject to the vengeful whims of the
patriarchal head of the family, and glorified deterministically in the films
26 M. Landy
as the embodiment of the ideal quality of resignation in the workings of

destiny’ (Günsberg 2005, p. 39).
Yvonne Sanson, a star in Matarazzo’s popular films of the 1950s,
often played the suffering mother, a mater dolorosa, a woman whose
fate is to be confined, presumably through marriage and maternity, but
her physical attractiveness, her sensuality, and her weakness for music
and dance, draw men to her. Regulated by the husband, the children,
and community, her desire is punished, the most common punishment
being the loss of her children—as in Catene, Tormento, I figli di nessuno,
Torna, L’angelo bianco. Starring with the popular Amedeo Nazzari as her
husband, Sanson plays a tormented mother misunderstood by her hus-
band, harassed by lovers who seek to destroy her marriage, to become
an object of surveillance by children confused about their allegiances to
father or mother and their ‘paternity.’ In Tormento, I figli di nessuno, and
Torna, the mother is victimized by a malevolent woman, often a mother
herself, who is the agent of separation between the husband and wife,
and responsible for separating the young mother from her children.
These malevolent maternal figures are older, envious, adherents to an
archaic and violent world, but they are further indications of the persis-
tence of the idealized mother-child dyad that will be investigated, if not
challenged, in the thrillers and horror films of Argento.
Dario Argento and the Giallo

Dario Argento has been classified as a creator of genres (filoni), crime
detection (gialli) and horror films, the latter often eliciting a strong, crit-
ical, and even moral reaction to his treatment of horror, which is labelled
as exploitative, thus effacing consideration of its experimentation in style
and thought. His crime, detection, and horror films from the 1960s
through to the 1990s are hybrid, mixing comedy and melodrama, natu-
ralism and fantasy, to elicit affect and analysis. Disfigurement, loss, and
decay are largely inherent in many of his milieus, suggesting a baroque
fascination with mortality, a characteristic most critical to Argento’s
treatment of the horrific. In short, Argento’s Profondo rosso (1975), as an
exemplary giallo (the commercial term for Italian literary and film thrill-
ers), breaches the boundaries between fable and realism through a focus
on murderous mothers.
Argento’s treatment of the mother  resembles Pasolini’s Mamma
Roma (1962), which inverts the sacrosanct identification of the maternal
figure with the nation. In contrast to Anna Magnani’s martyred Pina,

Pasolini’s Mamma Roma is at first uplifted ‘by association with the
mother—one of the sacred signifiers of Italian culture—and then degraded
in the name of a prostitute’ (Viano 1993, p. 90). Argento, reminiscent
of Pier Paolo Pasolini, whose work he admires, plays with a form of ‘free
indirect style’ to contaminate the mystique of motherhood through hor-
rific cinematic language. His mode is to unsettle commonsensical theories
about sadistic voyeurism and challenge the assumption that the viewer can-
not distinguish between art and life. Increasingly, Argento has explored
the potential of computer graphics to enhance the surreal landscape.
Rather than presenting himself as a filmmaker who remains commit-
ted to traditional cinema by waging a war against incursions by new
technologies, Argento’s experimentation with special effects by way of
digital technology is situated in an interface between cinematic and digi-
tal modes, with a fascination for ‘special effects’ as a dominant feature
of Argento’s balancing act between spectacle and reflection. His form
of treating internal states through his use of special effects, and more
recently digital technology, enables Argento to probe the boundaries
between the real and the fantasmatic in pursuit of reconfiguring history
and memory. His emphasis on an excess of vision is enhanced through
the opportunities afforded by cinematic technology in his commitment
to a Pasolinian cinema of poetry that has marked his works. Though
Argento’s films are often treated as being sensational and exploitative,
they occupy a place in a cinema that tries to get audiences to feel and
think. Commenting on surrealism as an earlier form of treating internal
states and his use of computer graphics, Argento has said:
Surrealism used to be hard to put on film properly. Although I was reticent

about it at first, computer graphics allow me to depict my extreme dreams
and dark fantasies. Exploding heads, slicing up bodies—it’s all easy to show
today. It’s hard to come to terms with the thought that you are only lim-
ited by your imagination when it comes to what you can achieve visually,
using today’s technical tools. (Argento in Jones 2004, p. 230)
Profondo Rosso and Cinematic Mothers

Dario Argento’s Profondo rosso (1975) begins with the sounds of a chil-
dren’s song, and a husband and wife arguing. The woman stabs the
man, and a bloody knife falls to the floor by a boy’s leg as he looks on
28 M. Landy
transfixed. The song plays on the soundtrack at crucial moments and it

will serve as a coda throughout the film to evoke the past and the pres-
ence of the maternal killer. Credits interrupt the action, which resumes
with a group of jazz musicians rehearsing the progressive rock music of
the Goblins, thereby introducing the leader of the group, Marc Daly,
played by David Hemmings. Hemmings also starred in Antonioni’s
Blow-Up (1966) as a fashion photographer involved in deciphering a
murder. Argento’s style is characterized by his use of allusion to other
filmmakers and actors as critical clues to the film form. Marc is constantly
in the vicinity of the murder through the criminals and the initial crime,
but he ‘is misled at every turn by the images that seem to be leading him
from the darkness into the light’ (McDonagh 2010, p. 41).
The viewer familiar with the conventional genre of crime detection
will find himself/herself unprepared for Argentian surprise and ambi-
guity in the unfolding of each of the serial murders. The mother in the
short episode seen stabbing the father does not visually resemble the
other female characters in subsequent episodes. But while the film in ret-
rospect provides clues to the killer, these clues are constantly thwarted,
proved erroneous, come too late to be useful, or are in need of elabora-
tion. Not until the ending of the film is the killer identified as Carlo’s
mother, suggesting the stereotypical ‘disbelief that a mother is the mur-
derer even when her crime has been witnessed is similarly framed in
Profondo rosso’ (Nerenberg 2014, p. 85).
The scene cuts to a hall where a talk by a parapsychologist is about to
take place. A non-Italian speaker, Helga Ullman, played by Macha Méril,
establishes her credibility in clairvoyance when she is able to correctly
identify hidden objects. She also identifies the presence in the building
of a killer. The emphasis on the intuitive powers of a parapsychologist in
the character of Helga Ullman is related to the centerpiece of this giallo,
involving the issue of sensual perception, of intuition that yields insight,
whereas actual viewing will prove in the course of the film to be mislead-
ing. The camera directions change to include an unknown presence and
montage editing that entails a relay of shots from an uncertain position,
creating ambiguity about the fragmented objects filmed and the killer.
The shot from the rear of the hall focusing on Helga in her trance
links her to the killer, and the red color of the background suggests
rage and blood. Helga confirms her uneasiness to the psychologist and
his colleague (overheard by the killer), articulating her awareness of the
killer’s identity. Thus Helga is marked out as a victim, and the brutal
murder entails a bloody cutting up of Helga, witnessed by Marc from

the street. The murder is seen both from the inside of the apartment
from the killer’s perspective and outside from Marc’s, who hears her
screams and sees Helga’s mutilated and bloodied body being thrown at
the window. The scene of her death forces Marc to run to the building
and enter the room. In his haste he passes through a corridor of paint-
ings where he sees what he believes is a painting that provides a clue
to identifying the killer and unraveling the crime. The police are now
involved. In their suspicion and antagonism toward Marc, their ineptness
is manifest as they rush to hasty conclusions about the killer. However,
Gianna (Daria Nicolodi), a reporter, connects with Marc to become his
partner in crime detection.
The film’s evocation of the past emerges as a major issue of investi-
gation involving history and recollection, especially knowledge, through
the senses of sight and hearing. The fleeting and unsettling elements of
Helga’s murder involve the history of Fascism and the War, from the
image of the menorah in her room to a shadow of a Star of David, her
identity as an Eastern European, and her burial in a Jewish cemetery in
Italy.
The film also conceals the killer’s gendered and social identity. Of the
giallo form, Mikel J. Koven writes, ‘the sexually confused giallo killer is
a frequent, but by no means typical, character: More pertinent to these
traumatized figures is an issue of history, if often indirect…. The real past
trauma is a historical one: the defeat and emasculation of Italy in the war
and under fascism: And this trauma has been haunting Italians ever since’
(Koven 2006, p. 109). Profondo rosso will unfold slowly and deviously
through the investigative efforts of Marc and Gianna. The ‘clues’ for
decoding the crime will entail a range of cultural artifacts from sculpture,
architecture, drawings, and photography, as embodied in Argento’s ser-
pentine method for invoking histories.
The ghosts of history are visual and aural, invoked by indirection and
through a range of allusions. Classical Rome is prominently filmed in
a sculpture of a fountain, where Marc meets his musician friend Carlo
(Gabriele Lavia). A photographic display of Carlo’s mother, played by
Clara Calamai, reveals her to have been an actress during the Fascist era,
which offers another significant layer of memory, that of cinema history
associated with Fascism and melodrama. In Ossessione (1943), directed
by Luchino Visconti, a young Calamai starred as Giovanna, the murderer
of her husband. Further, she is pregnant when she and Gino (Massimo
30 M. Landy
Girotti) decide to escape the husband’s trattoria and seek freedom from
the past. Visconti’s film ends with the death of the young Calamai.
Argento’s film ends with the actress now older, playing another mother
who, like her grown son, also meets a gruesome death, namely a behead-
ing identified in the intertextual terms invoked by Argento as a ‘behead-
ing of neorealism’ (Bertellini 2004, p. 202), but might also be more
appropriately considered as yet another invocation of the horrific mater-
nal as an excessive invocation of maternal rage.
Among the proliferation of clues to the murderer, in Profondo rosso,
running water is a repeated association with the killer’s identity. Initially
the killer tracks Helga into a lavatory where a close-up of running water
in the sink is connected to the familiar black-gloved hand of the killer,
though Helga eludes her assassin at this point. Later, after Marc and
Gianna learn from a book written by author Amanda Righetti (Giuliana
Calandra) of the decaying house where the murder took place, Righetti’s
house becomes the scene of another brutal murder. Her house and the
one she has written about serve as other important clues to the initial
murder scene. Righetti’s violent death also introduces relevant clues to
the mother’s murder of the husband as the child looks on: childhood
toys, a caged bird, a naked rubber baby doll identified with childhood.
The most significant and elusive clue becomes flowing hot steaming
water from the bath tub, the murderer’s choice of killing the woman
who knows too much. Running water is indicative of Argento’s invest-
ment in movement. The water becomes the trope for both birth (amni-
otic fluid death, also cinematic time). Surveying the steamy crime scene,
Professor Giordani, the psychologist, deciphers the name of the killer
written on the bathroom wall, the victim’s last writing. Seen by the killer,
Giordani’s fate is sealed. He is tracked to his house and murdered in a
surreal scene involving a grotesque mechanical puppet as the killer hacks
him to pieces. Ultimately Martha is identified as the murderer, seen in
the mirror that Marc earlier mistook for a painting.
Marc’s mistaken reflection in a mirror is a paradox of seeing as believ-
ing. In the extended sequence where he seeks to fathom the face of
the killer, viewers recognize that, in retrospect, the mother has actually
played a major though ‘cloaked presence in much of the rest of the film’
(Past 2012, p. 232). After Martha’s identification as the killer, the film
repeats the initial scene of the husband’s murder but endows the kill-
ing with a different resonance that leads to the house where the initial
murder occurred. As Maitland McDonagh writes, ‘Deep Red permits
supernatural glimmerings while seeking to absorb them back into a con-

text that permits the effect without demanding a paranormal explana-
tion’ (2010, pp. 121–22).
Profondo rosso changes into a different film when the mother, now rec-
ognized as a killer, alters from a faceless criminal to a figure of melo-
dramatic pathos. Marc’s confusion between the mirror and the painting
raises problematic dualities, specifically of connections between memory
and history, art and life. In horror films, dual identities proliferate, and in
Argento’s film, Martha’s figure seems to hold the key as both the actual
and virtual mother who ‘bestows mortal life, but life without infinity’
(Kristeva 1982, pp. 158–159).
Jacqueline Reich, writing on Argento’s treatment of maternal figures,
argues that the focus in all mothers of Argento’s horror is on male castra-
tion anxiety, in which what ‘the male subject sees as monstrous in him-
self… [is] projected onto the female body’ (2001, p. 92). His films are
not subversive but instrumental in restoring the female ‘to her rightful
place as object rather than subject in the symbolic order’ (Reich 2001,
p. 102). In Argento’s film, the enigma of the maternal resides in the
self-conscious investigation of abjection as a confrontation with ‘death
inflicting life… from which one does not part’ and ‘what disturbs iden-
tity, system, order. What does not respect order, system, rules’ (Kristeva
1982, p. 4). The form of the film violates rules governing narrative.
Sexual antagonism is handled in doubled fashion: as melodrama and as
comic. The maternal melodrama with the mother as an enraged killer
sets in motion the mother’s desperate and fatal attack on her husband
to evade being sent to a clinic ‘as a danger to society’ (Past 2012, p.
233). The child’s witnessing the primal murder scene also implicates
him (Carlo) as both a means of silencing him but also as a reinforc-
ing of the crime, particularly striking in I bambini ci guardano, where
the child serves as both complicit perpetrator and also victim, occupy-
ing social observer and affective personal roles in relation to his mother
(Nerenberg 2014, p. 204).
The comic narrative centers on the spirited character of Gianna
Brezzi, played by Daria Nicolodi (then Argento’s companion and mother
of Asia Argento) in her aggressive play with Marc. Gianna’s insistence on
games such as arm wrestling with Marc involves a struggle over domi-
nance and difference, suggesting a breakdown of gender barriers (as also
in the case of Carlo’s uncertain sexual identity). In their banter, the film
tracks them from outright antagonism, competition, and sexual threat
32 M. Landy
(his) and her insistence on an encounter. Her desire for combining crime
investigation with pleasure exposes his reticence about physical intimacy
in his obsession for unraveling the crime. An irony is evident in how
Argento offers a playful but resonant aspect of female desire, while pleas-
ure is threatening to the male figure.
Profondo rosso provides visual diagrams for tracing the passages (cor-
ridors, reflections, mirrors, windows) of sensation into the lair of com-
mon sense, ritual, and/or dream. These passages might be connected to
the maternal image and the birth canal, as later the archaic house of the
murder will be identified with the Freudian scene of the primal crime.
While the film allows Gianna (Daria Nicolodi) and Marc to use memory
to reconstruct the crime scene and the motive for the murder, the inves-
tigative character of this giallo is resistant to resolution.
In Profondo rosso, ‘sexual ambiguity… is both part of, and a metaphor
for a larger Argentian theme, that of the perpetual elusiveness associated
with the cinematic image’ (Bertellini 2004, p. 216). At the end of the
film, with Marc gazing at his own reflection in a pool of Martha’s blood,
conventional and uplifting conceptions of identity and truth become
uncertain in this sobering image of the mother’s Medusa head reflected
in the mirror. The film’s elusiveness is thus inherent in the image of
Marc as he reflects on the blood at his feet, where blood in this case,
not water, becomes the signifier of the frail mortal body, the killer’s and
her victims. By the end of Profondo rosso, the viewer has seen that the
film ‘hacks open not only victims but also narrative itself, allowing aes-
thetics rather than investigative concerns to surface’ (Past 2012, p. 225).
Actually, the aesthetics of cinematic investigation, not recuperation, is
Argento’s mode of working in his films.
Mothers, Medical Malpractice, and Murder: Fenomena

and Trauma
Argento’s Fenomena (Creepers, 1985) involves another murderous

maternal figure. Fourteen year-old Jennifer Corvino (Jennifer Connolly)
is sent to the Richard Wagner School in Switzerland. Abandoned by her
mother, who has deserted her father for another man, Jennifer suffers
from somnambulism and is disliked by all except the marginal students.
Enrolled at the school by her famous film director father—who has
placed Jennifer’s affairs in the hands of his agent, in effect—Jennifer is
an orphan, and the school only enhances her isolation from mother and
father, friends, and mentors. The teachers at the school treat Jennifer’s
somnambulism and her sympathetic bond with animals as a serious
defect, an abnormality, and attempt to treat her medically. In one of
her sleepwalking moments, she stumbles on the laboratory of Dr. John
McGregor, a Scottish entomologist who is investigating the death of a
young woman, his assistant. However, in his meeting with Jennifer he
identifies her with ‘uncanny abilities of perception’ that enable the young
woman to communicate intuitively with insects and animals. The Great
Sarcophagus Fly, an insect that feeds on dead flesh, will ultimately lead
Jennifer to the discovery of Mrs. Bruckner’s home and to the secret loca-
tion of her deformed child.
Dr. McGregor’s monkey Inga, who also bonds with Jennifer, will save
her life from the murderous Mrs. Bruckner. Not until the last quarter of
the film is it evident that one of the faculty, Mrs. Bruckner, is a mother
with a malformed child, another of the victims of medicine and research
inherent in Argento’s horrific world. Her house, where she sequesters her
son, is overrun with maggots, putrefying flesh, a reminder of the contami-
nation of life by death. The fetid pool of the dead in the lower depths
of Mrs. Bruckner’s house is a fortress to conceal her misshapen son. A
cesspool of decomposition and death in the basement contains the bod-
ies of Mrs. Bruckner’s victims. In the case of this film, the rape of the
mother and the birth deformity of the child characterize ‘a breaking
down of a world that has erased its borders… [through] death infecting
life’ (Kristeva 1982, p. 4). According to Barbara Creed, ‘the horror film
abounds with images of abjection, foremost of which is the corpse,’ which
links women—and specifically mothers—to the abject (1993, p. 10).6
As in Profondo rosso, Fenomena entails a vengeful mother, parapsychol-
ogy, crime detection by an amateur detective, mutilation, and blood.
Similarly, the antagonism between jejune and maternal woman is acted
out with the maternal figure prevailing. Fenomena differs, however, by
focusing on dying bodies, death and decomposition: the maggots in Mrs.
Bruckner’s house, the pool of water in the basement with the floating
dead bodies, and excrement situate the film closer to the Baroque fasci-
nation with time, loss and death.
The film explores the world of the dead, which is identified with
ruins, disarray, vomit, water, refuse, and the mother. Mrs. Bruckner is
the creator of the watery tomb to which she attempts to confine Jennifer.
Mrs. Bruckner emerges as an irrational monstrous maternity: punishing
the world for her humiliation, reveling in the suffering she causes. Her
34 M. Landy
murderous overprotection, secrecy, and confinement of her child reveal

that the boy is ‘less [as] a fairy-tale monster than a marvel of extreme
science [trisomy 13],’ a motif frequent in his films, where monstrosity
becomes aligned to difference, whether institutional, physical, or psychic.
In Fenomena, Argento juxtaposes Jennifer’s telepathy also, as a different
form of ‘abnormality’ that aligns the young woman’s figure with threats
to the integrity of the body of both mother and son.
Trauma (1993) offers a different pretext for the horrific acts perpe-
trated by a mother, though utilizing similar conventions. The film marks
the return of Argento’s monstrous maternal figure in the formidable form
of Adriana Petrescu, played by Piper Laurie, star of Brian DePalma’s mater-
nal melodrama Carrie (1976). Adriana underwent a traumatic labour,
resulting in the doctor’s decapitation of her baby Nicolas when the electric-
ity failed. In this film, Aura, played by Argento’s daughter Asia, is another
traumatized young woman in Argento’s world of maternal horrors.
When the film begins, Aura is contemplating suicide by jumping
off a bridge. She is prevented by David (Christopher Rydell), a young
reporter driving past. David is recovering from drug addiction, and so is
Aura, who was escaping from a hospital where her mother had ostensibly
sent her for a drug cure. Later, David attempts to form a friendship with
Aura but she eludes him. She experiences another trauma when during
a telepathic session at her home a storm disturbs the electricity, and, in
the darkness and mayhem, Adriana’s husband is beheaded. His decapita-
tion is attributed to a serial murderer identified by the police as ‘Head
Hunter.’ Aura’s response to these traumatic events is anorexia and fear of
sex, so that David does not make sexual demands on her in an attempt to
win her confidence.
Later, the film reveals the reason why Aura had escaped the hospi-
tal: it is the same hospital in which the mother’s trauma had occurred.
Dr. Judd (Fredric Forest), the doctor responsible for the baby’s death,
has Aura readmitted to his clinic to destroy her memory of that event.
Through flashback, Aura is able to reconstruct the murder of her father
and her mother’s murderous role in the father’s death. Aura’s grow-
ing relationship with David begins to alter her physical reaction to the
world, similar to his own difficulties in overcoming an earlier attachment
to drugs. At the film’s climax both Aura and David are reunited, deter-
mined to track the elusive Adriana to her nondescript house.
The doctor is now accused of being the Head Hunter, since several
severed heads have been found in the trunk of the car. However, through
a young curious boy, Gabriel (Corey Garvin), who has been observing
Adriana’s house and noticing strange events, the identity of the killer
emerges. David and Aura, trapped in Adriana’s house, learn that Adriana
was the headhunter who killed her husband, the nurses at the hospital,
and also Dr. Judd. Young Gabriel becomes their rescuer. Through his
intervention Adriana is beheaded, without the melodramatic pathos of
Profondo Rosso. This film qualifies as Argento’s self-consciously turning
his back on the supernatural, if not on artifice, preferring to offer a more
restrained social problem treatment of the problems of anorexia, psychia-
try, maternal aggression, and medical malpractice.
The film gives pride of place to the social problem of drug use and
anorexia above sensory aspects (other than suspense) and myths that
have made Argento’s films conceptually and aesthetically challenging.
One of the differences between Trauma and Fenomena, Profondo rosso
and The Mothers’ Trilogy is how Trauma introduces familiar psycho-
analytic motifs while downplaying the director’s well-known and self-
conscious critique of the medium through such motifs as incomplete
mourning and loss, castration, and sexual repression.
Allegory and the Baroque: The Mothers’ Trilogy

The Mother’s Trilogy, thus named by Argento, consists of Suspiria
(1977), Inferno (1980), and La terza madre (2006), and represents
Argento’s attempt to foray into the world of myth and symbol through
mother figures and a more disclosed connection to Fascism. The films
are intent on evoking deep-seated fears and anxieties that attach to rage,
abjection, and death associated with the powerful maternal figures. Their
personas and milieus invite a close examination of Argento’s self-con-
scious uses of the medium as artifice, through the operations of a cam-
era, editing, and attention to clichés through color, spaces, and bodies.
The three films are shot in Germany, the United States, and Italy. The
phenomenon of witchcraft is associated with the lower depths reminis-
cent of Dante’s Divine Comedy, the Inferno, but also allegorically with
the human body. This Argentian body is frequently identified with the
evil mother, the bad witch, and teachers. Argento’s maternal figures,
teacher, and witches also include occasional benign witches, most nota-
bly in Sarah, Mandy’s mother in the third film of the trilogy.
In Suspiria, the first of the trio of films, Suzy Bannion (Jessica
Harper), a wholesome appearing teenage girl, is a student in a Freiburg
36 M. Landy
school of dance. Her arrival in a deluge, with no one to receive her

except a fleeing young woman, the first victim, who will remark in a kind
of proleptic meta-commentary, ‘so absurd, so fantastic.’ As a protagonist
in a quest to discover the evil that has destroyed her classmates, Suzy
will lose her innocence; helper figures will show the way; and a malevo-
lent maternal trio composed of her headmistress Madame Blanc (Joan
Bennett), Miss Tanner (Alida Valli), and Teacher (Margherita Horowitz)
will fall to Suzy to destroy.
Argento’s gialli and his supernatural films, including the Mother’s
Trilogy, have been considered controversial for his treatment of gen-
der and sexuality. Sexual ambiguity, as well as charges of misogyny,
has been commonplace in Argento criticism. However, the histori-
cal, mythical, and supernatural prevail, and it is significant that while
fathers are merely alluded to, the maternal plays the dominant role and
the issue of sexuality is downplayed in the presence of younger women.
Suspiria is indebted to Thomas De Quincey’s Suspiria de Profundis
from which Argento borrows his Mothers—Mater Lachrymarum
(Mother of Tears), Mater Suspiriorum (Mother of Sighs), and Mater
Tenebrarum (Mother of Darkness)—to bring cinema and buried worlds
into dialogue, with an especial emphasis on death and grief. Suspiria
refines Profondo rosso in pursuing the unthought and unarticulated in
conventional narration, especially in relation to threatening fantasies of
motherhood acted out in the films by the young women in their fear of
rejection, loss, and death.
The administrator of the Richard Wagner School is Madame Blanc
(Joan Bennett). The whiteness of Madame Blanc’s name contrasts with
the ‘Black Queen’ of witchcraft, Helene Marcos, a nineteenth century
Greek immigrant responsible for the underworld of witchcraft. She and
the other teachers, surrogate maternal figures, are not only of indetermi-
nate ‘nature,’ but are old in contrast to the young women who are their
charges and often their victims. The gruesome death of the blind pianist
Daniel compels Linda Schulte-Sasse to ask, ‘Is the milieu created by the
film, especially the house and the square where Daniel is attacked and
killed, evocative of Munich rather than Freiberg architecture and redo-
lent of Nazism, thus lending the film a potential fascist subtext?’ (2002).
The Suspiria text is reminiscent of Klaus Theweleit’s study of Fascism
in Male Fantasies (1987), according to which wives and mothers are
degraded, except for the nurses who are presented as desexualized
and hence unthreatening. The focus in Theweleit is on the Freikorps’
relationship to National Socialism through violence, architecture, litera-

ture, films, and cartoons, expressing their fascist attitudes toward bodies,
fluids, women, history, politics, and socialism. Of Argento’s supernatural
mothers, Schulte-Sasse has written that they constitute a critical aspect
of the style and politics of Suspiria: ‘[I]f the hidden reverse of fascism’s
friendly face was brutality, Argento’s cinema reverses Disney to show the
source of beauty in rottenness and the impossibility of reliance—on the
spoken or written word, on technology, on other people, on oneself.’
The film language of Suspiria parallels Argento’s desire ‘to render visible
the invisible, which always entails recognizing and remembering, map-
ping an unmappable space and returning the other’s malevolent gaze’
(Schulte-Sasse 2002).
At the climax of Suspiria, comparable to painter Francis Bacon’s use
of color and distortion, Argento does more than render the invisible vis-
ible; he defamiliarizes the visible to render the different faces and bod-
ies of the mothers as in a shadow theater. In Suspiria, Argento’s most
innovative and successful film, Argento adopted a Gothic supernatural
form. Allegory and surrealism play a significant role in the films. Argento
draws on a range of sources: fairy tales, folk tales, De Quincey, Disney
films, The Divine Comedy, and expressionist art, with their emphasis on
extreme affect, distortion and violence. The film takes the viewer from
the everyday world into the maternal reign of death, a world of corpses,
and antique rituals. The lighting in the film, the uses of color, the uses
of sound, and its grotesque dreamlike scenarios are connected to figures
from history, legend, and art through a pedagogy of power and perver-
sion that becomes surrealistic.
The casting of the teachers at the dance school is characteristic of
Argento’s use of famous actors in his films: in Suspiria, Joan Bennett,
of Hollywood fame, and the Italian star Alida Valli, also identified with
Hollywood cinema and with Alfred Hitchcock for The Paradine Case
(1947). Argento’s penchant for young protagonists is also evident with
Suzy Banyon (Jessica Harper). The familiar generational divide is evi-
dent in the dark, evil smelling, and shadowy underworld discovered by
Suzy, which is revealed as the lair of the mothers and their engines for
destroying obstacles to their survival and maintaining their power over
the young.
From an critical perspective, Jacqueline Reich suggests that the films
mimic Argento’s misogynist designs on his viewers (2001, p. 109).
This view would reinforce Argento as a purveyor of decadence and
38 M. Landy
sensationalism in his reliance on reproducing conditions of imitation, iden-

tification, and unselfconscious affect. While Reich is aware of the artifice,
special effects, and operatic character of horror, her emphasis seems to be
on the mimetic dimensions of violence and the material of cinema as real
and influential through being fused within the body of woman, particu-
larly of mothers, as well as the role of narrative endings. This position pos-
tulates a cinema that fails to distinguish Argento’s distinctive contribution
to a mode of cinema that does not merely stimulate affect, but, through
formal and aesthetic strategies, incites the viewer to react intellectually.
Schulte-Sasse’s comments on the aesthetics of Suspiria’s sheer specular-
ity invoke a different view of gendered representation. The film invites a
mode other than narrative, one of viewing as a journey through magic or
psychopathology as the dissolution of the family progresses. The witches’
goal is ‘systematic and widespread accumulation of capital and will to
power’, combined with psychosis as ‘a destructive power that resembles
magic in its capacity to cause real-life disaster’ (Schulte-Sasse 2002).
The filming of the deaths of the victims in Suspiria vies with the graphic
design of the art deco architecture to produce a response that does not
elicit reductive interpretation or meaning but a moment of sensory over-
load: involving jarring camera angles, dazzling coloration, and vertiginous
images of the disintegrating Helene Marcos. The intensity of the moment
‘is subsumed by the laws of aesthetics that literally reduce her to an objet
d’art, and our reception shifts wildly from the closeness of identification to
the pleasure of aesthetic distance—a pleasure that is disinterested in a very
different sense than that meant by Kant’ (Schulte-Sasse 2002).
In Inferno, the second of the trilogy, the cruelty of Argento’s cin-
ema evokes a world that has become exceedingly violent and stylized.
Argento’s allegories would insert gore into the world both of sitcoms
and of popular psychology to unsettle commonsensical theories about
voyeurism and maternal bodies. The assumption of many critical com-
mentators is that viewers cannot distinguish between art and life.
Inferno (1980) establishes a dreamlike work that characterizes the trials
of the different protagonists in the New York house erected for Mater
Tenebrarum, the Mother of Darkness.
Rose Elliott (Irene Miracle) is the first to penetrate the lower depths
of the antique seller Kazamian’s shop by descending through a fetid pool
of water containing a corpse. She enters the world of the damned, only
to be destroyed herself. As in Dante’s Inferno, Mark Elliott, seeking his
sister, Rose, undergoes the same journey to find her and penetrates more
deeply into the inferno. The characters he encounters along the route
are vicious and exploitative, such as the caretaker played by Alida Valli
and her paramour; also the Countess Elise, played by Daria Nicolodi,
afflicted with debilitating anxiety and overrun by cats. Mark continues
through the labyrinths until he arrives face to face with Varelli, the archi-
tect of the three houses, who informs him of their history, and finally
he encounters the Mother of Darkness, who attempts to seduce him to
remain in her world.
One of the most horrifying moments in Inferno is the gruesome scene
of the antiques dealer Kazamian (Sacha Pitoeff), seeking to bury a bag of
hated cats in the river, when he is overrun by rats who feed on his body.
This moment balances with the earlier scene in which Rose is drawn into
the dirty pool in Kazamian’s basement, which yields a rotting corpse. In
a film of escalating and horrific murders, Inferno ends with the lone sur-
vivor Mark escaping from the burning house. The film’s journey through
the inferno appears as a riddle or a perverse game, embodied by the char-
acters in the film as they portray different aspects of greed, romance,
paranoia, curiosity, and sexuality. In this film, as in La terza madre, the
emphasis is on investigation, exemplified in Kazamian’s books, in the
film’s extra-textual allusions to Poe, alchemy, and technological experi-
mentation, all leading to the central enigma, the Mother of Darkness,
with her warning that ‘all will die,’ but Mark flees and finds himself in
the everyday world of New York City.
Argento’s world in both Inferno and La terza madre invokes Walter
Benjamin’s obsession with the pervasiveness of evil, the ‘blackness of the
soul… the literal hell which haunts Baroque reflexes’ (Benjamin 1998,
p. 18). The archaic mother figure is identified with the Jungian Magna
Mater and/or the three mothers described by Deleuze as embodying the
uterine, oral, and the Oedipal mother, connected to the power of the law
(Deleuze 1989).
Artaud’s Theater of Cruelty and the Neo-Baroque

Antonin Artaud, in his conception of a theater of cruelty as a violent
reaction against representation, called for ‘ocular destruction’ as a social
act. Artaud’s theater is, ‘At its best… a temporary vehicle for channeling
forces; at its worst it makes the power of forces stagnate by captivating
them with its process of completion and self-containment’ (Deleuze 1993,
p. x). Benjamin’s The Origins of German Tragic Drama offers variants on
40 M. Landy
the world of the senses through theatrical forms. In Argento, the assaults
on cinematic representation function to radically de-realize inherited
images of the world. The Argento syndrome is a theater of cruelty cre-
ated to attack commonplace reality, challenging the spectator to partici-
pate in, not merely passively view, the nature and consequences of torture
and death so frequently associated with the feminine and maternal figure.
Argento’s experimentations with cinematic forms are akin to ‘baroque
effects to render death and terror visible’ (Canova 2003, p. 108).
In La terza madre, Sarah Mandy (Asia Argento) is a student of art
restoration who becomes involved in a tragic error involving the opening
of a tomb containing items belonging to the third mother, the Mother
of Tears. Unfortunately, the seal is broken (the Seventh Seal?) by Sarah’s
colleague Giselle, who is murdered, and Sarah undertakes to discover the
circumstances of Giselle’s death. This will lead her into a confrontation
not only with the inmates of the Roman house but also with the con-
temporary inhabitants of Rome, since the evil let loose is more threaten-
ing than in the previous films. The streets are overrun with murderous
groups, and also, psychoses have become so prolific: mothers throwing
their babies into the Tiber, street crimes, thefts, murders, etc. Sarah fur-
ther learns of her genealogy as daughter of a benevolent witch and of the
nature of alchemy that involves white and black magic. At the climax,
Sarah joins forces with the police and Enzo Marchi, a detective (Cristian
Solimeno), is assigned to work with her. After arduous ordeals, the two
reach the underground center, where they confront the Mother of Tears,
in appearance first as sensuously seductive, later clothed, and finally as
the skeletal figure of Death.
The realm of the mythic mother in each of the versions of the
Mothers’ Trilogy, but especially La terza madre, is tied to Argento’s
obsessive concern with violence by way of visual culture. The maternal
metamorphosis of the maternal body into a skeleton is identified with
advertising and commercial television, a specific object of Argentian
contempt. For Argento, ‘television is the literal nightmare of cinema’
(Thoret 2008, p. 130, my trans.), not only in its censoring practices but
more in its commonplace view of the world. Argento’s scathing televisual
nightmare ‘is in the murderous figure of the television talk show as well
as in the censuring role of formulaic fixed patterns’ (Thoret 2008, pp.
129–130, my trans.) that he identifies with epistemological violence.
In developing his conceptions of the Baroque, Gilles Deleuze
invoked Walter Benjamin’s Origins of German Tragic Drama, writing
that ‘Walter Benjamin… showed that allegory… was a power of figura-

tion entirely different from that of the symbol… [and] transforms his-
tory into a nature in a world that has no center’ (Deleuze 1993, p. 125).
In this perspective, the figures resist identification in literal or individual
terms; they become generators of anxiety, defined in Eugenie Brinkema’s
words as ‘the creeping of the flesh’ that she defines as something that is
a nothing, it is a not-yet nothing that churns’. Brinkema criticizes the
tendency to reduce affect to intentionality by arguing that ‘affect is nei-
ther purposive nor intentional’ (Brinkema 2014, p. 187). For her, affect
is non-intentional, indifferent, and resists the given-over attributes of a
teleological spectatorship. From this perspective the text contests reduc-
tive naming and interpretation, leaving the text open to interrogation
and uncertainty.
Conclusion
Argento’s style does not fall into utopian or dystopian forms common
to critical writings on the technological sublime, but it can be said to be
an aesthetic of the sublime. His films, especially the gialli, are investi-
gations of cinema, television at times, animating and unsettling institu-
tional and cinematic clichés concerning violence and wanton brutality in
all its forms. Argento’s uses of media are predicated on the importance
of actively engaging his viewers in experiencing and also in contemplat-
ing the horrors displayed. Through riddles, deadly games, and dream-
like images, he fuses older cinematic forms with current digitalized ones,
conventional genre forms and avant-garde styles, and nightmares of
sexuality and violence in the midst of everyday banality gone amok. His
baroque sensibility as identified by critics (as well as by himself) might
be understood as existing in a fourth world where thoughts of infinity
give rise (not always felicitously) to reflections on the body, the senses,
on organic and inorganic life, and on violence and power.
This essay has traced Argento’s frequent attachment to the figure of
the mother through the excesses of melodrama and has appropriated
often innovating cinematic styles and languages to propose different con-
ceptions of history, myth, and imagination in philosophic and aesthetic
terms, in order to illuminate and perhaps undermine clichés of mother-
hood. While he has been criticized for his treatments of maternal figures,
his work at its most shocking has revealed that in his treatment of them,
he has challenged ‘spectators to question their own pleasures in watching
42 M. Landy
these films… [that] demand that we think about the very ontology of
cinema’ (Koven 2006, p. 156–157). His uses of violent, bloody, and
decomposing figures and situations are substitutes for the repulsive
aspects of a world where sentiment neutralizes and cruelty poses the
potential to question and reflect on reigning beliefs and actions, espe-
cially those that surround the mystique of motherhood.
Notes
1. See Landy (1986, pp. 123–126).
2. See Landy (2009, pp. 113–136).
3. See Landy (1986, pp. 105–108).
4. See Günsberg (2005, pp. 46–49).
5. See Landy (2004, pp. 85–106).
6. See also Brinkema (2014, p. 138).
Works Cited
Benjamin, W. (1998). The origin of German tragic drama (J. Osborne, Trans.).
London: Verso.
Bertellini, G. (2004). Profondo rosso. In G. Bertellini (Ed.), The cinema of Italy.
London: Wallflower Press.
Brinkema, E. (2014). The forms of the affects. Durham: Duke University Press.
Canova, G. (2003). La sindrome del sublime: Poetica dell’eccesso e deriva dello
sguardo. L’ultimo Argento. In G. Carluccio, G. Manzoli & R. Menarini
(Eds.), L’eccesso della visione: Il cinema di Dario Argento. Turin: Lindau.
Creed, B. (1993). The monstrous-feminine. Film, feminism, psychoanalysis. New
York: Routledge.
Dalle Vacche, A. (2008). Diva: Defiance and passion in early Italian cinema.
Austin: University of Texas Press.
De Grazia, V. (1992). How fascism ruled women. Berkeley: University of
California Press.
De Quincey, T. (2013). Confessions of an English opium-eater and other writ-
ings. In R. Morrison (Ed.), Oxford world’s classics. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Deleuze, G. (1986).  Cinema 1: The movement image (H. Tomlinson &
B. Habberjam, Trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Deleuze, G. (1989). Masochism: Coldness and cruelty. New York: Zone Books.
Deleuze, G. (1993). The fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (T. Conley, Trans.).
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Fischer, L. (1996). Cinemamaternity: Film, motherhood, genre. Princeton:

Princeton University Press.
Günsberg, M. (2005). Italian cinema: Gender and genre. Palgrave Macmillan:
Basingstoke.
Jones, A. (2004). Profondo argento: The man, the myths & the magic. Surrey: FAB
Press.
Koven, M. J. (2006). La Dolce Morte: Vernacular cinema and the Italian Giallo
Film. Scarecrow Press.
Kristeva, J. (1982). Powers of horror: An essay on abjection. New York: Columbia
University Press.
Landy, M. (1986). Fascism in film. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Landy, M. (2004). Diverting clichés: Femininity, masculinity, and neorealism. In
S. Gottlieb (Ed.), Open city (pp. 85–106). Cambridge University Press.
Landy, M. (2009). The medieval imaginary in Italian films. In B. Bildhauer
& A. Bernau (Eds.), The middle ages in film (pp. 113–136). Manchester:
Manchester University Press.
Macciocchi, M. (1979). Female sexuality in fascist ideology. Feminist Review, 1,
67–82.
McDonagh, M. (2010). Broken mirrors, broken minds: The dark dreams of dario
argento. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Nerenberg, E. (2014). Murder made in Italy: Homicide, media and contemporary
culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Past, E. (2012). Methods of murder: Beccarian introspection and lombrosian vivi-
section in crime film. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Reich, J. (2001). The eother of all horror: Witches, gender, and the films of
Dario Argento. In K. Jewell (ed.), Monsters in the Italian literary imagination
(pp. 89–105). Wayne State University Press.
Ricci, S. (2008). Cinema and Fascism: Italian film and society, 1922–1943.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Schulte-Sasse, L. (2002). The “Mother” of all horror movies (Dario
Argento’s Suspiria, 1977). Kinoeye: New Perspectives in European Film, 2(11),
June 10. Webarchive.
Theweleit, K. (1987). Male fantasies: Women, floods, bodies, history (C. Turner,
E. Carter & S. Conway, Trans.), Vol. 1. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press.
Thoret, J. B. (2008). Dario Argento magicien de la peur. Paris: Cahiers du
Cinema Ed.
Viano, M. (1993). A certain realism: Making use of Pasolini’s film theory and
practice. Berkeley: University of California.
Wood, M. P. (2005). Italian cinema. Oxford: Berg.
44 M. Landy
Author Biography
Marcia Landy is Distinguished Professor of English and Film Studies Emerita
at the University of Pittsburgh.  Her books include Fascism in Film: The Italian
Commercial Cinema, 1931–1943 (1986); Imitations of Life: A Reader on Film
and Television Melodrama (1991), British Genres: Cinema and Society, 1930–
1960 (1991); Film, Politics, and Gramsci (1994); Queen Christina (1996 with
Amy Villarejo); Cinematic Uses of the Past (1996); The Folklore of Consensus:
Theatricality and Spectacle in Italian Cinema 1930–1943 (1998); Italian Film
(2000); The Historical Film: History and Memory in Media (2000); Stars: The
Film Reader (2004 co-edited with Lucy Fischer); Monty Python’s Flying Circus
(2005), and Stardom, Italian Style: Screen Performance and Personality in Italian
Cinema (2008); Cinema and Counter-History (2015).  Her essays on cultural
theory, cinema history, national cinema, and genres have appeared in anthologies
and in prestigious scholarly journals.
CHAPTER 3
Maternal Ambivalence in Contemporary

Italian Cinema
Bernadette Luciano and Susanna Scarparo
In the third millennium, a growing number of Italian women film-

makers, such as Cristina Comencini, Francesca Comencini, and Alina
Marazzi, have been making films that challenge prevailing cultural myths
about motherhood. Told from the point of view of women, these films
recount stories of women who struggle to reconcile the societal expec-
tations of motherhood with their lived experiences as mothers. In this
chapter, we discuss two films: Alina Marazzi’s first feature film Tutto
parla di te (All About You 2012) and Cristina Comencini’s Quando la
notte (When the Night 2011). With very different styles, the films con-
front what psychologists and scholars have termed maternal ambivalence:
‘the experience shared variously by all mothers in which loving and hat-
ing feelings for their children exists side by side’ (Parker 1995, p. 1). In
Marazzi’s words, this ambivalence can be defined as ‘that sentiment in
B. Luciano (*) 
University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand
e-mail: b.luciano@auckland.ac.nz
S. Scarparo 
Monash University, Melbourne, Australia
e-mail: Susanna.Scarparo@monash.edu

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-56675-7_3
46 B. Luciano and S. Scarparo
balance between love and refusal of her own child. It’s a painful tension
to experience and very hard to confess’1.
As personal and political films, Tutto parla di te and Quando la notte
emphasize the cultural and societal pressures that are behind the range
of complex emotions that can lead to violence and infanticide. Unlike
other recent films such as Maternity Blues (Fabrizio Cattani 2011) and
Sorrow and Joy (Nils Malmros 2013), Marazzi and Comencini’s films do
not primarily emphasize violence and infanticide, but rather highlight the
ambiguity of the mother’s position. The focus of these films harks back
to ‘a most sacred premise of Western culture’ (Du Plessix Gray 1981,
p. ix) that was famously challenged in 1949 by Simone de Beauvoir’s
questioning of the existence of a maternal instinct and later discussed
extensively by scholars such as Elisabeth Badinter with her controversial
1980 L’amour en plus, translated into English a year later as The Myth of
Motherhood, and in her recent Le conflit, la femme et la mère, 2010 (The
Conflict: Woman and Mother 2011). The suggestion that maternal love
may not be a matter of natural instinct but rather one of choice and/
or social conditioning, has continued to provoke intense discussion, as
demonstrated, for instance, by Badinter’s most recent contribution to
the debate. Directly linked to motherly love is the notion of bonding,
which, according to Meira Weiss, has commonly been understood as ‘the
natural, regular process of “falling in love” with one’s child after birth’
(1998, p. 88). The belief in the naturalness of bonding has remained
largely unquestioned because it is primarily based on the supposedly sci-
entific discourses of psychology and ethology (Weiss 1998, p. 89).
Feminist debates on motherly love, bonding and maternal instinct
have been, with varying degrees of ambiguity and complexity, primar-
ily concerned with debunking the stereotypes, social constructions, and
power dynamics that inform widespread assumptions about motherly
love. These debates reveal a crucial tension between four feminist agen-
das, advanced primarily by Anglo-American and Western European femi-
nist scholars and writers. One agenda aims to question the institution of
motherhood (while celebrating the experience of motherhood), famously
articulated in 1976 by Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born. The second
aims at a revaluing of mothering, either as a feminine disposition that val-
ues interpersonal relationships or the care of others (which took its most
notable inspiration from Carol Gilligan’s In a Different Voice 1982).
The third questions the devaluation of motherhood by patriarchal con-
structions based on ‘natural’ differences between the genders (as initially
3 MATERNAL AMBIVALENCE IN CONTEMPORARY ITALIAN CINEMA 47
articulated by Carole Pateman in the Sexual Contract 1988). The fourth

agenda involves rethinking the imaginary and symbolic configurations of
the maternal legacy (Humm 2007, p. 177). In Italy, the desire to revalue
mothering and to re-imagine a different symbolic understanding of the
mother has found its most articulate expression in the call for women
to (re)discover and/or (re)create their subjectivities in search of a female
genealogy (see Luisa Muraro’s L’ordine simbolico della madre, Diotima’s
Il pensiero della differenza sessuale and L’ombra della madre).
Notwithstanding the tensions inherent in these agendas, and conse-
quently the multifaceted understandings of motherhood and mothering,
feminist scholarship has demonstrated that the link between mother-
hood and nature is rooted in Western historical, philosophical, juridical
and political discourses. Indeed, as feminist scholars have pointed out,
‘the association of maternity with woman’s “nature” conflates biological
and social motherhood, and denies that motherhood is work’ (Neyer and
Bernardi 2011, p. 165).
In the 2000s, the complexity and ambiguity of motherhood have
been at the forefront of much public discussion. In addition to the femi-
nist debates in academia and feminist presses, an increasing number of
mothers have used memoirs, blogs, popular media and websites to reflect
on and discuss their supposedly unnatural and non-maternal feelings of
anger, frustration and loneliness. As Samira Kawash pointed out in a spe-
cial 2011 issue of the feminist journal Signs, entitled ‘New Directions in
Motherhood Studies’: ‘mothering memories in the 2000s have shifted
the weight from finely tuned sensibilities to fiercely wrought expressions
of anger, shock, and resilience, often organized as brief essays that more
often than not saw first light as blog posts’ (2011, p. 987).
The films discussed in this chapter resonate with sentiments of unease,
guilt, anger and, ultimately, resilience. While this complex set of feel-
ings adhere to the definition of maternal ambivalence mentioned earlier,
the Italian philosopher Adriana Cavarero provides an alternative defini-
tion, which she calls maternal inclination (2013, pp. 135–167; 2011b,
pp. 195–204). Referring to Cavarero’s conceptualization of inclination,
we argue that Tutto parla di te and Quando la notte invite us to view
maternal ambiguity as integral to—rather than as an aberration of—the
experience of motherhood. Moreover, we claim that the two films ask
us to reflect on the crucial role that women play or can play in support-
ing each other through the difficult choice: to care or not to care for the
child. In addition, Quando la notte reflects on the need to expand the
support network of care beyond women to include fathers. As Cavarero

suggests: ‘D’altronde, dato che siamo nati, non siamo forse tutti stati
infanti? E cosa impedisce che anche gli uomini, così come le donne, si
prendano cura dell’infante e delle creature vulnerabili in generale?’
(2013, p. 175)
Tutto parla di te
Alina Marazzi’s Tutto parla di te tells the story of two women and their
encounter. Pauline (Charlotte Rampling) is a middle-aged woman who
returns to her hometown of Turin after a fifty-year absence; Emma
(Elena Radonicich) is a dancer and new mother. The two women meet
at a local women’s health clinic that supports pregnant women and new
mothers, where Pauline is helping to set up an archive that collects sto-
ries of women’s maternal experiences. Both women are struggling:
Emma is clearly troubled and unsure of how to deal with her feelings of
aggression towards her infant son, whereas Pauline is wrestling with the
past, trying to understand what drove her own mother to kill her infant
son and later die in a mental hospital. The film’s pervading atmosphere
of isolation and solitude is reinforced by the consistent framing of the
two women either alone, or in Emma’s case, alone with her child.
Both women avoid intimacy. Emma spends her days feeling restless
and angry, walking through the streets with her child in a pram or in
her arms, and visiting the health clinic. She is elusive, isolates herself
from friends and family and refuses to return to her dancing. Having
recently inherited her aunt’s apartment in Turin, Pauline divides her
days between sorting out the apartment and working at the health clinic.
At work, she listens to video interviews of women talking about their
experiences of giving birth and post-natal depression, reads diaries of
young mothers struggling with their feelings and sorts through boxes of
photo portraits of mothers with their children. At her aunt’s apartment,
she finds photos, children’s toys, and boxes full of mementos from her
childhood.
The mementos at the apartment and the stories and women she meets
at the maternity centre trigger childhood memories that take the form
of black and white flashbacks. Most of these memories resemble images
from home movies and include a baby and a mother, with the occasional
inclusion of an image of a young girl. As the narrative unfolds, Pauline’s
memories intersect with her growing desire to understand and support
Emma. Indeed, her interest in Emma’s predicament is clearly linked to

her own search to comprehend her mother’s experience. Thus, in what
plays out as a game of mirrors, the younger Emma becomes an image
of the mother for the older Pauline, as Pauline also becomes a sort of
mother figure for the younger woman.
As in her previous films, in Tutto parla di te Marazzi intersperses the
main fictional narrative with personal stories, interviews, archival foot-
age, animated clips, and documentary sequences, all of which contribute
to the exploration of the complex and conflicting emotions experienced
by mothers.2 As is well known, in her autobiographical documentary
Un’ora sola ti vorrei (For One More Hour with You, 2002), Marazzi uses
home movies, letters and diaries in an attempt to re-discover and re-cre-
ate an encounter on screen with her mother, who had committed suicide
when the filmmaker was a child. Focusing on the diaries of women who
came of age just before and/or during the years of the women’s libera-
tion movement, Vogliamo anche le rose is a follow up to Un’ora sola ti
vorrei (We Want Roses Too, 2007).3 Similarly, Tutto parla di te, with its
focus on motherhood, the daughter’s quest to understand the mother
and the use of personal stories, is the third installment of what can be
interpreted as a trilogy.4
Tutto parla di te is also meta-cinematic in that it establishes a dialogue
with Marazzi’s earlier film Un’ora sola ti vorrei through the identifica-
tion of the filmmaker Marazzi with the fictional Pauline. In Un’ora sola
ti vorrei, Marazzi literally gives voice to her mother: in a voiceover she
reads an imaginary letter from her mother addressed to her, in which the
mother states, ‘Voglio raccontarti la mia storia adesso che è passato così
tanto tempo da quando sono morta.’ The ensuing posthumous account
interweaves readings of her mother’s letters and private journals with
medical reports from psychiatric hospitals.
Similarly, in Tutto parla di te, Pauline finds old tapes of her mother,
whose voice is rendered by Marazzi. The woman on the tapes is talk-
ing to a psychiatrist about her struggles with motherhood. Pauline’s
mother (through Marazzi’s voice) on the tapes states: ‘Non so cosa dire.’
To which a male voice (presumably the psychiatrist) replies: ‘Quello che
vuole.’ The woman on the tape then questions why she was referred to
these sessions, but then comments: ‘nessuno mi ha aiutata, e mi sentivo
sempre stanca. Perché mi guarda così? Io non riesco a liberarmi dal senso
di colpa e voglio guarire, voglio uscire, non ne posso più.’
As Pauline listens to her mother on tape, the camera cuts to an over-

the-shoulder shot of her watching video interviews at the health clinic.
With the camera positioned behind Pauline, we watch her watching the
video interviews and taking notes. In this scene, Marazzi establishes
a visual identification between Pauline and herself—that is, between
Pauline’s archival work and Marazzi’s own research for the film—as she
explains in her webdoc, Tutto parla di voi. Hence, Pauline becomes a fic-
tional alter ego for Marazzi the filmmaker, but also for the character of
the daughter searching for her mother in Un’ora sola ti vorrei.
This mise en âbyme has twofold consequences. On the one hand,
Marazzi self-reflexively stages her own research and writing experience,
reminding us of the role that fiction and editing play in filmmaking, thus
emphasizing her own act of interpretation and invention of her moth-
er’s experience. On the other hand, by using her own voice to give voice
to both her mother in Un’ora sola ti vorrei and to Pauline’s mother in
Tutto parla di te, she links the search for her mother in her previous film
with Pauline’s search for understanding and forgiveness for the mother
who refused to care for her children. This mirroring becomes clear in
the filming itself, as the camera moves from behind Pauline’s shoulders,
zooms in on her face and then cuts to a woman in a video interview who
has been convicted of killing her five-month old child. Speaking from a
mental hospital, the woman describes her experiences of talking to a psy-
chologist about her fears and anxiety at that time. She comments on how
the sessions with the psychologist made her feel worse, concluding, as
Pauline’s mother had stated on the old tapes, with the words: ‘Io ero
sola. Ero vuota. Sola, avevo un muro davanti.’
As she listens to these words, a frontal mid-shot of Pauline, sitting
next to her friend who runs the clinic, shows her furrowed expression, as
she is visibly disturbed by this interview. The camera then cuts to Pauline
listening to the old tapes in her aunt’s apartment. This time, however,
she has placed an old black and white photograph of a woman with
her infant son and young daughter next to the tape recorder, while the
voice-over remains that of the convicted killer from the video interview.
From this shot, the camera cuts back to the video interview, with a close-
up shot of the woman recounting the events on the day she killed her
son. This sequence reveals to the audience the secret of Pauline’s past
and identifies her as the young girl standing next to the mother and child
in the photograph placed next to the tape recorder.
Through the interviews of the women at the clinic and of her mother
on the old tapes, Pauline begins to acknowledge her suppressed feelings
and subsequently comes to understand her mother. As she states: ‘Ora
comincio a capire chi sono. Ho fatto di tutto per imparare ad odiarti
ma dentro di me ti ho protetto segretamente in attesa.’ Following these
words, the camera returns to a black and white sequence of long shots of
a woman walking outdoors with a child in her arms, followed by a shot
of Emma walking through the snow carrying her son. The woman in the
black and white memory sequences, however, appears like a silhouette:
her face is hardly visible. In the absence of a clear image of the woman
from the past, the sequence of shots cutting from her to Emma estab-
lishes a visual link between Emma and Pauline’s mother, as the mother
comes back to her daughter as a memory and in the distance. The link
between Pauline’s mother and Emma is further confirmed by a follow-up
sequence of Emma crying, alternating with shadows of Pauline’s mother.
Searching for her mother, and becoming increasingly aware of the rea-
sons behind her interest in Emma, Pauline states:
Ti ho visto l’altro giorno. Stesso portamento, stesso sguardo profondo.

Tutto mi parla di te qui. Mi sembra di vederti ad ogni angolo di strada, ti
immagino dietro ogni finestra illuminata sono stata via per molto tempo,
mi sono tenuta lontana di proposito, ho cercato di strapparti fuori da me
per poter vivere una vita solo mia senza il segno della tua presenza.
With these words, Pauline begins a process of self-discovery that is visu-

ally conveyed by the fact that the memory sequences in black and white
now begin to include more clearly Pauline as the young girl who appears
in them. The increasing visibility of herself as a child in the memory
sequences shows that Pauline is both willing to reconcile herself with
the little girl she had been and is also ready to face her mother’s actions.
Crucially, it is Emma who helps Pauline’s journey towards self-recogni-
tion, as it is through watching, listening and, ultimately, understanding
Emma that Pauline will begin to lift her own mother from the shadows.
As she becomes closer to Emma, Pauline’s memories shift from black
and white to animation in color. The woman in the animation clip is
blonde, like Emma, and we see her saying goodbye to her daughter and
husband as they leave for school and work respectively. She climbs the
stairs to her baby’s room where he is crying in his cot and she shuts the
windows. At this point the cry of the child becomes the cry of Emma’s
child, as the camera transitions from the animation to a shot of Emma

asleep in the dark, being woken up by the cry of her son.
Immediately following this sequence, and already forty minutes into
the film, we witness the first dialogue, beyond a polite exchange of
greetings, between Pauline and Emma. Emma sees Pauline in the act of
reading a book and comments: ‘Un libro, che bello! Vorrei pensare di
leggere non dico un libro ma almeno una pagina. Mi sembra una cosa
incredibile. Forse mi sono addirittura dimenticata come si fa. Non ce
la faccio più.’ In a gesture of support, Pauline offers her a cigarette. As
Emma smokes, the camera cuts to Pauline, sitting at a desk in her aunt’s
apartment, also smoking a cigarette and listening to her mother on the
tapes. Echoing Emma’s statement, the voice on the tapes says: ‘Nessuno
mi ha aiutata, e mi sentivo sempre stanca. Non ne posso più … tanto
nessuno mi crede più.’
It is significant that the book that Pauline is reading, and that facili-
tates the conversation between the two women, is Goliarda Sapienza’s
L’arte della gioia, posthumously published in 1996 by Stampa
Alternativa and re-published by Einaudi in 2008. L’arte della gioia pre-
sents a complex plot in which most of the relationships between women
follow the pattern of a mother-daughter bond.5 In particular, the pro-
tagonist, Modesta, assumes both roles of daughter and mother at differ-
ent times in the novel, and is both mother and daughter to a number of
women to whom she is not biologically related. Similarly, in Tutto parla
di te, the forging of maternal and filial bonds, independent of biology,
foreground the growing closeness between Pauline and Emma.
Pauline’s mixture of concern, but also need, for Emma begins early
in the film. Following a brief encounter where Pauline helps the young
mother to lift the pram while exiting the health clinic, she comes across
an interview with Emma among the video interviews she is cataloguing.
In the interview, Emma states:
Con il bambino non mi sento in sintonia. Spesso non lo capisco. Non mi

sento di entrare in comunicazione con lui e capire quali sono le sue esi-
genze. Piange e io spesso piango. Il momento più difficile è stato quando
ho realizzato lucidamente che non sarei mai più stata la persona che ero
prima perché nella mia vita era entrato in maniera preponderante e per
sempre un altro essere umano che dipende da me e che io, tra l’altro, non
sono capace di gestire e che dipenderà da me per sempre e per tutta la vita
avrò questa responsabilità.
These statements are uttered within a sequence of images in which we

see mid- and close-up shots of Emma, followed by close-ups of Pauline
listening and watching Emma on the screen. Emma is sitting (presum-
ably) at a kitchen table and is framed by the ordinary objects and uten-
sils that make up a kitchen. Her body language shows signs of anxiety
mixed with sadness, but also anger and defiance. She knows that her
words express feelings that contravene societal expectations of moth-
erly love. Indeed, in an earlier sequence, as the camera lingers on smil-
ing new-born babies with their mothers, we hear the voice of a woman
at the clinic who states: ‘Ho sempre sognato di aver un figlio, o anche
più di uno. Secondo me esiste un istinto materno in noi donne, sì. E
intuivo che ci sarebbe stato anche in me. Questo desiderio di prendersi
cura incondizionatamente dell’altro.’
Emma’s words reject this view, but her body language suggests that
she thinks there is something wrong with her inability to relate to her
child, and, more significantly, with her fear that becoming a mother
has permanently altered her identity. In her reaction to Emma’s video
interview, Pauline’s facial expression and slight movement of the head
show signs of both compassion and anxiety, as if she is both drawn to
Emma’s words and to a desire to understand her, while also attempting
to distance herself from them and the pain they invoke. Slow and gentle
music links the close-up shot of Pauline’s confused and pained face with
a medium shot of a sorrowful Emma holding her child and looking at
herself in a mirror. The following one in which Pauline, walking through
the streets at night, remembers a mother holding a child, thus creating a
further link between Emma and her mother, complements this sequence.
Emma’s anguish is intricately connected with two main assumptions
that are firmly rooted in contemporary Western societies. One, as already
mentioned, is the expectation that motherly love should come naturally
to women and should prevail over all other emotions. The other assump-
tion relates to the ways in which Emma’s understanding of herself is
shaped by her longing for a self-contained self that she fears is now lost
to her. In other words, as a mother, Emma sees her self as existing only
in relation to her child, and her longing for a solipsistic self is in con-
flict with the cultural idiom of motherly love that is beyond her reach. In
this respect, Emma is caught up in the contradictions of gender stereo-
types according to a scheme already entrenched in Aristotle, for which,
as Cavarero points out, ‘man exists in fact for himself and for the political
community, whereas woman, confined within the domestic sphere, exists

for the other’ (emphasis in original, 2011b, p. 199).
Emma’s dilemma, however, cannot be understood solely in terms of
feminist and/or postmodernist deconstructions of gender stereotypes
that aim to dismantle the cultural constructions that justify stereotypes.
The dilemma of the mother can be further explained as the dilemma of
maternal inclination. In Inclinazioni: critica della rettitudine (2013),
Cavarero traces the origins of the concept of inclination, dating back
to the Greek pre-Socratic thinkers, through Plato, Aristotle, Kant, and
more recently, Levinas and Canetti. She argues that the concept of incli-
nation is best understood in relation to what she calls ‘rettitudine’ (recti-
tude), which, in turn, informs the Western articulation of subjectivity as
created by a self-sufficient and independent subject capable of standing
up in its own right (2011b, p. 195).
Significantly, in opposition to the self that stands erect, Cavarero does
not posit a postmodern fragmented subject, but rather she advocates for
a subject constituted through relationality. Cavarero defines this posi-
tion of the subject as one that is neither ‘vertical’ nor entirely one of ‘flat
horizontality’, adding that this is not a relationality that is constituted in
terms of ‘interdependence and ideal reciprocity’ (2011b, p. 195). This
is, rather, a subject that is ‘given over, exposed, offered, inclined to the
other’ (emphasis in original, 2011b, p. 195).
Linking this definition of inclination with maternity, Cavarero claims
that ‘it is commonly understood that the maternal is, for women, an
inclination’, which, she adds, ‘is plausible. Not, however, in the sense
usually invoked, that feminine nature is inclined to maternity; but rather
in the sense, truer to the etymology of the term, that “every inclina-
tion turns outwards, it leans out of the self” (Arendt)’ (2011b, pp.
197–198). Hence, while inclining or leaning over her child, the mother
must make the choice of whether or not to provide care for her vulner-
able child, which also implies whether or not to incline away from herself
and towards her child, thus renouncing her view of herself as erect and
self-contained.
The notion of inclination is inextricably linked to the vulnerability of
the newborn. As Cavarero argues:
Even though, as bodies, vulnerability accompanies us throughout our lives,

only in the newborn, where the vulnerable and the defenseless are one and
the same, does it express itself so brazenly… The vulnerable being is here
the absolutely exposed and helpless one who is awaiting care and has no
means to defend itself against wounding. Its relation to the other is a total
consignment of its corporeal singularity in a context that does not allow
for reciprocity (2011a, pp. 20–21).
Hence, the relationship between mother and infant is predicated on

the vulnerability and dependency of the child. It follows, thus, that ‘the
child is totally given to the action, benign or malign, of the one bending
over him’, and as such, ‘the infant embodies in an exemplary way the
other as helpless’ (Cavarero 2011b, p. 200). Given that the mother has
the option of not caring and thus wounding the helpless child, mater-
nal ambivalence is intrinsically a part of motherhood. Indeed, as Alison
Stone points out, for Cavarero the ‘mother’s inclination is ambiguous’
precisely because she has the choice to turn away from the vulnerable
child and to refuse care (2010, p. 3).6
But if the choice to wound the infant were indeed a possibility, what
would persuade the mother to incline towards the child and choose care
over neglect and harm? In Tutto parla di te the answer to this question
lies in the relationship that Pauline and Emma develop throughout the
course of the narrative. Through this relationship, both women come to
recognize and accept themselves and each other as inclined subjects. In
Emma’s case, this is conveyed visually as she leans over her child and ten-
derly caresses him at the end of the film, a moment which sits in opposi-
tion to her abandonment of the pram with the crying baby in an earlier
sequence. In Pauline’s case, we witness her growing empathy with Emma
and her demeanor increasingly shows a change in her feelings towards the
young mother, slowly moving from curiosity to the desire to care for her.
The visual codification of motherhood familiar to Western cultures is
firmly rooted in the Christian iconography that frames Madonna and child
in a self-contained dyad. What is missing from this iconography is the cru-
cial role that other women, taking the role of mothers, can play in sup-
porting the new mother. Leonardo’s painting, Sant’Anna, la Madonna e
il bambino con l’agnello (1510–1513), as discussed by Cavarero, is a sig-
nificant exception and it resembles Marazzi’s attempt at exemplifying the
loneliness of the mother when locked in the dyadic relationship with her
child. As Cavarero points out, the structure of the painting is remarkable
for two reasons. First is the ‘conspicuous inclination’ of the Virgin Mary
who leans towards and bends over her child, whose vulnerability is exem-
plified by the lambs he holds in his hands (2011b, p. 197, emphasis in
original). Second is the presence of Mary’s mother, Anne, holding her

daughter in her lap, while bending her head towards her, with a demeanor
that is reminiscent of Pauline’s towards Emma.7
Crucially for Cavarero, Anne’s body supports and anchors Mary’s,
providing her with the necessary stability to lean forward and incline
towards her child (2013, p. 148). Similarly, in Tutto parla di te, what
saves Emma and her child is not a system of morals, but strength that
also comes from the older woman, Pauline, who is a mother figure to
Emma. Fearing that Emma may harm herself and her child and wishing
to reach her, Pauline writes her a letter. The letter, which according to
Sara Filippelli seems almost to be directed to the lost mother of Un’ora
sola ti vorrei (2015, p. 281), states:
Cara Emma, ho capito che posso aiutarti solo dicendoti di me. … Per tanto
tempo ho scritto lettere a mia madre che non potevo spedire. Oggi questa
lettera ha trovato in te la madre che può accoglierla. Una mattina mentre io
ero a scuola e il mio fratellino dormiva ancora c’è stato un incendio e la casa
si è riempita di fumo. Le finestre stranamente erano tutte chiuse, le aveva
chiuse lei. Di mio fratello non si è mai più parlato. Mia madre si è lasciata
morire in ospedale senza ricordare la sua vita passata e quello che aveva fatto.
Hence, the mother Pauline could not save when she was only a little girl
becomes the one (Emma) whom she wants to, and can, save. In turn,
Emma saves Pauline, who finds her own mother through her. As with
Leonardo’s painting, the mother provides the crucial strength and sta-
bility that allows the daughter to lean forward, ‘out of herself,’ and to
incline towards her child. Deprived of the mother, the daughter leans
‘out of herself’ in isolation, in danger of falling over and, potentially,
harming her child. Confirming to Emma that she can find a way of being
in the world as a mother, Pauline says to Emma: ‘Tu non sei stata las-
ciata sola come mia madre.’ Ultimately, through the story of Emma and
Pauline, Marazzi reminds her audience that, as Cavarero states in her
interpretation of the painting by Leonardo, ‘every mother had a mother,
according to a potentially infinite series of unilateral inclinations first
received and then given’ (2011b, p. 204).
Quando la notte
In her review of Badinter’s The Myth of Motherhood, published by the
journal Rinascita in 1981, Cristina Comencini argued that the Women’s
Liberation Movement had by and large avoided tackling the complexities
of motherhood, mainly discussing it in terms of the debate on abortion.

In her view then, ‘la maternità non affrontata nel movimento è ritornata
poi a popolare i dibattiti pubblici più disparati… È ritornata tema pri-
vato per eccellenza, tema corporeo, luogo inestricabile di non detti e via
dicendo’ (1981, p. 25). Moreover, Comencini comments:
La concezione dominante è ancora quella che il lavoro di madre sia un

lavoro naturale privo di capacità individuale e dunque non rimane che
considerarlo ‘in più,’ tranne a tirarlo in ballo quando esso diviene, per gli
psicanalisti, causa di nevrosi o di carenze affettive… E il lavoro di padre?
Dovere preciso degli uomini o brandelli di cooperazione da ricavare con
lotte quotidiane in famiglia e sul mondo di lavoro? (1981, p. 26).
Three decades later, Comencini returns to address maternal instinct,

maternal ambivalence, and the responsibilities of fathers as caregivers
in her film, Quando la notte. Focusing on the complexity of emotions
that maternity evokes, and the cultural stereotypes against which women
must battle, the film is an example of the filmmaking choices that earned
Cristina Comencini a special Nastro d’Argento (Direttivo Nazionale dei
Giornalisti Cinematografici) award in 2015 for a career dedicated to
the courageous examination of controversial themes and the defense of
women’s rights. Comencini’s attention to issues of gender is evident in
all her films, starting from her first feature film, Zoo (1988), about an
eleven-year-old girl who lives in the Rome zoo where she meets and
befriends a young Rom boy. Her films are often kaleidoscopic works that
reflect on the dysfunctional institution of the family and the pressures
brought upon this institution by social and cultural changes in contem-
porary Italy.8 In Quando la notte, Comencini develops a narrative that
seeks to provide a pathway out of the solitude and inadequacy felt by a
young mother burdened by her incapacity to live up to the cultural ste-
reotypes of maternity.
Told retrospectively, Quando la notte begins with a pan of a bleak win-
try mountain landscape shot from the inside of a bus. The camera moves
its focus from outside to inside to capture the contemplative, strained
face of the film’s main character, Marina (Claudia Pandolfi), as the bus
travels up the mountain before entering a tunnel. Emerging on the other
side in a different season and time, the bright colors of a summer sunlit
day are accompanied by the cry of a baby, as the camera now focuses on
a younger (longer haired) version of Marina on the same bus, trying to
calm her child.
Marina is travelling to an isolated mountain village where she has been

encouraged to spend her summer holiday with her baby son, Marco.
The film’s first part centers on the challenges Marina faces in the days
and nights of solo-mothering on her holiday. Inhabiting the upstairs
of a house on the edge of town, she is observed and listened to by the
unsympathetic owner, Manfred (Filippo Timi), who lives downstairs.
Abandoned as a child by his own mother, Manfred’s anger is directed
toward all women, whom he views as potential bad mothers who will
harm their children. Marina’s increasing isolation and exhaustion culmi-
nate in an act of violence against her child and it is Manfred who brings
them to the hospital, thus ‘saving’ Marco’s life. In signature Cristina
Comencini fashion, the main plot expands to include numerous subplots
in the second part of the film. After Marina’s and Marco’s safe return
from the hospital, the tense relationship between Marina and Manfred
dominates the narrative. The tension between them reaches a climax
during a distressing walking trip up to a mountain hut and restaurant
operated by Manfred’s older brother. During her stay at the hut, how-
ever, Marina meets Manfred’s sister-in-law Bianca. Marina finally finds in
Bianca a mother who shares with her the challenges and difficulties of
motherhood. Through Bianca, Marina realizes that the guilt and inability
to deal with her conflicted emotions are not uncommon: ‘perché nes-
suno ci dice che è così difficile?’ Marina asks Bianca. Through her con-
versation with Bianca, Marina experiences an epiphany of sorts and finds
the strength and desire to have another child, whom she will name Silvia,
after Bianca’s own daughter.
The second part of the film culminates in Manfred’s near-death
experience in the mountains, and a sense of reciprocity and equilib-
rium is established, as Marina is responsible for saving Manfred’s life.
This part of the film closes with the acknowledgement of a deep bond
forged between the two characters. Their unfulfilled love story derails
and dominates the final part of the film, which picks up where the intro-
duction left us before the long flashback which makes up most of the
film. As the bus comes out of the tunnel a second time, we move into
the present, fifteen years later, when Marina returns to the site of her
transformative summer. Defying the obstacles posed by the moun-
tain and winter weather, Marina and Manfred meet up, rediscover each
other, consummate their relationship, and confess the deep love that
has lasted for fifteen years before they once again separate, each inevi-
tably returning to the life they had been leading. Despite the digressive
ending, Comencini’s film forces the viewer to rethink social construc-

tions of motherhood, expectations of women as mothers, and paternal
responsibility.
In many ways, the characters of Emma and Marina are cut from the
same cloth in two films dominated by images and feelings of solitude and
isolation. The two young mothers experience a loss of identity and inde-
pendence, and are increasingly overwhelmed by the everyday challenges
of motherhood which are exacerbated by the endless resounding cry-
ing of their children, reminding both mothers and viewers of the child’s
dependence and vulnerability. Marazzi’s film advocates the positive role
that relationality and a community of women can play in assisting with
the challenges of motherhood. Comencini’s film, by contrast, focusing
almost exclusively in the first part on the figure of Marina, highlights the
cumulative process that can lead a young mother to incline toward harm-
ing rather than caring for her child.
From the very early scenes, Quando la notte abounds in instances and
images of maternal inclination, in which Marina picks up her child to
sooth him, promises to feed him, leans over him and sings lullabies. As
the film progresses, however, the lullabies Marina sings, the stories she
recounts, and the actions she takes to address her child’s needs become
more and more charged with what can only be seen as the overpower-
ing of negative emotions over positive ones, as she becomes increas-
ingly exhausted and isolated. Initially, Marina leans over Marco singing
the well-known lullaby, ‘Stella, stellina’ which reassures the child that he
has a mother, and it is time to sleep. As she becomes more and more
challenged and tired, however, the lullaby she sings reflects the mother’s
desire to be free of her baby: ‘Questo bambino a chi lo do, lo darò alla
befana che lo tiene per una settimana/lo darò al Bambino Gesù/che lo
tiene un mese più.’9
Marina is also seen reading the popular fable of the three owls that are
perplexed as to the disappearance of their mother. Marina’s version of
the fable ends with the mother’s mysterious departure and not with the
fable’s happy ending, in which the mother returns. The final example of
reliance on cultural collateral as a means of managing ambivalence takes
place in the mother’s tense sketching of a small child, based on a local
nursery rhyme. While Marina tensely sketches head, face and body, the
final version of the sketch that we see is the one which Manfred discov-
ers, with the words ‘amore,’ and ‘odio’ scrawled around the image. As
the sketch suggests, creative management10 has reached its limit when in
her final night of desperation she is not able to contain her ‘hate.’ The
cumulative impact of Marina’s isolation, entrapment and lack of sleep,
and the slow passage of time registered by the repeated images of a tick-
ing clock, turn the narrative into a time bomb waiting to explode. With
no visible means of physical and emotional strength and support, Marina,
if we use Cavarero’s paradigm, leans out of herself, in isolation, loses her
balance and harms her child.
Christian iconography has created a model of maternal instinct and
sacrifice that contributes to women’s isolation. To this end, Quando la
notte provides multiple variations on the theme of the Madonna and
child as a way to draw attention to the tension between the cultural
maternal ideal ‘founded on a representation of the unity of mother and
child’ and the mother’s ‘ideal founded on mutuality’ (Parker 1995, p.
24). As already mentioned, what is missing from the iconography of
the mother-child dyad is the significant role that other women, but also
men—particularly fathers—can and should play in supporting the new
mother.
Marina and Marco are often framed as a mother-son dyad that repli-
cate iconic images of mother and child as one: mother holding son on
the terrace of the house looking at the mountain, mother holding son
framed in window in a low-angle shot, mother holding son reflected in
the rear view mirror of Manfred’s car, to name a few examples. These
images are usually motivated by instances in which Marina responds to
the expectations imposed on her by her husband—and more broadly
by social and cultural assumptions—that she should calm, nurture and
care for her young child. As Cavarero reminds us, in these images that
l’arte sacra have rendered popular, the mother remains ‘quasi immobile
e cristallizzata in uno stato fermo, come se l’inclinazione materna fosse
qui non un movimento, bensì una piegatura originaria e naturale, una
postura archetipica’ (2011b, p. 19). Hence, according to this iconogra-
phy, the mother’s inclined position over her child becomes her suppos-
edly natural posture, rather than the outcome of a choice. This posture
associated with the feminine is also in direct contrast with the vertical
position of an independent subject, usually associated with masculinity.
Marina’s resistance to maternal inclination and her desire to retain her
view of herself as a self-contained and vertical subject come across in a
powerful scene in which she is blissfully dancing in the kitchen to the
tune of Gianna Nannini’s song, Romanza. As Marina sways her body
to the music, her freedom is accentuated by the fact that she occupies
this space alone. The child has been left downstairs in the garden where
he has fallen asleep in the stroller, and it is only Manfred’s return home
that reminds Marina, and signals to us the presence, of a child outside
the mother’s space. The lyrics of the song are significant as they mirror
maternal ambivalence and the mixed emotions of motherhood. Although
Romanza is a romantic love song of sorts, its words resonate with the
relationship Marina has with her child, and the metaphorical language
captures the very coexistence of love and hate that defines the ambivalent
relationship. This ambivalent love, it can be deadly; it is ‘una camera a
gas,’ ‘una lama sottile,’ ‘un gelato al veleno,’ ‘una bomba all’hotel,’ ‘una
fiamma che esplode.’ The lyrics from the song preempt what is to hap-
pen later in the film.
Comencini’s paralleling of Marina and the Madonna further high-
lights the tension between the singular and fixed role promulgated in
Christian iconography and the sense of self and independence that femi-
nist movements have granted to women. These tensions are visible in the
two moments in the film when Marina finds herself in front of a mod-
ernist rendition of the Madonna and child dyad: the first when Marina
arrives at the hospital with her injured child, who is taken into the emer-
gency room, and the second, toward the end of the second part of the
film, when Marina returns to the hospital to visit a bed-ridden Manfred.
In the first instance, Marina stands in front of the painting with her back
to the viewer, staring at the picture. What is clear is that the reflection
is incomplete; she is positioned as a woman alone, in a vertical position,
not inclined toward her child, who is notably missing, and reflecting the
choice she has made to turn away from caring, a choice that has brought
harm to her child. While we do not see Marina’s reaction to the paint-
ing in a reverse shot, her position alone in front of the painting with-
out her child accentuates the unspeakable guilt she feels, but is unable to
articulate, about the injury she has caused and which runs counter to all
images of ideal mothering.
The second time she sees the picture, restored to her inclined posi-
tion and mirroring the painting, Marina is holding her child. A scene
in which Marina is able to acknowledge the events of the violent night
follows this moment of apparent reflection of idealized motherhood.
Marina turns from the picture, hands Marco over to Bianca and walks
into Manfred’s hospital room. As she hands Manfred his glasses, so that
he can see her clearly, he also prompts her to finally see clearly for herself
what happened on the night of the accident. As viewers, we finally see
through a flashback what we were denied in the early representation of

the night of the accident. Images, unaccompanied by sound, show her
shaking the baby and tossing him; the viewer sees her actions but not the
impact on the child, which she is unable to describe. For the first time
Marina fully articulates her ambivalence, her failure to incline and to pro-
vide care to the vulnerable infant:
forse hai ragione non sono una buona madre, lo amo ma mi capita di odi-
arlo, certe volte vorrei andarmene, lasciarlo a qualcuno essere di nuovo lib-
era, ma lui piange se non mi vede non so cosa mi è successo quella notte,
mi sono addormentata, lui si è arrampicato, ha buttato giù la bottiglia, ha
cominciato a piangere, quando piange non smette più un piangere che
ti sembra di impazzire, io ho sentito dentro di me una violenza terribile,
credo di averlo…
This cathartic moment allows her to acknowledge her co-existing love

and hate for the child, her desire for independence versus the required
inclination toward the vulnerable child.
Another iconic mother-child image plays a significant role in illustrat-
ing once again the tensions and contrasts between cultural expectations
and Marina’s conflicted desire for independence. In one of the many
nights when Marco cannot fall asleep, the camera dwells on a Madonna
and child picture typical of those found hung above beds in many Italian
households. The camera then pans down to frame Marina and Marco
posed as a mirror image of that picture. The dialogue that ensues, how-
ever, rejects the very idea represented both by the picture and by the
unified representation of Marina and Marco on the bed. Talking more
to herself than to her child (this lack of communication is the nature of
pictures of the mother-son dyad where both are looking ahead and not
at each other), she expresses her yearning to break free of the dyad by
stating: ‘a settembre torno a lavorare.’ Returning to work, which she
describes as something she needs to do for herself, is not understood by
her husband, who sees it as financially illogical and a rejection of her role
as mother.
In a subsequent flashback shortly thereafter, Marina remembers or
imagines a distant or unachievable blissful maternal moment, with her-
self seated at the table eating and inclining toward her child in a high
chair. But this blissful state is no longer within reach, as she becomes
increasingly incapable of identifying with idealized images of maternity
and the need to provide the vulnerable infant with constant care. Alone
and unsupported, tormented by her own feelings of inadequacy, she falls
deeper and deeper into a vortex that leads to violence.
Comencini’s film (as Marazzi’s) is a call for a relational network
that supports young mothers and prevents the downward spiral expe-
rienced by the protagonists. Whereas in Marazzi’s film relationality is
constructed along matrilineal lines, whereby inclination is first received
from a mother and then given as a mother, Comencini’s film yearns for
a form of relationality and care-giving that would include fathers. This
is a model based not on the Leonardo painting cited by Cavarero, but
potentially on iconographic precedents such as Michelangelo’s Sacra
famiglia (1506–1508), where the mother, supported by Joseph, inclines
forward toward the child, while Joseph, inclined on the mother, holds
the child, who turns his gaze back to both of them.
The desire for paternal participation in child-rearing alongside the
mother comes across strongly in the film through a number of male
characters that are portrayed as examples of both negative and positive
models. Marina’s husband, whose presence is off-screen and whose reac-
tions and opinions are reported to us through telephone conversations
with Marina, is clearly a negative but stereotypical paternal example. He
regularly questions her mothering ability, accuses her of being on edge,
and expects her to manage her role as mother and wife at the same time.
He represents prevailing paternal behavior condoned by society and
vehemently condemned by Comencini in a number of interviews about
the film:
l’uomo medio gliene fa passare di tutti i colori alla propria compagna…

gli uomini devono fare di più, non sparecchiare e svegliarsi nel cuore della
notte, ma capire ed essere pronti a supportare.11
La maternità deve essere vista non solo come un affare della donna ma
anche dell’uomo. Bisogna rimettere in questo presepe anche la figura
maschile. L’uomo e la donna sono essenziali l’uno all’altra e nel libro e nel
film questo è un passaggio fondamentale.12
In contrast to Marina’s husband, Comencini introduces the charac-

ters of Manfred and his brother, Albert, in order to highlight the com-
plex relationship men have with their mothers that leads them to equate
womanhood with motherhood, and that subsequently has an impact on
their role as fathers.
Per l’uomo la madre non è una donna, è la madre. Punto. E l’uomo si

porrà in età adulta nei confronti delle donne a seconda di come si è posta
con lui la madre. La prima donna di un uomo è la madre e questa cosa
causa la non conoscenza dell’uomo della donna, perché la madre è un
tabù: bisogna infrangere il naturalismo della madre perché l’uomo la ricon-
osca come donna. Solo così, entrambi, uomo e donna, possono rivelarsi
reciprocamente le proprie ambivalenze.13
In Quando la notte, Manfred exemplifies this point of view. His mock-

ing and criticism of Marina stems from his inability to disentangle his
expectations or understanding of women from the fact that he was aban-
doned by his own mother when he was a child and that his wife has left
him, taking their children with her. Manfred’s mother walked away from
her children, but not without first leaving them a merenda, hence a final
gesture of caring and a symbol of her ambivalence. Precisely because
Manfred equates womanhood with motherhood, Manfred sees Marina as
his own mother, and as a woman not to be trusted, destined to abandon,
and hence harm, her children.
In what appears to be an apparently sexist comment to his philan-
derer younger brother, who seems to think Manfred should clearly take
advantage of Marina, a woman alone living in his house, Manfred’s
response is that ‘non ha tette.’ The seemingly sexist slur can be inter-
preted in a number of ways: as a clear reference to an imperfect female
body that physically and metaphorically fails to nurture her child or to
the de-sexualization of all women who are mothers, based on the model
of the Virgin Mary, dedicated completely to the care of her child. For
Manfred, all of Marina’s actions are suspect because she reminds him
of his mother. This becomes obvious when he derides her to his older
brother by stating: ‘Le piace ballare/E allora?/Non te la ricordi a Natale,
ci prendeva in braccio ci faceva ballare.’ Hence, identifying with the
young Marco and seeing Marina struggling with the travails of bring-
ing up her son, he relives his own abandonment. In essence, he becomes
Marco and also wants to save the young boy, and through him all young
boys, from mothers destined to leave their children. This identification
with Marina’s son is confirmed when she goes to say goodbye to him at
the hospital and while holding her he whispers: ‘non mi lasciare.’ When
she asks him to repeat what he says he utters: ‘non lo lasciare—Marco−
non lo lasciare.’
In contrast to Manfred, Comencini offers an alternative paternal

model in the figure of Manfred’s older brother, Albert. Comencini con-
structs Albert as a character who has a completely different understand-
ing of his mother’s departure and of his wife’s needs as a mother. It is
precisely because his mother left him when he was a child that he does
not take for granted the challenges that child-rearing pose to women and
thus becomes a supportive husband and father. Bianca, in fact, confesses
to Marina that she has managed to raise three children only because of
Albert. Ultimately maternal ambivalence, perceived very differently by
the two brothers, leads each to assume responsibility, in radically differ-
ent ways, in relation to the vulnerable child.
Conclusion
The two films discussed in this chapter hold a unique place in contem-
porary Italian cinema. By drawing attention to the contradictions inher-
ent in cultural assumptions concerning maternal instinct and care from
the point of view of women, Tutto parla di te and Quando la notte pro-
pose a rethinking of socially constructed and culturally reinforced mater-
nal myths perpetuated in Western cultures. In addition, they interrogate
the nature of maternal ambivalence and create a cinematic space for
such behavior to be represented and normalized, rather than rendered
aberrant.
Cavarero’s notion of maternal inclination foregrounds the ambiguity
of the mother’s position. Caught up in a relationship that is unevenly
predicated on the vulnerability and complete dependence of the child,
the mother is called upon to make the choice to care for the infant. The
mother, according to Cavarero, is ‘the name of an inclination over the
other’ (emphasis in original, 2011b, p. 201) and that inclination does
not necessarily coincide with ‘the self-renouncing, oblative figure of the
Western mother’ (Cavarero 2011b, p. 201). Thus, ambivalence, rather
than maternal instinct, appears to be constitutive of the maternal posi-
tion—and this, as Alison Stone points out in her response to Cavarero,
‘gives us the basis of a welcome non-moralistic approach to maternal
ambivalence’ (2010, p. 4).
Moreover, understanding motherhood as the crucial encounter of the
inclined subject with the vulnerability of the other leads the protago-
nists of Tutto parla di te and Quando la notte to challenge the individ-
ualistic ontology of the solipsistic self aimed primarily ‘at making itself
immune from the other through a gesture of vertical self-foundation

that pretends not to need the other’s inclination’ (Cavarero 2011b,
pp. 199–200). Ultimately, the two young mothers of Marazzi and
Comencini’s films find a pathway to a different type of subjectivity that
allows them to re-imagine mothering as founded on relationality: a rela-
tionality that attenuates the solitude of maternal care. Maternal figures,
such as Pauline in Marazzi’s Tutto parla di te and Bianca in Comencini’s
Quando la notte, endow the protagonists of these films with the strength
to incline toward the vulnerable child without losing their balance and
causing harm. In this vein, the endings of Tutto parla di te and Quando
la notte are predicated on a genealogical understanding of maternal
strength and on a re-conceptualization of the father, in Comencini’s film,
to allow for networks of support whereby the mother is not left alone to
incline and lose her balance in a movement that puts the vulnerable one
at risk.
Notes
1. English Pressbook of Tutto parla di te. http://www.kinoweb.it/cinema/
tutto_parla_di_te/presskit/english_pressbook.pdf.
2. In addition, Marazzi has expanded Tutto parla di te through a webdoc
(produced by Mir cinematografica—Ventura film—Rsi Swiss Radio and
Television, and in collaboration with Ilfattoquotidiano.it and Bim distri-
bution). Entitled Tutto parla di voi, the webdoc includes interviews with
new parents, doctors, midwives, early childhood educators and psycholo-
gists. The interviews were conducted while researching for and filming
Tutto parla di te. Alongside these interviews, Marazzi also invited inter-
ested members of the public to send videos, photos, posts, or tweets
about their experience of parenting (http://www.ilfattoquotidiano.it/).
This desire for open participation is reflected in the collective pronoun
(voi) of the title of the webdoc. In fact, like the film, the webdoc aims
to extend the discussion about maternity by questioning the stereotypes
and expectations of motherhood, the notion of a primordial sacrifice, and
the experience of ‘dolce maternità.’ It also aims to create a virtual space
which functions as an agorà for the sharing of experiences and resources
for mothers, women, and their partners. The webdoc has now become a
Facebook site (https://www.facebook.com/Tuttoparladivoi).
3. In an interview with Cristina Gamberi, Marazzi states that ‘despite their
differences, both movies are the follow-up of one another’ (Gamberi
2013b: 233). For discussion and analysis of Marazzi’s Un’ora sola ti
vorrei and Vogliamo anche le rose, see Luciano and Scarparo’s Reframing
Italy: New trends in Italian Women’s Filmmaking (2013) (in particular,
Chaps. 3 and 4); Cecchini (2013, pp. 173–193); and Gamberi (2013a,
pp. 149–171).
4. Sara Filippelli has also discussed the three films as a maternal trilogy, argu-
ing that they are all inextricably linked to Marazzi’s trauma for the loss of
her mother as a young child. According to Filippelli, if this trauma, how-
ever, motivated Marazzi to embark on a personal journey of discovery,
her journey moves beyond the private, as the filmmaker looks for her own
stories through the personal stories of other women (2015, p. 280).
5. Considerably ahead of its time in its depiction of the mother-daughter
bond, L’Arte della Gioia articulates an unconventional deconstruction
and reconstruction of the Italian family and the role of the mother within
it. As Scarparo and Di Rollo argue, through the deconstruction of male
and female gendered roles, Sapienza creates a new kind of mother-daugh-
ter relationship and a radically unconventional understanding of mother-
hood. The novel, moreover, disrupts the conventional understanding of
family based on bloodlines, and calls for the creation of a family that is
conceived as a network of persons not necessarily related through biologi-
cal ties (Scarparo and Di Rollo 2015).
6. Claudia Karagoz has also discussed the trope of inclination in her analysis
of Francesca Comencini’s Lo spazio bianco (See Karagoz 2013, p. 114).
7. For Cavarero’s compelling discussion of Leonardo’s painting, see also her
chapter ‘Leonardo e l’inclinazione materna’ in 2013, pp. 135–148.
8. An early example of her interest in the family is evident in the film
Matrimoni (Weddings, 1998), which reflects on the institution of mar-
riage through the intersecting stories of a number of family relationships.
Il più bel giorno della mia vita (The Best Day of My Life, 2002) looks at
three generations of women in an Italian family, while also exploring
issues of sexuality and sexual identity through a visual style that chal-
lenges traditional representations of the female body. A focus on the dark
side of family life, child molestation, as well as the exploration of sexual
identity, are at the core of La bestia nel cuore (Don’t Tell, 2005), a film
based on Comencini’s novel of the same title and Italy’s contender for an
Oscar in 2006.
9. It is interesting that the version of the lullaby that Comencini uses implies
only benevolent ‘babysitters’—la Befana and Jesus. She does not include
the more sinister and racist elements of the lullaby more commonly
known: ‘lo darò all’uomo nero che lo tiene un anno intero.’
10. Parker suggests that the singing of lullabies illustrate the co-existence of
maternal love and hate, and also provide the mother with a creative vehi-
cle for containing negative emotions (1995, p. 61).
11.
www.cristinacomencini.it.
12.
https://femminileingenere.wordpress.com/2012/11/07/essere-madre-
un-lavoro-culturale.
13. https://femminileingenere.wordpress.com/2012/11/07/essere-madre-
un-lavoro-culturale.
Works Cited
Badinter, E. (2011). The conflict: Woman and mother. Melbourne: Text Publishing.
Cavarero, A. (2011a). Horrorism: Naming contemporary violence. New York:
Columbia University Press.
——— (2011b). Inclining the subject: Ethics, alterity and natality. In J. Elliott &
D. Attridge (Eds.), Theory after theory (pp. 195–204). New York: Routledge.
——— (2013). Inclinazioni: Critica della rettitudine. Milan: Raffaello Cortina
Editore.
Cecchini, F. (2013). Alina Marazzi’s women: A director in search of herself
through a female genealogy. In M. Cantini (ed.), Filmmakers and the gendered
screen (pp. 173–193). New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Comencini, C. (1981). La dannazione di Madame Roland. Rinascita, 38,
pp. 25–26.
Diotima. (2003). Il pensiero della differenza sessuale. Milano: La Tartaruga.
Diotima. (2007). L’ombra della madre. Naples: Liguori.
Du Plessix Gray, F. (1981). Foreword. In E. Badinter (Ed.), The myth of mother-
hood (pp. ix–xvii). London: Souvenir Press.
Filippelli, S. (2015). La trilogia materna di Alina Marazzi. The Italianist, 35(2),
272–283.
Gamberi, C. (2013a). Envisioning our Mother’s Face: Reading Alina Marazzi’s
Un’ora sola ti vorrei and Vogliamo anche le rose. In M. Cantini (Ed.), Italian
women filmmakers and the gendered screen (pp. 149–171). New York: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Gamberi, C. (2013b). Skype interview with Alina Marazzi. In M. Cantini (Ed.),
Italian women filmmakers and the gendered screen (pp. 231–235). New York:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Gilligan, C. (1982). In a different voice: Psychological theory and women’s develop-
ment. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Humm, M. (2007). Simone de Beauvoir, Virginia Woolf and the Maternal. In A.
Giorgio & J. Waters (Eds.), Women’s writing in Western Europe: Gender, gen-
eration and legacy (pp. 186–199). Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars.
Karagoz, C. (2013). Motherhood Revisited in Francesca Comencini’s Lo spazio
bianco. In M. Cantini (Ed.), Italian women filmmakers and the gendered screen
(pp. 103–119). New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Kawash, S. (2011). New Directions in Motherhood Studies, Signs, 36(4),

969–1003.
Luciano, B., & Scarparo, G. (2013). Reframing Italy: New trends in Italian
women’s filmmaking. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press.
Muraro, L. (1991). L’ordine simbolico della madre. Milan: Editori Riuniti.
Neyer G., & Bernardi, L. (2011). Feminist perspectives on motherhood and
reproduction. Historical Social Research, 36(2), 162–176.
Parker, R. (1995). Mother love/mother hate: The power of maternal ambivalence.
New York: Harper-Collins.
Pateman, C. (1988). Sexual contract. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Rich, A. (1976). Of woman born: Motherhood as experience and institution. New
York: Norton.
Scarparo, S., & Di Rollo, A. (2015). Mothers, Daughters and Family in Goliarda
Sapienza’s L’arte della gioia. The Italianist, 35(1), pp. 91–106.
Stone, A. (2010). The ontology of the maternal: A response to Adriana
Cavarero. Studies in the Maternal, 2(1), pp. 1–7.
Weiss, M. (1998). Conditions of mothering: The bio-politics of falling in love
with your child. The Social Science Journal, 35(1), pp. 87–105.
Filmography
Comencini, C., dir. (2011). Quando la notte (When the Night). Italy: Cattleya
and Rai Cinema.
Marazzi, A., dir. (2012). Tutto parla di te (All About You). Italy and Switzerland:
Mir Cinematografica and Ventura Films.
Authors’ Biography
Bernadette Luciano is professor of Italian at the University of Auckland and
specializes in Italian cinema and cultural studies. She has published articles and
book chapters on Italian cinema, film adaptation, Italian women’s historical nov-
els, women’s autobiographical writing, and literary translation. She is author of
The Cinema of Silvio Soldini: Dream, Image, Voyage (2008) and co-author of
Reframing Italy: New trends in Italian Women’s Filmmaking (2013).
Susanna Scarparo is associate professor in the Faculty of Arts at Monash

University. She teaches and researches on Italian cinema, global studies, liter-
ary and cultural studies. She has published numerous articles and book chap-
ters on Italian women’s historical writing, women’s life writing, Italian feminist
theory, Italian-Australian literature and Italian cinema. She is co-author of
Reframing Italy: New trends in Italian Women’s Filmmaking (2013), author

of Elusive Subjects: Biography as Gendered Metafiction (2005) and has co-edited
Violent Depictions: Representing Violence Across Cultures (2006), Across Genres,
Generations and Borders: Italian Women Writing Lives (2005) and Gender and
Sexuality in Contemporary Italian Culture: Representations and Critical Debates
(2010)
CHAPTER 4
‘A Bad Mother and a Small Heap of Bones:’

Maternal Indifference in Alessandro
Capone’s L’Amore Nascosto
Claudia Karagoz
L’amore nascosto (Hidden Love, 2009), by Roman film, television, and

stage director Alessandro Capone, contributes a uniquely matrifocal
narrative to Italian cinema and culture, and addresses a theme—a
mother’s indifference and hatred for her daughter—rarely represented
on screen.1 Capone’s film is based on Maria Venturi’s book Madre e ossa
(1997) which, when the film was made and distributed, was believed
to be Venturi’s translation into Italian of a diary chronicling the real-
life experiences of a French woman, Danielle Girard.2 Set in contem-
porary France, and coproduced by Italy, Belgium, and Luxembourg,
L’amore nascosto dramatizes a highly troubled relationship between
Danielle (Isabelle Huppert) and her daughter Sophie (Mélanie Laurent).
Activated by Danielle’s emotional rejection of Sophie at birth, the rift
between mother and daughter develops according to increasingly
acute patterns of reciprocal hostility and resentment, and results in
each of the women separately resolving to commit suicide. Their story
C. Karagoz (*) 
Saint Louis University, St. Louis, USA
e-mail: ckaragoz@slu.edu

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-56675-7_4
72 C. Karagoz
emerges through Danielle’s fragmented yet authoritative discourse—

a series of written communications that she addresses to her psycholo-
gist Dr. Madeleine Nielsen (Greta Scacchi), and some verbal exchanges
between Danielle and Dr. Nielsen. Several black and white flashbacks to
the mother-daughter’s past, which are narrated by Danielle’s voice-over,
constitute integral parts of her tale.
Unlike most cinematic and literary mother-daughter narratives in
Italian culture, which are generally constructed from the daughter’s
point of view, L’amore nascosto brings the mother’s position and her
story to the fore.3 Male figures—Danielle’s husband and Sophie’s father
in primis—remain largely marginal to the mother-daughter plot.4 More
importantly, little space is granted to the daughter’s perspective and
experiences. Sophie’s viewpoint is filtered through the mother’s narra-
tion, and voiced directly by the daughter on only three occasions. The
mother’s voice—quite literally, since Danielle’s voice-over dominates the
soundtrack of the film—takes control of the narrative. Notwithstanding
her initial, self-imposed silence—following her third suicide attempt and
consequent hospitalization, Danielle refuses to speak for a long period of
time—the mother is able to tell her own story.
Yet, while L’amore nascosto grants narrative agency to the mother
figure and, through her voice and perspective, compellingly stages her
un-motherly feelings—her lack of desire to become a mother, indiffer-
ence for her newborn daughter and, later, hatred toward Sophie—the
film contradicts its own narrative by re-affirming the inevitability of
maternal love. As the title proclaims, and parts of the final sequences
suggest, Danielle’s love for her daughter, albeit hidden, was always
there: she had just been unable to manifest it.5 Moreover, Danielle’s
psychotherapy is meant to cure her from her mutism and suicidal inten-
tions by guiding her to re-envision her maternal experience: once the
mother-daughter relationship is mended, Danielle’s psychoses are sup-
posed to disappear. However, the cure fails, hatred, not love, informs
the mother-daughter relationship until the end, and Danielle resolves to
commit suicide again. But Sophie takes her own life first.
L’amore nascosto thus attempts but ultimately fails to challenge
normative notions of womanhood and idealized motherhood. In this
chapter I contest the film’s reduction of Danielle’s story to a drama of
maternal ambivalence, that is, its assumption that Danielle simultane-
ously loves and hates her daughter, which I describe as the master nar-
rative of this text. I argue that what L’amore nascosto instead represents,
4 ‘A BAD MOTHER AND A SMALL HEAP OF BONES’ … 73
through its counter narrative, is a woman’s lack of interest in mothering

and her inability to love her daughter, a position I call maternal indif-
ference. To probe the film’s conflicting narratives—the ways in which
L’amore nascosto focuses on maternal indifference and hatred, yet reas-
serts the maternal ideal by taking for granted the protagonist’s love for
her daughter—I draw from, and extend, Rozsika Parker’s psychoana-
lytic notions of maternal ambivalence, guilt, and shame. Analyses of the
interplay of devices such as framing and lighting with the film’s ambiva-
lent narrative, with a focus on the black and white flashbacks, support
my study of L’amore nascosto.
An Unnatural Mother
Maternal ambivalence, a mother’s coexisting feelings of love and hatred
for her child, is a crucial aspect of maternal experience and a socially
relevant issue that has been largely absent from both public debates
and cultural representations of motherhood in Italy. In Italian cin-
ema, few films have dealt with this subject.6 Psychoanalysis, in turn, has
largely addressed maternal ambivalence from the child’s perspective.7
Challenging her discipline’s failure to examine ambivalence in relation
to the mother’s subjectivity, British psychoanalyst Rozsika Parker has
explored the creative potential of properly managed maternal ambiva-
lence. For Parker, if acknowledged and reflected upon, a process she
describes as ‘mentalisation,’ maternal ambivalence can foster self-knowl-
edge and a woman’s ability to mother successfully, ‘sparking the impulse
to give, understand, construct and mend’ (2012, p. 110). Conversely, if
a mother hides her hostile feelings for her child out of guilt and shame,
which are amplified by the societal idealization of motherhood, the anxi-
ety and fear caused by maternal ambivalence intensify, rendering the
ambivalence unmanageable, which leads to psychosis.
According to Parker, ‘Acknowledging that she hates where she loves is
acutely painful for a mother’ (2012, p. 87; emphasis mine). This sug-
gests that a mother’s natural response to her child is love, while hatred
is the undesirable affect that might in some cases pollute the obliga-
tory maternal love. How then can we explain the position of mothers
like Danielle in L’amore nascosto, who do not love (where they hate)?
Although Danielle clearly suffers from severe psychological problems
resulting from her experiences as a mother, Parker’s understanding of
maternal ambivalence does not elucidate her position. As the black and
74 C. Karagoz
white flashbacks in which Danielle reconstructs the mother-daughter

story demonstrate, her experiences cannot be re-contained within the
paradigm of maternal ambivalence. These flashbacks are embedded in
Danielle’s narration of her past as addressed to Dr. Nielsen: unable, or
unwilling, to speak in the first part of the film, she reluctantly agrees to
her therapist’s request to communicate her story in writing. Her voice-
over conveys the content of these texts, which Dr. Nielsen reads during
their sessions together, and accompanies the flashbacks.
As these sequences make clear, Danielle had always been keenly
aware of her lack of desire to become a mother, and of her indifference
and hostility toward her daughter. Although the narrative of maternal
ambivalence infiltrates Danielle’s discourse in some scenes—for exam-
ple, through her admission of guilt for her perceived inadequacies as a
mother—no manifestations of love for Sophie ever enter the mother-
daughter tableaux that the film recreates. Rather, these scenes show
a calm, impassive Danielle observing her daughter, as a newborn and
at different stages of her childhood, from a physical and emotional dis-
tance, and barely interacting with her. According to Capone, only
Isabelle Huppert could have played Danielle’s role because of her vis-
ceral approach to acting, and the ‘cruelty’ she is able to express through
her performances (DVD Extras). But Huppert’s idiosyncratic acting
style—particularly the elusiveness of her screen presence, and her ability
to endow her often powerless characters with agency—ultimately under-
mines the film’s ability to control the narrative her character conveys.8
Cinematically, the flashback sequences signify Danielle’s want of inter-
est and feeling for her daughter by means of overhead or high-angle
medium close-ups of her unresponsive face and absent gestures, and with
shots where she remains in the background of the frame. When she is in
the foreground, Danielle turns away from Sophie to look directly into
the camera and continue her narration. The impassiveness of her direct
utterances and voice-over commentary in these scenes corroborate the
distance conveyed by point of view, framing, and mise-en-scène. More
broadly, the fact that Danielle’s unemotional direct speech and voice-
over narration dominate the sound throughout the film grants her
narrative agency and lends authority to her perspective on the mother-
daughter story, ultimately strengthening the film’s counter-narrative of
maternal indifference. Furthermore, the protagonist’s aloof stare consist-
ently eludes the control of the often elevated, regulatory camera gaze,
and, at times, openly defies it by addressing the viewers directly.9
For example, in the overhead shot set in the delivery room when a
member of the hospital staff places the newborn Sophie on her chest,
Danielle’s face appears emotionless. Simultaneously, her voice-over viv-
idly describes the pain she experienced giving birth, and protests against
the societal romanticization of human birth. Although in this sequence
Danielle does not stare directly into the camera, she actively contests
idealized motherhood by refusing to surrender her emotions to its con-
trolling gaze, as well as through her voice-over commentary. Similarly,
in the next shot we see Danielle in the background of the frame, sitting
on her hospital bed and blankly observing several family members (in the
foreground) joyously crowding around Sophie, who is in the arms of her
adoring father.
In this scene the film’s master discourse is uncharacteristically voiced
through Danielle’s own narration. As the camera zooms into a medium
close-up of the protagonist, her voice-over recalls how her family’s hap-
piness about Sophie’s birth, which she was unable to share, had dis-
tracted her from bonding with her daughter. This early disconnection
led to fatal consequences for their future relationship, the voice-over
continues, engendering the feelings of guilt that have stayed with her
ever since. But Danielle’s account in this sequence contradicts her own
reactions and commentary in the delivery room scene, where her actual
first contact with Sophie had occurred, producing only indifference. In
the hospital room sequence she appears unemotional again—hardly the
countenance of a new mother distressed by her inability to bond with
her newborn daughter. While, in this instance, Danielle’s voice-over
remarks reproduce received notions of ideal motherhood, the mise-en-
scène and the protagonist’s expression instead corroborate her previous
account of her lack of emotion after Sophie’s birth.
Two other flashbacks, filmed from high angles, show Danielle absently
sitting next to her daughter, now a toddler. In one of them, Danielle dis-
tractedly places a few clothespins on Sophie’s smock, in a feeble attempt
at engaging in play with her daughter. In the second scene, Danielle
lounges on the sofa with one of Sophie’s stuffed animals in her arms. In
both shots, she ignores her daughter’s requests for attention, and turns
away from her to look directly into the camera, and resume her narration.
In the latter flashback, Danielle also pays no heed to Sophie’s remonstra-
tions after she declares, speaking at the camera, that she never found her
daughter pretty. No other moment in the film captures Danielle’s affec-
tive distance from Sophie as eloquently as the rapid, subtle movement of
76 C. Karagoz
her head as she interrupts her narration, turns toward Sophie for just a
few seconds, and then turns back toward the camera to resume her tale.
In another scene the protagonist, barely visible in the dark background,
sits on the bathroom’s windowsill and watches Sophie wash her hands in
the sink. Here, her voice-over explains that her daughter so disliked her
from the outset that, starting from the age of three, she refused to let
her touch her. As in the hospital room sequence, Danielle’s words imply
concern for her lack of bonding with her daughter. However, as in that
scene, the absence of interest in Sophie conveyed by her body language
belies the concern expressed by her commentary.
Another important way in which these initial sequences purport to
stage Danielle’s maternal ambivalence is through her admission of guilt
for her inadequacies as a mother. Guilt, Danielle’s voice-over explains,
had caused her to quit her job in order to devote herself fully to Sophie,
and to shower her with toys, clothes, and attention. I propose, however,
that Danielle’s guilt does not stem from remorse for hating a daugh-
ter she also loved, but from her perceived failure to conform to societal
definitions of womanhood and mothering, which she had attempted to
obey by marrying, and having a child with a man she did not love. From
this perspective, marriage and motherhood had not been choices for
Danielle. A solitary yet independent and relatively content woman before
her marriage, Danielle had passively surrendered to her future husband’s
courtship, and then yielded to his wish to father a child. Specifically, after
continuing to use the pill secretly for some time after marriage, Danielle
had acquiesced to becoming a mother in order to avoid any further sex-
ual intercourse with a man she found physically repulsive once pregnant.
As Elisabeth Badinter has shown in The Conflict, in France and other
Western countries, the last three decades have been marked by a return
to traditional models of motherhood, a true ‘revolution’ fuelled by natu-
ralist ideologies of parenting, with the result that motherhood has been
‘put squarely back at the heart of women’s lives’ (2011, p. 1). From this
perspective, Danielle’s story in L’amore nascosto can be seen as the chron-
icle of the potential consequences of capitulating to societal pressures
prescribing marriage and motherhood for women, and dictating that they
surrender their autonomy to devote themselves to their children. Since
society, the family, and even psychoanalysis, still expect that women pro-
create—and that they be loving, nurturing, selfless mothers—any woman
uninterested in mothering, and worse still like Danielle, who does not
love her children, will perceive herself as monstrous, and be overwhelmed

by guilt.
It is also important to note that while Danielle proclaims her guilt
for being an inadequate mother, she simultaneously challenges norma-
tive constructs of motherhood. During a session with Dr. Nielsen, for
example, recalling the physical pain she experienced during childbirth,
she stresses how the birthing process lacks grace and dignity, and pro-
vocatively asks her therapist why women, unlike other animals, are not
allowed to reject their offspring at birth, if they feel so inclined. ‘Is
this the reaction of an unnatural mother?’ Danielle asks, looking at Dr.
Nielsen straight in the eye, as if to question psychoanalytical assumptions
about maternal love and attachment, and simultaneously indict ideolo-
gies of naturalistic motherhood.10 Just as Danielle defies the control-
ling gaze of the camera by staring directly into it in other scenes, here
she challenges the authority of psychoanalysis by looking intently at her
therapist.
In this respect, Dr. Nielsen and the discipline she represents are asso-
ciated with surveillance and control throughout the film. In the scenes
staging Danielle’s therapy sessions, for example, she is simultaneously
framed by and finds herself the object of multiple gazes: Dr. Nielsen’s
analytical stare, the all-seeing eye of the camera, and the focused gaze
of a small video camera, positioned behind the therapist’s desk and
pointed toward Danielle, which records their conversations. Moreover,
in two scenes set at Dr. Nielsen’s home, we see recordings of therapy
sessions playing on a large flat screen TV. Here, the TV monitor tightly
frames a close-up of Danielle’s face, signaling a further attempt to con-
strain her story within the film’s master narrative and the rigid interpreta-
tive parameters of psychoanalysis. Danielle’s tale, however, which in this
scene unapologetically chronicles the circumstances that made it impos-
sible for her to love Sophie, resists interpretation. In addition, the fact
that Dr. Nielsen’s patient has entered her personal space through these
recordings signifies the therapist’s growing involvement in the mother-
daughter conflict—an additional defeat for her discipline. Several scenes,
both in the final DVD version of the film and in the Extras, dramatize
Dr. Nielsen’s gradual loss of distance from Danielle’s case, and even her
nascent psychosis resulting from it. By gazing back at the camera, and
confounding psychoanalysis, Danielle has eluded these means of surveil-
lance. From being a surveilled object, she has acquired control of the
apparatuses meant to regulate her dissenting maternal position.
78 C. Karagoz
In the foundational scenes of the mother-daughter story staged in the

flashbacks, Danielle appears physically removed from Sophie, and rele-
gated to the background of the frame. When she is next to her daughter,
she deliberately turns away from her to stare directly at the camera and
address the viewers. Similarly, Danielle actively gazes back to elude the
regulatory interpretation imposed by psychoanalysis. Although her own
narration at times adheres to the film’s normative discourse on maternal
ambivalence, guilt, and ideal motherhood—by rehearsing, for example,
received notions of mother-child early bonding11—Huppert’s perfor-
mance and the film’s cinematic grammar corroborate its counter-narra-
tive of maternal indifference.
A Hateful Daughter
With reference to Parker’s theorization of guilt associated to maternal
ambivalence, I have argued that in L’amore nascosto Danielle’s avowed
guilt does not stem from an intra-psychic conflict between love and
hate for her daughter, but from her perceived inadequacy to conform
to normative definitions of womanhood and mothering. To obey these
norms, Danielle relinquishes her independence and submits to marriage
and childbirth. However, it is important to note that Parker has iden-
tified another affect as colluding with guilt to render maternal ambiva-
lence unmanageable: a mother’s shame for her hostility toward her child.
While guilt focuses on the action performed, shame is an all-encompass-
ing affect that centers on the self, and causes the subject to lose her sense
of agency. A shamed mother sees herself as ‘the baby’s helpless object
with little or no sense of herself as author or agent in her life with the
child’ (2012, p. 95). This position seems akin to Danielle’s perception of
being at the mercy of her all-powerful and hateful daughter. For exam-
ple, she reveals to Dr. Nielsen that as a child Sophie had the uncanny
ability to fall ill, thus preventing her from spending time with her partner
Luc. Danielle blames her for having undermined their liaison and ulti-
mately causing it to end. The therapist’s response espouses Parker’s inter-
pretation of—and cure for—maternal shame: she invites her patient to
cease seeing Sophie as omnipotent, and herself as the defenseless victim
of her daughter. But, as the film shows, Danielle’s reconstruction of the
mother-daughter story, and of Sophie’s power over her, is fairly accurate.
The little we see of Sophie in the film, and hear directly from her
outside her mother’s narration, corroborates Danielle’s portrait of her
daughter as controlling, deceiving, and destructive, so much so that

Dr. Nielsen becomes increasingly sympathetic to the mother’s position.
In her rare direct appearances and interventions in the film’s narrative,
Sophie’s behavior is consistently resentful, manipulative, even physically
aggressive toward her mother. In the only sequence in which we see
Sophie face to face with Dr. Nielsen, for example, she accuses the thera-
pist of having fallen for Danielle’s theatrics—that is how she describes
her present condition—and calls her mother a heartless and destruc-
tive woman. But, suddenly addressing Dr. Nielsen with the informal tu,
Sophie concludes her tirade by reproaching the therapist for not believ-
ing she can still love her mother.
Here, the film’s affirmation of the naturalness of the mother-child
bond and affection is rehearsed through Sophie’s protestation of love for
her mother. Yet, her cynical dismissal of her present condition as play-
acting proves otherwise. Despite Sophie’s belated attempt at captatio
benevolentiae, this scene validates Danielle’s depiction of her daughter,
as do the hard-hearted words Sophie directs to Danielle, privately, when
they eventually meet. In their first and last actual encounter of the film—
all other scenes which show them together are dreams, hallucinations, or
flashbacks focalized through Danielle’s perspective—Sophie harshly urges
her mother to stop trying to hurt her by pretending she is ill, and threat-
ens to sell her apartment to pay for the hospital bills if she does not get
better soon.
This scene takes place at the second, more affordable private hospi-
tal where Danielle is eventually transferred. The tone of the encounter is
set by the opening frame: a back shot of a visibly frightened, trembling
Danielle, seated at her desk, and facing a barred window. Simultaneously,
we hear Sophie’s sullen voice off screen. Throughout the encounter,
Sophie directs multiple accusations and threats to Danielle, who remains
mostly silent. When her mother tries to leave the room, Sophie grabs
her by the arm and violently pushes her onto the bed. Here, the film’s
love-hate discourse manifests itself through an almost imperceptible
movement of Sophie’s hand, when, after forcing her mother to sit on
the bed, she lightly touches a strand of her hair. This gesture, however,
is as unconvincing, and incongruent with all other mother-daughter
interactions, as Sophie’s declaration of love for Danielle to Dr. Nielsen.
Significantly, both the gesture and the declaration were absent from
these same scenes in Madre e ossa, the book by Venturi on which L’amore
nascosto is based. More broadly, in Venturi’s text there is no evidence of
any latent love between mother and daughter.
80 C. Karagoz
According to Danielle’s narrative, her indifference toward, and vague

dislike of her daughter, turned into hostility in response to Sophie’s
hatred for her. As she reveals to Dr. Nielsen, recollecting a particu-
lar violent reaction toward her on Sophie’s part, Danielle had for some
years been fearful of her daughter. She had felt herself at the mercy of
Sophie’s continuous hostility, resentment, and manipulation, because she
knew the origin, and irrevocability, of these feelings: her husband had
molested Sophie until the age of five, unbeknownst to Danielle, but
Sophie believed her mother had connived in the abuse. Shortly after
Danielle witnessed an instance of inappropriate contact between father
and daughter, her husband had left their home, and lives, forever. But
Sophie had not confessed the extent and duration of the abuse to her
mother until she was twelve. It is important to note that this piece of the
story plays a central role in Venturi’s text, and was originally included in
the film as part of Danielle’s narration to Dr. Nielsen. But in the final
DVD version, this crucial chapter of the mother-daughter plot is rele-
gated to the Extras. What remains of it is a fleeting reference, embedded
in an imagined encounter with Sophie at the hospital, to the overly effu-
sive displays of affection between father and daughter. This sibylline ref-
erence is quickly dismissed, as Sophie tells her mother that that old story
had nothing to do with their conflict—it was a problem strictly between
the two of them.
Yet this part of their past is relevant in that Sophie’s hatred and con-
stant resentment toward her mother stemmed from her conviction that
Danielle had not only failed to protect her from her father’s abuse, but
had also known about it and kept silent. This belief, as Danielle explains
to Dr. Nielsen in the scene included in the DVD Extras, had become a
powerful alibi for Sophie, legitimizing her anger and aggression toward
Danielle. According to her reconstruction of the events, had her daugh-
ter shared her suffering earlier, or sought her compassion when she
finally revealed her secret, mutual understanding and perhaps even affec-
tion could have developed between them. But Sophie had hurled the
facts of the abuse at her with violent resentment, and used them as a
weapon against her. An indifferent mother until then, to defend herself
from her daughter’s unending hostility, Danielle started to hate her in
return.
Framing the Maternal

The imagined encounter hinting at the abuse Sophie suffered as a child
belongs to a small set of dreamlike, visually compelling sequences that
interrupt the film’s alternating pattern of flashbacks and scenes set in the
present. Whereas in the flashbacks Danielle’s lucid voice-over and per-
spective control the narrative, the dreamlike sequences ostensibly offer
unmediated insight into her troubled inner world. Similarly, the scenes in
which the camera follows her aimless, at times frantic wandering through
the hospital’s corridors and staircases are meant to capture her disturbed
present condition. The shots showing Danielle’s attempts to record her
story in writing, and the night scenes in which we see her turn restlessly
in her hospital bed, also purport to frame her internal disorder. It is also
important to note that in several shots Danielle appears framed by win-
dows and doorways: these elements of the mise-en-scène signify and
redouble the film’s effort to constrain the protagonist’s complex mater-
nal position within rigid interpretative parameters.
In these sequences a number of cinematic devices appear to support
the film’s intentions: in the hallucinatory and dreamlike scenes, for exam-
ple, highlighting emphasizes Danielle and Sophie’s troubled expressions
and actions. In the hospital scenes, to signify the protagonist’s oppres-
sive internal world, gray tonalities prevail in the daytime shots, while
focused blue lighting is used in the night scenes. Overall, back shots and
overhead or low camera angles often frame the protagonist’s actions.
Insofar as they seem to capture her story and psyche objectively, these
sequences serve the film’s master narrative better than those in which
Danielle agentially reconstructs her own story. In some of these scenes,
however, the devices meant to dramatize Danielle’s psychotic state ulti-
mately denote the inscrutability of her position, weakening the narrative
of maternal love.
One of the first scenes set at the hospital reveals well the film’s limita-
tions in capturing Danielle’s story. The scene opens with a series of low-
angle moving frames—back shots of Danielle seated at her desk as she
attempts to start her written narration to Dr. Nielsen. Unable to write at
first, the protagonist frustratedly tears numerous sheets of paper from her
notepad and throws them on the floor. Several times, the camera moves
progressively closer to Danielle but then rapidly retreats to its initial
82 C. Karagoz
position. These moving frames also swiftly alternate with brief high-angle
close-ups of Danielle’s hand holding a pen and attempting to write on
the notepad. The rapid editing and shrill accents of the musical score
accentuate the unsettling effect of the camera movements. Although,
on the whole, the filmic grammar succeeds in conveying Danielle’s inner
turmoil, the reframing, back and forth movements of the camera hint at
the inability of the cinematic gaze to fully apprehend her experiences. In
addition, by zooming in on the protagonist’s reluctance to confide her
story in writing, this sequence reiterates her resistance to psychoanalytical
interpretation.
Similarly, the dreamlike sequences share a distinctive use of lighting
and point of view that reinforces their ambiguity and eludes interpreta-
tion. These scenes take different forms: some are actual dreams, while
others are hallucinations, or reveries. The first dream dramatized in the
film is inserted in one of the opening sequences, an extremely dark scene
where Danielle, barely visible and partially lit by blue lighting, sleeps agi-
tatedly in her hospital bed. In the dream we see Danielle in an empty
attic, pregnant, kneeling down and caressing the belly of another preg-
nant Danielle, who is seated on a chair.12 A powerful stream of seem-
ingly natural light, which enters the attic through a small window, frames
the two women, highlighting their faces as they smile at one another.
The scene ends when the Danielle who is kneeling on the floor realizes
that a third woman—Sophie, as we guess from the dress she is wearing,
since only part of her back is visible in the frame—is observing them
from a dark corner of the room. This brief, mysterious scene might be
read as expressing Danielle’s wish to re-imagine her maternal experi-
ence, and recover the possibility of loving her daughter. Yet, the mise-
en-scène places center stage, and literally highlights, Danielle’s solipsistic
doubling, simultaneously casting Sophie as the excluded, unwelcome
intruder. Rather than foreshadowing a positive outcome for the mother-
daughter story, the dream frames Danielle’s self-directed love, and her
indifference toward Sophie.
Lighting and coloring also play a relevant role in the staging of the
imagined encounter between Danielle and Sophie I referenced earlier,
which is set in a brightly lit linen storage room. With the exception of
Sophie’s red dress, in this sequence every element of the mise-en-scène is
white, in sharp contrast to the muted lighting and coloring typical of the
hospital scenes. Here, the uncharacteristic use of light and color is meant
to signal that the encounter is a hallucination created by the mother’s
diseased imagination. But the clash between the overall brightness of the
setting and the intense redness of Sophie’s dress has the effect of drawing
our gaze, and attention, to the daughter’s harsh words and demeanor
toward her mother. Far from undermining Danielle’s lucid account of
her maternal experiences in the flashbacks, the mother-daughter encoun-
ter staged in this scene provides a convincing analysis of the causes, pat-
terns, and irrevocability of their mutual hatred.
Another visually compelling dreamlike sequence occurs near the end
of the film, after Dr. Nielsen has informed Danielle of Sophie’s death.
This night scene opens with a back shot of Danielle walking, under pour-
ing rain, toward Sophie’s nude, lifeless body, which lies at the bottom of
a large grave. She then kneels down and cradles her daughter’s body in
her arms, holding it up and gently resting it on the ground again several
times. Throughout the scene a beam of bright light illuminates Danielle
and Sophie, accentuating the eeriness of the mise-en-scène. This medium
long shot cuts to an aerial view of the scene as Danielle, after resting her
daughter’s body on the ground, looks up and stares directly at the cam-
era above her. The mother-daughter tableau staged here is reminiscent of
the iconography of a Pietà: the mother holds her child in her arms one
last time, and both are lit by a supernatural, powerful source of light—
signifying, here, Danielle’s newly rediscovered love for her daughter.
At the end, after looking up as if to relinquish her child to the heavens,
through a rapid fade-out the mother disappears into the night. Yet, as in
other scenes of the film, in this final sequence Danielle is again actively
looking back at the camera, refusing that her story be contained by its
almighty gaze. Indeed, the reconciliation implied by this scene is soon
belied by Danielle’s description of her reactions to Sophie’s death.
The last sequences of the film are again accompanied by Danielle’s
voice-over, which conveys, in her final letter to Dr. Nielsen, a commen-
tary on the events following Sophie’s suicide. In the letter, Danielle reit-
erates her enduring hatred for her daughter: for having taken her life
before she could take her own, and for having died without leaving her
a single good memory of her. She even questions Sophie’s love for her
daughter Dominique, wondering what kind of despair could have sur-
passed the maternal love Sophie professed to have for her child. As for
their mother-daughter story, Danielle’s voice-over concludes as we see
her walking away from Sophie’s grave, a ‘bad mother, and a small heap
of bones’ is all that will be left of it in a few years. But then Danielle
remembers that Sophie left a daughter behind. A dissolve to a black and
84 C. Karagoz
white, high-angle shot of a patch of grass introduces the final sequence

of the film. As color replaces the black and white images, we see a lit-
tle girl, Dominique, running toward Danielle, who smiles, picks her up,
and speaks to her affectionately. Meanwhile, Sophie’s voice-over conveys
the content of the brief note she left for her mother: in it, she entrusts
Dominique to Danielle, confident that they will be able to love one
another. The scene closes with an aerial shot of Danielle and Dominique
walking away, hand in hand, as the camera pans toward the sky. The
fact that the initial images of this sequence are black and white, and
that Dominique is played by the same actress who plays Sophie at the
same age in the flashbacks, conflates Danielle’s future relationship with
her granddaughter with her past as a mother, in an attempt to reinforce
the film’s narrative of hidden or rediscovered love. But Danielle’s life can
only be re-envisioned outside and beyond her story as Sophie’s mother.
Conclusion
An imperfect cinematic work, L’amore nascosto nevertheless contributes
to Italian cinema and culture a highly original, frank representation of
maternal experience and feelings. Rather than representing maternal
ambivalence, as intended, Capone’s film dramatizes the protagonist’s
indifference and hatred toward her daughter. I have described maternal
indifference as the position taken by women uninterested in becoming
mothers and in mothering, and who are incapable or unwilling to love
and cherish their children. L’amore nascosto unequivocally establishes
Danielle’s indifference for Sophie through the black and white flash-
backs in which she reconstructs her story as a mother. Danielle’s voice-
over, which conveys the content of the notes and letters she writes to
Dr. Nielsen, pervades the film, amply serving its intent to highlight the
mother’s perspective. Simultaneously, by staring back at, and refusing
to surrender her emotions to the camera, Danielle gains agency, and
eludes the regulatory gaze of the filmic apparatus. Devices such as fram-
ing, point of view, and lighting undermine the film’s master narrative of
maternal ambivalence. Through Dr. Nielsen’s consuming involvement in
the mother-daughter vicissitudes, the film also dramatizes the failure of
psychoanalysis to capture the complexity of maternal subjectivity.
L’amore nascosto is a well-intentioned, courageous film that, inso-
far as it takes for granted Danielle’s simultaneous love and hatred for
her daughter, does not succeed in dismantling the taboo it purports to
challenge—the naturalness of maternal love. Rather, the film re-inscribes

the protagonist’s rejection of normative motherhood, and her question-
ing of the nature and necessity of the mother-child bond, in a perplex-
ing conclusion that suppresses Danielle’s unconditional indifference
and hatred for her daughter. Sophie’s suicide functions as the deus-ex-
machina that brings about Danielle’s maternal redemption: her latent
love for her daughter finally surfaces, and she is given a second chance
at mothering—a granddaughter, this time. But Madre e ossa, a (bad)
mother, and a few bones, as Danielle remarks at the conclusion of the
film, are truly all that remains of this mother-daughter story in the end.
What the hopeful finale shows—a contented Danielle walking on a beach
with Sophie’s newly orphaned daughter Dominique—is the subject of
another story.
Notes
1. According to Elizabeth Podnieks and Andrea O’Reilly, a matrifocal text
is a narrative in which ‘motherhood is thematically elaborated and val-
ued, and structurally central to the plot.’ Following Brenda O. Daly
and Maureen T. Reddy, Podnieks and O’Reilly explain that matrifo-
cal narratives ‘“begin with the mother in her own right, from her own
perspective,” and … “hold fast to a maternal perspective”’ (2010, p. 3).
2. In the Introduction to Madre e Ossa, Maria Venturi presented herself
as the translator and editor of a diary sent to Baldini and Castoldi by a
French woman, Danielle Girard. However, a 2009 article by Cristina
Taglietti in Corriere della sera revealed that Venturi had authored the
book herself. Venturi explained that since Madre e Ossa had been inspired
by a letter sent to her by a reader of the magazine she directed, it was
based on a real story after all.
3. From a foundational text of Italian women’s writing like Sibilla Aleramo’s
Una donna (1906) to recent literary and cinematic mother-daughter nar-
ratives such as Alina Marazzi’s film Un’ora sola ti vorrei (For One More
Hour with You, 2002), the mother’s story, albeit central to the text, is
told from the perspective of the daughter. Although the mother’s expe-
riences and voice have been increasingly integrated into the daughter’s
narrative, these works generally chronicle the daughter’s journey of self-
discovery through the search for the maternal legacies and life experi-
ences (for example, Elena Ferrante’s L’amore molesto, 1992, and Mario
Martone’s 1995 film by the same title).
4. However, in Venturi’s Madre e ossa, Danielle’s husband plays a relevant
role. Here, the rift between Sophie and Danielle is clearly linked to the
86 C. Karagoz
daughter’s resentment for her mother’s failure to protect her from being
molested by her father as a child.
5. The film’s internal contradictions also emerge in Capone’s, the producer
Massimo Cristaldi’s, and Huppert’s discourse about it. On the one hand,
in interviews, both Capone and Cristaldi have underscored the film’s
uniquely honest and bold portrayal of a mother’s negative feelings toward
her daughter, and stressed the political ‘urgency’ of making a film that
addresses this social ‘taboo.’ On the other, both Cristaldi and Huppert
have stated that L’amore nascosto is really about exploring the difficulty of
expressing maternal love (DVD Extras).
6. In this respect, Alina Marazzi’s Tutto parla di te (2012) and Fabrizio
Cattani’s Maternity Blues (2012) are notable exceptions in that they pro-
vide honest, compelling portrayals of maternal ambivalence and its varied,
potentially tragic outcomes.
7. For a brief summary of psychoanalysis’s treatment of maternal ambiva-
lence—particularly its failure to address it from the mother’s perspec-
tive—see Parker (1995, pp. 12–19).
8. For a lucid analysis of Huppert’s ‘star-text,’ particularly in relation to
notions of agency, power, and subjectivity, see Lara Cox (2012), where
she rejects critiques of Huppert’s stardom that equate her ‘muted reserve
and pathological powerlessness,’ and argues that her characters enact
instead various strategies of ‘subjective destabilization’ in order to disrupt
hegemonic ideologies (p. 69).
9. In her study of Huppert’s star-text, Cox suggests that by looking ‘straight
into the camera,’ which she sees as a motif of Huppert’s acting, her (often
victimized) characters defy the ‘masculinist gaze’ (as theorized by Laura
Mulvey), and acquire agency (2012, p. 68). As discussed, in the case of
L’amore nascosto (a film largely built around the French actress), Huppert’s
elusive, idiosyncratic acting style grants agency and authority to Danielle,
ultimately undermining the film’s maternal love/ambivalence narrative.
10. For a discussion of neo-reactionary, naturalistic ideologies of mother-
hood in Western countries, see Badinter (2011, pp. 33–61). In the Italian
context, the return to traditional notions of motherhood is discussed
in Marina Bettaglio’s recent study of Italian maternal memoirs. Here,
Bettaglio shows how these texts respond to ‘the postfeminist resignifica-
tion and mythification of the maternal figure in popular culture, a figure
which glorifies retreatism, domesticity and the Mulino Bianco family syn-
drome’ (2016, p. 48).
11. For example, with regard to the necessity of ‘early mirroring,’ Parker
explains: ‘it is through the mirroring look of the baby that the mother is
brought into being’ (2012, p. 102, emphasis mine). See also Badinter’s
discussion of ‘the bonding theory’ (2011, pp. 46–50), and its recent
resurrection by the proponents of naturalistic mothering, such as the
French branch of the La Leche League, who support ‘skin-to-skin contact

… immediately after birth to awaken the maternal instinct’ (2011, p. 49,
emphasis mine).
12.
This scene recalls Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story ‘The Yellow
Wallpaper’ (1892). This well-known novella recounts the experiences
of a woman suffering from postpartum depression, who is confined to a
room and forbidden to write by her husband. As the narrator descends
into psychosis, she imagines that another woman lives behind the yellow
wallpaper of the room, and starts peeling it off in order to free her. It is
interesting to note that the floral pattern of the dress the two Danielles
wear in this sequence resembles the design of Victorian wallpaper, and
that one of the dresses is yellow.
Works Cited
Aleramo, S. (1906). Una donna Milan: Feltrinelli, 2013.
Badinter, E. (2011). The conflict: How modern motherhood undermines the status
of women, trans A. Hunter (Metropolitan: New York).
Bettaglio, M. (2016). ‘Maternal Momoirs in Contemporary Italy’ in L. Lazzari
and J. Charnley (Eds.) To Be or Not to Be a Mother: Choice, Refusal,
Reluctance and Conflict. Motherhood and Female Identity in Italian Literature
and Culture, Special Issue of intervalla, 1, pp. 47–60. Accessible at: http://
www.fus.edu/intervalla/volume-3-environmental-justice-collapse-and-the-
question-of-evidence/57. Accessed February 25, 2016.
Cox, L. (2012). ‘Going global: The ‘stars’ of french theory and french cin-
ema’. Journal of Romance Studies, 12(2), 59–74.
Ferrante, E. (1992). L’amore molesto Rome: Edizioni e/o.
Gilman, Perkins C. (1892). ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’. In C. J. Golden (Ed.). The
captive imagination: A casebook on ‘the yellow wallpaper’ (pp. 24–42).
New York: The Feminist Press, 1992.
O’Reilly, A., & Podnieks, E. (Eds.). (2010). Textual mothers/maternal texts:
Motherhood in contemporary women’s literatures. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier UP.
Parker, R. (1995). Mother love/mother hate: The power of maternal ambiva-
lence. New York: Harper.
Parker, R. (2012). ‘Shame and maternal ambivalence’. In P. Mariotti (Ed.). The
maternal lineage: Identification, desire, and transgenerational issues
(pp. 85–112). London: Routledge.
Taglietti, C. (2009). ‘Una madre che odia la figlia. La storia vera è tutta inven-
tata’, Corriere della Sera, 5 July. Available at: http://www.pressreader.com.
Accessed August 31, 2016.
Venturi, M. (1997). Madre e ossa Milan: Baldini.
88 C. Karagoz
Filmography
Capone, A. (2007). L’amore nascosto (Hidden Love). Italy, Belgium,
Luxembourg: Cristaldi Pictures, Soho Films, Tarantula, U Media.
Cattani, F. (2012). Maternity Blues. Italy: Faso Film, Ipotesi Cinema, The
Coproducers.
Marazzi, A. (2002). Un’ora sola ti vorrei (For One More Hour with You). Italy
and Switzerland: Venerdì, Bartlebyfilms, Radiotelevisione Svizzera Italiana.
Marazzi, A. (2012). Tutto parla di te (All About You). Italy and Switzerland:
Mir Cinematografica, Ventura Film, RAI Cinema, Radiotelevisione Svizzera
Italiana.
Martone, M. (1995). L’amore molesto (Nasty Love). Italy: Lucky Red, Teatri
Uniti, RAI 3.
Author Biography
Claudia Karagoz is Associate Professor of Italian and Women’s and Gender
Studies at Saint Louis University. Her research interests are in contemporary
Italian literature and cinema, gender studies, and Sicilian culture. She has pub-
lished articles and book chapters on Italian women writers and directors and on
Letizia Battaglia’s photographs, and recently coedited the volume Sicily and the
Mediterranean. Migration, Exchange, Reinvention (Palgrave 2015). She is cur-
rently completing a monograph on the representation of motherhood in Italian
women’s writing and cinema.
PART II
Lost Mothers
CHAPTER 5
Rich Wives, Poor Mothers: Can a Matriarch

Be a Mother?
Giorgio Galbussera
‘Capital is democracy.’ Thus states, towards the end of Luca Guadagnino’s

Io sono l’amore (I Am Love, 2009), Shai Kubelkian, the new Indian-
American business partner who is acquiring the Recchi family’s textile
business and helping them expand their wealth even farther onto inter-
national financial markets; in preaching the gospel of contemporary eco-
nomic neoliberalism, he glosses over the darker side of it: the reduction of
everything, including human life, to monetary concerns. Paolo Virzì’s Il
capitale umano (Human Capital, 2013) derives its title from the human
capital of insurance companies’ lingo, the specific sum of money assigned
to the value of a man’s life, thus equating literally capital with the phys-
ical existence of a person, translating on an individual level Kubelkian’s
macroeconomic/political statement. Both films paint a pessimistic pic-
ture of contemporary Italian society by focusing on the hugely wealthy
classes, the fraction of the 1% who dominate the national and interna-
tional flux of money. In order to personalize its critique, each of the two
films centers, with different degrees of audience identification and sym-
pathy, on the character of the family matriarch in the midst of an identity
G. Galbussera (*) 
Arcadia University, Glenside, PA, USA
e-mail: galbusserag@arcadia.edu

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-56675-7_5
92 G. Galbussera
crisis, precipitated by external events: Emma Recchi (Tilda Swinton) and

Carla Bernaschi (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi). Stuck in their futile role as tro-
phy wives first, and then merely tasked with producing children who will
continue the family line, the two women are nonetheless excluded from
a full emotional and physical expression of maternal attachment to their
grown-up children by the strict social rituals of their class. They are rep-
resented as the psychological and physical opposite of the stereotypi-
cal Mediterranean mother in all her variants within Italian cinema: from
the self-sacrificing mothers (and often sinners to be redeemed on their
deathbed) of Matarazzo’s popular melodramas, to the earthy, lioness-
mother of many of Anna Magnani’s roles, to Sophia Loren’s conjugation
of Neapolitan proletarian motherhood and sexualized bombshell body.
According to E. Ann Kaplan’s description of the mechanism of classic
Hollywood maternal melodrama, both women are too self-concerned and
deficient in their mothering to fall into the self-sacrificing ‘angel’ stereo-
type, but too weak and powerless to embody the phallic ‘witch’ mother.
Although both films try to liberate them from the constrictions of their
environment through narratives of escape and self-discovery, which could
be consistent with what Kaplan has called the ‘resisting maternal wom-
an’s film’ (Kaplan 1992), they are nonetheless imprisoned in their role as
wealthy and glamorous women, which seems to prevent any significant
access to positive or meaningful mothering: as the films sympathize (to
different degrees) with their plight as women, they still imply that they
can’t function as mothers because of their physical, social, and financial
status.
On a superficial level, Emma’s and Carla’s glamorous appearance and
their blondeness cast them apart from typical depictions of Italian moth-
erhood, and can be identified by a general audience as shorthand for
wealth and privilege. In addition, the casting suggests that they are for-
eign, as non-Italian and somewhat isolated from their own environment:
Tilda Swinton1 embodies Emma Recchi as a beautiful woman found by
her husband Tancredi in Soviet Russia when she was very young, and
taken to Milan to become the perfect portrait of a high-society lady. Il
capitale umano’s Carla Bernaschi is not literally foreign-born, but the
casting of Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, an actress equally employed in Italian
and French cinema, and with strong ties to France through her upbring-
ing and her family background, suggests a class foreignness that clearly
sets her apart from your regular Italian woman next door.2
5 RICH WIVES, POOR MOTHERS: CAN A MATRIARCH … 93
Io sono l’amore focuses almost entirely on the Recchis, a high bour-

geois Milanese family who have apparently survived untouched by the
very obsolescence of their class, partially isolated from the outside world
in their museum-like residence, where they live within modernist archi-
tecture and surrounded by an extensive art collection, the signifiers of a
world of solid industrial capitalism. Indeed, the location chosen for film-
ing is itself a museum: Villa Necchi Campiglio,3 a masterpiece of resi-
dential architecture by Piero Portaluppi, built in the 1930s. As long as
the Recchis are within the walls of their villa and garden, time seems to
have frozen, and everything looks vaguely retro, from the uniforms of
the maids and the white-gloved waiters, to the formality of the family
social rituals, to the very clothes that the family members are wearing:
on the rare occasions in which the men are not in impeccably tailored
suits, they are wearing preppy and understated leisure clothes. More cen-
tral in the film’s discourse on appearance and class, the women, especially
Emma and her über-snob mother-in-law Rori,4 wear chic but classic
clothing, stylish but never too conspicuous; paired with their hairstyle
and make-up, the effect is a somewhat timeless style, as appropriate for
a contemporary high society setting as it would be for a 1950s or 1960s
tale of a grand bourgeois family. The symbolic importance of clothing in
the film’s examination of class dynamics is highlighted by the prominent
position given to the brands Jil Sander and Fendi in the opening titles,
and the participation of Silvia Venturini Fendi as associate producer.
From the start, the film establishes a potential conflict between the
social and aesthetic conservatism of the Recchis and the requirements
of a dynamic evolution into a financial global capitalist dimension fit for
the 21st century. By the end, however, the dialectics are neutralized, as
the family and their name live on by expelling the individuals who are
unable to keep up with their evolution. Thus conservation and capital-
ist progress coincide, revealing that the demise of the high bourgeois
society was an illusion, its tenets able to survive through adaptation to
the environment and transformation. Even Mr. Kubelkian, in his preach-
ing of the gospel of progressive de-localized capitalism as champion of
democracy, is perhaps ironically unaware that his vision is less utopian
future than a look back at Futurism and the origins of Fascism—both the
artistic and the political movements having deep roots in the same bour-
geois Milanese milieu at the time when the Recchi fortune must have
originated: echoing Marinetti’s famous image of war as the ‘world’s only
hygiene,’ he states enthusiastically that ‘war leads to development.’
94 G. Galbussera
As the most appropriate tool to portray such a social environment, the

film adopts a style replete with citations and cultural references, indeed
an overabundance of filmic, literary, painterly and musical references; as
the Recchis live surrounded by cultural artifacts that symbolize and reify
their wealth, the only way to observe them is through the lens of the rich
tradition of bourgeois self-perception and narration. If the allusions to
cinema and the visual arts are the most obvious, Guadagnino himself has
also mentioned novelistic sources of inspiration, such as Thomas Mann’s
Buddenbrooks for its narration of a family’s decadence (Romney 2010, p.
21). But one can also see in the patrician isolation of the Recchis, which
sets them apart as if anthropologically different, a parallel with the Finzi-
Continis, both in Bassani’s novel and De Sica’s film, confined to their
garden and their grand residence, ambiguously characterized as both
a museum and a tomb. As for Italian classic cinema, there are several
points of contact with Pasolini’s similar attacks against the bourgeois sys-
tem and the patriarchal family as its fundamental unit in Teorema (1968)
and Porcile (1969): where Pasolini’s cinema evoked revolution and the
possible disintegration of the family institution under the pressure of
the contradictory forces of tradition and capitalism, in Guadagnino such
spirit has been co-opted by capitalism itself, resulting in the perpetua-
tion of patriarchy under new fluid disguises. Although on a less physi-
cally revolting level, the cannibalistic metaphor that sustained Porcile,
and the final devouring of the rebellious son, hold true at the end of Io
sono l’amore, where the members of the family who do not fully accept
the dynamics of conservation through change are expelled, by literal or
metaphorical death. Whereas in Teorema the nuclear family imploded
into chaos and madness under the stress of the encounter with the other,
here the only way out is, ultimately, individual escape or personal annihi-
lation, which leave the system standing, albeit challenged. Guadagnino,
like Pasolini, focuses much of his critique through the experience of the
mother: in casting Tilda Swinton as Emma and then proceeding to strip
the actress of any sign of her usual androgyny, the director turns her into
the perfectly styled and poised vestal of the household, the embodiment
of femininity and maternity as keeper of patriarchy. The sympathy of the
spectator is progressively drawn towards Emma as victim as well as col-
laborator, as she gradually rebels against her social role, but at the begin-
ning of the film she is essentially reminiscent of Silvana Mangano’s turn
in Teorema, the woman imprisoned in her respectability as bourgeois wife
and mother: the cold composure, the paleness, the chic attire, and the
repressed emotions barely visible behind a mask of décor make the par-
allel quite obvious. The first time Emma appears on screen she is busy
directing the housekeeper and maids, and deciding seat placement for a
formal dinner, the typical tasks of a high-society lady.
However, the film’s most pervasive cinematic subtext, as widely noted
in its Italian and international reception, is the profusion of references to
Visconti’s cinema, as if to imply that Pasolini’s attack is vain in a world
that—instead of progressing towards the destruction of established social
structures—has retreated even more into the rituals of high bourgeois
society in the Italy of the economic boom. The history of Italian cin-
ema thus provides Guadagnino with a tool to assess the self-perception
of a class from the inside, a world that seemed already dead, as Visconti
observed with fascination its empty attachment to an aesthetic tradition
of high art and beautiful artifacts, in a desperate attempt to hold on to
a form devoid of contents. The opening shots of the Stazione Centrale
and of Milan under the snow, the articulation of the film in chapters with
full-screen titles superimposed on the image, and the scene on the roof
of the Duomo, all point unmistakably to Rocco e i suoi fratelli (Rocco
and His Brothers, 1960), while the opening sequence with the family
gathered for the last birthday party of the old dying patriarch Edoardo
Recchi Sr., who announces his legacy and designates his successors, is
almost a remake of the opening of La caduta degli dei (The Damned,
1969), Visconti’s take on the moral decline of an industrialist dynasty.
The shot of mechanical looms from the Recchi factory that, without any
narrative justification, is edited into the scene of the family’s conversation
at the reception table, echoes the apocalyptic vision of the steel factory
opening Visconti’s film: here they remind the spectator of the mecha-
nized world on which the Recchis depend, and at the same time hint at
their ties to an almost pre-historical phase of industrial capitalism.
Even before it focuses fully on its human protagonists, the film reveals
a close attention to objects as physical metonymies of class: the open-
ing shot is a detail of the Central Station, then a long shot of the same
building, followed by static shots of several buildings and views of Milan.
However, it is a cold, clinical gaze, not a picturesque vision of the city.
Once the scene moves into the Recchi residence, the camera still seems
as interested in objects as in the family: the shots pan through the house,
from architectural and furniture details, to artwork, to luxurious table-
ware, to beautifully elaborate culinary creations, and people seem to
enter the frame quite accidentally, as just one more decorative element.
96 G. Galbussera
In fact, before we see some of the family members in person, the cam-
era presents close-ups of black and white photos showing the Recchis
immortalized in their role as scions of a privileged class, turned into
home decoration as much as the other objects they have acquired with
their wealth; they are conventional portraits of a smiling and loving fam-
ily, a fiction that belies the reality of their lives that will be revealed over
the course of the film. The Recchi villa is many things: museum, infor-
mal company headquarters, gourmet kitchen for formal banquets, but it
falls short of simply being a home in its conventional connotations—as
a place of warmth and nurturing. This is essentially sanctioned by the
dying patriarch’s speech, which equates family with factory and with
Nation: the history of the Recchis (and by extension of modern Italy) is
inextricable from their business, and in turn it leaves no space for a con-
ception of family that is not that of an entrepreneurial dynasty.
Emma’s tentative liberation from this milieu begins with a rather tra-
ditional rhetoric of re-awakening of her senses as a rebellion against the
machine-like universe of the Recchis; in a highly symbolic scene that fully
engages in theatrical excess, the woman is illuminated by a spotlight as
everybody else around her momentarily disappears into darkness, and the
camera closes in on her eyes and mouth as she is tasting a plate of beauti-
fully photographed prawns prepared by the restaurant chef Antonio, the
friend of Edoardo Jr. (Edo). The diegesis of the film is briefly and notice-
ably interrupted through a fetishistic gaze, isolating Emma in her discov-
ery from the other two women at the table: her mother-in-law Rori and
Edo’s fiancée Eva. This happens at the very moment when Rori toasts
Eva’s entrance into the exclusive club of the ‘wives of the Recchis,’ mak-
ing sure that the family tradition of ornamental femininity as comple-
ment to masculine activity is perpetuated. The sensual pleasure of food
is thus a clear preamble to the sexual pleasure of the future affair with
Antonio, in which Emma clearly tries to escape the constrictions of her
status.
More interestingly than through the stereotypical plot device of an
extramarital affair, the woman’s transformation is established clearly
on a visual level, by playing with the actress’s body and appearance. In
Antonio’s isolated retreat on the mountains of Liguria, Emma is finally
free to shed the chic clothes and embrace a more casual attire, and Tilda
Swinton is finally free to reveal her natural androgyny, which had been
hidden under layers of makeup and glamorous clothing; after Antonio
cuts her hair short in what is essentially a ritual of mutual redefinition
of roles, Emma appears in a headscarf covering her hair, taking Swinton

back to her debut on the big screen, in Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio
(1986), in which she first appeared with a tightly tied headscarf of the
same color, her slender and angular body questioning the boundaries
between the feminine and the masculine. The two also celebrate their
shared passion for cooking, free from the formality of the high-end gas-
tronomy that dominates most of the film with its succession of formal
receptions: Emma prepares for Antonio a soup based on her grandmoth-
er’s recipe, while telling him about her childhood in Russia and her cul-
tural shock as Tancredi brought her to Milan. As she and Antonio later
make love outside, the camera slowly pans on their bodies, with more
and more extreme close-ups to the point that it becomes difficult to tell
them apart, the different skin tone of the two glowing similarly, bathed
in the bright and soft light of the cinematography.
The use of extreme close-ups is one of Guadagnino’s stylistic signa-
tures throughout the film; as mentioned above, the technique is widely
employed from the opening shots, reserved initially for objects in the
Recchi villa, as well as architectural details around Milan. Here, the close
scrutiny of the camera is turned onto the two lovers; if the composi-
tions are technically similar and the extreme close-ups equally magnify
details of the couple’s bodies, the film’s intention is clearly not that of
objectifying Emma and Antonio and reducing them to the bourgeois
world of commodities, but quite the opposite: as the narrative arc lib-
erates Emma from the constrictions of her social role, the director tries
to redeem the camera from its complicity with the world of superficial
materialism, to disavow the fetishism that turns even the most exqui-
site art into a commodity once it is collected as a signifier of wealth, or
photographed for the enjoyment of the film’s audience. In moving the
camera as close as possible to Antonio and Emma, Guadagnino seems to
invite the spectator to establish a close contact with them, almost to par-
ticipate tactually in their escape from the deadly prison of bourgeois con-
ventions. Previously linked with the sensual pleasure of food, the erotic
is here inserted in a rhetoric of idealization of nature as the only place
of authenticity, a world apart in which Emma, not only in sex, but also
in later scenes of mountain hiking with Antonio, is finally free to use her
body outside of the regimented life of her adoptive class. Swinton sum-
marizes the original idea of the film as ‘all nature—human included—just
bursting through the cracks and having its wicked way’ (James 2010).
After the first romantic encounter between the two lovers, the scene cuts
98 G. Galbussera
to Emma arriving at her house, running to the bathroom and sitting on

the toilet with a smile on her face while urinating, for the first time shed-
ding the statuesque self-control she displays when walking the corridors
of the villa, through a symbolic surrender to bodily functions.
Such embrace of the liberating role of nature is, of course, a tentative
endeavor, as the escapist traits of the relationship are quite clear, and the
utopia can only exist in a dimension outside of society, and quite possibly
outside of historical time. The couple can exist as such only in the idyl-
lic retreat of Liguria, far away from the city and its rules; here, for the
first time in the film, the camera partakes in the characters’ freedom, and
while they are making love on the grass, it crosscuts between their bodies
and minutely observes insects and blades of grass, who seem to move in
unison with the copulating bodies and the rhythm of the musical score.
Thus, far beyond a mere social liberation, the celebration of nature seems
to imply a sense of panic fusion between human existence and the land-
scape. For the first time the film explores the landscape in sweeping long
shots of mountain vistas devoid of human presence, in contrast to the
previous panoramic shots of Milan and its architecture, which may have
been equally pleasing aesthetically, but as city views they were a constant
reminder of the social establishment of a world structured on class and
wealth. The picturesque and serene slopes are clearly used as the objec-
tive correlation of the character’s liberation from the strict rules of bour-
geois society: the camera moves there as the crescendo of the score and
the couple’s moans signal the impending orgasm. But complicating
things, and showing that their liberation is frail and fleeting, right at this
moment the natural vista dissolves into a shot of its opposite, a view of
the skyscrapers of the City of London, identified in a full-screen cap-
tion. Through a sound bridge the audience first hears the beginning of a
business discussion, in English, and is then taken inside one of the glass
buildings, in a sparsely furnished and sterile looking office that seems to
occupy an entire high floor, where the (male) Recchis are negotiating the
sale of their company. Kubelkian’s litany of the catchphrases of contem-
porary financial capitalism offers the starkest possible contrast to the pre-
vious scene of euphoric fusion with nature.
Although not quite the blue-collar proletarian, with his rather mid-
dle-class family owning a restaurant, Antonio is unequivocally introduced
as the figure of class fracture within the patrician environment of the
Recchis.5 During the opening dinner he brings a cake for Edo, whom
he has beaten in a rowing competition—to the dismay of his brother
Gianluca (‘the Recchis never lose’) and Rori (‘beaten by a chef?’).

Invited to come in, he dares not cross the threshold, a quite monumental
glass portal into the villa, and he discreetly disappears as Edo and Emma
are busy with other guests. On later visits, even after he has developed a
very close friendship with Edo, he is mostly confined to the downstairs
kitchen, and when inside the main part of the house, he is visibly embar-
rassed. Throughout the film his casual clothing, his dusty pickup truck,
his rugged masculinity mark both his class inferiority and his freedom
from the constraints of the upper-class prison of respectable behavior.
Hence Emma’s inevitable attraction to him, as he represents an objec-
tive infraction to the rules of bourgeois patriarchy, which in a few mem-
ory and dream sequences connects her back to her childhood in Russia,
before her husband Tancredi, during a trip in search of antiques, picked
her as he would a beautiful statue and turned her into the model of a
trophy wife.6 Before they have sex for the first time, Antonio undresses
Emma in the same slow and meticulous way as Tancredi had helped her
dress earlier in the film; he undoes the husband’s adornment of her, and
the scene comes across more as a ritual of investment of a new identity
than an act of sexual manipulation. But after years of self-imposed com-
mitment to her role as mother and wife in the Recchi household, Emma
lacks even the basic vocabulary to articulate a fully conscious rejection
of social conformity; in the whole film she never tries to explain verbally,
even just to herself, what is happening to her, and why. She retreats more
and more into silence, trying to disappear against the background of the
house furnishings and decoration, slipping away unnoticed through back
stairs and walking around as a ghostly presence. Without a verbal articu-
lation of her problems and desires, she is left with the physical as her only
outlet; on the other hand, in her context, the rediscovery of her body
and her decision to subtract it more and more from the performance of
family duties can be read as a political act in itself.
The most problematic aspect of her rebellion is not the betrayal and
eventual rejection of her husband, but her necessary reconsideration of
the maternal role, including the possibility that she may have to give this
up too, as it is inextricably tied to the identity of a Recchi wife that has
been constructed around her. To be the perfectly poised and voiceless
incarnation of a wife and mother are both parts of the job description in
her social environment: although she is close to her adult children, for
the most part Emma is denied the intimacy and warmth of a fully devel-
oped maternal relationship with them. There are moments of physical
100 G. Galbussera
affection with Edo and Betta, but they have to be constantly negoti-
ated according to the acceptable degree of sentimentality that can be
displayed in the Recchi household; the perfectly evolved specimens are
Tancredi and his mother Rori, both polished to the extreme, poised, and
sexless. In a rather clichéd view of class dynamics, the emotional maternal
function is performed, when needed, by the housekeeper Ida, in whose
lap Edo bursts into tears like a little child before the film’s tragic ending.
The conventionally soft maternal body of the dark-haired Ida is a clear
opposite of Emma’s slender, angular and pale physique.
The younger son, Gianluca, a pragmatist who is driving the family’s
expansion into international finance, is quite clearly the closest copy of
the father’s original; as such, it is natural that the relationship between
him and Emma, already revealed as weak through the scarcity of their
interaction, becomes soon nonexistent. Far more traumatic to Emma
is the evolution of her relationship to Edo, which in its tragic ending
comes to symbolize the explosion of the repressed emotions barely con-
tained under the surface of the Recchis’ glamorous life: the closer the
bond, the more painful its disentanglement. Even more than a filial rela-
tion, the bond between Emma and Edo is characterized primarily as a
close mutual identification, as if to bridge the generational gap and sanc-
tion the alliance of the two rebellious members against the conformity of
the family. Edo is the only one who speaks Russian with his mother, the
last feeble thread connecting her to her childhood; it is he who intro-
duces Antonio into the family, breaking the unwritten rules of strict class
separation under which the Recchis live.
The film also charges the relationship between Edo and Antonio with
a clear homosocial subtext, which at times verges very obviously on
homoerotic attraction on the part of Edo towards the chef, jokingly dis-
missed, but nonetheless explicitly stated: not only does his sister Betta
comment that ‘Edo is crazy about Antonio,’ but Edo himself, as he first
introduces Antonio to Emma, confesses: ‘ever since I tasted his food, I
fell in love with him.’ Whether we are supposed to take this as a joke or
not, it does literally anticipate the exact chronology of Emma’s falling for
the man a few scenes later: the tasting of his food and then the physical
and romantic affair. When Edo later discovers the affair, his real shock is
not caused by the tainting of an pure, idealized maternal image, but by
the betrayal of somebody he sees as his equal, Emma, who has accom-
plished what he has only fantasized, the escape from the weight of the
Recchi legacy through the fetishized body of Antonio, as a stand-in for
class difference and a world of idyllic nature rescued from the mechaniza-
tion of capitalism.
Edo is thus the most contradictory of the film’s characters: both fully
within the bourgeois universe of the Recchis, and trying to establish his
difference from them, to find an outlet from a more and more visible
sense of malaise with his social position. On the one hand he is the heir
designated by Edoardo Sr. to assist Tancredi in perpetuating the business;
he looks the part in his impeccable suits, and he has a perfectly viable fian-
cée in Eva, who is sufficiently well-positioned within high society, but not
excessively so, just as ready to be molded into the perfect Recchi wife as
Emma once was. On the other hand, though, Edo befriends Antonio in
an attempt to fraternize with the working classes, and he tries to resist the
selling of the family business and the international financial metamorpho-
sis of their fortune: during the strategic meeting in London, he becomes
angry at the mention of his grandfather’s name by Mr. Kubelkian,
defending a tradition which he sees as noble old-fashioned industrial leg-
acy against the de-localization and de-personalization of contemporary
global capitalism; as the more cynical and realist Gianluca had pointed
out to him earlier, he is of course misguided in his romanticizing of the
grandfather, who exploited workers and their labor in the establishment
of his textile empire. A grandfather, after all, whose first and last name
Edo bears; therefore, his defense of the name’s honor is complicit with
the survival of the capitalist drive, which is now merely being redirected
in a global trajectory: he cannot take the history of the family without
the privilege and sense of superiority which come with it, no matter how
hard he tries to convince himself that he would like to be free, just like
Antonio. The relationship between the two men, rooted as it seems to be
in real and warm friendship, is nonetheless reminiscent of the traditional
patronage of the arts by the upper classes: not only does Edo encour-
age Antonio’s plan of opening a new restaurant, but he finances it and
intervenes with Antonio’s father in order to convince him of the viability
of the new business venture. Antonio is thankful but clearly embarrassed,
unsure what to make of this friend who can access unlimited funds at will
and does not seem to understand Antonio’s more pragmatic middle-class
caution. Whereas Antonio is always extremely aware of class differences,
Edo is at times tone-deaf in his reaching out to the friend, displaying the
typical upper-class nonchalance in fraternizing with the lower classes, only
to retreat back into their world when things get messy. After the signing
of the deal in London, as Edo is informing Betta, quite dramatically, that
102 G. Galbussera
‘it is all over, we are selling everything,’ she replies in an ominous tone
that they will only become ‘even richer,’ correctly pointing out the con-
servative nature of capitalistic enterprise, which moves money but does
not fundamentally alter its social distribution.
Edo is the physical locus in which the contradictions of his whole
social milieu most clearly surface; therefore, his destiny cannot but lead
to a tear in the fabric of the family’s life, once subjected to such con-
tradictory forces. In the melodramatic logic of the film, the character
of Edo cannot survive the failure of his rebellion and comes to a hasty
death as he is trying to pull away from his mother, the one person who
seemed to understand him and share his feelings. But as Edo realizes the
betrayal perpetrated through her appropriation of Antonio—who was
meant to be his hope for an escape from the prison of the high bour-
geoisie—he accuses her of being ‘like the others, like Gianluca and Dad
and Antonio.’ Even in this moment of explosive conflict he is trying to
rationalize his desired rebellion and fashion himself as within the family
but really outside of it; instead of acknowledging Emma’s similar posi-
tion, he assimilates her to the rest of the family and the world to better
highlight his own fantasized difference. On a narrative level his death is
clearly an accident, as he loses his balance while trying to pull away from
his mother and he hits his head on the side of the pool; but symbolically
it can also be read as a form of suicide, as Edo’s ultimate desire to pull
away from a family he feels to be a gilded cage. More disturbingly on
Emma’s part, it could also be read as a homicide, as she subconsciously
sacrifices him to escape towards happiness with Antonio, severing an
umbilical cord which kept her imprisoned more than her children.
The long funeral sequence that closes the film provides the melodra-
matic climax, but the conventional melodramatic gestures or outbursts
of emotions, which the audience would expect, are somewhat con-
trolled, as they are disgraceful to the Recchis, who have banished feel-
ings and human improprieties to such extreme depths that they can
barely surface even at a time of tragedy; the film denies the spectator the
easy consolation of free-flowing tears, making us instead participate in
Emma’s emotional containment, rehearsed during her entire adult life in
order to fit seamlessly into the high bourgeois milieu. She is visibly in
pain, physically frail and disheveled, barely able to stand and to speak;
but even now she is not allowed to break the rules of class décor and
scream or explode in uncontrolled gestures: she abandons herself on
Edo’s bed, and she falls asleep fully dressed hugging a stuffed lamb toy.
Instead, the emotional excess is expressed through the musical score,

with its crescendo that culminates in the final shots back at the Recchi
residence: it is melodrama in its literal sense, an operatic fusion of music
and images that are tasked to carry most of the meaning, given the scar-
city of dialogue. The movements of the actors are highly choreographed
and interact with the large and empty architectural space in which they
are symbolically situated: such is the case of Emma and Tancredi’s final
confrontation inside the Famedio of the Cimitero Monumentale. Right
in the place dedicated to memorializing Milanese civic glories and the
legacy of bourgeois wealth, Emma first timidly tries to subtract herself
from the embrace of Tancredi, who is yet again trying to cover her up,
to catch her again within the armor of his suit jacket; finally rejecting the
submission, Emma confesses to her husband her love for Antonio. His
answer is a very cold ‘you do not exist,’ reminding her that she is noth-
ing now that she has relinquished the role scripted for her. Interestingly,
this echoes Edo’s last words to his mother before dying (‘you are noth-
ing to me’), confirming Edo’s complicity with the system of patriarchal
oppression: despite his self-perceived difference, he cannot entirely let go
of its privilege and entitlement.
Beyond the temperamental similarity with Edo, Emma finds thus a
much more significant connection along gender lines with her daughter
Betta, with whom she identifies more and more. She provides the model
of a less public, but more successful rebellion: she pursues her artistic
inclination in London, where she also falls in love with a woman. She
returns home with her blonde flowing hair cut short—which will clearly
inspire her mother’s later decision to let Antonio give her a short hair-
cut—and finalizes the break-up with her boyfriend, refusing to fit within
the life planned for her by the family expectations, the same trajectory
that her mother has followed so far. Her rebellion does not contest fron-
tally the tenets of bourgeois propriety: she comes out to Edo and Emma,
but she asks her not to say anything to Gianluca or her father, because
they would not understand. The conversation with the mother takes
place at the poolside, thus establishing a parallel between her transforma-
tion and rebellion and Edo’s later death at the same location while argu-
ing with his mother. But under far less social scrutiny than her brothers,
Betta’s fate does not have to be tragic as she rejects the family script: she
is able to fall through the cracks of the traditional system of Italian fam-
ily capitalism, which does not give her as woman a voice or a role in the
business decisions that are the realm of her father and brothers.
104 G. Galbussera
The solidarity between mother and daughter is sanctioned in the final

shots of the film, as Emma and Betta stare intensely into each other’s
eyes, and Emma seems to ask for her daughter’s blessing in her decision
to leave; the two have a similar haircut and Emma is now wearing the
same gender-neutral exercise clothing as Betta, highlighting the specular
correspondence. Emma’s final rejection of her family does not include
Betta, but there are indications that their relationship has evolved into
one between equal allies, more like sisters than mother and child. Once
again, the stereotypical maternal melodramatic role is projected onto
Ida, who can sustain it more appropriately with her proletarian body; as
Emma frantically gets changed and packs whatever clothes she can grab,
the housekeeper helps her, and when Emma walks down the stairs, Ida
collapses onto a chair, sobbing loudly and uncontrollably in a full display
of those emotions that Emma could not muster. The camera does not
follow the protagonist immediately; delaying briefly the denouement of
the tense sequence, it remains for a few moments focused on Ida, who
is thus confirmed as the real mater dolorosa figure of the film, the only
one who can grieve fully through the physical release of tears for Edo,
Emma’s plight, and perhaps the collapse of the entire family. As Julia
Kristeva observes, ‘[m]ilk and tears are the signs par excellence of the
Mater dolorosa,’ and function as ‘metaphors of non-language’ (Kristeva
and Goldhammer 1985, p. 143); thus Ida, in her discreet presence, ful-
fills perfectly her tasks of nurturing and suffering: in addition to feed-
ing the family, in the scene mentioned earlier she had embraced Edo’s
head and rested it on her breast, evoking the centuries-long tradition of
two depictions of the Virgin, the Pietà and the Virgo Lactans. Ida’s class
positioning allows her to embody fully the expected outcome of popular
melodrama, whereas the Recchi women are too statuary in their perfec-
tion: their maternal qualities, or lack thereof, are hinted at through elab-
orate visual rhyming with paintings hanging in their gallery-like house.
The clear implication is that the working classes instead have a direct
connection to their physical emotions, mostly unmediated by culture.
In the final moments of the film the attention of the family is then
called to Eva, who reveals, indeed through a pictorial gesture to her
belly, followed by a shot of the painting gifted by Tancredi to Emma for
their wedding, that she is carrying Edo’s child. At the moment of the
expulsion of the rebellious mother and wife, the conspiratorial gaze of
the remaining faithful members of the dynasty seems to rejoice in the
propagation of the lineage and the reaffirmation of the capitalist con-

tinuity, in a total vision of maternity as instrumental to class survival.
When Betta turns around, her mother is gone, and the camera can only
remain fixed on the wide open glass door, the last proper shot of the
film, suggesting that Emma can finally be less a tragic Madame Bovary
than a contemporary version of Ibsen’s Nora escaping from her own
doll’s house. From this perspective, things have not changed much in
the more-than-a-century since Ibsen’s play: Emma has to run away, relin-
quish her role in the household, and risk losing her relationship to her
surviving children; her quiet exit, without even the satisfaction of slam-
ming the ponderous grand door of the Recchis, asserts her newfound
personal freedom, but comes at the cost of her physical and social disap-
pearance. Her victory against bourgeois hypocrisy is not systemic, only
individual, and can exist outside society in an idyllic retreat, and quite lit-
erally outside the film: it is only after the first end titles on a golden back-
ground that the screen slowly fades back into a final shot of Emma and
Antonio, barely distinguishable, lying together in the semi-obscurity of a
cave, their own private space in the mountains where they used to hike
after starting their affair. In a nod to the locus amoenus trope of ancient
and Renaissance literature and visual arts, it is a symbolic escape into a
serene and protected space, the realm of nature and authentic immedi-
acy, in stark contrast with the highly socialized and artificially regimented
urban world of Milan.
Thus the film’s political statement remains tentative, as Rebecca
Bauman has shown in her excellent reading of Io sono l’amore as political
melodrama, owing in equal parts to Douglas Sirk’s Hollywood models
and Visconti’s ‘merging of a highly aestheticized representation of the
family melodrama within a historically grounded sociopolitical critique’
(2013, p. 111). Despite the contemporary setting, the Recchis seem to
inhabit a somewhat ahistorical Italy, already signaled by the timelessness
of their personal and public style; not merely conservative, they are aris-
tocratically detached from an Italian reality that the spectator can only
assume is indeed out there somewhere, but is never directly depicted in
the way that has become common in Italian cinema and media of the
twenty-first century: no immigrants in sight, very limited use of cell
phones and computers, an isolated minute of television. After all, one
can hardly imagine the Recchis enmeshed in any way in the national
debates of the years of berlusconismo, which they certainly think are vul-
gar and beneath them, no matter where their political alliances may lie.
106 G. Galbussera
On the one hand, this is hardly surprising in a film that locates real
power in money and its flow, against the background of the impending
financial crisis that, soon after being a real worldwide traumatic event,
has become a source of endless debate in the political and artistic arena
of the past few years, with the proliferation of critical representations
of financial greed and corruption as the motors of postmodern capital-
ism. Thus the old-fashioned industrial power of the Recchis, relinquish-
ing traditional political formations, allies itself with the multinational
capital of finance in order to survive and prosper by mutating. On the
other hand, conceived as an art-house product, the film clearly intends
to appeal to an international audience—through its production history,
its casting, and its allusions to classics of Italian cinema—and therefore
avoids excessively direct references to Italian politics, opting instead for
a more generalized look at gender imbalances and family tensions driven
by class and wealth.
But as the audience is invited to condemn the hypocrisy and the emp-
tiness of the upper classes, one of the film’s inevitable sources of appeal
remains the glossy surface of the Recchis’ world. With the film’s sympa-
thy squarely positioned on Emma’s side against the conservative repres-
sion of the family, wealth is undeniably exposed in its moral oppressive
mechanisms, but its visual manifestations are always pleasant and never
verge on the vulgarity of excess: as conspicuous as consumption may be,
there is no place for kitsch in the Recchi universe. The film tries to recre-
ate and convey a sense of style traditionally associated with high-bour-
geois Milan, which in Guadagnino’s words is all ‘about being extremely
austere with the most high-luxury things’ (Romney 2010, p. 21), thus
indulging the public’s voyeuristic desire to see how the rich live, but
justifying it by turning away from the trashiness of the nouveaux riches
and offering instead a tasteful look at luxury that never becomes exces-
sive ostentation. Almost all reviews of the film, both the Italian and even
more so the international ones, have highlighted its rich visual appeal,
saluting its style as a throwback to a previous era of Italian filmmaking,
a nostalgic feeling that brings the spectators close to the Recchis’ attach-
ment to their patrician world, even as they are presented with a clear ide-
ological condemnation of this same world. Such ambiguity between the
film’s ethics and aesthetics is probably its most Viscontian trait, a con-
stant tension between what we critically understand and what we per-
ceive as sensually attractive; the film’s attempt to extend the spectators’
sight towards other senses (taste, touch), as experienced by the charac-

ters, encourages thus a full indulgence in its sensorial luxury.
The stance taken by Il capitale umano is instead much more plainly
political and univocally critical of wealth and privilege: as a decidedly
more middlebrow product, conceived primarily with an Italian audi-
ence in mind, the film does not refrain from direct, if fleeting, allusions
to Italian politics and to a country photographed in the final stages of
the social changes brought about by a couple of decades of berluscon-
ismo. Even as Virzì adapts the novel of the same title by the American
Stephen Amidon, as he transfers the action from post-2001 suburban
Connecticut to the Brianza area north of Milan in the midst of financial
crisis and economic recession, he finds a parallel for a world of privilege
and greed. On the surface the film follows the narrative arc of a rather
traditional whodunit, as it opens with the hit-and-run accident leading
to the death of a waiter who was riding his bicycle home from work dur-
ing a cold December night; the rest of the film develops through several
flashbacks towards a progressive clarification of how the events unfolded
and who is to blame for the accident. Most of the film is divided into
three main titled chapters, each presenting the limited point of view of
one of the characters: the almost-bankrupt real estate agent Dino Ossola,
Carla Bernaschi, and Dino’s teenage daughter Serena. The use of mul-
tiple points of view lets the spectator chase several red herrings, at first
blaming Massimiliano, the young Bernaschi scion, for the accident, until
the final revelation in Serena’s chapter.
But beyond the mystery narrative, the film is quite clearly a socio-
political satire, in line with Virzì’s preferred register ever since early films
of his like La bella vita (1994) and Ferie d’agosto (1996), up to Caterina
va in città (2003), which all center on a keen observation of class ten-
sions and political conflicts in Italian society; similar to those films, most
figures in Il capitale umano are easily recognizable types, whose character
development goes little beyond the satirical stereotype: the pathetic loser
aspiring to enter the world of the upper classes, the rich spoiled brat, or
the loner outcast with a heart of gold. Some of the minor characters, in
little more than cameo roles, are used by Virzì to make the most direct
political allusions in the film: the most obvious is a local representative
of a city council, who sports a bright green tie, is interrupted by his
cell phone ringtone (the ‘Va’, pensiero’ chorus from Verdi’s Nabucco),
and then proceeds to propose, for the reopening of the theater Carla
108 G. Galbussera
has decided to restore, a choir from a nearby mountain valley (‘voci

padane’); an Italian audience could not fail to link him to Lega Nord and
thus contextualize his rants against intellectualism and in defense of ‘the
common people.’7
References to Berlusconi and his influence on Italian politics and
society over the past two or three decades are central to Virzì’s vision
of a country in the grip of savage capitalism, driven by futile consump-
tion and superficial values; the assonance between the names Bernaschi
and Berlusconi is not accidental, and neither are the facts that the fam-
ily reside in a hill-top luxurious villa surrounded by a sprawling park,
which is located in a generic town in Brianza, hinting at the two his-
torical mansions occupied by Berlusconi and his family in that same area.
Nonetheless, Giovanni Bernaschi’s direct characterization owes more to
the stereotype of the cool and collected high-finance shark than to the
public persona of Berlusconi: instead of the politician’s affected bon-
homie and postures as a man of the people, Giovanni is thin, tall, com-
posed, much more a puppet-master behind the scenes than a populist
magnate. He has an almost regal aura as we first see him presiding over a
circle of assorted employees and counselors, displaying a fake friendliness
that utilizes the homosocial rituals typical of sports, but belies the fact
that these are more his subjects than his friends: after a tennis match, he
is in the center of the frame sprawled on a throne-like bench wearing a
bathrobe, while the other men sit meekly on either side and try to cap-
ture his attention and approval. It is instead with the character of Carla
that the allusion becomes the most open: her blondness, her reticent and
shy demeanor, and her past as a modestly talented stage actress, all point
to the public image of Veronica Lario, Berlusconi’s ex-wife, their divorce
being finalized right at the time that Il capitale umano was filmed and
released; a very public dispute, which had held the interest of Italian
public opinion and gossip magazines for years, after Lario’s open letter
to the daily la Repubblica in 2007 and equally public statements in 2009,
criticizing her husband in his private and public dealings with young
women and his unscrupulous mixing of politics and personal scandals.
From the decorative and silent wife, she became overnight the dignified
victim, suddenly reviled by some in Berlusconi’s camp as a traitor and
hypocrite and championed by some in the left as, paradoxically, the new
face of antiberlusconismo.
Carla is presented in an equally ambiguous way, satirized as the quin-
tessential trophy wife, but also granted some sympathy, and given a voice
and consideration in the chapter of the film named after her. When we
first see her, from Dino’s point of view, she is the image of the glam-
orous blonde, gracefully greeting him and excusing herself because she
has ‘the most complicated’ of days. As the film later comes back to this
moment from her point of view, the scene then cuts to a close-up of
Carla being chauffeured around Milan in a catatonic state, heading to a
manicure and a massage appointment that she is seemingly oblivious of
having ever made. She asks instead to be taken shopping, but can’t solve
the dilemma: shoes or curtains? She settles for a visit to a friend’s antique
shop, and she departs with a life-size wooden statue next to her on the
backseat, the difference between the living and the static passenger barely
noticeable. Thus her depiction is consistent with the stereotypical rich
bored wife, prisoner inside a monotonous life of emptiness; whereas Io
sono l’amore is totally on Emma’s side through its narrative attempts to
rescue her from a pointless life, here Carla is bestowed with limited sym-
pathy, which cannot lead the spectator beyond a generic sense of pity. As
we momentarily feel bad for her, we are still invited to pigeonhole her as
the trophy wife, a member of the spoiled ultra-rich class that the general
audience can observe with a good dose of Schadenfreude—and perhaps
some resentment too.
Carla’s ineptitude is highlighted in her interactions with the other
(male) members of the family: she is constantly infantilized and dismissed
by her husband and their son Massimiliano. Giovanni treats her as an
adult only in the moments when she has to fulfill her conjugal role as
sex object: when she takes an interest in the derelict local theater that is
about to be transformed into apartments or a bank, she has to ask her
husband for money in order to restore and reopen it. The scene plays out
in the bedroom, Carla in a silk nightgown, as Giovanni grabs her breasts
and initiates sex as he is agreeing to finance the project: the link between
money, sex, and marriage could not be any more explicit. Later on, as
things start going badly on the markets and the Bernaschi fund is threat-
ened, Carla asks her husband for explanations, only to be reassured and
told that these are complicated things she would not understand. After
her plaintive remonstrations, he sits her down and explains the situation
to her as one would to a child.
Yet, in her ability to provide sex and her glamorous façade, she is at
least functioning in her decorative role as an upper class wife; it is instead
in her totally ineffective mothering that Carla is portrayed univocally as
a defective person. Massimiliano, as immature and spoiled as he is, still
110 G. Galbussera
manages to treat her as his inferior: he is constantly raising his voice and
cursing at her, when not completely ignoring her. Carla, on the other
hand, is needy, and even when she tries to exert any sense of parental
authority, she sounds tentative and apologetic; throughout the film,
she resorts to suggesting to her husband and her son that maybe things
would get better if they just got together at the dinner table as a family,
revealing how she harbors a childish fantasy of what a family is, which
clashes entirely with reality, especially in their social milieu, where a fam-
ily is more economic enterprise than loving hearth. Even when a drunk
Massimiliano rails to his ex-girlfriend Serena against his father, whose
success and coldness oppress him, he curses finance and fantasizes about
being an orphan, wishing for his father’s death; his mother simply does
not count as a parent, only as a reflection of one of his father’s short-
comings (he alleges that Giovanni is not having sex with Carla anymore).
The mother registers on Massimiliano’s radar only as a disappoint-
ment: after the drunken night he reveals to her that he has seen her kiss
another man; thus, even as he does not seem to have any actual use for
his mother, he is quick to assert the patriarchal gaze of control over the
woman’s body as soon as she transgresses the limits of bourgeois décor.
Carla’s attempted escape from her own apathy and her husband’s
neglect takes the clichéd shape of an extra-marital affair with a man
who seems to appreciate her real self; in reality, she is made the object
of adulation, and then quickly infantilized and dismissed by her lover
too. Professor Russomanno, a parody of the leftist intellectual8, pro-
claims her a ‘true actress,’ despite her limited career, with his sight ulti-
mately fixed on directing the theater she is financing and entering the
glamorous world of the Bernaschis by proxy. When she eventually tells
him they have to stop seeing each other, and that the theater project had
to be canceled, he chases her out of his apartment, yelling repeatedly,
‘you are just a dilettante.’ If Emma Recchi finds in her sexual and roman-
tic escapade a fully satisfying and enlightening liberation, which begins
with melodramatic sensual abandonment and leads ultimately to a grand
tragic denouement, the register of Carla’s affair is a farce from the start:
Russomanno seduces her during a private screening of a Carmelo Bene
art film. The rather pretentious context barely masks the banality of the
seduction, and the scene is coded as intellectual porn: in the projection
room, with cigarette smoke and ambiguous lighting, Carla steps in the
way of the projector beam and climbs on top of the man, repeating at
the moment of orgasm the obsessively repetitive line of the film (‘I for-
give you’). Despite some sympathy bestowed on her, the film implies
that Carla cannot be a confident woman and a mother, caught as she is

in the rich-woman stereotype, her affectations used mostly as target for
laughter or indignation.
Clearly conceived as her opposite, Roberta (Valeria Golino)—Dino’s
new partner after he has been left by his wife—is endowed with a surplus
of maternal signifiers, spanning the whole range from literal to symbolic.
At the beginning of the film she announces her pregnancy to Dino (it
will turn out to be twins), and her belly is in full display when the film
focuses on events happening months later; several times she is seen feed-
ing and reassuring Dino, and showing him sonograms: she is so mater-
nally supportive with him that the audience might almost blame her for
not kicking out the imbecile she is living with. In her professional life she
is a sensitive psychologist working at a public facility, and in one scene
she even tries to convince the Bernaschis and their circle that extreme
competition is harmful to their children (they remain unconvinced, of
course). She is the only one to treat with humanity her patient Luca, the
troubled and orphaned teenager with an unfair drug conviction with
whom Serena eventually falls in love. Despite some initial awkwardness
between stepdaughter and new mother, Roberta is also the only adult
to be completely supportive and understanding of Serena, the only one
who can see the teenagers as individuals rather than objects of the adults’
aspirations and frustrations. In the dramatic denouement of the film, she
accompanies Serena to discover Luca being saved from a suicide attempt,
holding and comforting her. Thus, despite her limited screen time, she
becomes quite clearly the moral and emotional core of the film, in con-
trast with the greed and emptiness of most of the main characters. In
casting Golino, the film supports through her established star persona
the positive qualities of the character: admired as beautiful but approach-
able and unthreatening, thoughtful, reserved, and empathic both on and
off screen, Golino is the physical and spiritual opposite of the superficial
and fabricated glamour of Carla. Positive maternal qualities are associ-
ated with a reassuring image of normality: a good-looking but unglamor-
ous middle-class dark-haired woman, almost the photographic negative
of the blonde and always conspicuously dressed Carla. As Dino’s family
is decidedly middle class, albeit in dire financial straits, motherhood is
projected here not quite onto the proletarian body of a housekeeper, as
in Io sono l’amore, but the film still tries to separate the maternal from the
corrupting influence of wealth, embodying it instead in the unthreaten-
ing, plain-looking Roberta.
112 G. Galbussera
Ironically, the moment when Carla shows the most initiative in adopt-
ing a maternally protective role is when she agrees to bribing Dino in
exchange for the information that will clear her son and reveal to the
police that it was Luca behind the wheel of Massimiliano’s car at the time
of the accident. She does so against the apparent will of her husband,
who keeps up his role as the repressive disciplinarian towards their son.
Thus, even as she is stepping into the traditional shoes of maternal leni-
ency, it is suggested that wealthy mothering is inextricably linked with
the corrupting nature of money: the only nurturing she is capable of
borders on the criminal. In addition, it is clear to everybody where the
money is really coming from, as Dino requests the exact amount that he
was hoping to make from his investment in the Bernaschi hedge fund;
that and a kiss from Carla, which reveals her being, as trophy wife, a
mere pawn in the men’s game, even when she is apparently wielding the
power of her privilege.
Despite its clear-cut condemnation of money and greed, the film
reserves the pinnacle of its satirical cruelty not for the Bernaschis, but for
the scheming Dino; in Virzi’s world, even worse than the upper classes’
aristocratic disregard for anybody else is the aspirational gaze of desire
that Dino casts on their wealth and glamour ever since his first visit: he
uses his daughter as an excuse to enter their compound and then men-
tions to Giovanni her relationship with Massimiliano in a far too trans-
parent attempt to opt into the fund. Played by the normally handsome
Fabrizio Bentivoglio, Dino is instead represented through his language
and demeanor as pathetic and vulgar to the point of being physically
repulsive, the paradigm of an entrepreneurial middle class that feeds on
dreams of upward mobility from a world of relative wealth, lacking any
human values other than the pursuit of money.9 But for the most part,
the film tends to avoid what has become a very common aesthetic cri-
tique of berlusconismo: the gaudy ostentation, a popular culture obsessed
with TV trash, the unconscionable manipulation of female bodies; the
Bernaschis may certainly be villains, but they live in a sophisticated and
refined world, where their house, possessions and clothing are luxurious
but still within the confines of good taste—with the glaring exception of
Massimiliano’s brand new camouflage-print SUV, which in fact becomes
the unintentional weapon for the film’s manslaughter. Not quite as patri-
cian as the Recchis, they still possess a certain aura of the rich, which the
audience is invited to critique, but at the same time to be inevitably fas-
cinated with. Even Luca, invested by the film with proletarian innocence
and purity, upon arriving at the house party where he is helping Serena
rescue a drunk Massimiliano, instead of waiting outside as instructed,

cannot resist seeing ‘how the rich live,’ a transgression he will pay dearly
for, as it sets in motion the chain of events leading to the cyclist’s death.
Thus the gilded cage is very similar in the two films, whereas the out-
come of the women’s attempted rebellion is apparently opposite, as
Emma escapes to her private idyll and Carla instead fully retreats into the
fold; but they both reveal the structural solidity of the prison, which is
able to absorb the challenge by expulsion or annihilation of the rebels.
Carla’s defeat is total and her fate is sealed in the most memorable
lines of the film’s dialogue10. She directly accuses her husband and his
associates: ‘you bet on the failure of this country and you won.’ Giovanni
cynically corrects her: ‘we won, you’re in this too,’ finally moving her
from the victim’s position to that of at least a passive collaborator. The
scene takes place in their bedroom, as she is applying the final touches to
her makeup before joining the garden party that is celebrating with their
family and friends the survival of the Bernaschi financial empire. Widely
used publicity stills (e.g., in Aspesi 2014) show her smiling among guests
and toasting with champagne, but the film’s final cut does not have her
join the party, but only observing it from a bedroom window: we last see
her confined to this private factory of her glamour, after her husband has
told her she is beautiful, while her face is framed by her dressing table
mirror, her self-image totally coinciding with the socially imposed role
she is forced to play. The film abandons her, and instead offers in its last
shot a ray of hope, which is identified with the regenerative potential
of youth: Serena visits Luca in prison, hinting that the new generations
could change the course of society as charted by their parents. This scene
is not only about Serena saving Luca—as supportive and sympathetic as
she has been to him throughout the film—but it is also about him rescu-
ing her: offering her the opportunity to be authentic and maternal like
Roberta, and escape from what could have been her destiny as a replica
of Carla if she had accepted the gilded trap of the upper class.
Notes
1. It wouldn’t be correct to say that Guadagnino cast Swinton, as the two
have been collaborating for years and developed the idea of the film
together over a decade (James 2010, p. 22; Romney 2010, p. 20).
Although not credited among the writers, Swinton is one of the produc-
ers and was instrumental in securing the funds for the film.
114 G. Galbussera
2. Herself part of a family heir to a big industrialist fortune, who moved to

France in the 1970s, Bruni Tedeschi has used her background as clear
autobiographical inspiration for some of the films she has directed and
starred in, such as Il est plus facile pour un chameau… (2003) and Un
château en Italie (2013). In addition, an Italian audience would be inevi-
tably aware of the connection with her sister Carla Bruni’s public persona
and recent role as France’s first lady.
3. Although Guadagnino claims that the Recchi/Necchi assonance is acci-
dental, the source of the Necchis’ wealth, most prominently a very popu-
lar brand of sewing machines, hints at the textile empire of the Recchis.
4. Played by Marisa Berenson, who, as former model, actress, and 1970s jet-
setting It-girl from a prominent international family, offers yet another
example of glamour associated with the idea of rarefied foreignness.
5. Antonio is played by Edoardo Gabbriellini, who made his debut in Virzì’s
Ovosodo (1997) as the young proletarian who has to navigate his teenage
and early adult years among schoolmates who, despite superficial camara-
derie, turn out to be better positioned on the social ladder, and leave him
behind when real life starts reasserting class barriers.
6. Emma is quite literally the creation of Tancredi, a contemporary
Pygmalion: not only her last name, but even her first is artificially
imposed; we never find out what her real name is, except for a childhood
nickname that is one of the very few links, together with the Russian lan-
guage, to her previous identity.
7. The lack of direct allusions to Italian politics has been mentioned by some
foreign reviewers as a failure of the film to engage directly the Italian con-
text: see O’Donoghue (2015), who laments that ‘there is little sense that
the recession in its Italian variant was created under media mogul, far-right
sympathizer, and corrupt premier Silvio Berlusconi’ (p. 57). These reactions
are interesting, as they highlight how the film could function differently for
international and Italian audiences, for whom allusions to Berlusconi in the
film are quite clear, albeit without ever mentioning his name.
8. As common in Virzì’s cinema, the hypocrisy of the bourgeois Left is
exposed when it is revealed that, despite all the superficial opposition
with the reactionary Right, class trumps politics and the sacrificial vic-
tims caught in the middle are the working classes, for whom the ‘radical
chic’ Left has little real interest; see, for example, Caterina va in città or
Ovosodo.
9. Although an American critic has suggested that Dino’s family live ‘in a
cramped apartment’ (Klawans 2015, p. 28), to an Italian audience their
living arrangements immediately evoke the clichéd image of Brianza as
the eminently petit bourgeois land of suburban single-family homes and
townhouses.
10. In his positive response to the adaptation, the novel’s author expresses his
admiration for these final lines of dialogue, almost wishing that he had
written them himself (Amidon 2014, p. 19).
Works Cited
Amidon, S. (2014). Everything gained in translation. The Sunday Times,
09/14/2014, 18–19.
Aspesi, N. (2014). ‘L’élite secondo Virzì. Ecco gli italiani schiavi del denaro.’ La
Repubblica, 06/01/2014, p. 36.
Bauman, R. (2013). “You don’t exist:” I Am Love as political melodrama. Studies
in European Cinema, 10(2–3), 103–117.
James, N. (2010). Tilda Swinton Interview. Sight and Sound, 20(5), 22–23.
Kaplan, E. Ann. (1992). Motherhood and representation: The mother in popular
culture and melodrama. London and New York: Routledge.
Klawans, S. (2015). ‘Lower depths.’ The Nation. 2/2/2015, 300, 27–30.
Kristeva, J., & Goldhammer, A. (1985). Stabat mater. Poetics Today, 6(1/2),
133–152.
O’Donoghue, D. (2015). ‘Human Capital.’ Cineaste, Spring Issue, 55–57.
Romney, J. (2010). Italian cinema. Sight and Sound, 20(5), 16–21.
Filmography
Guadagnino, L., dir. (2009) Io sono l’amore. Italy: First Sun and Mikado.
Jarman, D., dir. (1986) Caravaggio. UK: BFI.
Pasolini, P.P., dir. (1968) Teorema. Italy: Aetos Produzioni Cinematografiche and
Euro International Film.
———. (1969). Porcile. Italy: I Film dell’Orso, INDIEF, IDI Cinematografica,
and C.A.P.A.C.
Virzì, P., dir. (1994) La bella vita. Italy: Life International, 1994.
———. (1996). Ferie d’agosto. Italy: Cecchi Gori Group Tiger Cinematografica.
———. (1997). Ovosodo. Italy: Cecchi Gori Group Tiger Cinematografica, 1997.
———. (2003). Caterina va in città. Italy: Cattleya and Rai Cinemafiction.
———. (2013). Il capitale umano. Italy: Indiana Production Company and
Motorino Amaranto.
Visconti, L., dir. (1960). Rocco e i suoi fratelli. Italy and France: Titanus and Les
Films Marceau.
———. (1969). La caduta degli dei (Götterdämmerung). Italy and Germany:
Italnoleggio, Praesidens, Pegaso, and Eichberg Film.
116 G. Galbussera
Author Biography
Giorgio Galbussera is Assistant Professor of Italian at Arcadia University in
Pennsylvania. He received an MA and Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from
the City University of New York, and a Laurea in European Languages and
Literatures from the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan. His main
research interests center on politics, social issues, and gender in European cin-
ema, in addition to literature and its intersections with the visual arts. He is also
active in the fields of translation and film subtitling.
CHAPTER 6
Mothers at a Loss: Identity and Mourning

in La Sconosciuta and Milyang
Francesco Pascuzzi
Already with their titles, Giuseppe Tornatore’s La sconosciuta (The

Unknown Woman, 2006) and Lee Chang-dong’s Milyang (Secret
Sunshine, 2007) announce matters of secrecy and seek to muddle the
audience’s perception of the two lead characters Irena (Ksenia Rappoport)
and Shin-ae (Jeon Do-yeon). The two protagonists are introduced as for-
eigners or outsiders in the process of moving to a new location, but very
little is immediately disclosed to otherwise define their status. When Irena
arrives in the fictitious town of Velarchi,1 her motives appear at the very
least suspicious: she finds employment in an upscale residential building
and rents an apartment across the street, only to spend her nights awake
by the window, staring outside into the distance. We do not know where
she is from, what she is looking for, and, to all intents and purposes,
she is indeed completely unknown to us and to the other characters as
well; only her generic Eastern European accent reveals her foreignness.
An earlier version of this chapter was published online by Film International on

4/30/2015.
F. Pascuzzi (*) 
Rutgers University, New Brunswick, USA
e-mail: ciski77@gmail.com

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-56675-7_6
118 F. Pascuzzi
Similarly, as Shin-ae and her child Jun arrive in the small town of Milyang,
we only know that the move was sparked by the woman’s decision to
honor her late husband, a native of the town. Nothing else is disclosed at
this point to further illuminate this decision or the circumstances behind
the man’s demise, and Shin-ae’s choice to leave Seoul to start anew in
a town called ‘secret sunshine’2 seems quaint, if a bit odd; much like
Irena, Shin-ae’s proper urban Seoul accent, noticeably different from the
Gyeongsang one spoken in Milyang, gives away her status as a stranger
and sets her apart. As it turns out, these suspicions are correctly founded:
both characters have, in fact, an ulterior motive.
Irena is a former sex worker who was once involved in a black mar-
ket adoption racket, and over the years she has been forced to relinquish
nine infants immediately after giving birth to them; she believes the last
of those nine children, a little girl named Tea, to be living in Velarchi
where, according to her investigations, she was adopted by the Adachers,
a couple of wealthy jewelry makers who eventually hire the protagonist
as a nanny and housekeeper. Shin-ae’s manifest desire to honor her late
husband instead conceals her firm intention to sever all ties with their
family back in Seoul following his passing; her life in the new town is,
however, shattered when Jun is abducted and murdered in a kidnap and
ransom plot. A set of similar narrative instances allows for a facile com-
parison between the two characters, Irena and Shin-ae, who otherwise
may seemingly have nothing in common: each film captures a mother
who has lost a child and is variously struggling to pick up the pieces and
start over. Yet, a closer look reveals deeper and more poignant ties from a
cultural and historical perspective: social advancements in Italy and South
Korea were both spurred and galvanized by two comparable periods of
outstanding growth (the so-called Italian economic miracle from the
1950s through the 1970s, and the rapid South Korean modernization
from the 1988 Olympics through the 1997 IMF crisis into the new mil-
lennium), which bore a strikingly similar shift within the organization of
social and family dynamics, also prompting the recalibration of a number
of socially sanctioned expectations associated with motherhood and with
womanhood at large.3
In Social Role Theory of Sex Differences and Similarities, Alice
H. Eagly, Wendy Wood, and Mary C. Johannesen-Schmidt argue that,
‘as the traditional division of labor weakens in industrial and post-indus-
trial societies [and] societies become more egalitarian, men and women
become more similarly positioned in the social structure.’ (2004, p. 283).
6 MOTHERS AT A LOSS: IDENTITY AND MOURNING IN LA SCONOSCIUTA … 119
While this study obviously does not instantiate the notion that matters
of gender inequality are suddenly resolved in industrialized societies, it
is useful to explain why the Italian economic miracle and the student
revolts in 1968 in Italy, and the modernization and democratization
of South Korea in the 1990s, had such a profound effect on feminist
movements in both countries,4 paving the way for women to assess new
opportunities and to begin thinking of themselves as other than/more
than. In this light, each film is actually furthering a protagonist who is a
single, financially independent woman, claiming motherhood not as the
fulfilling of patriarchal expectations but as an extension of her own self-
hood, and grappling with her denied status as mother insofar as it deeply
affects and shapes her own self-understanding.5 In Maternal Desire,
Daphne De Marneffe advances the claim that women may understand
themselves as mothers through the fulfilling of a desire to nurture a child
as an act of self-actualization, rather than an act of forced conforma-
tion to normative social influences, a desire which is, ‘[…] the authentic
desire to mother felt by a woman herself—a desire not derived from a
child’s need, though responsive to it; a desire not created by a social role,
though potentially supported by it; rather, a desire anchored in her expe-
rience of herself as an agent, an autonomous individual, a person’ (De
Marneffe 2004, p. 4). De Marneffe’s claim underlines the idea that dis-
cussions of identity and gender are in fact implicitly shortchanged by the
unwillingness to look at motherhood as an experience that shapes a wom-
an’s individuality as much as it affects her social status—or arguably even
more. This approach is of great value in the analysis of two films that
portray two characters as they go about re-organizing their self-under-
standings as mothers and as women. This chapter will consider this cen-
tral concern in connection to the experience of mourning with which
each character is faced, in order to understand how the loss of a child,
and by extension that of oneself as a mother, informs each character’s
selfhood.
Motherhood is posited as a central concern in this analysis because
it is variously encountered and ambiguously negotiated in each of the
two narratives. Not only are Irena and Shin-ae both mothers grappling
with the loss of a child, but in La sconosciuta, Tea’s adoptive mother
Valeria (Claudia Gerini) does not merely function as a diegetic foil to
Irena; she is rather a fully realized character meant to expose broader
issues related to the very nature of motherhood itself. Comparable
concerns are also raised in Milyang, since Shin-ae’s inherent worth
120 F. Pascuzzi
and personhood are called into question by her mother-in-law—and

later by Shin-ae herself—because of her own perceived failures as a
wife and as a mother, which the character considers automatically for-
given by a higher power when she becomes a born-again Christian. In
both instances, this approach hinges on a thematic reconsideration of
the mother stereotype, to be understood in this context as the nurtur-
ing and selfless life giver trope, one which is here questioned, if not
reversed altogether.
In La sconosciuta, Valeria Adacher is in fact an independent and mer-
curial woman who belongs to the upper middle classes and embraces
bourgeois ideals and practices; she has a profitable job and, as the film
implies, also a lover, threatening the family unit which her role would
instead demand she protect and foster. As an aberrant mother and wife,
Valeria is imagined as a character meant to function against the stabil-
ity of her family unit, making Irena by contrast an even more promi-
nent unifying figure in the narrative. The choice of Russian-born actor
Ksenia Rappoport as the film’s leading presence, according to Giovanna
Faleschini Lerner, in itself does not simply aim to muddle the film’s
narrative or confront the audience with vague issues of foreignness:
Rappoport is more exactly configured as ‘an instrument of destabiliza-
tion of notions of italianità,’ (2013, p. 9) whose extra-diegetic pur-
pose is to create a form of spectatorial anxiety which ‘also encompasses
the subversion of gender roles that the characters enact and exposes the
overlap that exists between gender identity and concepts of otherness’
(Faleschini Lerner 2013, p. 9). In other words, Rappoport’s foreignness
operates as a pointed tool in the narrative enterprise to complicate spec-
tatorial expectations vis-à-vis both her foreign origin and her femininity,
in that those expectations are often informed and shaped by pre-existing
bias or stereotypical, racist perceptions: as a transnational presence, Irena
invades the filmic space much like droves of immigrants have invaded
Italy’s geographical space. Moreover, Irena’s infiltration into the mono-
lith of italianità is rendered irreversible and thereby even more threaten-
ing by the fact that she gives birth to children who are then taken from
her and anonymously given up for adoption, becoming absorbed into
the social fabric of the nation in a process that legalizes and expunges
their otherness. The character is then to be primarily understood as a
vessel of ethnic reconfiguration, which the movie portrays as a highly
problematic yet ultimately unavoidable process.
Yet, the film presents Irena as a highly ambiguous mother character

as well, both in connection to the overarching, self-effacing narrative
structure of the film which conceals her intentions, and to Tea, whom
she mothers in rather unorthodox ways. Vetri Nathan aptly noted that,
‘at the center of the film’s theme […] lies a menace. There is a men-
ace felt by the protagonist, of a past that she is trying to both escape
from and trying to confront and change. There is also a constant menace
felt by the audience, who feel the disquiet generated by the unknown
nature of Irena’s incessant drive’ (Nathan 2010, p. 267). The film pur-
posefully exploits this angle by initially concealing Irena’s intentions as
she relates to Tea in counter-intuitive, unsettling ways. The child, who
has been diagnosed with a neurological disorder that makes her unable
to shield herself from injury, is over-sheltered and protected by Valeria;
Irena instead, throughout the course of the film, forces Tea to develop a
response to harm by confronting her directly with violence, pushing and
shoving her in an exercise supposed to teach her how to defend herself.
Valeria has fashioned a seemingly well-rounded existence for herself,
and the perfunctory fulfilling of her daily activities is carried out in effi-
cient, aseptic fashion, resembling a bullet point list not unlike the one
she robotically recites to Irena as the two go over Irena’s duties on her
first day in her new job. While Valeria’s core self-understanding appears
to encompass her agency as an independent woman and her professional
image as a jewelry maker, both of which she cultivates proficiently, it
does not appear to extend to the mothering of her adoptive daughter,
or to the carrying out of any motherly duties for that matter. Valeria’s
agency as a mother extends insofar as the bureaucratic steps that had to
be completed for her and her husband to be able to adopt a child, but
the film purposely almost never captures the character in the company
of Tea, and when it does, there is no real emotional significance to their
exchanges. The fact that Valeria could not have children in the first place
seems to serve as a pointed, almost fatalist nod to the fact that she was
altogether not meant to be a mother, a radical characterization that is
almost perfectly reversed in the unfolding of Irena’s vicissitudes; Valeria’s
gruesome death, orchestrated by Irena’s pimp Muffa (Michele Placido),
appears within the context of the narrative to represent a punishment
of sorts for the very fact that she is an aberrant mother. Irena, herself
a somewhat atypical mother (albeit not as unredeemable as Valeria), is
assigned a lesser punishment by being sentenced to serve jail time at
122 F. Pascuzzi
the end of the film for reasons that are left unclear: her lawyer, played
by Margherita Buy, tells her that the judge ‘couldn’t overlook every-
thing,’ even though she arguably killed Muffa in self-defense and she was
never formally charged with or even found responsible for assaulting the
Adachers’ former nanny in order to get her job, leaving some ambiguity
as to what ‘everything’ might be referring to.6 In any case, motherhood
for Valeria is indeed to be understood as nothing more than a perfor-
mance, one that needed to be undertaken because it appeared to be an
appropriate addendum to her status; the fact remains that Valeria is in
fact never a mother because she does not understand herself as one and
because she is never interested in re-structuring herself as one.
As a result, the character entirely delegates the actual mothering of
her daughter to her nanny, as she goes about furthering her business
and her social and economic influence with it; when she is faced with
the revelation that Irena may be Tea’s biological mother towards the
end of the film, Valeria has nothing to offer the protagonist but angry
threats that she is Tea’s mother because all the paperwork related to the
adoption is in order, which according to her makes her ‘la madre a tutti
gli effetti.’7 To make her point even more compelling, Valeria confis-
cates all the pictures of Tea and her drawings from Irena’s apartment,
evidently convinced that she will be able to break the bond between
the protagonist and the little girl by removing the physical and mate-
rial objects that connote their relationship. In this revelatory sequence,
Valeria flaunts her daughter as her property, an item that she has law-
fully obtained and thereby belongs to her, but she does not volunteer
or argue for the affective, motherly bond that one would expect her to
share with Tea. Irena’s sincere admission that the purpose of her pursuit
of Tea was the fulfillment of her dream to bear witness to her formative
years, rather than to drag her parents to court to have the adoption over-
turned, ultimately exposes the fact that the protagonist does not perceive
the meaning of motherhood in the bureaucratic sense in which Valeria
does. Irena never needed a stack of documents to understand herself as
a mother, whereas Valeria’s status as a mother is entirely bound to her
legal effort and the paperwork that defines her as such. This disengage-
ment from materialistic signifiers of motherhood is further reinforced by
Irena’s counter-intuitive reaction to Valeria’s outburst in that same scene,
in which Valeria’s anger and her instinctual reaction to deprive Irena of
Tea’s drawings and pictures leave Irena collectedly puzzled, rather than
angered or hurt. Even more significantly, by turning down a monetary
deal, Irena categorically demystifies Valeria’s assumption that she had

arrived in town seeking compensation in exchange for her silence about
Tea. Motherhood is an intrinsic component of Irena’s identity make-
up, and the film reinforces the notion that this self-understanding is not
bound to or defined by objects and paper, be they money, a child’s draw-
ings, or legal documents.
In Milyang, Shin-ae is burdened with the guilt of having indirectly
caused her beloved son’s death after purposely spreading the word about
her intention to find and buy a piece of land—a purchase she never
actually meant to seriously entertain—as a way to flaunt her presumed
wealth and increase her status and social clout in town, resulting in Jun’s
kidnapping and in her inability to pay the ransom. With her snobbish
attitude, Shin-ae initially fails to impress the locals, who humorously dis-
miss her unwanted advice on how to run their businesses and mock her
polite but firm standoffishness. It is then that Shin-ae starts casually hint-
ing at her plan to buy some land with her savings and get involved in
Jun’s kindergarten social activities: what is supposed to come across as
a sudden change of disposition is instead a disingenuous and calculated
move. Shin-ae spends the night of Jun’s disappearance out with a group
of girlfriends singing karaoke and drinking, casually dismissing a muffled
and seemingly distressed phone call from the child asking her to come
home at once, only to return to an empty apartment later that night;
her intention to dazzle the townswomen, fueled by the hope of revers-
ing their initial negative impression, ultimately facilitates Jun’s abduc-
tion. The film’s intention, however, is not to place the blame for these
events squarely on Shin-ae’s shoulders, but rather to place the charac-
ter in a mundane situation and confront her with a decision that, if not
agreeable, might be at the very least understandable for any parent who
has ever decided not to indulge his or her child’s tantrums. Jun’s dis-
appearance and eventual death are foreshadowed in an earlier sequence
meant to function as a red herring: one afternoon, Shin-ae leaves the
child outside in front of her new piano school when she is abruptly sum-
moned by the pharmacist across the street, only to be given a religious
pamphlet and a rather tactless speech on her presumed need to embrace
God and to believe in more than what she can see with her eyes, while
the audience is made uncomfortably aware that, in the background, Jun
can in fact no longer be seen where his mother had left him. Shin-ae
knows Jun to be a prankster and eventually finds him hiding out in their
backyard when he sneaks up behind her to surprise her, but the same
124 F. Pascuzzi
hide-and-seek scenario that is playfully enacted by the character as she

melodramatically calls out the child’s name and pretends to cry before
spotting him is then replicated with real, distressing urgency the night of
his kidnapping, when Shin-ae finds his bedroom empty and calls out his
name, in vain this time, until a phone call from the abductor reveals what
has happened to him, confirming her fears.
Any immediate epistemological mandates are ultimately forsaken, and
both films override their initial motivating moves to erect more complex
and layered narrative scaffoldings: establishing whether Irena is Tea’s
biological mother or not ultimately ceases to be the central diegetic
concern, as does determining the identity of Jun’s killer.8 Furthermore,
death and loss are presented in both films as a narrative leitmotif in the
lives of the protagonists, and variously embedded in their respective sto-
rylines in the form of brutal murders (Jun is killed and dumped in a river,
Irena’s boyfriend is murdered by her pimp, who is then killed by Irena
in self-defense later in the film) or deadly accidents (Shin-ae’s husband
and Valeria both die in off-screen car crashes). Irena is additionally con-
fronted with the loss of all the children whom she has been forced to
surrender over the years, a loss that is rendered even more final by the
fact that the intense strain of those pregnancies has rendered the charac-
ter unable to bear any more children, just as Shin-ae is confronted with
a crushing loss of faith in her God in the second half of the film, after
meeting her son’s killer in prison only to learn that he, too, has found
the Lord and considers himself forgiven and absolved of his crime.
Both films are similarly organized around a contrast between seeing
and believing, between what can be known and what may be blindly
accepted:9 despite having never met Tea, Irena is absolutely convinced
that the child is her daughter, an assumption that is later reinforced by
the fact that Tea bears a striking resemblance to Irena, and by the fact
that the two characters form a bond much stronger and more meaning-
ful than the one between Tea and her adoptive mother. The film subtly
builds on this suggestion, only to ultimately debunk it when it is finally
revealed that Irena was wrong all along, and Tea is not in fact her bio-
logical daughter. Conversely, Shin-ae only believes in what she can see
or empirically prove until she surrenders to her newly found faith: ‘It’s
just sunlight—nothing else,’ she bitterly remarks to her pharmacist one
afternoon after the woman has taken it upon herself to dispense even
more advice to Shin-ae after Jun’s death by declaring that ‘God’s will is
present even in that beam of sunlight.’ At this point, Shin-ae’s defiance
barely conceals the reality that she is utterly distraught, so much so that
she finds herself incapable of officially registering Jun’s death later that
day, wandering about until she casually decides to attend a revival ser-
vice in a newly opened church downtown. In spite of Shin-ae’s manifest
reticence, the seed has been planted: lost and aimless, the character has a
breakdown and resolves to surrender to what she cannot see, her hysteri-
cal sobbing finally placated by the hand of the off-screen pastor gently
landing on her head in order to bless her. Milyang pushes this thematic
concern even further, as it is bookended by two shots that appear almost
antagonistic in nature: the opening shot of the sky as seen from behind
the windshield of Shin-ae’s car, and the closing shot of the ground in
Shin-ae’s backyard. The former is a low-angle shot mediated by a fram-
ing device that restricts it and separates it from the observer (Jun, in that
case), and it is replicated later in the film as a bewildered Shin-ae looks
up to the sky from inside a police car, waiting to be summoned to iden-
tify her son’s body; the latter is a high-angle close-up that rests on a cor-
ner in Shin-ae’s backyard. These two shots similarly flank the trajectory
of Shin-ae’s relationship with God and her partaking in assiduous reli-
gious practices, occurring before her conversion and after she has aban-
doned her church, one representing an initial, ambiguous (yet alluring)
possibility, the other a final, unattractive (yet certain) reality.
In facing each protagonist with her status as a negated mother, the
two films advance analogous narrative structures: the revelation regard-
ing Tea’s identity shatters Irena’s certainties, but it bears no conse-
quences for the affection that has grown between the two characters;
Shin-ae turns to God to alleviate her pain and avoid confronting her cir-
cumstances and her accountability, but the closing shot ultimately offers
the character the reality of the dirt that grounds her as a new starting
point. These diegetic frameworks allow the two films to engage a narra-
tive of metaphorical rebirth as a response to loss. ‘Ho fatto tanti errori,
una vita non mi basta per pagarli tutti,’10 Irena briefly reflects as she
casually reminisces about her past. This line, as self-deprecatory as it is
apparently throwaway, conceals instead one of the main ideas embed-
ded in the narrative, that of motherhood as a form of self-renewal. In
Kinscripts: Reflections on Family, Generations, and Culture, Carol B.
Stack and Linda M. Burton theorized the notion of kin-time, described
as the ‘temporal script of families’ and ‘the temporal sequencing of
reproduction’ (1994, pp. 36–37), which represents the chronological
blueprint or layout of a family’s relationships, marking essential events
126 F. Pascuzzi
such as marriage and child-bearing as ‘rites of passage’ (Stack and Burton

1994, p. 37), mapping out the organization of family relationships, and
examining the way in which each generation shapes them for the fol-
lowing one; however, the notion that bearing a child allows a mother to
implicitly leave her own imprint in her family’s future generations is only
tangentially and indirectly addressed. In La sconosciuta, Irena employs
the awareness that her life may have been compromised beyond redemp-
tion by her poor choices and by the abuse of others as a driving force in
the pursuit to track down her daughter, a pursuit that on a superficial
level is supposed to afford her the chance to reclaim the child that has
been taken away from her, but one that shall also afford her the chance
to reclaim Tea as an extension of her own kin-time. Shin-ae operates
along a similarly attuned frequency: in a conversation with her brother,
she externalizes very conflicting feelings about her late husband, who
had cheated on her, and she implicitly frames the move to Milyang as
an opportunity to build a new life and new opportunities for her child
and herself. Shin-ae wishes to amend her perceived shortcomings as a
wife and cultivate her relationship with Jun by reclaiming her agency as a
mother; this project collapses after Jun’s death.
By embedding motherhood in the temporal sequence of kin-time,
La sconosciuta and Milyang are implicitly establishing Tea and Jun as the
Baudrillardian hyperreal,11 a copy/child that is more real than the origi-
nal/mother, and as such an opportunity at redemption as well as a ves-
sel of self-renewal. According to Jean Baudrillard, society has moved to
replace reality (and all real meaning by extension) with symbols, making
life not reality but rather a simulation of reality. In light of this, symbols
implicitly prove that reality itself is no longer necessary to craft an under-
standing of the human experience; reality and simulation thus cease to be
regulated by an order of dependence. In other words, in a world where
it has become increasingly challenging to discriminate between original
and copy, and the copy inherently represents the attempt to ameliorate
the original—thus coming to epitomize the hyperreal—the reproduc-
tion is to be considered more real than the original, and the original may
come to cease to have meaning, or even cease to exist altogether. If, as
Irena volunteers, one life is indeed not enough to atone for her mistakes,
the experience of mothering Tea and her investment in the bettering of
the child’s life are to be understood not so much as a motherly effort as
much as an effort in self-reshaping, a process meant to rectify her past as
she molds the future of someone else’s, as in that of a more perfect copy
of herself. From this perspective, it is not surprising that the event that
propels Irena’s entrance in Tea’s life would be the discovery of the girl’s
neurological condition: upon learning that Tea is defenseless against
injury and pain, Irena immediately sets her plan into motion, as though
she perceives that condition to be some sort of inherited birth defect of
which she absolutely must rid her presumed daughter. Irena, a victim of
unspeakable abuse for most of her life, simply cannot stand the idea that
her kin-time should also be defined by victimhood and defenselessness:
her project of reshaping through Tea shall rewrite that narrative anew.
Once Irena is able to win Tea over, after some initial wariness, she
engages her in a game which the child jokingly labels the salami game:
Irena ties the little girl up with belts and straps until she is almost
encased and completely unable to move her arms. The protagonist then
proceeds to push and shove the child around the room, causing her to
fall down on the floor and immediately ordering her to get back up,
shoving her down again as soon as she is able to do so. The purpose of
this brutal exercise is to help Tea confront and overcome her disorder,
but in a significant and revelatory feat of non-simultaneous crosscut edit-
ing, images of Tea being shoved by Irena and falling to the ground are
interwoven with random images from Irena’s past, as she is being shoved
around and into the ground by Muffa or a john, naked, bruised, bleed-
ing and, unlike Tea, unable to get back up. Tea is resentful and under-
standably upset at first, but she slowly comes to appreciate or at least
understand the goal of the exercise, and the purpose of Irena’s intentions
and actions; in the face of her adoptive mother’s more helpless, indiffer-
ent attitude, the little girl finds herself increasingly drawn to her nanny as
someone who firmly believes she can and must overcome her disability.
The narrative of transformation which structures La sconosciuta begins to
take form at this point, once the film conclusively establishes Irena’s pur-
suit of motherhood as a pursuit in self-reshaping, and once Tea’s struggle
to overcome her disorder comes to represent Irena’s struggle to amend
her own past.
This idea of rebirth is engaged even more openly, and with a pre-
ponderant religious component, in Milyang, since Shin-ae embraces
Christianity shortly after the death of her child, an event which, as we
have seen, stunts her and effectively erases her kin-time until she decides
she must accept God as her savior. As hinted above, the character’s own
narrative of self-renewal reaches its climax in the second act of the film,
when Shin-ae travels to meet the man who murdered her child in prison.
128 F. Pascuzzi
The purpose of the visit is supposed to underline the character’s selfless-

ness as a woman of faith: Shin-ae wants to tell the criminal that she has
forgiven him in accordance with her newly-found doctrine while flaunt-
ing the edifying strength of her beliefs, not unlike the way in which she
had been flaunting her presumed financial wealth earlier in the film.
While praising her disposition and abnegation, her friends from church
also debate why she would need to meet the man in person in order to
bestow her forgiveness: why can’t she just decide she has forgiven him
and let that be enough? When questioned, Shin-ae argues that she must
spread the word of the Lord in person. As it turns out, this will be our
first clue that the character’s religious conversion is more problematic
than it appears: contrary to what she otherwise professes, the protagonist
still needs to see in order to believe. The meeting does not go according
to plan: Shin-ae finds herself on the receiving end of the same speech
about God and forgiveness she was ready to recite, with the prisoner
going as far as telling her, ‘I always pray for you.’ Shin-ae’s reaction is
not one of understanding or relief or fulfillment; on the contrary, the
meeting brings about a devastating crisis of faith that ultimately causes
the woman to reject God, a God that would not only absolve the mur-
derer of her child before she has had the chance to, but also a God that
does not even afford her the chance to feel morally and spiritually supe-
rior to the man who has destroyed her life. The shot/reverse-shot struc-
ture of this sequence significantly places both characters behind bars: the
prisoner is incarcerated for the crime he has committed, but Shin-ae, too,
is in a sense incarcerated by the unwillingness to grapple with her own
grief without an intermediary. Much of the scholarship on Milyang has
focused its attention on the film’s take on organized religion; Dennis
Lim, for example, argued that the narrative advances a critique of organ-
ized religion both in theory and in practice, saying that Milyang is ‘angry
at its hypocrisy and opportunism [and that it] shows how we use reli-
gion, and how religion uses us’ (Lim 2011). While the film does criticize
a certain tendency toward empty mass proselytism that belongs to the
structure of some organized religions, it is in fact more openly critical of
those who seek out religion as a therapeutic shortcut to avoid confront-
ing trauma and of those who employ a fundamentally arbitrary system
of beliefs to inherently claim the high moral ground. As a matter of fact,
Milyang questions Shin-ae’s intentions far more than it challenges the
ritualized practice of religion itself; this is further reinforced by the fact
that Shin-ae’s suitor Jong Chan (Song Kang-Ho), who had only started
attending church with the protagonist in an attempt to win her affec-

tion, has by the end of the film found a sincere faith within himself and
a meaningful relationship with God, and is himself filmically positioned
as a guardian angel of sorts, often framed behind Shin-ae at varying dis-
tances and angles, as though he has been tasked with the job of protect-
ing and supporting her.
While Irena and Shin-ae struggle to mourn their losses, each narra-
tive engenders the notion that loss is becoming who the two charac-
ters, in fact, altogether are: there does not seem to be anything more to
Irena than her frantic search for her daughter, and Shin-ae soon appears
equally consumed by her faith in God. In this light, mourning is con-
figured as a process which not only entails the confrontation and the
rationalization of a loss or a death, but more accurately one that also
inevitably entails the confrontation and the rationalization of the loss of
one’s self-understanding as a result of that loss or death. On a manifest
level, both films set out to investigate the heterogeneous ways in which
motherhood may be implicated in each narrative, asking the audience
to decide to what extent is Shin-ae responsible for her son’s death, if at
all, and whether Irena should be regarded as Tea’s mother regardless of
the biological connection that might—or might not—link the two char-
acters, since Valeria can claim motherhood rights over Tea by virtue of
having adopted and raised her. While the condition that regulates the
relationship between Irena and her lost children, and between Shin-ae
and her son Jun, could be readily categorized as mourning (which Freud
described as the reaction to losing a loved one),12 both films also instan-
tiate the notion that the two characters are faced with a more ambiguous
loss. In discussing the character of Shin-ae, Kyung Hyun Kim argues that
‘her ego and self-esteem are diminished to the point of emptiness’ (Kim
2011, p. 174), likening her condition to one of melancholia instead.
Kim adds that according to Freud, melancholia causes the subject to
‘know whom he has lost, but not what he has lost in him’ (Kim 2011,
p. 174), and that the crucial difference between the two conditions rests
on the notion that ‘in mourning, it is the world that has become poor
and empty; in melancholia, it is the ego itself’ (Kim 2011, p. 174). Both
Irena and Shin-ae may be interpreted as melancholic in the sense that
through the physical losses they are mourning, they are subconsciously
also mourning the self that was irremediably compromised as a result
of those losses, and no longer exists as it was understood before they
took place. Beyond matters of revenge, faith, and forgiveness, through
130 F. Pascuzzi
the staging of two annihilating experiences of grief the two films are in
fact investigating matters related to identity: can we still claim to be who
we believe we are when external events affect the very conditions which
engender our own self-understanding?
Drawing from Freud, in Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and
Violence, Judith Butler discusses mourning as it pertains to a pointedly
individual sphere, explaining that ‘[p]erhaps one mourns when one
accepts that by the loss one undergoes one will be changed, possibly for
ever (sic)’ (Butler 2004, p. 21); she further suggests that,
when we experience mourning, something about who we are is revealed,

something that delineates the ties we have to others, that shows us that
these ties constitute what we are, ties or bonds that compose us […] When
we lose some of these ties by which we are constituted, we do not know
who we are or what to do. On one level, I think I have lost ‘you’ only to
discover that ‘I’ have gone missing as well. (Butler 2004, p. 22)
Implicit in this idea of going missing or losing oneself is then a process

of self-mourning and of subsequent, necessary self-reconfiguration. If, as
Butler convincingly argues, ‘we’re undone by each other’ (Butler 2004,
p. 23), the loss of someone else then also brings about the loss of one-
self, a loss of which the subject might not be aware, but one which the
subject mourns and subconsciously moves to absorb in a renewed self-
understanding. While one might never stop mourning a specific loss, that
loss is charged with a power which Butler would call ‘transformative’
(Butler 2004, p. 21) in the sense that it asks of the subject to rethink
herself anew in light of the very experience of losing, because what was
lost was an intrinsic part of the subject’s self-understanding. Through the
example of two characters whose experience of motherhood has been
categorically denied, La sconosciuta and Milyang explore much deeper,
ontological implications: unless the subject is able to craft a new self-
understanding that is comprehensive of the loss of the object just as it
once was of the existence of the said object, such a process of self-recon-
figuration shall never be successful.
This interest in the transformative power of motherhood falls in line
with—and is supported by—De Marneffe’s own theories on mothering.
Drawing on Nancy Chodorow’s The Reproduction of Mothering (origi-
nally published in 1978, then revised and republished in 1999), a study
that set out to explore and explain the social, political, and economic
reasons why women still inherit and/or assume the role of primary
caretakers for their children, in Maternal Desire De Marneffe also ana-
lyzes the so-called mother-infant merger phenomenon, according to
which ‘the earliest relationship of an infant to his or her caretaker—
almost always a mother—is characterized by a sense of merger or one-
ness’ (De Marneffe 2004, p. 67). De Marneffe argues that mother-child
relationships ‘do not follow a linear progression from fusion to auton-
omy; rather, feelings of oneness and separateness oscillate through life’
(De Marneffe 2004, p. 67). This notion is further qualified and com-
plicated in La sconosciuta through Irena, whose separateness has been
coerced upon her time and time again, ultimately damaging her sense
of oneness not simply in terms of her non-existent relationship with her
children, but also in the very ability to understand herself as complete
within herself without them. In one of the film’s final and most affect-
ing scenes, Irena visits Tea in the hospital. At this point, Irena has been
arrested for the killing of Muffa, and Tea, differently abandoned by both
her bureaucratic mother and her affective one, has ended up in the hos-
pital because of her inappetence; Irena is brought in from jail in order
to try and feed Tea, who is otherwise unwilling to eat. After agreeing to
have some soup, Tea inquires about Irena’s sudden departure, and Irena
vaguely answers that she has found a new job that will keep her away for
some time. Irena then urges Tea to learn to write as soon as possible,
and to write all about what it feels like to become a woman. ‘Dovresti
saperlo,’ Tea quips back. ‘Io sono stata troppo distratta nella mia vita,
non me ne sono accorta,’13 Irena explains. This brief exchange reinforces
Irena’s own expectations vis-à-vis her self-understanding as Tea’s mother:
anchored to that very principle of oneness, the little girl’s future is sup-
posed to fulfill what has been irreparably compromised in Irena’s past;
in her path towards womanhood, Tea shall set out to rectify Irena’s own
path, which had instead gone irreparably astray. This process is mirrored
in Milyang not only through Shin-ae’s relationship with Jun, as noted
above, but also through her relationship with God, with whom she is
supposed to be one according to the tenets of her belief: this spiritual
rebirth posits the Lord as the Father, and Shin-ae as one of his chil-
dren. However, Shin-ae is eventually faced with the realization that her
devotion, unremitting religious practice, and tragic circumstances do
not afford her a privileged position within the structure of this relation-
ship: as it turns out, she is in fact also one, or the same, with her child’s
murderer. Following her rejection of Christianity, Shin-ae embarks on
132 F. Pascuzzi
a mission to completely separate herself from God: she first disrupts a

large religious gathering by substituting the spiritual hymn playing in
the background with the recording of a pop song called Lies, and then
she resolves to seduce the pharmacist’s unassuming husband. As the two
characters ready themselves to consume an impromptu sexual encounter
out in a field in the countryside, the camera pushes into frame an upside-
down close-up of Shin-ae’s face looking into, through and beyond the
lens up to the sky, externalizing an unmediated ‘desire for a gaze beyond
the cinematic,’ (Sng 2013, p. 17) as she whispers, ‘Can you see?’ in a
defiant, confrontational tone. This act of rebellion is foiled by the man’s
inability to perform, fueled by the guilt for cheating on his wife; Shin-ae
finally decides to slit her wrists and kill herself, but even this final attempt
at disobedience proves unsuccessful.
As abstracted above, La sconosciuta and Milyang invite a rather idi-
osyncratic reflection on the nature of mourning. Irena and Shin-ae are
actively working to undo and correct their pasts; moreover, both films
go one step further in suggesting that the work to amend one’s past is
indissolubly linked to the work that each character is doing to grapple
with her grief. The dynamics of this process are thoughtfully rendered
in both La sconosciuta’s and Milyang’s closing sequences in which,
coincidentally, both characters are released from facilities in which they
had spent time away from the public sphere: Shin-ae is released from a
psychiatric care center after her failed suicide attempt, whereas Irena is
finally released from jail. Shin-ae asks Jong Chan to drive her to a hair
salon to get a haircut. Jong Chan unknowingly drives her to a salon
where the daughter of Jun’s murderer, a wayward girl Shin-ae had briefly
met earlier in the film, is employed and randomly assigned to style her
hair. The two characters silently recognize each other, and this is config-
ured as yet another opportunity for Shin-ae to forgive someone who had
very likely facilitated Jun’s abduction and then assisted in concealing his
murder. Despite her best efforts, Shin-ae gets up midway through her
haircut and storms out of the salon, eventually retreating by foot to her
backyard where, with the help of Jong Chan, she finishes cutting her hair
on her own, as the camera slowly wanders off before settling onto that
shot of the ground which was discussed earlier. The ending of Milyang
openly acknowledges that Shin-ae’s relationship with God has not been
resolved; Shin-ae is not even emotionally whole or stable enough to be
fully social yet, but the act of cutting her own hair shows the character
no longer delegating but rather in charge of herself perhaps for the first
time in the film, hinting at a new awareness and ownership over herself.
The ending of La sconosciuta leaps at least fifteen years into the future
from the date of Irena’s imprisonment, based both on the ageing of the
protagonist and the fact that Tea appears now to be approaching her
twenties. Unsurprisingly, when we see Irena being released from jail,
she is still wearing unadorned black clothes, a pointed choice aimed at
suggesting that she has not completed her experience of mourning. The
appearance of an adult Tea in the distance, however, does more than sim-
ply redeem Irena for the audience in a neatly organized happy ending.
Tea has grown up but she has retained her uncanny resemblance to a
younger Irena; moreover, she seems happy, healthy, and well-adjusted.
The two characters do not exchange any words, but simply nod and
smile at each other, indicating the fact that the time apart has not weak-
ened their bond. As she reciprocates Tea’s gaze from a distance, Irena
at once realizes that not only her mothering of Tea, as unorthodox as
it might have been, was ultimately successful, but that through the per-
son smiling back at her, almost like a mirror image, she is indeed able
to wipe the slate clean. Irena’s incredulous smile, at once worn out and
fulfilled, represents a layered acknowledgement or affirmation: the char-
acter’s enterprise to foster her own self-understanding as a mother has
indeed proven more compelling than any external attempts to negate it,
and along with her self-understanding the character has also successfully
reclaimed her past for herself.
Notes
1. La sconosciuta was shot on location in Trieste and Rome. The setting for
the film is intentionally familiar but not immediately recognizable as a
way to universalize the themes engaged by the narrative.
2. The title of the film is an alternative spelling of Miryang, a small town
in the South Gyeongsang Province. The literal translation of the town’s
name is secret sunshine.
3. The interest in comparative, transnational film studiesis further supported
by current scholarship trends underlining the importance and value of a
global perspective in the discipline at large. Journal of Italian Cinema &
Media Studies, for example, has dedicated two volumes to intersections
between Italian and Chinese cinemas and has published several other
studies with transnational approaches/concerns. In particular, Giovanna
Faleschini Lerner’s Ksenia Rappoport and Transnational Stardom in
Contemporary Cinema examines the role of the actress in complicating
notions of Italian identity by considering her work in four Italian films,
including La sconosciuta.
134 F. Pascuzzi
4. As a reference, see Liberazione della donna. Feminism in Italy (Lucia

Chiavola Birnbaum) and Carving Out Space: Civil Society and the
Women’s Movement in South Korea (Seungsook Moon).
5. In discussing identity as self-understanding, I am purposefully divorcing
notions of identity as an agent or a script at the core of Identity Theory
(Burke, Stetts) while proposing a definition of identity as the core self-
understanding one formulates and maintains about oneself.
6. One may even argue that such an unconventional mother character is used
by Tornatore to reinforce a more traditional and commonly accepted
mother stereotype. In general, a few of Tornatore’s female characters are
variously punished for being aberrant or different or non-conforming.
See also Beata in L’uomo delle stelle (1995), Malèna in Malèna (2000),
and Claire in La migliore offerta (2013) as examples of this trend.
7. ‘The mother for all intents and purposes.’ My translation.
8. In very anti-climactic fashion, the killer is revealed to be one of Jun’s
teachers after a brief investigation.
9. In Syncretic Sunshine: Metaphor in the Cinema of Lee Chang-Dong,
Zachary Sng discusses the use of metaphor/technē in Milyang by focus-
ing on the opening and closing shots of the film and the way in which
they inform its visual rhetoric, striving for an unmediated gaze.
10. ‘I’ve made so many mistakes that one life isn’t enough to pay for all of
them.’ My translation.
11. The referent for this discussion is Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and
Simulation (1981).
12. At first, Freud (in Mourning and Melancholia, 1917) explained that
mourning comes to an end when the subject is able to cut all ties with the
loss and find a new object into which invest the libido that was freed up in
the process. Later (in The Ego and the Id, 1923) he revised his theory to
explain that incorporation is an integral component of mourning, allow-
ing for the assumption that mourning might be an endless enterprise.
13. ‘You should know,’ ‘I’ve been too absent-minded my entire life and I
didn’t notice.’ My translation.
Works Cited
Baudrillard, J. (1994). Simulacra and Simulation. (trans: Glaser, S.F. ). Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Butler, J. (2004). Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London;
New York: Verso.
Chiavola Birnbaum, L. (1986). Liberazione della donna. Feminism in Italy.
Middletown: Wesleyan University Press.
De Marneffe, D. (2004). Maternal Desire: On Children, Love and the Inner Life.
New York: Back Bay Books.
Eagly, A. H., Wood, W., Johannesen Schmidt, M. C. (2004). ‘Social Roles Theory
of Sex Differences and Similarities: Implications for the Partner Preference of
Women and Men.’ In A. H. Eagly, A. E. Bell, & R. J. Sternberg (Eds.), The
Psychology of Gender (pp. 123–174) (2nd ed.). New York: The Guilford Press.
Faleschini Lerner, G. (2013). ‘Ksenia Rappoport and Transnational Stardom in
Contemporary Cinema.’ Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies, 1(1),
7–20.
Kim, K. H. (2011). Virtual Hallyu: Korean Cinema of the Global Era. Durham:
London: Duke University Press.
Lim, D. (2011). Secret sunshine: A cinema of lucidity. www.criterion.com.
Moon, S. (2002). ‘Carving Out Space: Civil Society and the Women’s
Movement in South Korea.’ The Journal of Asian Studies, 6 (2), 437–500.
Nathan, V. J. (2010). ‘Nuovo Cinema Inferno: The affect of ambivalence in
Giuseppe Tornatore’s La sconosciuta.’ In G. Russo Bollaro (Ed.), From
Terrone to Extracomunitario. New Manifestations of Racism in Contemporary
Italian Cinema (pp. 264–279). Leicester: Troubador Italian Studies.
Sng, Z. (2013). ‘Syncretic Sunshine: Metaphor in the Cinema of Lee Chang-
Dong,’ Diacritics, 41(2), 6–30.
Stack, C. B. and Burton, L. M. (1994). ‘Kinscripts: Reflections on Family,
Generations, and Culture.’ In E. N. Glenn, G. Chang, & L. R. Forcey (Eds.),
Mothering. Ideology, Experience, and Agency. New York: Routledge.
Filmography
Lee, C., dir. (2007). Milyang (Secret Sunshine). South Korea: CJ Entertainment,
Cinema Service, and Pine House Film.
Author Biography
Francesco Pascuzzi received a Ph.D. in Italian from Rutgers University. He
currently teaches Italian at Ramapo College and English Writing at Rutgers
University. He has presented and published on a variety of topics, from Visconti’s
Morte a Venezia to the representation of reality in Cinema Novo and Neorealism.
He is the editor of Dreamscapes in Italian Cinema, an anthology that examines
the oneiric realm in Italian film culture, published in February 2015 by Fairleigh
Dickinson University. His main field of research encompasses transnational and
comparative studies between Italian and foreign cinema, and his current interests
include Hallyu and contemporary Korean cinema, Italian auteur film of the new
millennium, modern and contemporary horror film, and the portrayal of family
dynamics in Italian and world film culture.
CHAPTER 7
‘Acquaintance with Grief ’: Filmmaking

as Mourning and Recognition in Nanni
Moretti’s Mia Madre
Stefania Benini
Something uncanny happens when we are touched by the death of a

loved one, and particularly by the death of a parent: even more so by
the death of a mother. It is as if the bond that connects us with life is
revealed in all its frailty: the vessel of our coming to the world drowns
into death, and the world takes a hue of vulnerability and uncertainty.
Nanni Moretti’s film Mia Madre (2015) inhabits this liminal area, of a
mortality to come, an announced tragedy that is about to happen but for
which no one could ever be prepared, even when it is diagnosed and offi-
cially declared as impending.
This is not the first time that Moretti deals with death and grief. In
his 2001 La stanza del figlio/The Son’s Room, he depicted the mourning
process of a family (father, mother, and a daughter) struck by the sudden
death of a son. However, Moretti’s latest movie approaches death from
another perspective: the natural passing away of a parent, originated by
an autobiographical event, the death of the director’s mother in 2010.
S. Benini (*) 
Saint Joseph’s University, Philadelphia, PA, USA
e-mail: oneifigenia@gmail.com

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-56675-7_7
138 S. Benini
In Mia madre, like the son’s death experienced by the family in La

stanza del figlio, the death of the mother is unacceptable for Moretti’s
protagonists, yet in this movie it is natural and thus inevitable. The
characters’ lives take on a different trajectory, a path of tragic intimacy
and sad but contained attachment that does not want to let go but is
forced to do so by the circumstances. The characters hold their moth-
er’s hands as if they hold onto life itself, hoping that their grasp will be
strong enough to keep the mother alive, and exorcise the call of death.
Yet we see the aftermath of the passing of the mother, and we are faced
with the openly acknowledged derailment and loss of direction of the
protagonist—both daughter and filmmaker—in her sense of inadequacy
about her work as well as about her life that reminds us of Moretti’s pre-
vious movie, Habemus Papam. As Emiliano Morreale has pointed out,
however,
Le film est fait de petites séquences autonomes, suspendues, accompag-

nèes des trèmolos sans mèlodie d’Arvo Part, reposant sur une palette des
couleurs éteintes, où les verts, les jaunes, les rouges sont pratiquement
absents. Le film n’est d’ailleurs pas construit sur une idèe magnifique aut-
our de laquelle s’articulerait le scénario […]. C’est plutôt comme si le non-
évènement, l’abîme gisant au fond de quotidien, avait lentement envahi
chaque plan, chaque geste étudié des acteurs, se transformant en musique
du fond. (Morreale 2015, p. 15)
The tragedy at the heart of the quotidian, the non-events that surround
the definitive event to come are at the center of the movie: there is no
acting out of pathos nor any eruption of laughter, and yet tragedy and
comedy are intertwined in an introverted grief, which is subtle and sub-
dued. The dimension of everyday life is revealed as nonsense, and stub-
bornly reaffirmed, while the meaning of love is disclosed as being in a
short-circuit with death. At the end of the process lies the elegiac discov-
ery of filial love, which is transposed in a different cinematic approach:
from cinema as an expression of grief to cinema as a monument. The
film’s memorial and diaristic dimensions of grieving transform death into
meaning, denial into acceptance, and loss into love.
In 2010, while he was working on the montage of Habemus Papam,
Nanni Moretti lost his mother, Agata Apicella. Right after, in 2011, he
started to work with Francesco Piccolo and Valia Santella on his new
7 ‘ACQUAINTANCE WITH GRIEF’: FILMMAKING AS MOURNING … 139
project—a film dedicated to this moment of personal loss and existential

distress, the screenplay of Mia madre—by re-reading the diaries he wrote
during his mother’s illness and agony:
Ma mère est décédée en octobre 2010 lorsque j’étais au montage

d’Habemus Papam. Je dois dire que j’y ai pensé tout de suite: j’ai com-
mencé à travailler à ce projet dès qu’est sorti Habemus Papam en avril
2011. Et dès le début, il y avait cette idée d’une réalisatrice femme qui
était en train de travailler à son film alors que sa mère était malade et qui
ensuite mourrait. […] Je trouvais plus interessant de raconter cette histoire
à travers les yeux d’une femme. […] Je ne saurais dire de manière claire,
lucide, dans quelle mesure j’ai été concerné par ce thème douloureux que
je voulais raconter. Je ne réussis pas à le comprendre. Le moment dou-
loureux s’est produit quand, après avoir terminé la première rédaction du
scenario, je suis allé relire – c’est une chose que je renvoyais sans cesse - le
journal intime que je tenais pendant la maladie de ma mère. Ce moment
m’a touché: aller dans les sentiments, dans les états d’âme qui étaient les
miens lors des ces semaines. (Gili 2015, p. 19)
This diaristic imprinting is evident in the movie: Moretti follows his steps
into a journal intime mode (as he had done previously in Caro diario
and Aprile) but with a third person narration that deflects the autobi-
ography onto a different character. Stephane Delorme from Les Cahiers
du Cinema has differentiated in Moretti’s film the usage of the ‘first per-
son’ against the ‘autofiction:’ the autofiction is a caricature of the first
person, a paranoid and narcissistic mise-en-scène of the self, with a clear
contempt of the other (Delorme 2015a, b, p. 9). On the contrary,
Faire un cinéma à la première personne, c’est s’exposer, dire la verité, bais-

ser les armes, se rendre vunérable. Et pour le spectateur, c’est sentir la
personne de l’écrivain, du cinéaste, juste là, derrière l’image, nous accom-
pagnant pour partager son expérience. C’est entrer avec lui dans la nuit.
[…]
L’autofiction, c’est tourner autor de soi. Le cinéma à la première personne,

c’est plonger en soi. […] Le cinéma à la première personne trasmet un res-
senti (plus qu’un vécu), parce qu’il parvient à dépasser le niveau individuel:
c’est par la diffraction des personnages, autant d’incarnations de l’auteur,
qu’il rend possible son évaporation dans des nuages d’affects. (Delorme
2015a, b, pp. 8 and 10).
140 S. Benini
According to Natalia Aspesi, Mia madre is not ‘un autobiografia, non un

caro diario, non una confessione, ma certamente una storia autoreferen-
ziale, negli eventi e nei sentimenti’ (Aspesi 2015). The director speaks
about his personal and existential crisis after the death of his mother by
diffracting himself into the three main characters of the film. The first,
the protagonist, is Margherita (Margherita Buy), a divorced mother of
a teenager and a filmmaker, who is shooting a politically committed film
on post-Fordist Italy. The story of her film is fully engaged with real-
ity: the workers of a factory suffer job losses, and confront the American
‘master’ who has taken over the plant and the foreign capital that wants
to reconvert the factory and dismiss its labor force. The filmmaker is
caught between her dilemmas at work (a ‘political’ film of denunciation
that is always on the edge of being clichéd and disconnected at a deeper
level from reality) and her underlying feelings about her sick mother.
Anxiety at work and anxiety for her mother intersect with a dramatic cre-
scendo, one growing out of the other, and Margherita is never at peace,
thinking about work when she is at the hospital and thinking about her
mother when she is on the set: ‘Margherita sta accanto alla madre ma sta
anche altrove, nel suo passato, nei suoi sogni, nella sua immaginazione,
nel suo lavoro. Ed ancora sta sul set ma sta anche accanto alla madre’
(De Gaetano 2015, p. 227). To this spiral of unresolved anxiety she adds
the enigma of facing—through her ailing mother—her own mortality,
in a moment in which she is in an existential crisis, having just had an
unsentimental break-up with a partner and arguments with her teenage
daughter.
The second character with whom Moretti identifies is Giovanni,
Margherita’s engineer brother, interpreted by Nanni Moretti himself,
who embodies the role of the caring son, always present at his moth-
er’s bed, who takes care of her life but collapses in the external world,
abandoning his job in order to assist his suffering mother. According
to Morreale (Delorme 2015a, b, p. 8), Giovanni seems almost a
projection of Nanni Moretti, but also of Margherita: he is the car-
ing person that both he and she would like to be. Moretti gives an
exceptional performance in the role of the brother, standing next to
the protagonist like a projection of her goodwill and acting as a figure
of consciousness and a reality check, as well as representing the inver-
sion of gender roles through his position of caretaker. Giovanni and
Margherita are animus and anima, in a Jungian sense, even though
their roles are reversed: anima is actually Giovanni, who takes the
caring role, and animus is Margherita, invested in her work, trying to

finish her film and maintaining her denial in the face of the approach-
ing death of her mother.
Finally, the third diffraction of Nanni Moretti is the character imper-
sonated by John Turturro, the American actor who in comedic tones
threatens to derail Margherita’s movie and who does not remember his
lines, because he suffers from amnesia and memory problems. Barry
Huggins—who claims a phantomatic work relationship with Stanley
Kubrick and who invokes upon him the Gotha of Italian cinema, primar-
ily Federico Fellini—represents the histrionic aspect of Nanni Moretti,
another counterpoint to Moretti’s previous cinematic personas and a tragi-
comic homage (and maybe farewell) to a certain kind of auteur cinema.
He is the one who shouts his protest against cinema (‘Cinema is a shit job!
I want to go back to reality! Take me to reality!’), which also represents
the underlying plea of Margherita the filmmaker, in her continual oscil-
lation between the reality of fiction and the fiction of a reality contami-
nated by memory, empathy, imagination and denial. The two processes
of creation and dissolution—both in life and in cinema—are mirrored, as
underlined by Giovanni Maria Rossi, who talks about ‘lo sdoppiamento
speculare e metaforico tra la finzione della realtà (il racconto principale)
e la realtà della finzione (la messa in scena di altre forme di rappresentazi-
one), come se il regista volesse mettere a nudo il farsi e disfarsi di un film
in parallelo col farsi e disfarsi della vita’ (in Masoni 2015, p. 6).
Turturro/Huggins is also the protagonist of one of the typical
‘dancing scenes’ that have accompanied Moretti’s cinema since Caro
Diario, embodying one of the most cherished passions of the Italian
filmmaker: dance as the emblem of a wished-for lightness that seems
so impossible to attain for Margherita, and that her mother instead
embraced, according to the story narrated by one of her mother’s for-
mer students, when Ada, professor of classics in a high school, during a
trip with her students, began to dance. As Nanni Moretti confessed in
Caro Diario, ‘all’ Margherita can do in the end is ‘to watch’: Moretti
loves dancing but does not dance and, like Margherita, he (along with
her) instead watches Turturro dancing, in search of that lightness that
his protagonist cannot reach.
Each of these three characters has a different weight, and Margherita
certainly occupies the role of the protagonist, together with Ada, the
mother, impersonated by Giulia Lazzarini. Margherita is the point
of contact between the two male alter-egos, Giovanni and Barry,
142 S. Benini
and a female genealogy that embraces three generations of women:

Margherita, her mother Ada and her daughter Livia. These are two tri-
angles that overlap through Margherita, who is a female character but
represents the closest alter-ego to Moretti. The deflection of masculin-
ity into femininity by entrusting Margherita with Moretti’s alter-ego’s
role functions as a creative tool to approach the world of the filmmaker’s
emotions.
Margherita, as the director has declared in many interviews, is a
woman, but with many characteristics of the director himself: her stand-
ing in for Nanni Moretti is, as underlined by Masoni, ‘un controcampo
autocanzonatorio’ (2015, p. 6). Margherita’s movie-in-the-movie is so lit-
tle Moretti, and yet Margherita is an engagée director like Moretti him-
self. She is committed to sending a political message to the outside world
by making a movie that clearly stages a class conflict, yet realizes that
that same world is changing under her eyes, and that even the bodies
of the extras do not look like the body of workers anymore … there are
no blue collars out there, everybody looks the same, Margherita sadly
realizes in a Pasolinian moment. Margherita, however, faces a series of
problems on the set, feeling herself out of touch with reality as it is by
depicting reality as she feels it should be, while at the same time being
overwhelmed as a result of problems in her private life. Just as in Fellini’s
Eight and a Half, Margherita slides into oneiric visions and sequences:
Moretti does not distinguish these intermittences of magic realism from
her reality, creating a sense of uncanny confusion and wonder in his spec-
tators, who do not know if what they are watching is a dream or real
life. More than magic, this realism seems to be of the ordinary kind; the
dreams are strikingly and painfully real in their sadness and their emo-
tional tone. Their female perspective reminds us of the dreams of Chiara,
the Red Brigades’ terrorist protagonist of Marco Bellocchio’s Buongiorno
notte/Good Morning Night, with their plain oneiric touch, as suggested
by Francesca Parmegiani. Dreams constitute the most diaristic part of the
movie: ‘Ici, visions et cauchemars semblent refléter le vide des person-
nages, comme si l’inconscient et ce qu’il charrie cachaient une surface et
non le monde profond du dessous—comme si le refoulé se revélait plus
triste qu’effrayant’ (Morreale 2015, p. 16).
In a comment about the movie, Moretti has said that, ‘È stata una
scelta stilistica. Nel personaggio di Margherita tutto convive nello stesso
momento, presente, ricordi, pensieri, sogni. C’è molto di autobiografico’
(in ari.fi. 2015). The enmeshment between the real and the imagination
is pronounced. Mereghetti in Il Corriere della Sera has underlined,

among others, this Fellinian reference to the meta-cinematic aspect of
the movie:
viene il dubbio che il regista si sia imbarcato in una personalissima (e dis-

tillata) versione di 8 e ½: le disavventure del film e delle sue riprese, con i
dubbi sul proprio mestiere e le proprie scelte, con gli incidenti di percorso
e di lavorazione (alcune volte anche molto comiche), sembrano soffocare
tutto. Ma piano piano il baricentro del film si sposta verso l’introspezione
e una (inaspettata) confessione in pubblico che stupisce e colpisce.
(Mereghetti 2015)
However, this is not 8 e 1/2: the visionary quality is so enmeshed

with the quotidian that we do not distinguish one from the other.
Discontinuity and fragmentation are sutured in such a way that they are
perceived as a continuum, in a Bunuelian modality (Masoni 2015, p. 7):
the fragments of dream sequences stand for imagination, memory and
the subconscious, speaking by means of telling and disconcerting images,
which constitute another movie-in-the-movie beyond the meta-cinematic
allusion. It is the latent film that Pasolini was referring to in his essay on
‘Cinema of Poetry‘ in Heretical Empiricism:
The ‘cinema of poetry’ as it appears a few years after its birth - thus has
the common characteristic of producing film with a double nature. The
film that is seen and ordinarily perceived is a ‘free indirect point-of-view
shot.’ It may be irregular and approximate - very free, in short, given that
the filmmaker makes use of the ‘dominant psychological state of mind in
the film,’ which is that of a sick, abnormal protagonist, in order to make it
a continual mimesis which allows him great, anomalous, and provocative
stylistic freedom.
Beneath this film runs another film, the one that the filmmaker would have
made even without the pretext of the visual mimesis of his protagonist -
a film whose character is completely and freely expressive-expressionistic.
(Pasolini 2005, p. 182)
An example of this hidden film—a film produced by the Id of every-

day life—is presented in the Capranichetta sequence. There Margherita
encounters her mother, her brother Giovanni/Nanni Moretti, and her
younger self among the crowd of spectators waiting to enter the old
144 S. Benini
Roman movie theatre Capranichetta, which no longer exists, to watch

Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire (Il cielo sopra Berlino). This means that
chronologically we are in 1987 and Margherita is watching a scene from
thirty years ago. The cinematic angels of Wenders have been internalized,
and now Margherita in her contemporary self is there outside the movie
theatre to visit and listen to her family and her old young self. 1987 was
two years before the Berlin Wall fell with the end of the Iron Curtain
and of Soviet Communism. Margherita was in her thirties then, a period
of time in which Moretti in his own life and career was about to direct
Palombella Rossa, a film where life and politics mixed together with the
private sphere and amnesia, a moment of great turmoil and of redefini-
tion of political identities, dictated by the watershed of the collapse of
the Berlin Wall and of the ideologies that fell with it:
In Palombella rossa, il film più apertamente politico, Moretti offre

l’immagine di un militante afflitto da vecchi fantasmi, alla ricerca della
propria identità. Il viaggio nella memoria di un uomo che, a causa di un
banale incidente, soffre di una temporanea amnesia, è motivo di riflessione
sulle scelte del partito comunista degli anni Novanta. Il regista romano
ironizza infatti sulle vicissitudini del partito comunista italiano, quando,
alla caduta del muro di Berlino, si è trovato davanti al crollo delle ideolo-
gie. La decisione della classe dirigente del PCI di fondare un nuovo polo di
sinistra, aperto al libero mercato e ad un concetto di società più libertario,
vede in Michele Apicella l’uomo simbolo. (D’Aquino 2004, p. 378)
Michele Apicella (Moretti’s mother’s last name) will end the movie with
a monologue full of angst—climaxing in an invocation to the mother as a
response to the end of ideologies:
Un monologo angosciato che si trasforma in una invocazione alla mamma

da parte di colui che si propone come guida. […] ‘Mamma, mamma, sono
tutti infelici e noi abbiamo tante idee. Noi siamo uguali agli altri, ma siamo
diversi, siamo uguali, ma siamo diversi. Mamma, mamma, vienimi a pren-
dere.’ (D’Aquino 2004, p. 380)
At that time in Nanni Moretti’s poetics, the conflict between the politi-
cal and the private was solved by a desperate and regressive call to the
Mother, a mother who is now, thirty years later, ailing and approaching
death. The private solution to the political turmoil is now an impossible
choice: the sheltering provided by the figure of the Mother cannot pro-
tect any longer. Another wall is falling, one that is very personal and yet
universal. It is a different kind of a political approach to a moment of
confusion and existential upheaval. Marco Travaglio has pointed out the
political nature of Mia madre:
Un film ‘politico’, come l’ha definito Moretti, proprio per quello che, al
primo impatto, sembrerebbe il meno politico. Invece ha ragione: è il suo
film più ‘politico,’ anche se non parla della ‘politica’ politicante. […]
Politica è occuparsi della vita, della morte, della sofferenza, degli ospe-
dali, delle fabbriche, delle cariche della polizia, dei ragazzi a scuola e delle
donne (che sono le protagoniste assolute del film). […] Politica è mostrare
la regista alle prese con le solite domande stanche dei giornalisti impeg-
nati che partono da ‘questo momento così delicato per la società’ e ‘dalla
coscienza del paese reale,’ e costretta prima a rispondere in automatico con
le eterne frasi fatte, prima di accorgersi che ‘ripeto le stesse cose da anni
perché tutti pensano che io, in quanto regista, sappia interpretare la realtà,
ma io non capisco più niente.’ (Travaglio 2015)
Margherita is facing all her contradictions in a crucial mid-life crisis

that brings her to the brink of a breakdown. We hear behind her words
Moretti speaking, with the same indignant tone he had in his desperate
‘Ma come parla? How are you talking?’ directed to the journalist inter-
viewing Michele Apicella in Palombella rossa, when Margherita invokes
her mother’s help to confront the emptiness of the political rhetoric she
is hearing: ‘Mamma, aiutami. Non sopporto la retorica,’ during the press
conference for the presentation of her movie. Her brother Giovanni in
the Capranichetta dream tells Margherita: ‘Margherita, fai qualcosa di
nuovo, di diverso. Dai, rompi almeno un tuo schema. Uno su duecento.
Non riesci ogni tanto a lasciarti andare, a essere un po’ leggera? Dài,
sorprendici.’ Here, this existential call for lightness invokes change as a
choice in a moment in which everything is about to disintegrate and cre-
ate a breakthrough in Margherita’s life.
Margherita shares Moretti’s neurotic relationship with filmmaking, a
sense of inadequacy, which seems to be the chord that Moretti’s cinema
is tuned to, certainly since Habemus Papam. In that instance, a man was
feeling overwhelmed by a charismatic position in a millenary institution
and failed to take on his pastoral and leadership role, leaving behind a
desperate cry of anguish among his faithful followers. Here, Margherita
acts like the doubtful Pope: she feels inadequate as a movie director, as a
daughter and as a mother. Yet, her mother’s illness is a call from the depth
of life: it is an existential dilemma to which Margherita responds with
denial. It is painful to watch a scene (in between reality and imagination)
146 S. Benini
in which she gets mad at her mother because the old woman is too weak
and cannot walk for a few meters (tre passi) from the bed to the bath-
room. We feel the sense of impotence of Margherita confronting an
ineluctable fate. The powerful body of the mother, invoked as a Dea ex
machina as the universal solution to political conflicts in Palombella Rossa,
the liminal space where life comes to light, the mythical figure of the
mother, becomes just an agonizing body: the myth collapses as life ends.
The roles are inverted and the mother becomes the needy ‘daughter’ of
her own daughter, in a reverted genealogy. Yet Ada’s extreme vulner-
ability makes her more precious, more unattainable, and more mysteri-
ous: who is this woman, who knows Margherita’s daughter’s plight better
than Margherita does, who is beloved by her old students of Greek and
Latin, and who still teaches the classical languages to her niece? ‘Who is
this mother who is abandoning me?’ Margherita seems to question. ‘Do
I know her? Where does her truth lie?’ We can feel the pain of role rever-
sal; we can see Margherita interrogating the objects that will last longer
than the mortal and frail body of her mother. Her books of classics, for
instance: we see for a moment a dolly shot among a bunch of boxes, the
fate of her mother’s belongings, and it offers a foreboding feeling of the
dismantling of a life. Objects are beautiful and cruel: they do not die, they
stay, and become a painful memento mori, but also cherished vehicles of
memories. As Nanni Moretti confessed in an interview with Stéphane
Delorme:
[…] l’actrice qui interprète la mère de Margherita, portait de temps en temps

de pulls de ma mère. Sur la table de chevet à l’hopital il y a un étui à lunettes
qui est vraiment celui de ma mère, un agenda aussi… Qui sait qu’a pensé de
tout ça l’actrice qui interprète ma mère? Et même, vers la fin, lors qu’elle lit
la feuille avec les médicaments qu’elle doit prendre, il s’agit réellment de celle
que ma mère avait préparée dans les dernières semaines de sa vie, pour savoir
quels médicaments prendre et quand. (Delorme 2015a, b, p. 9)
The objects of Moretti’s mother on the set are not only a comfort for
the director, but they act on the affective level like pages of a diary: they
evoke a presence, they establish an intimacy, they re-enact a memory.
They work as the opposite of the dream sequences: they disseminate
pieces of reality, fragments of the referent, in the cinematic representa-
tion. They conjure the lost presence of the mother on the set.
One of the questions that Margherita asks herself in the movie

is what she is going to do with the books of her mother, the classi-
cal books of her personal library. Moretti talks about Latin as he talks
about his mother: those books were the values, the spirit of humanis-
tic culture, embodied in her mother’s character. ‘Why do we study
Latin?’ asks Livia, Margherita’s daughter, who wished she had chosen a
Linguistic High School instead of the Liceo Classico. ‘Latin is important’
answers Margherita, for the language, for reasoning, and for reasons
that she seems not to remember. ‘I do not know,’ answers Margherita
in the end. During a translation session, Margherita does not remem-
ber any Latin, and Giovanni excavates his memory to retrieve the rule
of the dative of possession, a very simple classical construction. This all
testifies to the alienation from the world of the mother from which both
brother and sister are suffering. Latin literature is the world of their
mother, and it is a world of which both Margherita and Giovanni have
lost track, as they have lost track of who their mother is. Ada’s identity
comes back to life in Margherita’s caress to her mother’s classical books.
At the end of the movie, which is an elegy to the figure of the mother,
‘un viaggio asciutto negli affetti spezzati’ (Cappelli 2015), we know
why we study Latin. We know the meaning of this old world. Books
are now old like old people, and the classics of the ancient world are
older than books, and yet, even if compelled by the imperative of the
new, we still love them. They are our memory, and without memory we
are nothing. De Gaetano speaks of a generational integration through
a trasmissione del sapere (De Gaetano 2015, p. 230), from Ada to Lidia
via Margherita.
The scene in which Margherita caresses the books of her mother after
her mother’s death is her ‘animula, vagula, blandula’ and it reminds us of
Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian:
Animula, vagula, blandula

Hospes comesque corporis
Quae nunc abibis in loca
Pallidula, rigida, nudula,
Nec, ut soles, dabis iocos
In Yourcenar’s own translation:

148 S. Benini
Little soul, gentle and drifting, guest and companion of my body, now
you will dwell below in pallid places, stark and bare; there you will aban-
don your play of yore. But one moment still, let us gaze together on these
familiar shores, on these objects which doubtless we shall not see again.
… Let us try, if we can, to enter into death with open eyes… (Yourcenar
1990, p. 295)
It is a revealing moment of the film: while Margherita acts like Hadrian in

mourning, trying to open her eyes to the reality of her mother’s death, the
mother, counter-intuitively, is thinking about only one thing—and about
a single word that she speaks in a scene of visionary and realistic quality
at the same time: that word is ‘tomorrow.’ The importance of the mother
lies in this expression of the future, in fast forwarding time in its ending
moments, opening up to a new reality which is unfathomable and unthink-
able: a legacy for tomorrow. Moretti compares the close-up of Ada’s gaze
while she is murmuring ‘tomorrow’ with the teary gaze of Margherita,
pointing out a legacy full of sadness but also full of hope. Again, the
mother is entrusted with the answer to the crisis: out of the spiral of the
present moment, the message that Nanni Moretti sends us through the
voice of Ada is to move forward, even when moving forward means turn-
ing back to memory and to the excruciating loss of the Mother:
Certo, questo tramandamento, questa connessione intergenerazionale non

arriva in fondo a toccare gli stessi livelli emotivi della frattura. È piuttosto
qualcosa che sembra emergere nel film come una sorta di volontà di avere
fiducia nel futuro, che non è naturalmente la stessa cosa che averne. (De
Gaetano 2015, p. 231)
L’esperienza è quella della perdita dell’altro e di se stessi, il sentimento è

quello di profonda inadeguatezza rispetto a tale esperire. Le difese pass-
ano per la rimozione (come fa Margherita) o per l’accettazione rassegnata,
o ancora per l’invocazione ad un ‘domani,’ che permette al tempo non-
ostante tutto di aprirsi (anche se illusione e scetticismo sembrano accompa-
gnare questa apertura). (De Gaetano 2015, p. 234)
Concerning this intergenerational aspect of the film, there is a very inter-

esting scene that has Margherita’s young daughter Lidia as a protagonist.
Lidia is learning how to ride a scooter. Obviously, one cannot forget that
this is a Morettian sign. Memory and possibility meet in this disclosure
of a future, which is also the director’s past and an anadyplosis of the
icon of Caro diario. Lydia learns and translates Latin as an act of love
towards her grandmother, wears her grandmother’s robe with noncha-
lance, bypassing the mediation of Margherita, who does not feel ‘com-
fortable’ seeing her daughter in her mother’s clothes. Lydia is the hope
and a micro-signature of the director in his own work, through a tenta-
tive scooter ride. Lidia is the tomorrow that makes her first steps towards
an independence full of awareness. She is not in denial of her grief: she is
open, spontaneous, and in touch with her grandmother’s legacy.
Future and grief seem to be categories that do not share a common
space. Reading Roland Barthes’ Mourning Diaries, the diary the French
intellectual wrote after the death of his mother, one cannot help but see
the dominance of the past in the dimension of grief: ‘I want to go back’
is the spiritual cry of Barthes, and it is a going back spatially, temporally,
emotionally. It is all about rewinding, rebuilding a presence that can-
not be restored. A tragedy happened and there is no way back: time is
definitive. This definitiveness of time can cancel the sense of the future:
in Barthes everything is imbued with memories, and it seems that the
suffering of mourning cannot be extinguished because life has revealed
its true meaning through the end of the Mother. There is something so
primal about the breaking of this bond: it is like a second birth and it is a
birth to the awareness and feeling of death.
There is a sequence in the movie, borderline between reality and
dream, which alludes to this process of rebirth: at one point Margherita’s
apartment is flooded. We have seen her loading the washing machine,
but symbolically the rising of the waters is like the moment of a new
birth: it is the breaking of the waters, immediately before birth, when
the fetus is ready to leave the womb. Here Margherita, adult fetus, goes
in the opposite direction, abandoning her apartment and regressing ad
uterum: she goes to Ada’s apartment, to live there while she is assisting
her mother in the hospital. Inhabiting the space of the mother, her feel-
ings for Ada begin to surface beyond her denial: when she is looking for
a bill, in front of the astonished and embarrassed presence of a door-to-
door sales representative, she collapses and cries, realizing that she does
not know where to find the bill, that her mother is not there anymore
and she is in her empty space, destined to be increasingly empty until the
end. However, in another scene she finds Ada’s restaurant flyers in the
apartment, thereby discovering that her mother is adventurous in din-
ing: a fact that she did not know about her mother, and that she later
150 S. Benini
discusses with her daughter Lidia, as she realizes that often we do not
know so many things about the people to whom we are close.
Notwithstanding the difficult stance for a non-believer in an after-life,
Moretti seems to tell us that there is a tomorrow, a tomorrow in death
and awareness, and it is entrusted to those discoveries and those maternal
legacies. It is a different kind of hope: not Christian but classical, and the
movie sounds like a classical elegy. ‘Mia madre non è un film sul lutto, è
un film che sul lutto annunciato avvita una crisi esistenziale e alla fine in
qualche modo la sublima,’ says Alessandra Levantesi Kezich (Levantesi
2015). What Moretti reaches through his film is what Barthes in his late
writings would have called a ‘moment de verité:’ ‘the ‘moment of truth’
is set up by an emotional rending in which the subject finds himself
exposed to the fact that love and death coexist’ (Haustein 2015, p. 143).
Pietas and catharsis are the solution that Moretti proposes to his char-
acters’ crisis and to his personal tragedy, maintaining a tone that never
transcends into melodrama, minimally percussing the chords of pathos
for a sublimation that learns the lesson of the suffering other. This hap-
pens by an immersion in the feminine.
De Gaetano speaks of zone di indiscernibilità, areas of transition, and
of becoming between characters and situations, actors and characters and
between the characters themselves:
Queste zone di indiscernibilità tra le tre donne, nonna-madre-nipote, defi-

niscono allo stesso tempo una identificazione e uno scarto, tra le tre età
della vita, le tre ‘estasi’ del tempo (passato, presente, futuro), le tre dimen-
sioni dell’esperienza: l’esperienza da fare di Lidia, l’avere esperienza di
Ada, l’esperienza impossibile di Margherita. Ma quel qualcosa che hanno in
comune le tre donne nella loro singolarità e nella loro differenza (in primo
luogo generazionale) è innanzitutto l’unità data da Margherita, figlia e
madre lei stessa, anello centrale della catena, la protagonista, quella che
pronuncia ‘mia madre‘ e che non fa che scindersi, moltiplicarsi, proiettarsi
nelle ‘tre’. (De Gaetano 2015, p. 229)
Yet Moretti looks at the drama of the death of the mother from a tan-
gential perspective: the mother’s disease and her fears and panics towards
death are hinted at, but ‘out of focus.’ The drama is not the drama of the
mother facing death but that of the children facing their mother’s loss.
Each one of the characters responds as she/he can to this collapse and
this sudden appearance of death on the horizon. Neurotic immersion in
work or renunciation of work, getting lost in a community (Margherita
with the film crew, the extras, the actors) or drifting in isolation
(Giovanni): each one, in a crowd or alone, is facing their own mortality.
The mother/child relationship is not an easy one, as one can see in
the dream sequence scene of the driving license, when Margherita pun-
ishes her mother for driving with an expired driving license by tearing
her license into pieces and by crashing her car against the wall, over and
over again. Also, when the mother is helping Livia translate from Latin,
she is translating a famous passage from the Catilinaria by Cicero that
makes reference to a harsh relationship with one’s own parents:
Si te parentes timerent atque odissent tui neque eos ulla ratione placare
posses, ut opinor, ab eorum oculis aliquo concederes.
If your parents might fear you and hate you, and these by any manner you
are not able to please, I suppose, you would retreat from their eyes some-
where. (Cicero 1.17–18)
Are these hints by Moretti of a troubled relationship with the mother?

Probably there is an ambivalence there, which resurfaces in dreams but
not in reality, with Margherita and Giovanni overwhelmed by the trag-
edy to come.
The mother is nervous, unpredictable, capricious. She is bored by the
visits of acquaintances and friends, finding everybody noiosi, thus shedding
light on a demanding personality. At the beginning she resists going to the
hospital, and later on she resists the plan of going back to the house, look-
ing for excuses to stay and procrastinate her homecoming. We also have a
glimpse of the imagination of the mother when we see the scene of Ada
outside of the hospital, walking in the streets in her night gown, looking
lost. This is a vision of either Margherita or Ada, but it is not clear, and it
is pervaded by a sense of anxiety, but it can be read as Margherita’s fear as
well as her mother’s dream of liberation and drifting.
In conclusion, between disillusionment and hope, between inade-
quacy and love, the film acts as a moment of recognition of the mother,
of her spirit, her memory, her knowledge. As in a passage of Roland
Barthes’ Mourning Diary:
June 5, 1978
Before resuming sagely and stoically the course (quite unforeseen moreover)
of the work, it is necessary for me (I feel this strongly) to write this book
around maman.
152 S. Benini
In a sense, therefore, it is as if I had to make maman recognized. This is the

theme of the ‘monument,’ but:
For me, the Monument is not lasting, not eternal (my doctrine is too pro-
foundly Everything passes: tombs die too). It is an act, an action, an activity
that brings recognition. (Barthes 2009, p. 133)
To this act of recognition, which Barthes so clearly defines, Moretti

adds in his latest movie the dimension of a future: an indication of the
possibility of moving forward—as a son, as a father, as a daughter, as a
mother. As animus and anima, in full awakening. The Mother passed:
the Son continues, by acts of love, notwithstanding, or gaining strength
from, the disclosure of death’s presence on the horizon.
Works Cited
Aspesi, N. (2015, April 14). ‘Ecce Nanni. Tra lacrime e sorrisi Moretti racconta il
dolore più intimo,’ La Repubblica.
Barthes, R. (2009). Mourning diary. New York: Hill and Wang.
Cappelli, V. (2015, April, 14). ‘Margherita alter ego di Nanni. “Un po ‘inade-
guata come me’,” Corriere della Sera.
D’Aquino, A. (2004). Nanni Moretti: Intellettuale ibrido. Il cinema come spec-
chio della crisi di un maître à penser. Italica, 81(3), 367–397.
De Gaetano, R. (2015) Nanni Moretti. Lo smarrimento del presente (Cosenza:
Luigi Pellegrini Editore).
Delorme, S. (2015a). La Première Personne. Cahiers du Cinéma, 717, 8–10.
Delorme, S. (2015b). Un Sentiment d’inadéquation: Entretien avec Nanni
Moretti. Cahiers du Cinéma, 716, 8–19.
Gili, J. A. (2015). Entretien avec Nanni Moretti. Raconter cette histoire à travers
les yeux d’une femme. Positif n., 658, 19–23.
Haustein, K. (2015). “J’ai mal à l’autre:” Barthes on pity. L’Esprit Createur,
55(4), 131–147.
Levantesi Kezich, A. (2015, April, 16). ‘Moretti testimone per tutti noi,’ La
Stampa.
Masoni, T. (2015). Stato di grazia. Cineforum, 546, 5–7.
Mereghetti, P. (2015, April, 14). ‘Incertezze, malinconie, dolore: emoziona il
Moretti più intimo,’ Corriere della Sera.
Morreale, E. (2015). D’Autres vies que la mienne. Cahiers du Cinéma, 711,
14–16.
Pasolini, P. P. (2005). Heretical Empiricism. L. K. Barnett (Ed.), (B. Lawton &
L. K. Barnett, Trans.). Washington, DC: New Academia Publishing.
Rossi G. M. (2015). Vivi il cinema, n. 2. In T. Masoni ‘Stato di grazia.’

Travaglio, M. (2015, April, 14). ‘Nel nome della madre,’ Il Fatto Quotidiano.
Yourcenar, M. (1990). Memoirs of Hadrian. (G. Frick Trans.). New York:
Noonday Press.
Filmography
Moretti, N., dir. (1989). Palombella Rossa (Red Wood Pigeon).
Moretti, N., dir. (1993). Caro Diario (Dear Diary).
Moretti, N., dir. (1998). April (April).
Moretti, N., dir. (2001). La stanza del figlio (The Son’s Room).
Moretti, N., dir. (2011). Habemus Papam (We Have a Pope).
Moretti, N., dir. (2015). Mia madre (My Mother).
Author Biography
Stefania Benini (Ph.D. Stanford University) is currently assistant professor at
St. Joseph’s University. Her main research interests are the theory of the sacred
in cinema and the gaze and the voice of Italian and Italophone women writers
and filmmakers. She has published extensively, and her recent book, Pasolini:
The Sacred Flesh (Toronto University Press, 2015) explores Pasolini’s immanent
vision of the sacred. Benini was the recipient of the prestigious ‘Lauro De Bosis
Fellowship’ at Harvard University in 2014–2015. Her current research focuses
on Italian Women Filmmakers in the new millennium.
PART III
Motherhood and the Body Politics

CHAPTER 8
Francesca Comencini’s Single Moms

and Italian Family Law
Maria Letizia Bellocchio
Realistic Fairy Tales in the Feminine Voice

The deformations of the Italian family and its displacement in contem-
porary society are two main themes in Francesca Comencini’s artis-
tic works. Most of Comencini’s films deal with families in the present
tense1: from the free adaptation of Italo Svevo’s novel La coscienza di
Zeno (Le parole di mio padre/The Words of My Father, 20012) to A Special
Day (Un giorno speciale, 2012), including I Like to Work—Mobbing (Mi
piace lavorare—Mobbing, 2004), Our Country (A casa nostra, 2006) and
The White Space (Lo spazio bianco, 2009). In addition, she published the
novel Families (Famiglie, 2011), which focuses on a single mother and
her two children.
While The Words of My Father focuses on the relationship between
father and son, especially on the words unspoken between the two male
figures, the director’s interest since then has gradually moved toward
female figures. Her films explore the relationships between mother
and children, and the dynamics between the family unit and the state,
M.L. Bellocchio (*) 
College of Humanities, University of Arizona, Tucson, USA
e-mail: letiziabellocchio@gmail.com

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-56675-7_8
158 M.L. Bellocchio
society, and Italian family law. Comencini investigates motherhood

and the conditions of single moms in a series of films that she defines
as ‘realistic fairy tales’ about work, money and birth. By a ‘realistic
fairy tales’ she means a story halfway between documentary and fic-
tion, where these two genres interpenetrate. These realistic fairy tales
have nothing to do with films like Life Is Beautiful (La vita è bella, dir.
Roberto Benigni, 1997), for example. Life Is Beautiful is an imagina-
tive deformation of reality aimed at making this reality understand-
able, and therefore accessible and acceptable for both the character of
the child and the spectator, who is, in fact, an extension of the child.
Comencini’s films concentrate on real events, whose combination pro-
duces the story told by the film. At the same time she turns the dif-
ferent realities into a parable. Moreover, Comencini’s documentary
vocation often opens up to dreamlike imagery, which intervenes to rep-
resent the moods, fears and anxieties of her female protagonists.3 There
are many types of Italian women in her works: single moms (Mobbing
and The White Space), women who want a child but cannot have one
(Our Country and Families),4 women who have a child and don’t con-
sider it a good reason for giving up their jobs (Mobbing), and women
who didn’t want children but are happy to have unexpected pregnan-
cies (The White Space). This essay will focus on Mobbing, Our Country
and especially The White Space to investigate the artistic and political
representation of motherhood in contemporary Italy.
Talking about The White Space in an interview with Gabriella Gallozzi‚
Comencini said:
I was not interested in making a film about the decay (putrefazione) of the
traditional family‚ but I would like to tell how beautiful alternative families
are. I would like to give a positive message through a realistic fairy tale
about a birth. This story tells how women can choose‚ and how women
can get respect. While many men and women identified with the stories of
Palazzo Grazioli‚ fortunately it’s not like that for everyone. And as a mat-
ter of fact‚ maybe we are the majority.5
It is no coincidence that Comencini makes a direct reference to

contemporary Italy by mentioning Palazzo Grazioli, which was Silvio
Berlusconi’s residence in Rome in 2009. In her films, Comencini gives
voice to stories, different both from those that reinforce traditional views
of the family and the scandals that Berlusconi’s Italy witnessed. The
8 FRANCESCA COMENCINI’S SINGLE MOMS AND ITALIAN FAMILY LAW 159
behavior of many politicians, and especially Silvio Berlusconi, who was

Prime Minister in 2009, presents a derogatory and offensive representa-
tion of women that contrasts with Comencini’s characters, who do eve-
rything to defend their dignity.
Along with her sister Cristina, Francesca Comencini is one of the
founders and promoters of the national movement Se non ora quando
(If Not Now, When), which started out of indignation against the objec-
tification of the female body.6 Launched with a rally held in Rome on
February 13, 2011, Se non ora quando is a movement born to give voice
to the difficulties faced by many women in the workplace and during
their maternity, and to protect them from many pressures and violence
to which they are exposed daily. Although in the 1970s Italy had one of
the strongest feminist movements in Europe, equality between the sexes
has since remained ‘a good idea not entirely realized.’7 The condition of
women in Italy has been made even more difficult by the wave of sex-
ist obscurantism that has dominated recent decades, when women have
been too often rewarded more for their beauty and levity than for their
intellectual or professional skills.
Comencini takes into consideration the reality of women who are
mothers and fights to ensure that their rights are respected. The novel
Families and films like Mobbing, Our Country, The White Space, and A
Special Day depict problems that women face when they work and
when they are moms, with special attention given to new family models.
Taking for granted the ‘decay’—as Comencini puts it—of the traditional
Italian family in fiction as in reality, Francesca Comencini and other con-
temporary filmmakers are investigating the emergence of alternative fam-
ily models such as unmarried couples, gay couples or single parents. In
Francesca Comencini’s case this survey is also a political battle, aimed at
making Italian family laws consonant with the real condition of the fam-
ily institution, and with the new forms the family is taking. Comencini’s
female characters, then, depict the crisis of traditional families and the
consequent proliferation of alternative models. As Judith Butler put it
in relation to the classical figure of Antigone, Comencini’s artistic rep-
resentation aims to achieve political representation,8 at a time when the
traditional family, patriarchal and Catholic, still bears a very significant
burden, and in many cases defends its rights against those of all other
existing family models.
Mobbing, Our Country and The White Space represent the female pro-
tagonists’ moods and anxieties in a very often absent society and in a
160 M.L. Bellocchio
state that does not protect their status as single women and/or work-
ing mothers. The female protagonists’ subjective perception subverts
the representation of the reality in which they live. It condenses and dis-
places the representation of the cities in which they move (Rome, Milan,
Naples). These three films constitute a coming-of-age journey for the
female characters, who gradually become more mature and more aware
of themselves and of their rights. These inner movements resonate with
the moves that the protagonists perform in the cities in which they live:
Rome is represented as a descent into hell for Anna in Mobbing; Milan
is depicted in Our Country as the place where Rita understands herself
better through encounters with characters, who appear as projections of
her unconscious; Naples allows Maria in The White Space to explore sev-
eral female destinies different from her own, but which share the same
human and political loneliness.
Comencini’s style materializes this displacement by focusing on sub-
jective perception and making extensive use of a handheld camera.
Mobbing and Our Country are completely shot with a handheld cam-
era. Other ways to translate women’s displacement and the hallucina-
tory dimension in which they live are the amplification of diegetic sound
that translates the altered state of their minds (Mobbing), the use of
shots taken at sunrise or sunset to enhance the eeriness of the city and
the characters (Our Country) and the use of oneiric imagery and men-
tal images to shape their memories and their moods (The White Space).
Comencini’s gaze moves through 360 degrees, not only showing how
women are treated and represented, but also translating into images
the possible effects of this treatment and these representations on their
imagination.
This essay will highlight how the director inserts within her films
issues related to Italian law, such as the presence of the unions in
defense of female workers in Mobbing; the intervention of the Guardia
di Finanza9 to prevent children without parents from being reduced to
mere commodities in Our Country and the issues that a single mother
faces when her partner does not recognize their child in The White Space.
The stories of Anna, Rita and Maria focus on loopholes in Italian law.
However, while the law works in the background in Mobbing and Our
Country, in The White Space it is the kernel of the film. For this reason I
will devote the largest part of this essay to the latter, which had a strong
political impact on the 2014 Family Law reform concerning the ‘legiti-
macy’ of children born out of wedlock.
Women, Mothers, the Law

I Like to Work—Mobbing was originally conceived as a documentary and
directed by Francesca Comencini for the Italian General Confederation
of Labour (CGIL).10 The movie and the documentary are based upon
real cases of mobbing reported by Italian unions. ‘Mobbing’ refers to the
persecutory treatment these workers were subjected to in the attempt to
force them to resign from their jobs.11 Mobbing combines documentary
and fiction, reality and nightmare. Anna (Nicoletta Braschi) is a woman
who is separated from her husband and has a daughter, Morgana. Anna
works as a chief accountant in a company. Her work is crucial because it
allows her to support her daughter and her father, who lives in a nursing
home. After a merger, the company is taken over by a multinational cor-
poration. Because of her family situation, a single woman with a depend-
ent child, Anna belongs to a protected category of workers, and this is
the reason why her new manager wants to get rid of her. She is soon
removed from her role and assigned a series of unnecessary tasks, the only
goal of which is to humiliate her and force her to resign.12 These humili-
ations are accompanied by the isolation she is subjected to by her col-
leagues who, terrified of incurring the same fate, show her no solidarity.
Anna’s story highlights that it is not enough for her to keep her job,
master it and belong to a category protected by law. Indeed, companies
often want to get rid of the most protected categories to achieve maxi-
mum flexibility. As a working woman with a dependent daughter, Anna
must know the law to deal with the violence of mobbing that her com-
pany inflicts on her. Only the unions allow her to better understand her
reality and rights. The film closes on a bittersweet note, with Anna leav-
ing on a trip with her daughter. After losing her job, Anna wins the case
against the company where she worked, thanks to the help of the unions,
and finds a new job. The law has therefore allowed her to regain her dig-
nity, provided that she sues the company and changes her job.
The structure of Our Country, orchestrated by Comencini with the
screenwriter Franco Bernini,13 is openly inspired by Robert Altman’s
Short Cuts (1993). As in Altman’s film, it interweaves several stories
that are connected to each other and that come together in the final
sequence. Comencini’s main characters, however, do not live in Los
Angeles but in a spooky Milan. Milan is almost always shot with pano-
ramic views from above at night or at dawn, with preference given to
the gray buildings that surround the Duomo, the tenements of suburban
162 M.L. Bellocchio
areas such as Bovisa, views overlooking the train tracks, and areas where
prostitutes work. Although there are no specific references, the film
offers a portrait first of socialist-ruled Milan and then of Berlusconi’s
Milan, with special attention given to families and to female figures.
Rita, the head of the Guardia di Finanza in Milan, investigates corrup-
tion among entrepreneurs, judges and politicians. Despite wiretaps that
lead Rita to identify a criminal operation, the only way to hit the cor-
rupters and the corruption is to stop a front man, Jerry, who has bro-
kered the sale of the unborn child of a prostitute to Ugo, a banker, who
wants to buy the child for his wife, who can’t have children. The film
shows that according to the law, if a pregnant prostitute or a single mom
dies, the request for custody of the child by whomsoever claims to be the
father can be challenged by requiring blood tests be conducted to con-
firm paternity. Ugo goes to the hospital to get the baby but is required
to submit to a blood test that reveals his non-paternity, preventing the
trafficking of a human life.
As already mentioned, while in these two films family law related
to motherhood acts in the background, in The White Space it takes on
a more pivotal role. The film is a cinematic adaptation of the novel of
the same title by Valeria Parrella (2008). The main character, Maria, is
a forty-year-old single mother of a baby girl born prematurely. She is
supported neither by her partner, who leaves her as soon as he discov-
ers she is pregnant, nor by her family, because her parents are dead. She
works as a teacher in a public night school. In the novel the reader enters
Maria’s life by sharing her thoughts, anxieties and memories. The writ-
ten story alternates the present and the recent past experienced by Maria
in Naples, with flashbacks of her childhood and adolescence spent with
her parents in the suburbs. The film, however, doesn’t show Maria’s dis-
tant past, instead focusing on the present—in which the baby, Irene, is in
the incubator—and on the recent past of Maria’s pregnancy. Unlike the
novel, Francesca Comencini’s gaze focuses on Maria’s and our present.
Comencini uses all the realistic elements of this ‘fairy tale about
birth’ and adds new details, revealing a profound study of the condi-
tion of women and single mothers in Italy. The director is well-versed
in this matter because she is a single mother of three children and lived
for a long time in France, where the situation is very different from
Italy. Elsewhere in the above-quoted interview with Gabriella Gallozzi,
Comencini says:
I think that never as in this moment do we need to put life at the center
of our common interest. Unfortunately, the Church and politics are mak-
ing ideological and instrumental use of it, missing the target. So Italy, in
the end, is the country with the lowest birth rate in Europe. If you look
at France, for example, […] they have a lot of children because any ideol-
ogy on the subject has been abandoned. Women are free even to choose
motherhood on their own, in the context of the idea of an alternative,
non-traditional family. […] This is looking realistically at what the family
is today beyond hypocrisy and bigotry. I am, after all, a single mother who
has raised three children from two different partners. […] And yet we have
a very strong sense of family. […] We are not, in short, a second-class fam-
ily, as some politics tend to misrepresent.
The White Space is both a film about a mother awaiting the birth (or
death) of her daughter and a film about the loneliness of single moth-
ers. Comencini’s camera shoots Maria closely—from behind, from the
side, from the front and from above—without leaving her alone, as if the
camera wants to maintain an intimate relationship with her. The editing
alternates close shots of Maria with details and very wide high-angle shots
that reconstruct the spaces from a vertical perspective. The space in which
Maria moves, the city of Naples, is completely reinvented by her subjec-
tive perception. Naples is a deserted and silent city, characterized by cool
colors that make it more like a northern city than a Mediterranean one.14
Promenades and travel by cable railway are often accompanied by extra-
diegetic music that overlaps with city noises. Making them almost imper-
ceptible. The sound image of the city is mental. Loneliness is depicted
through the eyes of the protagonist and her encounters with other
women. On the one hand, Maria observes the buildings and their inhabit-
ants from the windows of the cable railway tram. The editing translates her
subjective perception, selecting among all possible family intimacies only
those with women engaged in housework and women who, like her, are
smoking cigarettes while they wait. On the other hand, Maria’s growth is
marked by a series of encounters with women. Each of these women rep-
resents a specific problem: her student who leaves the night school because
of financial issues regarding the payment of her daughter’s school fees; the
woman who commits suicide after having an abortion after the first trimes-
ter; the mothers of premature babies with whom Maria spends her days
at the hospital; the female judge15 who tells Maria that she had to choose
between her career and her children, and she chose her career instead of:
164 M.L. Bellocchio
What a life! I didn’t want this life, it’s not like I chose it for myself. And
here is where they murdered a person I knew‚ a friend‚ a person I idol-
ized. That’s why I’m here, to investigate his death. It’s just that mine was
an extreme choice. I tried to figure out if it was the right choice, what
the right choice was. Leave my children‚ especially the youngest one who
is only ten years old‚ he still needs me. Or come here where people are
needed. I have asked myself many times‚ many times. And in the end the
only thing you can do is close the door and walk away. As if you haven’t
left anything behind. That’s what I did. I’ve been here for three years‚
without my children. You know‚ this year the eldest enrolled in law school.
She wants to be a judge … but I have not influenced her, ever. But, if she
did it, I’d be happy.
Other mothers’ issues let Maria accept what she perceives as a ‘pun-
ishment’: giving birth to a child born prematurely without having the
support of a partner. Francesca Comencini’s films reflect on current
problems related to motherhood, launching a painful appeal to those
who can legislate in this area of Italian law. The representation of sin-
gle mothers who are not protected by law is an act of accusation, fit-
ting into actual debates on these issues. Her stories are at the antipodes
of the ‘particularist syndrome,’16 or worse, of the ‘amoral familism’17
with which Italy is often identified. Comencini’s films bravely look past
individual family solidarities and search for the legal answers new fam-
ily models need. As I’ll show in the pages that follow, it is not by chance
that The White Space acted as a sounding board for the urgency of Italian
Family Law reform for children recognized only by a single parent.
Family Law in The White Space

Some sequences of The White Space characterize this story as a typically
Italian story, revealing a woman’s/single mother’s reality and her rela-
tionship with society, institutions and bureaucracy. Many of the issues
women face today stem from the failure to adjust and update family law
to reflect the changes that the institution of the family has gone through
since the 1970s. In many cases, there are no laws to protect non-tradi-
tional families, because many situations are not contemplated. The White
Space highlights some of these loopholes in Italian law.
Speaking with her friend Fabrizio, Maria confides to him that in
order to defeat her loneliness she goes to the movie theatre alone every
afternoon to watch art films. Comencini is wondering if going to the

movies alone‚ especially for a woman‚ is still embarrassing‚ even in the
third millennium. The director depicts how the woman who decides
to do so feels. The sequence in which Maria goes to the movie theatre
alone shows that it is not yet completely natural to do so, and Maria
is uncomfortable when she asks for the ticket. She asks for two tickets,
and then immediately corrects herself: ‘Sorry, one, I got distracted.’ The
box office cashier answers: ‘One, no problem!’ The exchange between
Maria and the cashier emphasizes the fact that the ‘normal’ situation is
for at least two people to go to the movie theatre together, and not for
a woman to go alone, although it is not a problem for her do to so. At
the movie theatre she meets a man—a single father as it happens—with
whom she becomes pregnant. Once she finds out he won’t legally rec-
ognize their baby, Maria decides to have the baby by herself, revealing
that solitude is almost her ontological condition. Speaking with Fabrizio,
Maria asks him: ‘How can I do it? Should I do it alone?’ and Fabrizio
answers: ‘You always do everything alone!’
This loneliness is even stronger when Maria has to take care of the
baby girl who, born prematurely, is placed in an incubator. Loneliness,
which so far has been a choice made by a single woman, becomes more
problematic when this woman has to care for another person, her daugh-
ter, without help. The problem shifts from a formal one to a legal one.
Things that we perceive as a source of embarrassment are often strongly
linked to the social rules in which we were raised, and correspond to pre-
cise customs and laws. The film reflects the fact that in Italy, children
who are legally recognized only by a single mother are not protected by
law in the same way as those who are recognized by married parents—
or, rather, they weren’t until November 2012 when the new law was
approved. Access to the neonatal intensive care unit is restricted by law
to ‘legitimate’ parents, those who recognize their child. Other people
(friends, relatives, new partners) are not allowed.18 This determines that
a single mother has to take care of her child alone without the help of
others. In the film, this problem is depicted through two different points
of view. First, we see the doctor, who assumes Maria is married because
it is ‘normal’ for her to have a husband: ‘That’s your daughter! You and
your husband can come […].’ But Maria is a single mother. Secondly, we
see Fabrizio’s point of view: he considers this limitation a ‘punishment’
for Maria. When Maria tells him the doctor said that only legitimate par-
ents can assist their children, Fabrizio replies, ‘What?’
166 M.L. Bellocchio
maria: Those who have procreated […]‚ who have the principle of respon-
sibility in their chromosomes. That means: between the two of us, me.19
fabrizio: That’s absurd. This way they force you to take care of the baby
alone. But who are they? And what is this for you? A punishment?
Comencini remains faithful to Parrella’s novel, while also further criti-

cizing the backwardness of Italian family law. The final obstacle that
Maria faces is the legal recognition of her daughter at the Office of Vital
Statistics.20 There, Maria discovers that children recognized only by their
mother are considered ‘illegitimate.’ In fact, from the legal point of view,
Comencini takes poetic license in order to make the situation under-
standable to the public. The Family Law was reformed in 197521 and
the derogatory expression ‘illegitimate,’ indicating children born out of
wedlock, was changed to ‘natural.’ In Italy, then, there were ‘legitimate’
children (whose parents were married) and ‘natural’ children (who were
recognized by one or both parents who were not married). For natu-
ral children the act of filiation did not occur automatically at birth (as
happened for legitimate children) but only when they were recognized
by law, which occurred when the parent or parents registered the child’s
birth at the Office of Vital Statistics. While the 1975 reform leveraged
family law on principles of equality enshrined in the Italian Constitution,
alternative families do not enjoy the same rights as traditional families. A
film like The White Space aims to bridge this gap, and is part of a wider
discourse in which all of Comencini’s ‘abnormal’ families seem to move
freely, raising issues that depart from films that always restore the broken
order.
Francesca Comencini’s film is part of a very current debate that, on
November 27, 2012, led a number of parliamentarians from across the
political spectrum to approve a new law making all children legitimate,
including those born out of wedlock.22 This was a real revolution in
family law that today considers all children born in Italy equal in terms
of paternity. In addition, the new law not only abolished the nagging
distinction between ‘legitimate’ and ‘natural’ children, but it allows
children born out of wedlock to have legally recognized family relation-
ships with grandparents, aunts and uncles, thus entering them into the
inheritance structure of the whole family. This opportunity was previ-
ously denied to them. Moreover, in case of dispute, the court of jurisdic-
tion is the Ordinary Court for all children, whereas previously, ‘natural’
children went through the Juvenile Court. Finally, under the new law,
children born of incestuous relationships will also be recognized, upon
judicial authorization.23
This is a very important law that puts an end to the discrimination,
enshrined by Italian family law, against children born out of wedlock.
Their increasing number24 demanded a revision of the law. In 2012,
married couples accounted for only 36.4% of the population, while
457,000 Italians were single and 1,175,000 were single-parent families,
and the vast majority of those single parents (86%) were women (De
Luca 2012, pp. 19–20).
Francesca Comencini’s films are political in the sense that they act
directly on the reality of contemporary Italy and fit into current debates
on women and on the laws protecting them. The status of women in
Italy is an issue that Francesca Comencini explores in different direc-
tions and via different media. In addition to films and documentaries,
she has also been challenging herself recently by taking on theatre direc-
tion with Libere,25 and through the national organization of the event
Se non ora quando. Comencini has investigated the status of women
closely, following the same rules which she adopts for documentaries, as
in Mobbing. The director plunges herself into the reality she is represent-
ing; she knows the places she is going to shoot intimately and enters into
a deep empathy with the actresses with whom she works. This immer-
sion in reality and this obsession with the truth allow her to broaden her
vision to include the subjectivity and moods experienced by these Italian
women. Comencini translates into images how the deep solitude of many
women often arises from the lack of laws able to protect their rights, and
how this situation turns their life into a waking nightmare.
The transition from a traditional to a contemporary family, and in
particular the renewed figure of the mother, stem from the profound
transformation of behaviors and dominant values and from the strong
social fragmentation that characterize the third millennium. Although
the social changes (such as the cultural revolution that started in the
1960s) and economic changes (such as the revolution in Western capi-
talism) of the second half of the twentieth century have opposite ideals
and goals, they have both contributed to a renewal of the family.26 The
rejection of any principle of authority and the fight for civil reforms have
changed the face of the traditional family, opening the way to the reform
of the Family Law (1975), as well as the introduction into law of divorce
(1970) and abortion (1978).
168 M.L. Bellocchio
At the same time, many changes seem to be rooted in the transition

from old to new capitalism. New family models reveal that the pyramidal
and hierarchical structure, which mirrors that of traditional capitalism,
has failed.27 Divorce and a freer mentality have made contemporary fami-
lies as flexible and open as the individuals who compose them. According
to Zygmunt Bauman (2000), ‘liquid modernity’ is characterized by flex-
ibility, which we can read as a form of precariousness. Family and work
are no longer a possession or a relationship that binds individuals until
death, but become instead a set of liquid relations, short-lived and sub-
ject to continuous restructuring. The patterns and cages of the past have
dissolved, leaving individuals freer, but also depriving them of the cer-
tainties of the past. Individual subjectivity has taken a leading role in the
definition of households, including or excluding its members and open-
ing them up to renewal. Faced with these changes and given this lique-
faction of relationships, individuals increasingly need laws that respond
to their new needs, as illustrated by the protagonists of Comencini’s
films.
Francesca Comencini reveals a family model no longer tied to wedlock
and highly aware of its diversity and its rights. The artistic representation
of this model is finding political and legal representation as well, identify-
ing in activism and reforms the only possible responses to new demands
originating from the radical transformation of the family and society in
the third millennium.
Notes
1. The exceptions to this are Comencini’s documentaries devoted to Elsa
Morante, the director and actor Carlo Cecchi, the new Italian work-
ing class, the tragedies of the G8 summit in Genoa, and L’Aquila: Elsa
Morante (1997), Shakespeare a Palermo (Shakespeare in Palermo, 1997),
In fabbrica (The Factory, 2007), Carlo Giuliani, ragazzo (Carlo Giuliani,
Boy, 2002), L’Aquila 2009: Cinque registi tra le macerie (L’Aquila 2009:
Five Directors Among the Rubble, 2009).
2. Comencini’s film adaptation shifts the plot in time and space, setting the
story of Zeno Cosini in contemporary Rome.
3. On Comencini’s oneiric imagery, see Bellocchio (2014), pp. 147–58.
4. The novel Famiglie deals with the figures of single mothers and women
who cannot have children.
5. L’Unità, August 22, 2009, emphasis mine; this translation and all others
throughout this essay are mine.
6. The commodification of the female body, as will be discussed later in this

essay, is at the center of Our Country.
7. I quote from an interview with Cristina Comencini, Francesca’s sister,
conducted by Daria Bignardi on the TV show Invasioni Barbariche on
November 2, 2011. It can be viewed on YouTube: http://www.youtube.
com/watch?v=TCZksoUwY_E.
8. In Antigone’s Claim (2000), Butler gives a new interpretation of
Sophocles’s Antigone, challenging Hegel’s interpretation based on the
opposition between the family and the state. According to Hegel, the
conflict between Antigone and Creon represents a battle between private
reasons and public reasons, and the supersession of the former by the lat-
ter. Rejecting Hegel’s interpretation, Butler identifies Sophocles’s hero-
ine with the crisis of kinship and the advent of new and unconventional
family models. According to Butler, Antigone does not symbolize the
institution of the family but its deformation and displacement: ‘But can
Antigone herself be made into a representative for a certain kind of femi-
nist politics, if Antigone’s own representative function is itself in crisis? As
I hope to show in what follows, she hardly represents the normative prin-
ciple of kinship, steeped as she is in incestuous legacies that confound her
position within kinship. And she hardly represents a feminism that might
in any way be unimplicated in the very power that it opposes. Indeed,
it is not just that, as a fiction, the mimetic or representative character of
Antigone is already put in question, but that as a figure for politics, she
points somewhere else, not to politics as a question of representation but
to that political possibility that emerges when the limits to representation
and representability are exposed’ (Butler 2000, p. 2).
9. An Italian law enforcement agency primarily responsible for dealing with
financial crimes and smuggling, including drug trafficking.
10. The CGIL (Confederazione Generale Italiana del Lavoro) is one of the
most important unions in Italy.
11. The film opens with the following dedication: ‘This film is based on true
stories. It was produced with the generous support of the many who took
part in it. To all, thank you.’ Except for Anna (Nicoletta Braschi) and
Morgana (Camille Dugay Comencini), the actors are real trade unionists
and employees.
12. Her manager asks her to look for an invoice in their archive, but she will
discover that this invoice is not in the archive. Then, he assigns her the
task of monitoring the work done in the warehouse and the time they take
to do it. Finally, he asks her to stand next to the copier and to record the
name of those who use the copier and the number of copies they make.
13. The script is by Francesca Comencini while the screenplay is by
Comencini and Franco Bernini.
170 M.L. Bellocchio
14. See the interview with the director of photography, Luca Bigazzi, in I.

Gatti (2011), p. 187.
15. She appears to be inspired by the Italian judge Ilda Bocassini, the fearless
prosecutor of the Italian Mob and of Silvio Berlusconi.
16. On the ‘particularist syndrome’ see L. Sciolla (1997).
17. Many Italian and foreign observers agree in identifying the source of all
Italian evils in a ‘particularist syndrome,’ whose cultural components can
be summarized precisely in familism: an excessive or exclusive attach-
ment to the family unit, which can degenerate into what Edward Banfield
(1958) stigmatized as ‘amoral familism.’ Hence the stereotype of Italians
as individualistic people, aimed at serving only the interests of their family
unit regardless of the common good, unable to build a strong civil soci-
ety, and therefore not very attentive to democratic values.
18. See the novel: ‘If just one of my friends had been able to get up off the
sofa he was sitting on and, putting down his glass of wine and leaving
the music behind him, had been able to come to the hospital with me,
get past the customs of intensive care and feel himself, for once at least,
assailed, in my place, by the professional prudence with which the female
doctor knocked the wind out of me with each report, then I would have
called. But the Law read ‘only legitimate parents,’ and the only other
human being on the face of the earth who could have shared this dif-
ficulty with me did not have The Principle of Responsibility among his
books or his chromosomes’ (Parrella 2008, pp. 46–47).
19. With ‘us’ she means between herself and Irene’s father.
20. Parrella only mentions it in the novel: ‘A few days later a Bourbonic
bureaucracy without any connection to life recorded her surname, mine’
(Parrella 2008, p. 25).
21. Family Law, codified in the Civil Code in 1942, conceived a family based
on the subordination of the wife to her husband, both in personal rela-
tionships and in asset management (patrimony relationships), as well as
in couple relationships and with respect to the children. It was also a fam-
ily founded on discrimination against children born out of wedlock, who
received less favorable legal treatment than legitimate children (‘illegiti-
mate’ children had practically no rights). With the 1975 reform (Law no.
151/1975), legislators made an attempt to standardize family law with
respect to the principles of equality enshrined in the Italian Constitution
(enacted in 1947). For example, it raised the minimum age for mar-
riage, recognized the legal equality of spouses, repealed the institution of
dowry, recognized the same protection for natural children as for legiti-
mate children (except for the possibility in the case of inheritance for
them to be paid a sum so that property is left to legitimate children). It
also established community property as a legal asset of the family (in the
absence of a different arrangement), and paternal authority was replaced

by the authority of both parents. Thanks to this reform, the surviving
spouse becomes the heir in the inheritance regardless of gender, whereas
before, legally, the widow could not inherit anything. The intervention of
the judge in certain cases of conflict between spouses in the management
of family life was also introduced. ‘Guilt’ as a cause for the legal separa-
tion of spouses was abolished and replaced by the specific accusation. The
power to bring legal action against a denial of paternity is also recognized
for the mother and child. Regarding jurisdiction, everything related to
legitimate children is treated by the Ordinary Courts, which are present
in every city, while for natural children jurisdiction is that of the Juvenile
Courts, which are fewer in number than the Ordinary Courts: specifically,
there is one for each Court of Appeal.
22. Some of the members of parliament belonging to different political parties
who approved the law, and their comments on the law, were: Alessandra
Mussolini (Forza Italia): ‘It is an act of civilization’; Giulia Bongiorno
(Futuro e libertà/Future and Freedom): ‘We have finally reached a his-
toric achievement in the field of civil rights, filing away odious norms
based on an anachronistic sense of morality;’ Anna Finocchiaro (Partito
Democratico/Democratic Party): ‘There are no longer first-class and sec-
ond-class children;’ Rosy Bindi (Partito Democratico/Democratic Party):
‘A law of civilization that we can give the country at the end of a difficult
term’ (De Luca 2012, p. 19).
23. This major reform of the Family Law was completed between 2012 and
2014. In 2012, the new law reformed Article 315 of the Civil Code,
establishing that ‘all the children have the same legal status.’ This deter-
mined that in all legislation, references to ‘legitimate children’ (those
born within wedlock) and ‘natural children’ (those born out of wed-
lock) have been replaced by the word ‘children,’ equating all children,
whether born within the institution of marriage or outside of it. It also
amended Article 315a of the Civil Code: ‘the child is entitled to be main-
tained, raised, educated and morally supported by the parents in accord-
ance with his/her abilities, natural inclinations and aspirations. The child
has the right to grow up in the family and have meaningful relationships
with relatives. The minor child who has turned twelve, and even younger
when capable of judgment, has the right to be heard in all matters and
procedures relating to him/her. The child should respect his/her par-
ents and must contribute, in relation to their abilities, their resources and
their income, to the maintenance of the family while he/she lives with
them.’ Before the 2012 reform the child born out of wedlock could have
emotional but not legal relationships with grandparents and other rela-
tives, while now he/she has a real, legal, family relationship with them.
172 M.L. Bellocchio
Moreover, thanks to this reform, legal actions for custody issues for chil-
dren born out of wedlock are devolved to the Ordinary Court (and no
longer to the Juvenile Court), just like for children born in wedlock.
This Reform was completed when it went into effect on February 7,
2014 (Decree 28 December 2013 no 154), which essentially continues
to adapt existing legislation to the 2012 reform, eliminating all references
to the ‘natural’ or ‘legitimate’ child and replacing them with the single
indication of ‘child.’ The decree introduced some important innova-
tions, such as the replacement of the concept of ‘parental authority’ with
that of ‘parental responsibility.’ Parental engagement should not there-
fore be considered as ‘authority’ over the child but as the assumption
of responsibility by both parents on an equal basis with respect to the
child. Moreover, the fact that now in the Law there are only ‘children’
also changes all the rules concerning filiation. Even children born out
of wedlock fully enter into the inheritance structure of the entire family.
Finally, grandparents (ancestors) thus acquire the right to maintain mean-
ingful relationships with minor grandchildren, being able to apply to the
court if this right is denied to them. On law no 219 of 2012, see M. Sesta
(2013), pp. 231–41 and G. Buffone (2014), pp. 5–12.
24. In 2011, children born out of wedlock numbered 134,000 (De Luca
2012, p. 19).
25. Libere is a theatrical text written by Cristina Comencini based on a series
of discussions, debates and meetings on contemporary Italian women,
held at the Associazione Di Nuovo in Turin. The text compares a woman
of today (played by Isabella Ragonese) with another woman who fought
for women’s emancipation as part of the generation of 1968 (played by
Lunetta Savino). The show was first performed in July 2010 in Rome in
the open space of the National Academy of Dance. It was then taken to
other cities and performed by other actresses.
26. See P. Ginsborg (1998).
27. See R. Sennett (2006).
Works Cited
Banfield‚ E. C. (1958). The Moral Basis of a Backward Society. Glencoe: The Free
Press.
Bauman‚ Z. (2000). Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Bellocchio‚ L. (2014). ‘Dreams, Nightmares, and Hallucinations in Francesca
Comencini’s Cinema’. In F. Pascuzzi and B. Cracchiolo (Eds.), Dreamscapes
in Italian Film. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.
Bignardi, D. (2011). ‘Interview with Cristina Comencini,’ Le invasioni bar-
bariche November 2nd: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCZksoUwY_E.
Buffone, G. (2014). ‘Le novità del ‘decreto filiazione’. Il Civilista. Milan: Giuffré.
Butler, J. (2000). Antigone’s Claim. New York: Columbia U Press.
Comencini, F. (2011). Famiglie. Rome: Fandango.
De Luca, M. N. (2012, November, 28). ‘Rivoluzione in famiglia: tutti i figli
sono uguali,’ La Repubblica.
Gallozzi, G. (2009, August, 22) ‘Interview with Francesca Comencini,’ L’Unità.
Gatti, I. (2011). Francesca Comencini. Genoa: Le Mani.
Ginsborg, P. (1998). Storia d’Italia. 1943–1996. Famiglia, Società, Stato. Turin:
Einaudi.
Parrella, V. (2008). Lo spazio bianco. Turin: Einaudi.
Sciolla‚ L. (1997). Italiani. Stereotipi di casa nostra. Bologna: Il Mulino.
Sennett, R. (2006). The Culture of New Capitalism. New Haven: Yale U Press.
Sesta‚ M. (2013). ‘L’unicità dello stato di filiazione e i nuovi assetti delle relazi-
oni familiari‚’ Famiglia e diritto, 3.
Author Biography
Maria Letizia Bellocchio is a lecturer in the Department of French and Italian
at the University of Arizona. She earned a Ph.D. in Comparative Studies from
the University of Siena in 2007 and a Ph.D. in Italian from Rutgers University in
2014. Her current research examines the tension between tradition and innova-
tion in the filmic construction of the politics, practices and symbolic values of the
Italian family. Her areas of expertise are Film Studies, 19th–20th–21st century
Italian Literature and Theatre, Intermediality, Italian culture and Law. She has
published articles and presented papers on Cinema and Theatre. She edited the
book Finestre (Florence: Le Monnier, 2006) and she is working on a Special
Issue of the journal Italian Quarterly on Italian business in Post-War Italy.
CHAPTER 9
Gy-neology and Genealogy of a Female

Filmmaker: The Case of Susanna
Nicchiarelli’s Films
Silvia Carlorosi
In the history of the Academy Awards, only four women have ever been
nominated for the most prestigious Best Director prize, and to date
only one has won such an award, Kathryn Bigelow for the Hurt Locker
(2009).1 As critics Bernadette Luciano and Susanna Scarparo note, ‘the
Italian National Institute of Statistics reports that the number of women
directors in Italy has increased significantly, with women represent-
ing 20% of the profession (30% if assistant directors are included), but
women still need to prove themselves’ (2002, p. 3); the cinematic indus-
try makes it difficult for them to gain the same level of recognition as
their male counterparts. However, women filmmakers are increasingly
changing the landscape of global cinema, through works that challenge
both traditional gender roles and dominant cinematic genre models.
The Italian cinematographic landscape is representative. Alina Marazzi,
Marina Spada, Francesca Comencini, Cristina Comencini, Costanza
S. Carlorosi (*) 
Bronx Community College of the City University of New York,
New York City, USA
e-mail: scarlorosi@gmail.com

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-56675-7_9
176 S. Carlorosi
Quatriglio and Susanna Nicchiarelli are just a few already established yet
young women filmmakers who currently bring to the screen, often in
innovative ways, strong figures of women who counteract the established
patriarchal and male dominated social relationships.
In this essay I focus on the work of Susanna Nicchiarelli, a female direc-
tor whose films consistently challenge the Italian cinematic industry. I
argue that her films are concerned with the representation of history that
places female subjectivity at the center. Her female-centered reinterpreta-
tions revolve around maternal figures and mother-daughter interactions
that follow classic feminist thought as defined by the all-female Diotima
group of philosophers—and Luisa Muraro in particular.2 The director
offers a narrative of the mother-daughter relationship, which is essential
to interpreting her films individually, as well as part of the director’s cin-
ematic investigation. These individual stories of mothers and daughters
work as pieces of microhistory, impacting the macrohistory of Italian
society of the time.3 History, in fact, serves as the background for the
confrontations between mothers and daughters, and holds a central posi-
tion in Nicchiarelli’s films. Within the narrative of her films, the mother-
daughter genealogical conflict functions as a gy-nealogical opportunity for
women to grow and gain strength, and it is an instrument through which
the director proposes alternate readings of the historical discourse.
In the documentary Il terzo occhio (2003), Nicchiarelli explores the
relationship of a mother and her two daughters who are growing apart;
while the daughters continue to search for a connection with their
mother, the latter wants to emancipate herself from her motherly role.
More recently, her first feature film Cosmonauta (2009) offers a cri-
tique of bourgeois motherhood through the figure of the young female
protagonist’s mother, as well as an alternative model of feminist filiality
through the mentorship of the only female adult member of the local
section of the PCI. Finally, in La scoperta dell’alba (2012), a daughter is
empowered to reshape her mother’s story, and thus her own. Through
her films, Nicchiarelli creates alternative frameworks for telling wom-
en’s stories—and maternal stories in particular—which generate original
narrative models that attempt to challenge socially determined gender
structures, and contribute significantly to the revitalization of the Italian
cinematic landscape.
Although still at the beginning of her cinematographic career,
Susanna Nicchiarelli’s films have already been the subject of vari-
ous recent studies, which approach the director’s work in different
9 GY-NEOLOGY AND GENEALOGY OF A FEMALE FILMMAKER … 177
ways. In their volume, Reframing Italy (2013), Susanna Scarparo and

Bernadette Luciano provide a comprehensive study of how contempo-
rary women filmmakers are offering alternate readings of official—and
patriarchal driven—tradition, history, society and industry. Their essays
on Il terzo occhio and Cosmonauta, respectively, examine the filmmaker’s
reconfiguration of the mother-daughter relationship and the refram-
ing of the political history of Italian communism.4 Additionally, Dana
Renga’s study of Cosmonauta, in the context of teen movies, explains
how Nicchiarelli offers an example of post-feminist resistance towards a
more traditional romantic plot of coming of age films (Renga 2014).5
Nicoletta Marini-Maio, furthermore, explores the political message
of Cosmonauta more in-depth, reading it as a nostalgic representa-
tion of communism and at the same time ‘a reassessment of its historic
erasure’ (2016, pp. 279–280). My essay contributes to this critical dis-
course by exploring all three of Nicchiarelli’s films and investigating how
the maternal figure is crucial within the context of personal stories—or
microhistories—that aim to become part of the official historical record.
In accordance with Italian feminist thought, the director intends to
give a new voice to motherly figures who suffer a generational discon-
nect with their daughters. Their relationships appear damaged; mothers
criticize daughters who don’t obey standard societal roles (as evident in
Il terzo occhio), daughters clash with their mothers (Cosmonauta), until
finally they arrive at an epiphanic moment of understanding and need
redemption (La scoperta dell’alba). All of these conflicts result in the cre-
ation of unconventionally strong female figures who build their strength
as a result of an opposing mother-daughter relationship.
Nicchiarelli’s representation of mother and daughter figures are seen
as especially progressive within the context of Italian cinematic tradition.
Italian cinema is generally conservative in its representation of women,
reflecting in this respect the reactionary aspect of Italian social culture.
The main reason for this can be found in the foundation of Italian cul-
ture, based on Catholic moral values, promoting family and the role of a
pater familias. As a matter of fact, traditional representations of women
in Italian cinema often rely on the role model of an attentive—and beau-
tiful—mother dedicated to her family, protective of her children, and
subjected to a patriarchal order.6 Even if these values have always been
at the core of Italian Catholic society, they were strengthened and reaf-
firmed after the Second World War and during the reconstruction that
followed, in order to implement a socially cohesive sense of national
178 S. Carlorosi
identity. As Stephen Gundle puts it, ‘With the collapse of Fascism and
the impossibility of restoring the values and political forms of the pre-
Fascist era, a series of old ideas about the nation and its destiny fell into
abeyance’ (Gundle 1995, p. 368). A new, shared identity needed to be
assessed. Three subcultures mainly influenced this process: the Catholic
Church, left-wing culture, and American society (Gundle 1995, pp.
368–369). While women, after the war and the Resistance in which
they played an active role, felt a strong identification with the working
class and believed in the remaking of a society inclusive of its values, the
Church and the Christian Democratic party strongly promoted the view
of women as primarily mothers and defenders of the family, stressing the
value of their traditional family role, and setting them in opposition to
the immorality of the Communist party (PCI) . After all, what every-
one wanted at that point was a period of stasis, peace, and freedom. And
the Christian Democratic Party (DC) promised just that, leading Italian
women to exercise their right to vote in what they deemed to be the
right manner, in order to protect their family from the inside against any
violent threat.7 At the same time, the massive input of American subcul-
ture, coming through films, fashion, and consumer products, influenced
women’s desire to be and appear to be up-to-date housewives, combin-
ing modernity and tradition. The contemporary Italian cinematographic
landscape reinforced these representations, mostly presenting female fig-
ures who fulfilled the traditional roles of wives and mothers dedicated
to their husband and children, bearers of meaning, rather than makers
of meanings. Anna Magnani in Roma città aperta (1945) or Lionella
Carelli, the female protagonist of Ladri di biciclette (1948), are exam-
ples that demonstrate such maternal role models. Gundle makes the case
that even a social icon like Sophia Loren achieved her ultimate success
only when her personal life was kept within the parameters of a good
wife and mother. In order to maintain her status as a social icon, she had
to conform to what Italy socially wanted, and she strategically used cin-
ema as a channel for conveying this identity. ‘The real key to [Sophia
Loren’s] success as a cultural icon,’ he explains, ‘lies in the construction
of a screen image in which a perfect identification was achieved with the
different variants of the dominant Italian ideology. In so far as this was
matched by a stress on motherhood and on a secularized vision of family
values acceptable to all, Loren guaranteed for herself a permanent place
in the symbolic universe of the Italian people’ (Gundle 1995, p. 394).
As Laura Benedetti makes clear, the Italian cinematic tradition does not
explore creatively the role of the mother, and her representations don’t
embody any challenge to the social status quo, as she appears ‘[t]oo weak
socially to act as a positive role model, and at the same time too closely
linked to her biological role’ (2007, p. 5).8
New critical attention is currently being paid to feminism and femi-
nist theoretical debates; this attention mostly originates abroad but
is beginning to spread to Italy as well. New studies and initiatives are
shedding light on women and their non-conformist roles in cinema as a
mirror of Italian society at large.9 Thus, works on emerging filmmakers
and feminist critical trends are on the rise, such as Vito Zagarrio’s edited
volume La meglio gioventù: Nuovo cinema italiano 2000–2006 (2006),
which investigates new trends in Italian contemporary cinema, and
underlines how women have emerged in key positions in recent years,
as directors, screenwriters and actors. Furthermore, the aforementioned
study by Luciano and Scarparo, Reframing Italy, gives a new critical
view of Italian cinema, aiming to rethink the traditional cinematic land-
scape from a female-centered perspective. In an industry that still makes
it difficult for women to make their voices heard, Luciano and Scarparo
analyze the subtle yet sophisticated ways in which women dwell in and
change conventional Italian cinematic modes. Similarly, this collection of
essays brings to light new perspectives to look at and analyze women’s
position in Italian cinema, challenging more traditional perceptions.10
Nicchiarelli’s first three productions, which represent strong female
characters as protagonists, challenge the representation of women in the
collective Italian imaginary. The women protagonists of her films strive
to become subjects and agents of their own lives, as opposed to their tra-
ditional function of objects of the patriarchal role. She prioritizes female
subjectivity both in the content and authorship of her films, which need
to be understood in dialectic relation to the male hegemonic cinematic
tradition. As Luciano and Scarparo argue, ‘…for these women filmmak-
ers, the creation of a space in which to represent and create a differ-
ent social subject and to address the spectator as female, is intrinsically
tied to the search for the self that is linked to the search for the mother
and the re-evaluation of the mother’s perspective’ (2010, p. 489). And
asserting their own original self is ultimately a strong and influential
political tool in the hands of the filmmakers.
In this context, with her films, Nicchiarelli re-walks the path of clas-
sical feminism. In Il terzo occhio she first represents mothers and daugh-
ters as separate entities, then in Cosmonauta she brings to the screen
180 S. Carlorosi
an exceptionally rebellious young daughter who rejects her mother and

looks for a surrogate motherly figure, while in La scoperta dell’alba an
adult daughter is now strong enough to redeem her mother, giving her a
new life in a parallel possible story. As already mentioned, this cinematic
path follows the stages of Italian feminist thought focused on the mother
and daughter figures, as theorized by Luisa Muraro.
Within the context of classic Italian feminism, Muraro proposes an
active reaction to the socially imposed figure of a mother who devotes
her life to reproducing children and assisting her family. New aware-
ness grants daughters a fresh strength that allows them to initiate a con-
flict with their mothers, and to exit the supposed comfort zone of the
family in search of a surrogate mother figure. In her L’ordine simbolico
della madre (1991), Muraro explains how initially she felt that the same
woman who brought her to the world was the real enemy of her inde-
pendence, and how she felt the necessity of a separation from her.11
However, thanks to the feminist movement she learnt how, in order to
be really strong, free and independent, one needs to learn to love one’s
mother as a separate entity and at the same time as a symbolic pres-
ence.12 The way the patriarchal society asks sons and daughters to love
their mothers, though, is flawed. They love a speechless mother, which
becomes an approximation of their own figure, thus reversing the order
of things and depriving her of her own identity. Furthermore, Muraro
goes on, basic Freudian psychoanalysis explains how the initial love of
a daughter for her mother is very strong, but doomed to become hate,
as the two enter into inevitable conflict.13 Patriarchal rule conceals
one’s own subjective identity and unique sense of being, which can be
retrieved only by learning to love the mother as an independent separate
entity. It is thanks to this conflict, though, that daughters gain strength
to liberate their voices and counteract these established patriarchal and
male dominated social relationships.
Significantly, with her first films Nicchiarelli re-visits all of these stages:
mother-daughter detachment and conflict, search for a surrogate moth-
erly figure, and finally redemption and love for her as an independent
identity freed from societal constrictions. The director brings to the
screen strong female figures who are real subjects of their own lives, and
learns to resist the trap of the patriarchal social agendas in place. While
telling her stories using her own ‘liberated’ voice, Nicchiarelli creates
her narrative and retells her vision of history. At the same time and on a
more formal level, she also challenges the cinematic genre, blurring the
boundaries between documentary and fiction (in Il terzo occhio), between

history and fantasy (both in Cosmonauta and La scoperta dell’alba), and
using footage in a non-traditional way (in Cosmonauta).
Il terzo occhio, an early work by Nicchiarelli, is an experimental docu-
mentary shot with an almost all-female cast and crew. Nicchiarelli, her
sister, Federica Nicchiarelli, and her mother, Annagrazia Bassi, all appear
on screen, resulting in a blurring of the boundaries between fact and
fiction. The director employs a self-reflexive camera to explore the rela-
tionship between mothers and daughters, intertwined with the personal
stories of three other women. Significantly, the director includes female
crew members on the screen twice, when cutting from one scene to
another, in order to make the point that we are indeed watching a film,
her own re-reading of personal stories. Furthermore, the all-female crew
and cast members are Nicchiarelli’s statement, as Luciano and Scarparo
note, that ‘we are watching a different kind of film, one that is indeed by
and for women’ (2013, p. 13). The story is set in a health spa, special-
izing in treatments that stimulate the ‘third eye,’ the sixth chakra that
helps to resurface forgotten memories. While our two eyes look toward
the world outside, the third eye focuses inward on the self. Symbolically,
I argue, this third eye is also the eye of the director, who investigates her
complex personal relationship with her mother. As a place to rehabili-
tate their third eye, the health spa becomes the occasion for each of the
women to focus on herself and look for her own identity, despite the role
that society imposes on her as wife, partner, or mother.
The first and only direct confrontation between mother and daugh-
ter happens around a restaurant table, in the presence of another young
woman, Ilaria, who is explaining to the other two that she decided to
pierce her tongue to please her partner. As the camera follows their con-
versation, closing in on each of the three as they speak, at times embar-
rassed, about the importance of pleasure, Annagrazia is visibly shocked
by how much importance the two younger women grant to pleasure in
a relationship. The generational difference is immediately evident, and
the distance between mother and daughter increases when she explains
that pleasure shouldn’t be the most important element of an endur-
ing bond: ‘Quello che mi impressiona è che voi evidentemente date
un’importanza al piacere enorme. Ecco poi perché lasciate i ragazzi, per-
ché dal momento in cui magari non vi danno abbastanza piacere, basta.
Poveracci.’ And then, directly to her daughter, she concludes: ‘….tant’è
vero che non te ne dura uno di uomo.’ Her decisive judgment on her
182 S. Carlorosi
daughter’s sentimental choices is underlined by a close-up on Susanna’s

now melancholic face, which fades, significantly losing definition in the
following scene. Her mother’s judgment is harsh as her daughter suffers
for not being able to meet her mother’s expectations for her. Susanna’s
out-of-focus face is an expression of her undefined place in a patriarchal
society, which would instead require every woman to fulfill her role as an
established wife and mother.
The two sisters are in search of connections with their inner selves and
with their mother, only to discover that they can better relate to other
women. Their mother remains in the margins, avoiding any other inter-
vention in her daughters’ lives. Susanna and Federica need to reconnect
with their mother, but cannot. During a therapeutic session to stimulate
her third eye, Susanna explains to the therapist that she saw her child-
hood house, but it was empty, with just a cat. The figure of a mother is
thus missing in this core picture. The now aged woman, instead, explains
that she brought her daughters to the clinic in order to allow the two
of them to spend some time together, but in the end she finds an ulti-
mate resolution: she is looking for her own redemption as a woman, not
just as a mother. In one of the last scenes, when one of her daughters
tries to ask for her advice, she surprisingly backs off. She admits that
now, after having dedicated her life to being a good mother, she wants
to keep some distance from her daughters; she wants to be left alone, to
stop being their confidante and living her life in her capacity as a mother.
Abruptly, she cuts off her daughter who approaches her, explaining: ‘Che
una generazione viva in funzione dell’altra…eh no! Non è così. Io c’ho
una vita sola da vivere, ognuno di noi una ce l’ha. Ora, te ne posso dare
mezza. Basta. Sono oltre la metà.’ As Luciano and Scaparo have carefully
noted, she ‘authorizes herself…ultimately gives the gift of subjectivity
to herself’ (2013, p. 77). The mother-daughter relationship is spoiled,
not only from the daughter’s side who doesn’t recognize herself in her
mother’s traditional ideals, but also from the mother’s side, who refuses
to be defined for her whole life according to her social role.
With this experimental and self-reflexive documentary, Nicchiarelli
exposes a disconnect between mother and daughter, a detachment that
asks to be bridged. Although the mother refuses to give advice to her
daughters, she is ultimately recognized and thanked for her guidance by
another woman, thus revealing her true motherly nature. In a similar way
her daughters, whose independence in thoughts and lives is still affected
by their mother’s judgment, are uncomfortable with their mother. A
new feminist daughterhood is to be conceived, one that grants strength,

emancipation and individuality to each subject. With Cosmonauta,
Nicchiarelli explores another stage of this emotive journey, the direct
rejection of a mother by a daughter who searches for a surrogate whose
ideals align more closely with her anti-conformity.
Cosmonauta is the coming of age story of a teenage girl, Luciana, in
the 1960s. As an active member of the Communist party, she takes over
the political faith of her dead father and tries to rebel in her own way
against the societal norm that places women at home. The film opens
with Luciana’s first theatrical act of rebellion. In line with many other
young girls to receive her first Communion, the young Luciana arrives
to the altar only to turn her back to it and run away from the Church
with a proud smile on her face. To her desperate mother asking ‘Perché
mi fai questo’ Luciana fiercely replies: ‘Perchè sono comunista!’14 From
the very beginning, the figure of Luciana is in direct contrast with that of
her own mother, Rosalba. Widowed with two kids, Luciana and Arturo,
Rosalba remarries. Her new husband is a well-off man who will grant
her the security of the middle-class and bourgeois lifestyle to which
she aspires, including the possession of massive status symbols such as
a refrigerator and a television. Luciana slowly but fiercely distances
herself from her mother, instead following in her father’s footsteps by
embracing his political ideology as a member of the Communist Party.
She resists societal expectations that want her to embrace Catholicism
as part of the recently reassessed national identity. As previously noted
with Gundle’s analysis, the Church, along with the Christian Democratic
Party and American subculture, shaped Italian society by means of a
patriarchal order that expected women to be primarily mothers and
defenders of faith and family. While Luciana rejects this predetermined
role from an early age, her mother fulfills it. Once widowed, she finds
herself a new husband who provides the family with a new house, eco-
nomic stability and, not insignificantly, household appliances.
As Scarparo and Luciano note, mother and daughter are put in direct
filmic contrast in a hospital scene, when Arturo is diagnosed with epi-
lepsy. The camera moves from one figure to the other, and while Rosalba
throws herself at a new man, Luciana is shown proudly standing with her
fists clenched (2013, p. 104). The contrast is further underscored later
in the film, when Luciana comes home with documents about work-
ing women’s rights that require her mother’s consent. In this scene, the
young girl is portrayed in a leading position, standing and hovering over
184 S. Carlorosi
her mother, who is instead sitting and working with her head bowed
over a sewing machine as her husband sits on the sofa reading a news-
paper, dismissing the girl’s ideas as Communist nonsense. While Rosalba
subjects herself to the standard role of an obedient wife and mother who
takes care of the immediate needs of her family members, Luciana defies
such a role, bringing to the table workers’ constitutional rights. Luciana,
furthermore, is more of a mother to her brother than Rosalba herself.
She knows how to help him during his medical crises; she takes good
care of him and assists him in his experiments, while their mother is often
left unaware of what the two are doing. Meeting on the terrace, laying
down and looking at the sky, the connection between the two siblings
becomes stronger as they shoot their wishes toward the moon, both
symbolically and practically: Luciana with glorious dreams for women,
and Arturo with his space experiments.
Luciana’s ideas are well ahead of her time, even inside the microcosm
of the Young Communist Federation to which she belongs. Despite
being initially the only girl in the group, she actively participates and
speaks up about women’s rights. She even brings winning ideas, such
as raising awareness among the youth by centering a campaign around
the Soviets’ primacy in space missions. Her male comrades initially make
fun of and discard Luciana’s idea, stating ‘le donne di oggi vogliono
la lavatrice, mica la nave spaziale,’ but when the idea comes back and
is accredited to a male comrade, it is promoted. The girl’s innovative
ideas seem to be welcomed only by Marisa, another member of the party.
Luciana selects Marisa as a surrogate mother who, significantly, does not
have children of her own and is played by Susanna Nicchiarelli herself.
While dedicating her life to the PCI party ideals, she protects the young
Luciana, offers advice, even a shelter when needed, and she promises to
take Luciana to an international meeting in Moscow as a representative
of the women of their party’s section. As the Diotima group and Muraro
reinforce, women tend to trust one another in order to overcome the
inevitable obstacles of a patriarchal society. This tendency eventually
leads to the desire for a new feminine genealogy that moves away from
the original mother-daughter symbolic relationship, privileging other
motherly figures outside the boundaries of the family.15
Unfortunately, her surrogate mother Marisa also ultimately fails in this
role. Marisa is forced to withdraw her support of Luciana in favor of the
group’s male rationale when the adolescent Luciana makes the mistake
of acting on her feelings toward the boyfriend of another member of
the group, the daughter of an important senior fellow. Furthermore, she

decides to sleep with him. Marisa’s lecture to Luciana, explaining that
she cannot take her to Moscow after all, and that their—women’s—repu-
tation is as important as their ideas is bittersweet, and makes clear that
the PCI is still not ready to welcome innovative women.16 Luciana is left
alone with her own convictions, which nevertheless act as a warning to
contemporary viewers and thus as a political tool for changing historical
and political perception of what could have been possible, and should
still be, both on the personal microhistorical level and on a macrohistori-
cal one.
The way the director uses archival footage, intertextuality, and mon-
tage by editing shots from the present and from the past, is a political
tool that challenges spectators’ knowledge and perception of history,
forcing them to rewrite it on their own terms. In the context of post-
modern microhistory, this is Nicchiarelli’s original way of re-writing
her personal narrative while also asking viewers to re-examine history’s
official accounts. The film’s historical background is visually made up
of original archival images showing the Soviet Union’s successful space
missions in which they sent the first dog, man, and woman into space.
While the Russian Communist Party was at its maximum strength, the
USSR’s space missions were pivotal to the Italian Communist party’s
idealistic vision, and the representations of them are equally instrumental
to Nicchiarelli’s portrayal of this historical relationship. This background
functions not only as a historical context that influences the story, but is
also visually connected to the events and constitutes part of the hybrid
nature of this film. This is evident first and foremost at the visual level,
and from the very beginning, as the director frequently cross-cuts
between her fictional narrative and historical newsreels of Soviet cosmo-
nauts. The initial scene of the First Communion precedes the opening
credits that roll by on screen in between shots of Luciana’s rebellious
act, her brother reading and collecting newspaper clips about the first
Russian mission to space—the first dog, Laika—while at the same time,
black and white original newsreels show a visual record of the corre-
sponding historical moment. More images of other Russian missions (the
first man—Yuri Gagarin—and woman—Valentina Tereshkova—to space),
in black and white or in color, or just with voice recordings, appear in
various other moments during the film and are interspersed with the
plot.17 The characters are thus shown in direct relationship to history.
When Luciana finally kisses the boy who has been interested in her for
186 S. Carlorosi
a while, she is looking up at the sky as the film cuts to a clip of the first
man in space. Another significant scene that deploys the intermingling
of historical and fictional images is one of the last scenes: Luciana runs
towards Arturo, who had gone missing and was finally found, as the glo-
rious colored images of the first woman preparing to go to space alter-
nately appear.
The soundtrack also works to highlight the microhistorical nature
of the film. The songs that Nicchiarelli chooses are well known to the
Italian public of the 1960s, but the director opts for a contemporary
remix of them. Famous songs that form part of the Italian collective
memory of the period are performed by contemporary bands, which give
the music a metallic pop atmosphere, strident with the original songs.
Nicchiarelli’s strategy of interspersing microhistorical moments with well
known macrohistorical events forces an estrangement between the spec-
tators and the events of the past. It is as if the director asks her viewers to
recuperate and make new sense of their past.18 Furthermore, Nicchiarelli
explains that, rather than using the footage that was made available to
the public at the time, she used Soviet historical footage with a similar
aim. Needless to say, such a footage repertoire would have never been
shown to Italian Communist sympathizers. The director explains in the
interview included on the DVD release of the film: ‘Volevo che lo spet-
tatore non dimenticasse mai di stare assistendo a una “rilettura” degli
anni sessanta. Una rilettura in funzione di tutto ciò che non è stato e che
avrebbe potuto essere. Di quanto il nostro paese è cambiato senza che ce
ne rendessimo conto, e di quanto invece alcune cose sono rimaste uguali.
E di quanta strada c’è ancora da fare nell’emancipazione femminile.’
Marisa’s final words about women, who ‘vorrebbero solo avere la lib-
ertà di scegliere il proprio destino’ is another bittersweet statement, and
we hardly believe her when she comments on the Soviet mission with a
strong statement: ‘Questa è la nostra vittoria.’ Too many compromises
have been made. What destiny did the women in this film ultimately
choose? Rosalba chose to remarry and live her life conforming to the
demands of a patriarchal society. Marisa and Luciana chose to dedicate
their lives to grand political ideals, only to discover their ultimate uto-
pian nature. The film, as a matter of fact, ends with the images of the
first man on the Moon, who was not a Russian cosmonaut, but rather
an American astronaut who left the American flag on the celestial terri-
tory. Once more, Nicchiarelli’s film works as a political tool in the hands
of the spectators, who are invested with the possibility of re-reading
and changing the story of the present in light of what could have, and
perhaps should have, happened. Most importantly, at the microhistori-
cal level, she highlights the importance for women to decide and lead
their own lives instead of simply fulfilling the biological destiny of being
a mother who procreates and becomes the bearer of Catholic, male-cen-
tered conservative ideals.
Nicchiarelli’s second feature film, La scoperta dell’alba, extends the
mother-daughter relationship to the search for a certain level of under-
standing in a peaceful synthesis. The director’s latest film has a similar
objective to the previous one: it offers a re-reading and re-writing of a
historical period through the microhistorical subjective lens of a strong
woman who does not correspond to the socially acceptable representa-
tion of a vigilant and protective mother. This film is, again, notewor-
thy for its unique approach to history and its attempt to re-establish
women’s social dignity and status. La scoperta dell’alba is Nicchiarelli’s
filmic reading of a book by the ex-leader of the Italian Democratic
Party, Walter Veltroni, which tells the story of a man whose father dis-
appeared when he was a teenager during the Anni di Piombo, and only
now, as an adult, is he able to get in touch with his former self through
an old phone that opens the time barrier and allows him to make sense
of his loss.19 Significantly, Nicchiarelli changes the protagonist, ren-
dering her adaptation in an all-female main cast: Caterina and Barbara
Astengo, two sisters who are trying to cope with the premature loss of
their father when they were little kids, even now that they are successful
adults. Along with their recently deceased mother, the sisters have lived
the past 30 years in the shadow of the wealthy and successful patriarch
of their family. The improbable time machine, and the means for inter-
mediality in this film, is still an old dialing phone. Through it, Caterina
gets in touch with herself as a kid, and thanks to her younger self she is
able to make sense of her father’s loss and, by bringing to the surface his
faults and fragilities, she finally gets over her false memories of him as
a strong paternal figure. The man is, in fact, finally revealed to be part,
rather than a victim, of the Red Brigades. Even if Caterina is not able to
change what happened, taking action makes her stronger, and she suc-
ceeds in liberating her mother from a life of sorrow and regrets, even if
in an alternate life path.
The confusing anni di piombo, the historical background of this
film, functions as an excuse for an atemporal and ahistorical revelation:
the protagonist’s taking action to tell her own truth. Nicchiarelli’s film
188 S. Carlorosi
goes back and forth from the past to the present in a strategic attempt
to assimilate the present to the past, without emphasizing the difference
too much, and thus creating a new account of the events. Going back
and forth creates a unique new story whereby present and past alternate
and meld, and Caterina is at the same time a young girl and a successful
professor. The director, in fact, strategically keeps the same locations and
landscapes, portraying them with the same colors and cameras, as if past
and present are unfolding simultaneously.
The soundtrack of this film is originally composed by the same
band who worked on Nicchiarelli’s previous film, Gatto Ciliegia con-
tro il grande freddo. However, the opening song is the classic anti-
war Neunundneunnzig Luftballoons, in its original German version,
which sets the pacifist and nostalgic tone of the film.20 With this film,
Nicchiarelli again uses the soundtrack as a means of estrangement from
the story: often interfering with the narrative line, viewers hear musical
clips and rehearsals on various occasions from the group ‘Gatto Ciliegia,’
which in the story takes the active role of a rock group managed by
Caterina’s sister.21 Furthermore, the morning that the family discovers
the disappearance of Lucio, Caterina wakes up and enters a room full of
policemen, theatrically walking towards the camera in close-up, while
loud music cancels any other noise. While the camera stays on her as she
walks, a visibly preoccupied mother approaches her, but the girl contin-
ues towards the television transmitting the video song by the Buggles,
Video Killed the Radio Star, literally and physically ignoring the figure of
her mother. Lucio Astengo’s disappearance is thus paralleled in the video
itself, which was the first music video transmitted on Italian TV, mark-
ing the beginning of the culture of the 1980s and the end of the anni di
piombo.
Once more in this film, mother and daughter are opposite figures.
While they are never set in direct contrast through the filmic images,
they nevertheless represent opposite models of woman and mother.
Caterina’s mother is portrayed as an almost uniquely accessory figure:
she is the classic wife and mother of a bourgeois family. Passive in this
role, she never takes direct action and cannot impose herself, neither
on her husband who decides to come and go whenever he pleases, nor
on her youngest daughter who does not want to wear tights to a for-
mal event. Caterina’s mother is at her husband’s side on official occasions
and drives their girls to their vacation house at the beach. We see her
exercising in front of the television in popular aerobic dances, while she
is unaware that her children are discovering the betrayal of her husband.
Caterina’s relationship with her mother appears to be a superficial one, as
the two never really interact. A wall of silence and possibly incomprehen-
sion is between them. The first time an adult Caterina dials the number
and hears the voice of herself as a girl on the other end, she freezes. In
the very moment her mother picks up the phone, the camera closes in on
her face and we understand that she is scared of a direct confrontation.
Caterina is a far more decisive woman than her mother. She is a leader
figure to her younger sister who, despite a rebellious spirit, follows her
advice and her guidance. As an adult, she becomes a successful professor;
she is the strongest link in her love relationships, and she again takes the
lead with her sister in discovering their father’s secret. On the contrary,
her mother is symbolically silenced on the most significant occasions, as
shown in the already discussed scene of Lucio’s disappearance.
Although Caterina’s mother is dead in the present, this mother-
daughter relationship still needs to be mended. For Caterina this means,
in Muraro’s terms, to learn how to love her mother as an independent
figure while keeping a distance from the clunky figure of her father. If
at the beginning of the film Caterina’s goal was to finally understand
what had happened to her father, who was believed to be a victim of the
Red Brigades, at the end it clearly becomes to rehabilitate the figure of
her weak mother. She meaningfully reveals the truth about their father
to the betrayed wife, thus liberating her from living a life in the shadow
of a not-so-perfect husband, while the protagonist outgrows herself. At
the same time, grown-up Caterina gives her young self a new perspec-
tive with which to look at social expectations. During her last phone call,
Caterina tries to explain to her young self that she is in fact herself all
grown up: the girl is curious about her future life, wondering if she will
have a husband and children, in order to comply with society’s model of
being a successful woman. Grown-up Caterina easily dismisses the girl’s
preoccupations, explaining that she will not get married but will have a
very funny partner, and she will be very happy. In this way she outgrows
once more the social implications proper to a patriarchal, Catholic, con-
servative society that could influence her life.
Through Caterina and Luciana, Susanna Nicchiarelli shows that it
is time to re-tell history, challenging the official historical accounts and
recounting women’s subjective narratives, giving back to women the
freedom to be themselves and thus to be liberated from any artificial
social construction. The new heroines are daughters who rediscover and
190 S. Carlorosi
give dignity back to their mothers; mothers who, in turn, faced chal-
lenges and fought against the constraints of bourgeois society’s conven-
tions. As opposed to the internationally acclaimed Sophia Loren, who
owed her success to adapting to the role of model, actress, and mother,
these women challenge traditional views. Individual microhistories
focused on the crucial mother-daughter relationship impact the macro-
history of the entire nation. The generational conflict and resulting gy-
neologic reconnection is instrumental for individual growth as well as for
a historical re-consideration of Italian society at large. Nicchiarelli’s cin-
ema is a strong political weapon that ultimately works to call its female
spectators to activate their own memories, making sense of their lives in
an environment free from the socially oppressive boundaries that have
characterized it until now. Instead of expecting a merely passive recogni-
tion and acceptance, Nicchiarelli uses cinema in often innovative ways:
to broaden the voices of her works, which in turn initiate an active and
dynamic gaze for the spectators. These films are thus capable of creatively
engaging and affecting the viewers’ societal and cultural consciousness.
Notes
1. The only other female directors nominated are Lina Wertmüller
(Pasqualino Sette Bellezze 1976), Jane Campion (The Piano 1993), and
Sophia Coppola (Lost in Translation 2003). Critics Susanna Scarparo and
Bernadette Luciano remind us how, announcing the winner of the Oscar
for Best Director in 2010, which for the first time ever went to a woman,
Kathryn Bigelow (The Hurt Locker), Barbara Streisand exclaimed ‘the
time has come.’ (quoted in Luciano 2013, p. 1). Time has indeed come
for women to assert their voices on the most global scene. Even Disney’s
latest releases, Moana (2017), Frozen (2013), and before that, Brave
(2012), have brought to the attention of the youngest generation that
princesses don’t need to find a charming prince to find self-actualization,
they are heroines who fight to assert themselves.
2. Diotima is a group formed only by women constituted in Verona in 1983.
They are known as a philosophical community of women who investigate
and are engaged in classic feminist thought.
3. I refer here to the concepts of microstoria as developed by Carlo Ginzburg
in Il formaggio e i vermi. Il cosmo del mugnaio del 500, and theorized in
‘Microhistory: Two or Three Things I Know About It.’ In his explana-
tion of the genealogy of the term, and the way it has been used by vari-
ous authors, Ginzburg makes it clear how microhistory is represented by
local histories that are written ‘from a qualitative rather and a quantitative
perspective’ (1993, p. 12). Personal stories, furthermore, are important
tools to construct history, and ‘any document, even the most anomalous,
can be inserted into a series’ so as to create an historical narrative (p. 21).
4. For their analysis of these two films, see specifically the sections dedicated
in Chaps. 3 and 4.
5. See Renga 310.
6. Sophia Loren’s acclaimed films are a classical example, along with the
iconic Anna Magnani’s mother figure in Visconti’s Bellissima (1952), to
name some of the more famous examples.
7. Penelope Morris offers an interesting study of the condition of women
in Italy after World War II. In Women in Italy 1945–1960. An interdis-
ciplinary study, she explains the political role of the DC in constructing
social identity during those years: ‘In promoting the traditional view
of women as mothers and defenders of the family, the Church and the
DC were not only concerned with shoring up Italian society against the
threats they and the Catholic religion were perceived to be facing, they
were also aiming to present an image that would appeal to the female
electorate. Because despite, or indeed alongside, a wish for greater free-
doms, a period of stasis was exactly what many Italian women wanted’
(2006, pp. 5–6).
8. The same conformist attitude seems also to be found in Italian film stud-
ies. Critic Danielle Hipkins has offered a very detailed overview of the
patriarchal approach to film studies in Italy, addressing the ‘apparent
reluctance to engage with feminist film theory and gender studies in the
mainstream of Italian film studies’ (213). She points to the dominance
of mainstream Italian contemporary films, which reinforce the myth of
a patriarchal society, focusing mostly on the male gaze while relegat-
ing female characters to the side, or exclusively to a domestic sphere.
Moreover, national critics seem to accept this tendency, failing to offer
an alternate perspective that would give more attention to feminism and
its theoretical debates. Examples of this tendency are numerous, starting
with Marco Tullio Giordana’s films (including La meglio gioventù 2003
and Quando sei nato non puoi più nasconderti 2005) ; Daniele Luchetti’s
(Mio fratello è figlio unico 2007; La nostra vita 2010 and Anni felici
2013); Paolo Sorrentino’s (Le conseguenze dell’amore 2004; L’amico di
famiglia 2006); Matteo Garrone’s (Primo amore 2004; Reality 2012); to
name just a few internationally renowned filmmakers. One exception is
the case of Silvio Soldini who, already in the last decade of the twentieth
century, was able to show figures of women who did not conform to a
traditional model. His films for the first time brought to the screen fig-
ures of women as active subjects and agents of their own life: let’s quickly
192 S. Carlorosi
remember Rosalba in Pane e tulipani (2000), or Elsa in Giorni e nuvole

(2007).
9. One of the latest of these initiatives is a conference that has been organ-
ized in Italy in September 2015, promoting a monographic volume of a
journal dedicated to women in Italian cinema: Storie in divenire. Le donne
nel cinema italiano, in Quaderni del Centro di Studi del Cinema Italiano,
Lucia Cardone, Cristina Jandelli e Chiara Tognolotti eds, vol. 11, 2015.
10. The topic is gathering more and more interest from academics all around
the world, and many symposiums and conventions have been organized
to give it the visibility it deserves. Even if these events are usually driven
by critics and academic researchers who work outside of the Italian bor-
ders, it is reasonable to think that their work is influential on Italian criti-
cal production too.
11. ‘Io sentivo e agivo come se la donna che mi ha messa al mondo fosse
nemica della mia indipendenza simbolica. E come se quest’ultima com-
portasse necessariamente la mia separazione da lei e la sua fine’ (Muraro
1991, p. 9).
12. ‘Da[lla politica delle donne] ho imparato, precisamente, che per la sua
esistenza libera una donna ha bisogno, simbolicamente, della potenza
materna, così come ne ha avuto bisogno materialmente per venire al
mondo. E che può averla tutta dalla sua parte in cambio di amore e di
riconoscenza’ (Muraro 1991, p. 9).
13. ‘Secondo Freud, l’amore iniziale della bambina per la madre, che egli
chiama attaccamento, è molto forte ma destinato a tramutarsi quasi
sempre in odio: l’esistenza di quell’amore è evidente, egli dice, ma non
dura perché la figlia deve distaccarsi dalla madre e il ‘distacco avviene
all’insegna dell’ostilità, l’attaccamento alla madre finisce in odio’
‘ (Muraro 1991, p. 14).
14. Emphasis mine.
15. See both Muraro 1991 and Diotima 2007.
16. ‘Luciana questo è un discorso che non ti ho mai fatto, però noi dobbiamo
stare attente a come ci comportiamo. […] Anche la reputazione è impor-
tante. [….] Queste cose non si fanno e non si fanno con i compagni. Se ti
comporti in questo modo poi ti bollano per sempre e a quel punto qua-
lunque cosa fai o dici… Io non sono nella posizione di difendere nessuno,
Luciana.’
17. These three missions refer respectively to Sputnik 2 (1957), Vostok 1
(1961), and Vostok 6 (1963).
18. Marini-Maio explains in greater detail how this film is at the same time
a representation of communism as well as a nostalgic reassessment of its
historic erasure.
19. With the expression anni di piombo we refer to a period of demonstrations
and acts of violence as an opposition to political dialogue. It is inscribed
mostly in the 1970s, ending at the beginning of the 1980s, but does not
have a specific timeframe.
20. Neunundneunzig Luftballons is an anti-war protest song by the German
band Nena, which became a top hit worldwide in 1983. Clearly,
Nicchiarelli wants to set an anti-war atmosphere in the film that should
oppose the same anni di piombo to which she refers.
21. Especially worth noting is the scene when Caterina remembers her dis-
covery as a young girl of the existence of her father’s friend, clearly his
lover, and decides to keep it a secret. Caterina and her sisters are por-
trayed roller skating, in a mise-en-scene that offers a collection of many
stereotypical symbols of the 1980s. The girls suddenly stop and stare at
their father and his special friend. Interrupting the scene, Nicchiarelli cuts
to Gatto Ciliegia’s rehearsals, thus adding to the scene an atmosphere of
estrangement. The director makes it clear that she wants to underline the
fact that the scene is not a realistic one, but rather a re-writing of the
past, so that the audience can see the past with new eyes.
Works Cited
Benedetti, L. (2007). The Tigress in the Snow: Motherhood and Literature in
Twentieth-century Italy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Cardone, L., Jandelli, C., & Tognolotti, C. (Eds.). (2015). Storie in divenire: le
donne nel cinema italiano. Special Issue of Quaderni del CSCI, Vol. 11.
Diotima, (2007). L’ombra della madre. Napoli: Liguori.
Ginzburg, C. (1993). ‘Microhistory: Two or three things i know about it’
(J. Tedeschi, & A. C. Tedeschi, Trans.). Critical Inquiry, 20(1), 10–35.
Ginzburg, C. (2009). Il formaggio e i vermi. Torino: Einaudi.
Gundle, S. (1995). Sophia Loren, Italian Icon. Historical Journal Film, Radio
and Television, 15(3), 367–386.
Hipkins, D. (2008). Why Italian film studies needs a second take on gender.
Italian Studies, 63(2), 213–234.
Luciano, B., & Scarparo, S. (2002). Rethinking identity in the cinema of Silvio
Soldini. Forum for Modern Languages Studies, 38(3), 341–351.
Luciano, B., & Scarparo, S. (2010). The personal is still political: Films by and
for women by the new documentariste. Italica, 87(3), 488–503.
Luciano, B., & Scarparo, S. (2013). Reframing Italy: New trends in Italian wom-
en’s filmmaking. Lafayette: Perdue UP.
Marini-Maio, N. (2016). The space race, or when communist girls dreamed of
the moon. Cosmonauta by Susanna Nicchiarelli (2009). In G. Lombardi &
C. Uva (Eds.), Nuovo Cinema Politico (pp. 279–290). Oxford: Peter Lang.
Morris, P. (Ed.). (2006). Women in Italy: 1945–1960. An interdisciplinary study.
New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
194 S. Carlorosi
Muraro, L. (1991). L’ordine simbolico della madre. Roma: Editori Riuniti.

Renga, D. (2014). Italian teen film and the female auteur. In D. Hipkins &
R. Pitt (Eds.), New vision of the child in Italian cinema (pp. 307–329).
Oxford: Peter Lang.
Zagarrio, V. (2006). La meglio gioventù: Nuovo cinema italiano 2000–2006.
Venezia: Marsilio.
Author Biography
Silvia Carlorosi received a Laurea in Lingue e Letterature Straniere from the
University of Urbino, Italy, an MA in Mass Communications at Miami University
of Ohio (2001), and a Ph.D. in Italian at the University of Pennsylvania (2007).
She is assistant professor at Bronx Community College of the City University
of New York. Her interests include twentieth century Italian literature and film,
cultural studies, literary theory and philosophy, and teaching pedagogy. She is
the author of A Grammar of Cinepoiesis: Poetic Cameras of Italian Cinema
(Maryland: Lexington Books, Rowman and Littlefield, 2015). She has also pub-
lished numerous articles on twentieth-century and contemporary Italian cinema
and literature.
CHAPTER 10
Unnatural Child Birth: Naples, the

Neo-Natal Intensive Care Unit, and the
Blank Space of Possibility in Francesca
Comencini’s Lo Spazio Bianco
Millicent Marcus
In the opening episode of Francesca Comencini’s 2010 film Lo Spazio

bianco (The White Space), the protagonist Maria has a chance meeting
with a former lover whom she had obviously not seen for some time.
‘Sì, sono rimasta a Napoli,’ she remarks. ‘Mi piace Napoli, ce l’ho fatta,
visto?’ From this sliver of dialogue, we glean some vital background
information: that Maria is a relative newcomer to the city, and that her
adjustment to Neapolitan life has not been easy. At this point, her ex-
lover produces a photograph of his six-month-old daughter, causing a
moment of confusion in the spectator, who is led to wonder if Maria
were the baby’s mother and if the child had been abandoned by her
in early infancy. Subsequent dialogue dispels this misunderstanding.
Nonetheless, it sets up a vital connection between Naples, new parent-
hood, and the photographic representation of incipient life.1
M. Marcus (*) 
Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA
e-mail: millicent.marcus@yale.edu

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-56675-7_10
196 M. Marcus
During the course of the film, based on Valeria Parrella’s 2008 novel
of the same title, Maria will give birth to her own child, Irene, delivered
in the sixth month of pregnancy and confined to a neonatal intensive
care unit for the 50 days necessary to determine the infant’s viability.2
Comencini’s adaptation of the novel makes Naples a focal point of its
signifying technique, appropriating a time-honored topos—the city’s
link with triumphant procreativity—and exploits the profound irony of
the fact that the protagonist’s pregnancy is anything but triumphant,
and more importantly, anything but natural in its final months. In so
doing, the filmmaker both invokes and complicates an Italian iconogra-
phy which feminizes the metaphor of the body politic, according to a
figurative history dating back at least as far as to Virgil’s representation of
Roma as an empress wearing a crown in the shape of a walled city, ech-
oed by Cesare Ripa’s famous 1593 emblem of Italia as a queen and her
many subsequent incarnations across the centuries.3 Naples partakes of
this iconographic tradition with a characteristic flair: the baroque excess
of Neapolitan popular culture makes the feminized signifier in and of
itself insufficient to represent the city’s plenitude. Corporeal depictions
of Neapolitan collective identity require a body which harbors within it
new life.
Though Comencini’s choice of setting was determined by Parrella’s
novel, and by the filmmaker’s own stated association of the city with the
theme of sopravvivenza,4 the Neapolitan location places Lo spazio bianco
within a genealogy of films which align the city with the pregnant body.
Rossellini’s Viaggio in Italia (1954) immediately comes to mind, as
does De Sica’s Ieri, oggi, domani (1963). In the former film, the cold
and repressed British tourist Katherine Joyce undergoes a profound emo-
tional awakening upon exposure to the raw passions and exuberant vital-
ity of the city, which makes a fetish of its dead (the charnel house of Le
Fontanelle) while proudly exhibiting the bringers of new life (the mul-
titudes of pregnant women who crowd its public spaces). It is the spec-
tacle of the Pompeian couple, eternally frozen in a desperate embrace,
which triggers Katherine’s emotional breakdown and inspires the follow-
ing diagnosis of her own marriage’s demise: ‘maybe what is wrong is that
we didn’t have a child.’
The Neapolitan cult of procreativity finds no more flamboyant
enactment than the ‘Adelina’ episode of De Sica’s 1963 film Ieri, oggi,
domani, where the fulsome body of Sophia Loren becomes the personi-
fication of an entire community as it delights in the serial pregnancies
10 UNNATURAL CHILD BIRTH: NAPLES … 197
which keep her out of jail. Adelina’s dire socio-economic situation,

in keeping with the up-beat cinematic culture of ‘Il Boom,’ Italy’s
Economic Miracle of the late 1950s and 1960s, gives birth to a boister-
ous musical comedy, crowned by a rousing production number in which
the protagonist parades down the streets of the old city to the anthem
‘Tien la panza’, accompanied by a chorus of neighbors and bevies of
small children, who rejoice in her triumphant maternity.
In Comencini’s film, instead, a street in the old city becomes the set-
ting for Maria’s collapse and the prolongation of her pregnancy by arti-
ficial means in the neonatal intensive care unit of a Neapolitan hospital.
The iconic link between the city and the pregnant body becomes denat-
uralized—technology intrudes to challenge the stereotypical association
of Naples with easy and abundant procreativity. Maria accompanies the
announcement of her out-of-wedlock pregnancy to her friend and confi-
dant Fabrizio with a sonogram—harbinger of the technological interven-
tions necessary to keep the fetus viable. As in the film’s opening scene,
which established the nexus between new parenthood, Naples, and the
representation of incipient life, here too Maria invokes the theme of
partenopeità. This time, however, she does so as a way of absolving her
lover of responsibility for her plight. ‘Io sapevo che questa città mi fre-
gava,’ she quips,5 prompting Fabrizio’s wry response, ‘e che mo’ la colpa
è di Napoli pure co’ te,’ suggesting that Maria is not alone in endow-
ing the city with mythic powers of impregnation. In a feeble attempt to
relieve his friend’s distress, Fabrizio remarks of the image in the sono-
gram: ‘È proprio un bel bimbo,’ but Maria immediately calls his bluff:
‘E’ solo un’ombra.’ Fabrizio’s comeback, ‘è una bella ombra’, drives
home a sobering truth—the sonogram, at this stage, can only mark the
shadowy beginning of a long and precarious journey toward medical via-
bility and technological visibility. The difference between this embryonic
mark of pregnancy and the full-fledged photograph of the six-month-
old, displayed by Maria’s ex-lover in the film’s first scene, is a measure
of the challenge faced by the filmmaker in forging a cinematic language
adequate to the task of bringing this ‘bella ombra’ into the world of pos-
sible neonatal imagery.
Given Comencini’s acute cinematic self-consciousness about film-
ing the story of Maria’s anomalous pregnancy, it should come as no
surprise that movie-going itself would be elevated to a place of primary
thematic concern. As Maria explains to Fabrizio, cinema has become her
hedge against the emptiness of her solo life. In order to while away the
198 M. Marcus
afternoon hours before proceeding to the night school where she teaches
Italian to adults seeking their diplomas for the terza media, Maria goes
to the movies, and it is there that her affair with Pietro, the co-author
of her precarious pregnancy, has its start. Himself a single parent who is
spending an afternoon babysitting his infant in a movie theater, Pietro
is forced to leave in mid-screening when his child’s squalling becomes a
public nuisance. At the conclusion of the show, Maria encounters Pietro
outside the theater, and urges him to see its second half. Asked how the
story ends, Maria replies ‘bene. Non bene nel senso che tutti vissero felici
e contenti. Finisce come doveva finire.’ Pietro, baffled by her response,
can only think in terms of a conventional romantic denouement: ‘Sono
rimasti insieme?’ he guesses. ‘No.’ ‘Lui è andato via?’ ‘No’. Refusing
to give away the plot, she invites him to see the second half for him-
self, ‘magari domani.’ Though Pietro takes her up on the invitation, he
nonetheless will never learn the film’s outcome, because he and Maria
will spend their time in the movie theater initiating their own love story,
literally blocking the camera’s access to the inner screen as they passion-
ately kiss in the foreground of the frame.
Like Pietro, all we will ever know about the film-within-the film is
what Maria had previously reported: that its ending involved neither
of the alternatives expected of a conventional romance plot: the lovers’
union, or their splitting apart.
This indeterminacy, of course, is what will define Comencini’s ‘outer
film.’ Pietro’s exit from the love story does, in fact, adhere to the
unhappy ending that he proposes as the second possibility for the con-
clusion of the ‘inner film,’ but it will emerge as immaterial to the real
substance of Lo spazio bianco, which involves the blank space between
a premature birth and the moment when an infant exits the mecha-
nized womb of the neonatal intensive care unit as a sustainable life form.
Within that blank space, another life will also take definitive shape—that
of Maria mater, who will evolve from a state of shock, confusion and
ambivalence to one of growing preparedness and confidence in her own
maternal strength. Lo spazio bianco, then, is the space of possibility and
hope afforded by the technology of artificial gestation on the one hand,
and by the freedom from the strictures of the conventional love plot on
the other. In other words, the title suggests the space beyond the either/
or of happily-ever-after or abject abandonment—the space for a new kind
of narrative: ‘che finiva come doveva finire.’
The novelty of Lo spazio bianco extends beyond generic confines to

include a rewriting of Naples itself, understood as a topos in the lit-
eral sense—as a place which conjures up a welter of popular associa-
tions beyond those connected with procreativity.6 First and foremost is
the expectation of Neapolitan backwardness, Bourbonic inefficiency,
and general civic dysfunction—all of which are powerfully contradicted
by the state-of-the-art workings of the neonatal intensive care unit and
the robust institutional health of the hospital as a whole. While Maria
ascends for occasional cigarette breaks to the rooftop terrace of the
building, where the lovely Vesuvian skyline seems to reinforce traditional
views of Naples as a picturesque outpost immune to the incursions of
progress, her experience within the hospital places the city firmly in the
flow of twenty-first century scientific advances. Comencini’s insistence
on documenting Neapolitan cultural modernity emerges in the settings
of two important scenes—one located in a gallery of contemporary art
and the second in a musical venue featuring the avant-garde solo perfor-
mance of Maria’s ex-lover.
It is the protagonist’s engagement with the city of Naples in voca-
tional terms that gives the title to both Parrella’s novel and Comencini’s
film. Maria makes her living as a teacher of literacy for those adults who
had to leave school prematurely, and for whom the preparation course
leading to the proficiency exam constitutes its own form of artificial ges-
tation portending a second birth—this time into the world of increased
cultural and economic possibility. In completing the essay portion of the
test, Gaetano, one of the most promising students of the class, encoun-
ters writer’s block. Maria, who is proctoring the exam, sidles up to him
and offers a hint about how to proceed. ‘Mettici uno spazio bianco e
ricomincia a scrivere quello che vuoi.’ With this, she liberates him from
the spatial strictures of conventional essay form and allows him to write
his own text for a ‘presente nuovo.’
In adapting Parrella’s text to the screen, Comencini has sharpened
the running parallelism between the preparation for the literacy exam
and the development of Maria’s child in the intensive care unit. The
shared issue of time limits—the count-down to the exam date, on the
one hand, and the day when Irene will be disconnected from the breath-
ing tubes to test if her lungs can function on their own—structures the
progress of both narrative strands. Unlike the text, in which the admin-
istering of the literacy exam is reported in an epilogue, the film stages
200 M. Marcus
both climactic events on the same day. Maria is torn between her need
to be present at both, and, hoping that Irene’s ‘test’ will take place first
thing in the morning so that she can attend her students’ exam on time,
she is distraught to learn that another infant’s emergency has delayed
the timing of her daughter’s breathing trial. Rushing to the location of
the exam, she is on-site just long enough to rescue Gaetano from his
paralysis before a text message calls her back to the hospital where she
returns to cradle Irene in her lap, freed from life support and breathing
on her own. The camera allows us to linger momentarily upon the unen-
cumbered image of this beautiful infant before she is enfolded in Maria’s
arms and the nurse draws a white curtain in front of mother and child to
protect the intimacy of this scene from further optical intrusion. At this
point, the screen fades to white and the film’s title receives its final and
definitive cinematic rendering.
Significantly, this is not the first time that Comencini had used the
fade-to-white editorial device in the film. An earlier instance of its use
had preceded Maria’s introduction into the neonatal intensive care unit
as she scrubbed up in preparation for entering that sterile environment.7
This striking technique for turning the entire screen into a spazio bianco
thus serves to bracket the narrative present of Maria’s incubator-side
vigil, and suggests that within these brackets, a text of possibility, like
the blank space on Gaetano’s page, can be written.8 That text will have
nothing to do with the conventional scenario for cinematic romance
that had been ruled out by Maria’s cryptic response to Pietro’s ques-
tions about the ending of the film-within-the-film at the start of their
affair. Throughout Maria’s spazio bianco experience within the neona-
tal care unit, the specter of Pietro progressively shrinks in size, in para-
doxical contrast to the enormity of the hold that the miniscule figure of
Irene has on the protagonist’s consciousness. ‘Adesso lui è lontano, pic-
colo piccolo, più piccolo di Irene,’ Maria confides to Fabrizio, ‘come se
si fosse sgonfiato, sciolto in una pozzanghera.’ That puddle of murkiness,
that dark tangle of emotions caused by the botched love story, has been
replaced by a clean page onto which Maria is now able to inscribe a new
narrative, unbound by conventional strictures of genre and emotional cli-
chés that have been rendered obsolete by the unprecedented experience
of artificial gestation and the new evolutionary relationships it brings into
the realm of possibility.
Whiteness also prevails within the precincts of the neonatal intensive
care unit itself, in the ubiquitous curtains that envelope each cubicle,
surrounding the incubator and its margins with an illusion of privacy.

That illusion marks the attempt to offset the traumatic reality of a preg-
nancy turned inside-out, where the private, opaque, and internal tissues
of the uterine walls are usurped by the transparent, porous, and syn-
thetic materials of their high-tech replacement. The nature of the ges-
tational experience as one of unalloyed interiority and intimacy has now
been rendered external, public, and mechanized. The categories of inside
and outside have undergone a monstrous inversion. Blood vessels have
been replaced by synthetic tubes, the placenta by a network of electrodes
whose signals are translated into numbers to be broadcast on monitors
for public consumption. It is Mina, the most loquacious and down-to-
earth of the mothers in this neonatal community, who gives voice to the
shocking and profoundly estranging experience of such high-tech gesta-
tion—she compares it to a horror film.
Later, when Maria asks Fabrizio his impression upon visiting the
unit for the first time, his answer is succinct: ‘È proprio uno strazio.’
Significantly, this conversation takes place in a setting far removed from
the hospital grounds—in the above-mentioned avant-garde art gallery,
a context which puts a premium on unconventional modes of looking.
Maria’s very strategy for framing her query is telling: ‘come sembravamo
di là dal vetro?’ she asks, in a formulation which makes of the ‘vetro’ an
aperture in the existential wall separating the world of natural processes
from that of their artificial inversion.
When viewed ‘di là dal vetro,’ the workings of the neonatal inten-
sive care unit are obscene in the etymological sense. The violation of
pregnancy’s intimate and private course is nowhere more dramatically
portrayed than in the episode held on ‘visitors’ day’, when friends and
relatives are invited to witness the mechanisms and effects of artificially
prolonged gestations. Comencini films this sequence as a comic sketch,
devoid of dialogue and accompanied by up-beat music appropriate to the
forced gaiety of the occasion. The display of each child, in succession,
to the audience ‘di là dal vetro’ becomes a grotesque spectacle—one
in which Maria will take no part. Rather than wheel Irene’s incuba-
tor toward the ‘vetro’ for public viewing, she and Mina choose to hide
themselves and their babies under tent-like coverings, sealed in a pact
of invisibility, bound by their efforts to disappear from this awkward
voyeuristic scenario.
Comencini’s enactment of Maria’s desire to protect her tiny daugh-
ter from probing eyes has significant meta-cinematic implications for
202 M. Marcus
the filmmaker’s own wielding of the camera to show us what we should

not be able to see. She is acutely sensitive to the ethical problem of
filming an inside-out pregnancy, of exploiting the visual access to fetal
development that artificial gestation affords, and of capitalizing on the
prurient curiosity that such high-tech recordings of intimate human
drama can arouse. Comencini’s camerawork must achieve a delicate bal-
ance between discretion and revelation, and it does so by appropriating
Maria’s own subjectivity as she tentatively takes in the spectacle of her
premature daughter for the first time. A curtain is drawn open and the
neonatologist announces ‘ecco sua figlia.’ As he explains the baby’s con-
dition and prognosis, the camera begins a long, slow pan, moving from
right to left, following the pathway of tubes leading from a bottle of
I.V. fluid, down into the incubator, past the metal carapace around the
baby’s torso, up a series of tubes to another I.V. bottle, and then to a
monitor dense with numbers, symbols, and lines. During this journey,
all the camera has shown us of the baby is a fleeting view of the top of
her head, bristling with black hairs, and the hint of an ear. At this point,
the doctor and his team exit the cubicle and Comencini’s camera remains
with Maria, filming her in profile against fleeting glimpses of the baby’s
leg, followed by a shot of a tiny arm. From the ‘bella ombra’ as Fabrizio
had remarked of the sonogram, the baby has become a fragmented and
unreadable image, a composite of hair, wrinkled skin, metallic casing and
plastic tubes which Comencini, with delicacy and tact, refuses to probe.
In a later scene, we get a full body view of the baby from an extreme
aerial height, as Maria imagines the incubator in its nocturnal solitude.
The oneiric quality of the scene and the camera’s distance from its object
afford us no access to the baby as an intelligible image. In a later scene,
the only sustained close-up we get of the infant before the film’s final
frames involves an extremely blurry shot of the baby’s head, with breath-
ing apparatus protruding from her mouth. The opportunity for moth-
ers to directly observe the gestational process from outside the maternal
body is seen as an ironic privilege by Mina, who expresses her views in a
formulation rife with meaning for Comencini’s own project in filming
the story of a pregnancy turned inside-out. ‘Le altre mamme si devono
accontentare dell’ecografia, ma noi vediamo tutto in diretta’, she muses,
and in so doing calls attention to the visual invasiveness of the very film
we are watching.
Comencini’s reticence in portraying this inside-out pregnancy may
be seen as a reaction to the intrusiveness of the filmic medium in a
medical setting, recalling Benjamin’s comparison of the cameraman to

the surgeon in ‘Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.’ Referring
to the writings of otolaryngolist Luc Durtain, Benjamin compares the
‘specific technical sleights of hand’ of the surgeon (1969, p. 248) to the
boldness of the cinematographer’s ‘thoroughgoing permeation of reality
with mechanical equipment’ (1969, p. 254).9 While Benjamin celebrates
the cinema’s ability to surgically penetrate into the hidden recesses of
the real, Comencini balks at such voyeurist intrusiveness when the body
part is a pregnant womb, albeit an artificial one. What Comencini shares
with Benjamin in his canonical essay is a profound ambivalence about
the technology of artistic reproduction itself. For Benjamin, of course, it
both usurps the ‘aura’ of the work of art while it exponentially increases
the human faculties of visual and acoustic apperception. For Comencini,
photographic technology, while seen as invasive, cannot be separated
from the crucial role played by the technological sphere within the story
of Irene’s miraculous survival.
Throughout the early days of Maria’s incubator-side vigil, her struggle
to maintain a modicum of privacy had led her to reject emotional contact
with the other mothers in the unit, and to refuse the staff’s request that
she make public the name of her child. Maria spends her time enclosed
in her cubicle, reading—an activity which in and of itself separates her
from the relatively uneducated majority of her cohorts. At one point
early on, an outburst of emotionalism on Mina’s part sends Maria even
further into her cocoon of solitude. There is a moment, however, which
marks a significant breakthrough in her willingness to emerge from isola-
tion. The young doctor (who will ultimately become Maria’s lover) urges
her to place a name-tag on the front of the incubator, and he employs
a clever rhetorical device in the attempt to convince her. ‘Scrivere il suo
nome qui è come metterlo su un citofono. Vuol dire che la casa è abitata,
c’è qualcuno.’ With this analogy, the doctor gives Maria a metaphoric
alternative to that of the inside-out womb. ‘È un po’’ he continues,
‘come se ci trovassimo in una camera vuota in cui non si può dire come
potrà succedere.’ The ‘camera vuota’ is another version of ‘lo spazio
bianco,’ the blank page on which a text of possibilities is yet to be writ-
ten. What clinches Maria’s acceptance of the doctor’s plea to name her
child and ‘go public’ with it is his declaration that ‘sua figlia ha una fibra
molto vitale.’ With this vote of confidence in the baby’s viability, Maria
responds ‘ci scriva Irene.’ Of the utmost significance is the fact that Irene
was the name of Maria’s mother, and in giving it to her fragile child, she
204 M. Marcus
is inserting this new young life into a feminine genealogy, with all the
hope of sustainability that such a lineage entails. With this breakthrough,
Maria enters slowly into the community of mothers who share her plight,
agreeing to join them at lunch, helping the distraught Rosa to read the
fetal monitor, participating in the exercise of ‘music therapy,’ daydream-
ing about her cohorts’ performance of an interpretive dance on the hos-
pital floor, and shopping with Mina for baby clothes.
In her growing willingness to bond with the mothers in her unit,
Maria reverses the condition of estrangement which had characterized
her relationship to Neapolitan forms of family life. Throughout much
of the film, she had been consigned to a position of watching oth-
ers engaged in familial routines. Two scenes offer striking examples of
Maria’s outsider’s status within the Neapolitan context. Living in the
city’s upper reaches, Maria commutes downtown on a funicular, which
affords her a montage of glimpses into the lives of those whose balconies
and windows border its tracks. A series of shots pass by on screen, inter-
cut with images of Maria observing from within the vehicle: a boy walks
from the balcony into a kitchen to join his father at the table; a middle-
aged woman stands at a window with coffee cup in hand; an elderly man
plays cards; a young woman with luxurious black hair smokes on a bal-
cony; a woman sits at a table preparing food; two girls play cat’s cradle.
It is of the utmost importance that this sequence, which foregrounds the
mobilized gaze and the technique of montage at the heart of cinematic
language, leads Maria to a movie theater. Adding to the importance of
this juxtaposition is Maria’s Freudian slip at the box office, where she
mistakenly orders two tickets in a none-too-subtle revelation of her
desire for companionship. And of course, it will be this screening that
will provide the impetus for the affair with Pietro. Significant, too, is the
fact that the funicular ride will recur toward the end of the film, just after
Maria telephones Fabrizio to say that Irene’s breathing trial is scheduled
for the next day, and that she is ready to take on the full-fledged respon-
sibilities of motherhood. During the second, though shorter, montage
sequence viewed from the window of the cable car, glimpses of the
same households recur, but the intercuts to Maria’s face show her more
engaged. In one shot she is smiling, and in another, the stillness that has
characterized these inserts is broken by a rotation of her face, at first par-
tially concealed, toward the camera into a full ¾ view.10
There is another character in the film who is of singular importance
in that she, like Maria, lives in Naples as an outsider, and like Maria,
struggles with her maternal role. This woman (added to the cast of char-
acters included in Parrella’s text) is a judge whose choice to preside over
an anti-Mafia trial in Naples required her to leave behind a husband and
three children in the North.11 Living on the same floor as Maria, the
judge is insulated by a permanent entourage of bodyguards, but the two
women do manage to have a rooftop dialogue of considerable conse-
quence to the film’s ethical concerns. The pretext for engaging Maria in
conversation is that the judge has found a way to combat the scourge of
ants that have invaded the building. ‘Non si arrenda’, she had told Maria
earlier in the film, and in its most general sense, this exhortation applies
to the judge’s own decision to join the anti-Mafia struggle, though it
meant sacrificing her role as wife and mother. For Maria, the battle cry
will sound the opposite summons—to embrace her new maternal role, to
resist surrendering to the difficulties of single-motherhood, and the pos-
sibility that her child will be impaired.
Toward the end of the film, a T.V. news flash reveals the unfortu-
nate denouement of the judge’s subplot with the report that she has
been removed from the trial—a defeat, both for her commitment to the
anti-Mafia cause and her decision to place the demands of social justice
above those of her domestic life. In metaphoric terms, we could see the
three years that she had devoted to preparing for the trial as a prolonged
period of gestation, ending in an ideologically fraught miscarriage.
Since pregnancy and birth shape the temporal confines of Lo spazio
bianco, time itself becomes a central philosophical preoccupation of both
novel and film. Early in Parrella’s text, the first person narrator intro-
duces an oxymoronic formulation for the process unfolding over the
course of her vigil. She attributes a double and contradictory set of terms
to Irene’s condition, comparing it to a coin toss: ‘[E]ra che qualcuno
aveva lanciato una monetina in aria, e quella prima o poi doveva cadere
su una faccia. Per quaranta giorni sulla stessa moneta, morendo-nascendo’
(Parrella 2008, p. 11). Only at the end of 40 days, when the breath-
ing tubes are removed, will one of the two gerunds prevail in describ-
ing the process which had taken place over the preceding weeks. In the
meantime, Maria inhabits ‘la vita sospesa’ (Parrella 2008, p. 31) of those
consigned to Dante’s Inferno, living in ‘quell’aura sanza tempo tinta’
(Canto 3, l. 29). ‘Non portavo più l’orologio, nessuna di noi lo portava’
(Parrella 2008, p. 39); ‘il nostro tempo dilatato e fermo non rispettava le
ore frenetiche degli altri’ (Parrella 2008, p. 45). In Frank Kermode’s lex-
icon (1975), Maria is living in a condition of chronos, of simple duration,
206 M. Marcus
of undifferentiated temporal succession. The passage of time is marked

by repetition and waiting, of ritual hand-washing, of commuting to and
from the hospital, of the regular rhythms recorded on the fetal moni-
tor. What Maria craves, in Kermode’s terms, is the experience of event-
ful time, moments organized according to a hierarchy of importance:
kairos. In Comencini’s film, the hunger for eventfulness expressed in the
novel is intensified, and it has an occasional dark underside. At a certain
point, Maria confides to one of the night-school students, Luisa, that she
longs for something decisive to happen. This confession is immediately
followed by a hospital scene in which a fetus is rushed to intensive care—
the result of a late-term abortion. In another scene, Irene’s fetal moni-
tors begin to sound an alarm, and Maria hesitates before reporting this
ominous development to the hospital staff. Here, her longing for kairos,
for a definitive turn in events, has led to a sinister, if entirely understand-
able impulse to ‘intervene’ by inaction in the face of a medical crisis.
Kairos, in its fervently awaited and potentially most hopeful form,
comes on the day of Irene’s scheduled ‘second birth,’ when the breath-
ing tubes are removed and she passes the test of viability. As the mother-
daughter narrative reaches this joyous conclusion, we are reminded of
Maria’s answer to Pietro’s question about the end of the ‘inner film’ that
marked the beginning of their affair: ‘finiva come doveva finire.’ At this
early point in her own plot, Maria could hardly have imagined the narrative
and ethical force of the auxiliary verb ‘doveva,’ which will come to describe
the novelty of her own story’s resistance to the conventions of romance.
The dovere of Comencini’s film inheres in its commitment to the blank
space of opportunity made possible by the removal of Pietro from the
plot, and its restructuring around the mother-daughter scenario. The utter
irrelevance of the failed love story to the film’s denouement is displayed in
the final seconds of Lo spazio bianco, where the spectacle of white curtains
drawn around the image of mother and child presents a telling alternative
to the freeze-frame ending which a more conventional filmmaker would
have supplied. Comencini’s decision, instead to shelter this tender scene
of bonding from our prolonged gaze, brings closure to the film’s running
theme of privacy, and restores the intimacy lost during the ordeal of artifi-
cial gestation that had brought mother and child to this fortunate pass.
Of the utmost importance to the film’s final moments is the absence
of dialogue and the resounding musical acompaniment of Nina Simone’s
‘I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free.’ Though the lyrics speak
of a slave’s unrealized dream of emancipation, the song’s foregrounding
of that wish focuses our attention on the many levels of freedom that are
indeed achieved by the film’s conclusion. Most consequentially, Irene has
been liberated from the tubes and wires that have bound her tiny form
within the confines of the incubator. At the same time, Gaetano has been
freed from the strict rules of the exam format by leaving a blank space that
allows him to finish his essay in the ‘presente nuovo’. In terms of Maria’s
sentimental life, the freedom of the plot from the strictures of romance
opens up a future unencumbered by any ongoing saga of paternal neg-
ligence or the quest for a substitute Pietro—options which would divert
Maria’s energies from pursuing a materially and emotionally independent
ménage a deux. The image of Naples, which has exerted a kind of pro-
tagonism throughout the film, is freed from its iconic connection with easy
fertility, traditional family structure, and general socio-economic backward-
ness. In its relationship to the literary source, Comencini’s film has asserted
its freedom to add characters (the judge in particular), shift emphases, and
make the medium-specific changes necessary to give the novel a ‘second
birth’ in film. At the technical level, the film has liberated itself from the
kind of clinical voyeurism and documentary invasiveness that a drama set
in a neonatal intensive care unit would normally invite, insisting instead on
preserving the privacy of that anomalous maternal condition.
‘Bene,’ Maria had said in response to Pietro’s question about the end-
ing of the specular film-within-the-film that had spawned their affair.
‘Non bene nel senso che tutti vissero felici e contenti,’ she clarifies. ‘Finiva
come doveva finire.’ The outer film, too, will end well, not in the formu-
laic ‘happily-ever-after’ sense, but in its very indeterminacy, its offer of a
clean page on which Maria can write the script of her ‘presente nuovo.’ In
both its content and its cinematic form, Lo spazio bianco may be viewed as
the preparation course for Maria’s test of maternal readiness: Irene passes
the test of viability, and both mother and child learn to breathe on their
own. The freedom that she has achieved will be put to the service of a
higher accountability, as Maria and Irene exit the white space of possibility
that the hospital unit, and Comencini’s film, delivered to us.
Notes
1. In her essay ‘Motherhood Revisited in Francesca Comencini’s Lo spazio
bianco’ (2013), Claudia Karagoz critiques the film’s depiction of Naples
as ‘devitalized’ and lacking in ‘individuality’ (p. 108). It is my intention
in the following essay to vindicate the film’s representation of the city as
highly attuned to its specificity, its vitality, and Maria’s evolving relation-
ship to its iconic significance.
208 M. Marcus
2. Valeria Parrella, Lo spazio bianco (2008). Page references will be included

in the body of the text. One of the discrepancies between the novel and
the film is the amount of time that the infant remains in intensive care.
While the novel specifies 40 days, the film extends the period to 50.
3. For a detailed account of this tradition, see Marcus (2000, pp. 329–347).
4. In an interview with Comencini included in the extra material on the
DVD, the filmmaker stated that the story could have been set anywhere
yet ‘c’è stata qualcosa di prepotente. Napoli tirava il film a sé perchè
quest’idea di una sopravvivenza, di una resistenza, resistenza a tutto, è di
una bellezza struggente. È magnifica che questa città continua, malgrado
tutto, a buttare alla faccia del mondo. È qualcosa che ha molto a che fare
col senso nudo e profondo della vita e della sopravvivenza. E quindi mi
sembrava sbagliato tirar fuori questa storia da Napoli, che ci stava un po’
dentro con dei legami forti.’
5. Karagoz, in keeping with her critique of the film’s Naples as ‘devitalized’
takes Maria’s comment as another example of the city’s portrayal ‘as
infected by chaos and decay’ (2013, p. 107), whereas I see it as linked to
the fertility topos described above.
6. According to Letizia Bellocchio, Naples is so transformed in the film as
to seem almost unrecognizable: ‘Napoli appare come una città deserta e
silenziosa, caratterizzata da colori freddi che la rendono più simile a una
città nordica che mediterranea’ (Bellocchio 2014, diss., p. 157).
7. For her acute insights about the use and interpretive significance of this
editorial device, see Karagoz (2013, p. 111).
8. See Karagoz (2013, p. 111).
9. I am grateful to Megan Crognale for pointing out the relevance of
Benjamin’s analogy to my study.
10. On Maria’s increased engagement with the glimpses of domestic life in
the second sequence, see Karagoz (2013, p. 114).
11. The model for this judge is the activist magistrate Ilda Boccassini. See
Letizia Bellocchio (2014, pp. 155; 164–165).
Works Cited
Bellocchio, L. (2014). (A) Morality of Kinship in Italian Cinema (1960–2010).
Unpublished dissertation. New Brunswick: Rutgers University.
Benjamin, W. (1969). The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.
In (H. Arendt (Ed.), H. Zohn (Trans.)). Illuminations (pp. 217–253). New
York: Schocken Books.
Karagoz, C. (2013). Motherhood Revisited in Francesca Comencini’s Lo spazio
bianco. In M. Cantini (Ed.), Italian women filmmakers and the gendered screen
(pp. 103–119). New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Kermode, F. (1975). The sense of an ending: Studies in the theory of fiction. New
York: Oxford University Press.
Marcus, M. (2000). The Italian body politic is a Woman: feminized national
identity in postwar Italian film. In D. E. Steward & A. Cornish (Eds.),
Sparks and Seeds: Medieval Literature and its Afterlife, Essays in Honor of John
Freccero (pp. 329–347). Turnhout: Brepols.
Parrella, V. (2008). Lo spazio bianco. Turin: Einaudi.
Filmography
Comencini, F., & dir., (2009). Lo spazio bianco (The White Space). Italy: Fandango.
De Sica, V., dir. (1963). Ieri, oggi, domani (Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow). Italy
and France: Champion, Les Films Concordia.
Rossellini, R., & dir., (1954). Viaggio in Italia (Journey to Italy). Italy and France:
Italiafilm, Junior, Sveva.
Author Biography
Millicent Marcus is Chair of the Italian Department at Yale University. Her spe-
cializations include medieval literature, Italian cinema, interrelationships between
literature and film, and representations of the Holocaust in post-war Italian cul-
ture. She is the author of An Allegory of Form: Literary Self-Consciousness in the
‘Decameron’ (l979), Italian Film in the Light of Neorealism (l986), winner of
the Howard R. Marraro Prize, awarded by the Modern Language Association
of America, Filmmaking by the Book: Italian Cinema and Literary Adaptation
(l993), winner of the American Association of Italian Studies book award, After
Fellini: National Cinema in the Postmodern Age (2002), winner of the Ennio
Flaiano book award, and Italian Film in the Shadow of Auschwitz (2007). She co-
edited, with Risa Sodi, New Reflections on Primo Levi Before and After Auschwitz
(2011). Her current project involves the study of contemporary Italian cinema
within the theoretical framework of ‘post-realism.’ But her proudest achievement
lies in the realm of motherhood: raising two wonderful children, Jacob and Lucy,
who speak perfect, unaccented Italian.
CHAPTER 11
Liquid Maternity in Italian Migration

Cinema
Global migration flows have radically changed the face of Italy over the
course of the last thirty years or so, and Italian cinema has explored
these changes in a number of films focusing on migrant characters and
their stories. Most Italian films about migration share a focus on male
figures, from Kwuaku in Michele Placido’s Pummarò (Tomato 1990) to
Assane in Vittorio De Seta’s Lettere dal Sahara (Letters from the Sahara
2006) and Yssouf in Guido Lombardi’s Là bas. Educazione criminale
(A Criminal Education 2011).1 In these films, women migrants tend
to appear in the background, in supporting roles as romantic interests
or as sexual objects (the prostitute Suad in Là bas, for example), as sis-
ters (Laura in Claudio Giovannesi’s 2012 Alì ha gli occhi azzurri (Alì
Blue Eyes)), and sometimes mothers. In this essay, I consider the roles
of migrant mothers in four Italian fiction films that make women key
narrative players: Andrea Segre’s Io sono Li (Li and the Poet 2011),
Federico Bondi’s Mar Nero (2008), Terraferma by Emanuele Crialese
(2011), and Io, l’altro by Mohsen Melliti (2006). As I show in my
analysis, the mothers in these films share a liquid experience of maternity
G. Faleschini Lerner (*) 
Franklin & Marshall College, Lancaster, USA
e-mail: glerner@fandm.edu

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-56675-7_11
212 G. Faleschini Lerner
insofar as they are associated visually with water as a metaphor for the
instability of migrant lives in the postmodern era.
My analysis develops according to two intersecting threads, one expe-
riential and the other—echoing Adrienne Rich—‘institutional’ (Rich
1976). On the experiential level, these films foreground the question of
what it means to be a mother in an age of transnational mobility and
feminization of migration. Each film focuses on a different typology of
migrant motherhood, which I analyze in the context of the characters’
specific histories and geographies, as philosopher Rosi Braidotti advo-
cates, expanding on Rich’s call for a feminist ‘politics of location’ (Rich
1986, p. 210). On an institutional level, I propose that these films’
mothers help de-center motherhood as a vehicle of national identity,
complicating the equivalence that Italian cinema, as Stephen Gundle
(2007) has shown, has typically cultivated. This destabilizing takes place
through medium-specific strategies that emphasize the visual role of
the sea and other waterways: in Io sono Li, the Venetian lagoon and the
canals of Chioggia; in Mar Nero, the delta of the Danube and the Arno
river; in Terraferma and Io, l’altro, the Mediterranean Sea.
Both in Western and Eastern cultures, water is culturally associated
with women and their bodies in their life-giving nature. In the Greek
world women are perceived, as Anne Carson writes, as ‘wet’ (Carson
1990, p. 137). Aristotle says that ‘the wet […] is that which is not
bounded by any boundary of its own but can readily be bounded, while
the dry […] is that which is already bounded by a boundary of its own’
(Carson 1990, p. 153). The emphasis on women’s liquidity, poros-
ity, and leakiness is important, as these are also qualities associated with
the sea. Bodies of water are geographical spaces of travel and encoun-
ter between individuals and cultures, liquid borders between nations
and continents. As Iain Chambers writes, such ‘borders are porous,
particularly so in the liquid materiality of the Mediterranean. The out-
come of historical and cultural clash and compromise is that borders are
both transitory and zones of transit’ (Chambers 2008, p. 5). Chambers’
reference to liquidity is both material and theoretical, echoing Zygmunt
Bauman’s notion of liquid modernity, which is characterized by fluidity,
speed, the progressive elimination of territorial barriers to the flux of
goods and people from one country to the other (Bauman 2000). As
Bauman observes, the flux of liquid modernity includes ‘enormous and
constantly rising quantities of human beings bereaved of their here-
tofore adequate ways and means of survival’ (Bauman 2004, p. 7).
11 LIQUID MATERNITY IN ITALIAN MIGRATION CINEMA 213
By locating the maternal figures in their films within fluid, watery spaces,
the directors propose a critique of stable notions of national identity,
motherhood, and subjectivity, at the same time highlighting the uneven
power relationships at play in liquid modernity, where ‘it is the most
elusive, those free to move without notice, who rule’ (Bauman 2000,
p. 120). Following Braidotti’s call for a nomadic feminist criticism that
privileges interdisciplinarity,2 my analysis draws on different approaches,
from postcolonial studies to feminist theory, migration studies, and soci-
ology, which together allow for a critical exploration of the intersection
between identity, subjectivity, and power, as it is visualized in the liquid
maternal figures that appear in these films.3
Since the late 2000s it has become commonplace in migration studies
to refer to the ‘feminization of migration.’ Scholars and experts acknowl-
edge that women have always participated in migration movements,
both internal and international, but whereas old patterns saw women
as dependent on men’s migratory decisions, more women today are
migrating independently. As an important 2010 Caritas Internationalis’
background paper highlights, migration is not gender-neutral. Women’s
migration is different from men’s, both in relation to circumstances
and opportunities. The feminization of migration has brought about
an increased awareness of the ‘important role of women as remittance
senders; the working conditions of jobs, such as domestic work and car-
egiving jobs taken by migrant women; the changing role of women in
the family and in the community; the phenomenon of mobility orphans;
and the vulnerability and exposure of migrant women to different kinds
of risks, including trafficking’ (Caritas 2010, p. 2). Bondi’s Mar Nero
explores these aspects of female migration by focusing on the story of
Angela (Doroteea Petre), the Romanian badante—or live-in caregiver—
to the elderly Gemma (Ilaria Occhini). Angela arrives in Italy around the
time of Romania’s entry into the European Union on January 1, 2007.
She and her husband want to build a family together, but their economic
situation is too unstable. Confirming the trend toward the feminization
of migration, it is Angela who leaves for Italy in search of the opportuni-
ties available to women, and especially Eastern European ones, to partici-
pate in the economy of care.
Lena Näre (2011) describes Italy’s welfare system as familistic, in the
sense that the family fills in the gaps in the social welfare system, espe-
cially in relation to child care and elder care. This system is highly gen-
dered: women are expected to be care providers within the family. The
rapidly aging population, low birthrate, and the growing numbers of

women employed outside the home, however, have made it increasingly
common to rely on female migrant labor as care providers (Näre 2011,
pp. 397–398). This kind of work places migrant women at the bottom
of the labor scale and thus makes them particularly vulnerable to exploi-
tation and abuse. The nature of care labor leads to ‘highly personalized
labor relationships’ resembling family relationships, which are often char-
acterized by maternalism and dependency (p. 397). As Näre’s research
shows, however, workers often describe experiences of gratification and
fulfillment in the ‘moral economy’ of the family (p. 408). In a 2016
essay on Mar Nero, Áine O’Healy offers an insightful analysis of the
‘emotional labour’ that migrant service employees perform. She builds
on Sandro Mezzadra’s work, as well as the research of feminist scholars
such as Jacqueline Andall, to show the imbrication of racial, gender, and
class constructs in the service workers’ expected ‘ability to produce and
sell affects’ (O’Healy 2016, p. 59). The constant negotiation of power
and mutual dependence implied in the affective labor of migrant caregiv-
ers emerges clearly in the story of Angela’s and Gemma’s relationship.
Hired by Gemma’s son to take care of his ailing mother, Angela initially
seems unable to break through the wall of hostility that Gemma presents
to her. Despite their rocky start, though, when Angela receives news that
her husband has disappeared, Gemma decides to embark with her on a
journey to Romania to look for him. The trip, which occupies the sec-
ond half of the film, is crucial to the development of the two women’s
rapport, as it navigates the waters of uneven, maternalistic power rela-
tionships at the same time as it explores the potential for a mutually
transformative and affirming relationship between the two women.
The largely positive thrust of the film is based, according to Bondi,
on his memory of his grandmother’s relationship of reciprocal trust and
affection with her own badante. As he claims in an interview, his grand-
mother ‘era una persona che teneva banco, parlava sempre, dava spet-
tacolo. Teneva la televisione sempre accesa, ma quando è arrivata Angela
l’ha spenta perché dovevano parlare, avevano qualcosa di più importante’
(qtd. in Falcinella 2009). The plural subject that Bondi uses to describe
her grandmother’s and her caregiver’s relationship is critical, because it
implies a mutuality that transforms both subjects. As Braidotti writes, the
‘processes of becoming are collective, intersubjective, and not individual
or isolated: it is always a matter of blocks of becoming. ‘“Others” are
the integral element of one’s successive becomings’ (Braidotti 2011b,

p. 153). Both Gemma and Angela exist in an inter-subjective dialogue
in which, as Adriana Cavarero (1997) suggests, stories play a crucial role.
The sharing of stories as the basis for mutual recognition and affir-
mation is visualized in the film in the image of the two rivers, the Arno
and the Danube, which represent both the narrative flow and the unroll-
ing of the two characters’ lonely existence, which comes together in the
delta of the Danube, at the end of their journey to Romania. A long
take of the riverbanks, shot from a barge traveling in the river, opens and
closes the film; if in the opening scene the focalizer was Angela, trave-
ling toward Italy, in the closing sequence the gaze of the camera overlaps
with Gemma’s. The director thus visualizes their progressive reciprocal
identification. Indeed, in the course of their cohabitation, Gemma comes
to recognize her own youthful self in Angela’s independence and deter-
mination to build a better future for herself. Through her reminiscing,
the film establishes an explicit parallel between Italy’s situation post-
WWII and the conditions of Eastern Europe in the tumultuous years
after the fall of the Berlin Wall. In this respect, Gemma can also be read
as an image of an aging Italy that looks back at the hopes and opportu-
nities that the immediate post-war period brought in a country devas-
tated by civil and military conflict, while the plight of post-dictatorship
Romania is not so different—director Bondi suggests—from Italy’s own
in the years leading to the economic boom and prosperity. What really
strikes Gemma, though, is Angela’s aspiration to save enough money to
secure a stable and prosperous life for her future child, which reminds
Gemma of her and her husband’s sacrifices to allow their son to pursue
his studies.
The importance of Angela’s becoming-mother appears immediately
in the film. When the viewer first sees her, the frame is gradually filled
with her body as she moves from the left side to the right, toward the
camera, while hurrying from her train seat to the bathroom, where she
vomits; the handheld camera stalks her into the bathroom through the
door, left ajar; the implication is that she must be pregnant, a suspicion
further confirmed by her need to go to the bathroom often, and, finally,
by her taking a pregnancy test in a supermarket bathroom. The camera,
as Millicent Marcus (2015, p. 368) has observed, seems to alternate in
these sequences between a Zavattini-inspired pedinamento and a semi-
subjective position, underscoring the centrality of Angela’s perspective.
In the scene in which Angela takes her pregnancy test, the camera adopts
her subjective point of view and remains fixed on the bathroom sink
while we hear the noises of her actions outside the frame. We do not see
the results of the test, but after a few days she calls her husband and we
overhear her telling him that it was a false alarm and she is menstruating.
The menstrual flow is, on the one hand, a confirmation of her biological
ability to become a mother—an aspect of woman’s ‘leakiness’—and on
the other the relief of remaining free to manage her own reproductive
power. Angela’s maternal desire4 emerges as the strongest motivation
for her character: though she is clearly attracted to another Romanian
migrant, Nelu, she avoids him because she does not want to be unfaith-
ful to her husband; when she and Gemma travel to Romania to find her
husband, despite his infidelity she ultimately decides to remain there and
build their family together.
Angela’s biological motherhood in potentia is not the only form of
maternity we encounter in Mar Nero. When she and Gemma travel
together toward Romania, Gemma encourages her to eat, with a typi-
cal maternal concern for nurturing that compounds both the affective
dimension and the uneven relationship of power inherent in the mother/
daughter bond: ‘è da ieri che non prendi niente,’ she tells the anguished
Angela. Similarly, when Angela leaves her with her father while she
searches for her husband with her brother-in-law, Gemma launches into
a soliloquy about what she thinks would be best for Angela’s future, tak-
ing on the role that would belong to Angela’s deceased mother—while
Angela’s father nods in uncomprehending accord. Finally, when Angela
returns from her search, having found her husband living with another
woman, she falls asleep with her head in Gemma’s lap, and it is Gemma
who recognizes the reversal of their roles by getting up and encourag-
ing Angela to go to bed. Motherhood in Mar Nero is thus defined as
an affective function that goes well beyond its biological constraints but
depends on a woman’s desire and sense of inter-subjective identity. By
leaving behind her familiar landscapes in a process of progressive de-
provincializing, as Marcus puts it (Marcus 2015, p. 370), Gemma opens
herself up to a ‘nomadic affectivity [that] is outward-bound and based
on complex relations with a multiplicity of others’ (Braidotti 2006).
If—as Marcus suggests (2015)—Gemma’s character represents a met-
aphor for the Italian nation, she offers an affirmative model for Italy’s
engagement with the revitalizing forces of migration flows, embodied in
Angela’s reproductive potential.
A process of de-centering is also present in the award-winning

Terraferma, directed by Crialese, who co-wrote the screenplay with
Vittorio Moroni. It is, first of all, a geographical de-centering, for the
film is set on and around the island of Linosa, located approximately
50 km north of Lampedusa, at the southernmost periphery of the Italian
nation. It tells the story of a family that finds itself at the margins of the
local economy: Ernesto (Mimmo Cuticchio), the patriarch of the family,
is an old fisherman with a crumbling boat; his daughter-in-law, Giulia
(Donatella Finocchiaro), is an unemployed widow, and her twenty-
year-old son, Filippo (Filippo Pucillo), who helps his grandfather on
the fishing boat, is regularly bullied by his peers. Ernesto also has a son,
Nino (Giuseppe Fiorello), who runs a small beach resort on the island.
Nino and Ernesto represent two conflicting views of life on the island:
whereas Ernesto remains attached to the fishing way of life, embodied
by his aging boat, Nino embraces the future, represented by the tourist
economy.
Since the institution of the Grand Tour tradition, which took young
British (and, later, American) upper-class youths through a months-
long journey of education across continental Europe, the Mediterranean
landscape has been associated with hospitality, both as a business and as
an ethical concept. By the middle of the twentieth century, the novel
speed, ease, and economy of transportation made travel from Northern
Europe and America to the Mediterranean coasts accessible to many.
Travelers, who spent months living and studying in southern Europe,
were replaced by short-term tourists, who effectively helped the eco-
nomic recovery of the region after WWII (Abulafia 2003). Tourism
fueled a thriving hospitality industry, which today offers virtually every-
thing, from farm home stays to thalassotherapy packages, from linguistic
sojourns to cooking courses. The emphasis on hospitality as a specifi-
cally Mediterranean principle is not simply a marketing strategy, but also,
as Claudio Fogu (2010) points out, an essential feature of contempo-
rary geo-philosophical discourses on the Mediterranean. From Jacques
Derrida (1992) to Massimo Cacciari (1997), current interpretations
of the Mediterranean underscore the need to embrace what Francesca
Saffioti describes as the Mediterranean ‘consuetudine con l’amicizia e
l’ospitalità’ (Saffioti 2010). Especially from the perspective of Italy’s pen-
insular location, with its multiple borders, both continental (European)
and Mediterranean, this logic has urgent political implications, which
play out dramatically in Terraferma.
Nino’s hospitality, in fact, is limited to paying guests: as he declares

during a public meeting of local citizens, if a boat of migrants sends an
SOS close to Linosa’s shores, the only thing for fishing and leisure boats
to do is to turn them away. The law, he claims, is clear: aiding illegal
immigration is a crime. He refers here to Law 189/2002, which the
finanziere—himself a foreigner, an outsider from northern Italy—also
interprets narrowly. But Ernesto cannot accept a law that he sees as
fundamentally at odds with the law of the sea, which explicitly requires
the captain of a vessel to rescue all persons in distress. When he sights a
boat of migrants and a group of men and women throwing themselves
into the water in order to reach his peschereccio, he and his crew rescue
them. Among these are a pregnant woman in labor and her young son.
Ernesto and Giulia help the woman deliver her baby girl, and hide her
from the authorities in the garage where they have moved, while their
apartment is being rented to tourists. Giulia is deeply ambivalent about
extending hospitality to the woman (Sara, played by Timnit T.), and
her small family; concerned about the consequences of defying the law,
she tells Ernesto that they need to tell the authorities in order to ‘come
out of this clean’—a statement that Ernesto receives with disbelieving
scorn.
After Ernesto rescues Sara from the sea, he delivers her to his daugh-
ter-in-law on land, where the labor of hospitality requires Giulia’s con-
sistent effort. Irina Aristarkhova (2012) has shown how both Derrida
and Emmanuel Levinas connect hospitality to femininity, albeit discon-
necting it from ‘the fact of empirical women’ (Derrida 1999, p. 44). In
contrast, Aristarkhova reclaims ‘the connection to the first home, the
home of the mother, the place of an original welcoming and hosting’ as
a strategy that allows ‘hospitality to be embodied as an act, to reconnect
it and reactualize it’ (2012, p. 174). According to Aristarkhova, ‘[t]he
maternal makes hospitality possible, exactly contrary to those terms that
Derrida and Levinas assign to idealized femininity: the maternal rela-
tion sustains life through/as the specific acts of hospitality delivered by
so-called “empirical” women’ (p. 174). Maternal hospitality, though, is
not ‘natural’ or ‘essentialist.’ It is intentional, proactive, and performa-
tive; in other words, it is work (p. 175). Moreover, as a relation, hos-
pitality ‘requires at least two, with the requisite durational and spatial
dimensions of the process: matter, expectancy, habitation, and genera-
tion’ (p. 176). The development of Giulia’s character displays the process
of maternal hospitality, moving from rejection to reluctant welcome and

finally identification.
Initially, Giulia strongly rejects Sara’s expressions of gratitude and dec-
larations of kinship. When Sara tells her that she is ‘blessed; you have
saved me and are my sister,’ Giulia retorts that she is not her sister, she
is not blessed, and that Sara should go away, but when Sara explains that
she needs to join her husband who’s working in Turin, Giulia explains
that this is no easy journey: ‘you need to cross the sea, take the ferry,
the train, the bus…’ Catching compassion in her own words, she then
hurries to add, ‘in any case I do not care how you get there; you must
leave here.’ But if Giulia hardens herself against the empathy she feels
toward Sara, she does not hesitate to show maternal feelings toward the
woman’s newborn child. Whenever the baby is fussy, it is Giulia who
can calm her crying and put her to sleep; when the baby’s older brother,
Omar, tries to smother her in her sleep, it is Giulia who realizes that
something is off and saves her. As Sara says, the baby recognizes her spe-
cial bond with Giulia as the woman who literally brought her into the
world. Though the screenplay here seems to embrace an orientalizing
view of Sara’s Ethiopian culture, which is represented as less rationalistic
and more open to spiritual interpretations of human experience, it also
puts forth a definition of kinship that is based on emotional connections,
rather than legal and biological ones. In this sense, it is significant that
when Giulia, Ernesto, and Antonio finally decide to try and smuggle
Sara and her children onto the terraferma, Giulia gives her one of her
dresses to wear, thus visualizing the process by which the two women
acknowledge that their difference is a geo-political construct. When Sara
shows Filippo and Giulia her journey through Addis Ababa, Libya, and
the Mediterranean Sea on a globe, Giulia in return points to the empty
space of the sea: her island is too small to occupy space on the map, too
insignificant to the global forces that have brought Sara and her family to
Italy. Giulia and Sara’s final embrace, before the Ethiopian family attempt
their final sea crossing, is thus another signal that she has realized how
similar their aspirations are: both of them want to offer their children
better opportunities for the future, and they both need to reach the ter-
raferma in order to do so.
As they finally leave their hiding place in the garage, the baby seems
to represent the promises of the future, but it is a future that comes at
a heavy price. As the audience learns after Omar tries to suffocate her in
her crib, the baby’s father is not Sara’s husband. Detained with her older
child in a Libyan prison for two years, Sara was regularly raped by guards
and policemen; the baby is the result of the violence inflicted on her
under the eyes of her son. Terraferma thus exposes both the gendered
experience of the journey of migration, of which women and children are
particularly vulnerable subjects, and the darker aspect of migrant moth-
erhood—a motherhood that may not be desired but in fact imposed
through violence. In Crialese’s film, the feelings of ambivalence and even
rejection of forced motherhood are projected onto the elder son, who
makes them explicit in an Amharic-language dialogue with his mother,
expressing the fear that his father will repudiate all of them because of
the baby. His words point to the difficulties that migrant families, espe-
cially from Africa, face when they reunite after years of separation, which
often include traumatic experiences in war- or famine-ridden countries,
as well as during the journey across the Sahara and through Libya.5
In Terraferma, as in Mar Nero, water assumes a symbolic valence,
foregrounded through Crialese’s signature underwater shots that give
the narration its visual rhythm. The opening sequence is a long underwa-
ter take of the bottom of a fishing boat. The camera slowly tilts to follow
the movement of the fishing nets cast from the boat. As Elena Past has
observed, adopting Pier Paolo Pasolini’s notion of cinema of poetry, ‘[t]
he image of the net becomes a poetic insign for Crialese, a visually over-
determined symbol that evokes human dependence on the sea, human
entanglement with marine life, and the intensity of relationship for any
life—human or non-human—so closely bound to another’ (Past 2013,
p. 57). The scene then cuts to the deck of the boat, where we meet two of
the main characters, Filippo and his grandfather Ernesto. This sequence,
magnificently filmed by cinematographer Fabio Cianchetti, is echoed in
the scene in which a crowd of carefree tourists jumps into the sea from
the boat driven by Nino. The opening sequence, when the silence of
the underwater shots contrasted with the music Filippo danced to on
deck, here is chiasmically repeated in the opposition between the noisy
festiveness of the tourists dancing the ‘Macaraibo’ before their collec-
tive jump, and the quiet of their swimming legs filmed from underwater.
The tourists’ leisurely moving legs are also visually opposed to the arms
of the migrants that flail and beat the water frantically when they throw
themselves into the sea from their raft and try to reach Filippo’s boat
during his ‘romantic’ excursion with Maura, a Milanese tourist played
by Martina Codecasa. The contrast between upper- and lower-body
extremities is not simply anatomical: while the tourists swim under a bril-
liant sun and blue skies, the migrants do so at night, lit only by Filippo’s
boat light. They emerge suddenly from the darkness, like repressed
memories. Whereas the new generations of islanders and tourists alike
would wish for their presence to be invisible, their bodies impose them-
selves as inescapably visible, as tourists and locals alike recognize when
they wash ashore. Thus, Crialese posits the Mediterranean Sea both as
a geopolitical border and a symbolic liminal space that allows for the
invisible to become visible, the repressed to emerge to as conscious-
ness, as Chambers has observed: in the Mediterranean ‘the foreign, the
repressed, the unconscious manage to infiltrate the domestic space; the
door is porous’ (Chambers 2008, p. 42).
Similarly, Sara’s pregnancy and her baby’s birth during their pas-
sage from Ethiopia through Libya to northern Italy are both a factual
reminder of the socio-political and gendered aspects of migration and
a symbol of the promise of the future that crossing the Mediterranean
signifies. This symbolic dimension is directly related to the connection
between liquidity and woman. Trinh Minh-Ha writes eloquently of the
‘corporeal fluidity from images of water […], water from the source, a
deep subterranean water that trickles in the womb, a meandering river,
a flow of life […]. This keeping-alive and life-giving water exists simul-
taneously as the writer’s ink, the mother’s milk, the woman’s blood and
menstruation’ (1989, p. 166). The woman’s waters must break before
a child’s birth can take place, analogously to Sara’s metaphorically
breaking of the waters of the Mediterranean on a raft first, and then on
Ernesto’s rickety boat, in order to give birth to a new life. In the final
scene of the film, after Ernesto’s and Giulia’s attempt to hide Sara and
her family in a van and take the ferry boat to the terraferma have been
stymied by the police, Filippo steals his grandfather’s boat and braves
a stormy night to try to carry out their mission. In this dramatically lit
night-time sequence, the camera slowly pulls away from the boat, which
gradually becomes lost to our gaze in the massive black waves. The fluc-
tuating movements of the boat in the stormy sea offer a metaphor for
the indefinite future that awaits Sara and her family once they reach the
solid borders of the terraferma: on the personal level the uncertainty of
their father’s embrace and acceptance, on the historical level the Italian
nation’s wavering between welcome and rejection toward migrants and
refugees.
As for Sara in Terraferma, family reunification is the ultimate goal of

Li, the Chinese migrant protagonist of Andrea Segre’s Io sono Li (2011).
Her story unveils another aspect of female migration, which is specific
to women from China.6 In order to leave China, Li (played by award-
winning actor Zhao Tao) borrowed money from her prospective employ-
ers and has to relinquish her passport to them as soon as she arrives in
Italy. Their promise to her is that once she has paid off her debt and
saved enough money, they will sponsor her eight-year-old son’s trip to
Italy and allow them to reunite. The film thus exposes another facet of
the gendered nature of migration, focusing on the experience of women
migrants from China, whose children become instruments of exploita-
tion and blackmail in the labor market of the textile industry. For these
women, motherhood is a weakness insofar as it renders them vulnerable
to exploitative migration and labor practices.7 In one of her first letters
to her son, Li reads in voice-over, ‘When my boss asks me to sew thirty
shirts a day, I sew ten more, and those ten are for you. All my jobs will
be for you, to allow you come here as soon as possible. You just need to
be patient, and you’ll see that we’ll be together again’ (my trans.). This
abnegation leaves very little room for professional advancement and edu-
cation, and ‘affects [women’s] own construction of social capital which
would help improve their integration into the society of their destination
country’ (Caritas 2010, p. 10).
As they leave behind their children, migrant women live motherhood
as an absence and a loss, in analogous ways to their relationship with
their native countries, nourished by nostalgia and longing. In Segre’s
film, Li is acutely aware of and pained by her son’s absence; she finds
some respite in the relationships she builds with her roommate and Bepi,
an old fisherman and faithful customer of the pub where she works as
a barista in Chioggia, after being relocated there by her employers.8
Interpreted by Croatian actor Rade Sherbedgia, Bepi, whom his friends
jokingly call ‘the poet,’ also comes from another country, as a refu-
gee from Yugoslavia at the end of World War II. The label ‘poet’—as
he explains—designates him as an eccentric, unusual character, differ-
ent from the other old fishermen that frequent the pub; in this respect,
too, he is, like Li, an outsider. Their encounter, Segre (2011) writes, ‘is a
poetic escape from solitude, a silent dialogue between cultures.’
The poetry of Io sono Li resides in great part in the subdued landscape
of the Chioggia lagoon, which cinematographer Luca Bigazzi films with
subtlety and skill. Water plays a crucial role in the film: the calm waters of
the lagoon are the source of Bepi’s livelihood, a backdrop to his and Li’s
developing friendship, and a reminder to Li—born to a family of fish-
ermen—of her own heritage. She shows Bepi pictures of her father and
son, of the Fuzhou Harbor, where her father fished from his boat, and
describes to him the traditional fishing techniques of her region. As she
writes to her son, over a visual background of long and very long shots
of the lagoon, ‘the sea here is very beautiful. I do not know why, but it
seems smaller than our own sea. Perhaps it’s because it has two names:
one is sea [mare], the other one is lagoon [laguna]. Calling it sea or
lagoon depends on the distance. In Italian lagoon is feminine, quiet and
mysterious; the sea is masculine’ (my trans.).
Li’s gendering of different bodies of water makes explicit the connec-
tion between her own identity as a mother and a woman and the brack-
ish, life-giving waters of the lagoon, but it also highlights the importance
of water and waterways in Chinese culture. Li’s roommate, for example,
is drawn to the quiet of the sea shore to practice Tai Chi on her days off
work. Li observes the Dragon Boat Festival, a holiday that commemo-
rates the poet and minister Qu Yuan, a member of the Chu dynasty in
exile, who committed suicide by drowning himself in a river when his
dynasty’s reign was conquered by its powerful ally Qin, about 300 years
BCE. His death is commemorated in China by racing dragon-shaped
boats on rivers and eating sticky rice dumplings. Li—also displaced from
her country—celebrates the holiday by floating paper lanterns on water.
In the first sequence of the film, she and a roommate use the bathtub
in the apartment they share with other Chinese migrants to celebrate
the holiday, transforming for a moment the shabby bathroom in a space
of poetic escape; during the acqua alta, Bepi also lights a tiny floating
candle as a surprise to Li and a display of affection; when Li is forced
to break up their friendship under the pressure of her employers and
his friends’ mutual prejudice, she marks her goodbye by letting a paper
lamp go on a quiet canal. When she returns to Chioggia, Bepi has died
and left it to her to light up and burn his casone (his fishing hut), as a
last lamp lit to honor him as an exiled poet. Poetry emerges in the title
itself of the film, Io sono Li, with its play on the homophony between Li’s
name and the Italian adverb lì (there), which evokes the poet Giacomo
Leopardi’s notion of poetic vagueness and indefiniteness. More impor-
tantly, it establishes Li as a nomadic self, existing in a space of mobil-
ity, visualized in the film as the liquid landscape of the Venetian lagoon.
Li is shaped by the lagoon and the web of relationships she builds in
Chioggia, both with Bepi and her roommate, who in the end disappears
after paying off Li’s debts and allowing her to reunite with her son. But
Li also shapes the lagoon with the floating lamps that light its waters and
transform the historically charged waterways of Chioggia into an aesthet-
ically hybrid space of poetic encounter—a visual model of the potential
for renewal that women’s migration can bring to the Italian nation.
The connection between water and motherhood emerges in uncanny
ways in Mohsen Melliti’s Io, l’altro (2006). The film recounts the story
of two fishermen, the Sicilian Giuseppe (played by Raoul Bova, who also
produced the film) and the Tunisian Yousef (Giuseppe Martorana),9 who
have been fishing partners since Yousef’s arrival in Italy as an undocu-
mented migrant worker ten years earlier. As their names indicate, they
are now closer than brothers—indeed, they are each a mirror of the
other. During a fishing expedition, a tragic misunderstanding, fueled
by prejudice and the paranoiac alarmism of a radio newscaster, will lead
Giuseppe to think that Yousef is, in reality, a terrorist. The dramatic con-
flict that Giuseppe’s doubts generate between the two friends will end in
Yousef’s tragic death.
Yousef’s demise is precipitated by the accidental recovery of a dead
woman whose body the two fishermen find entangled in their fishing
nets. She is one of the many migrants—men, women, and children—for
whom the Mediterranean is a liquid mass grave. With the exception of
Yousef’s (deceased) mother, whose face we see in the flashback sequence
that opens the film, no other women appear in the film. Here, as Gloria
Pastorino (2010, p. 330) has written, woman comes to represent death
and brings death with her. Similarly, Áine O’Healy (2009, p. 175)
describes her as a ‘dead weight’ that will cause both the ultimate tragic
end of Yousef’s and Giuseppe’s pact of solidarity and Yousef’s death. The
two enter an argument about what to do with her body: Yousef thinks
it’s wiser to throw her back into the sea, worried as he is about his pre-
carious status as an (unjustly) suspected terrorist; Giuseppe rejects this
argument and insists they bring the body to shore to be buried.
The question of the legitimacy of a burial evokes an important set of
Mediterranean cultural references that Melliti incorporates in the film:
Greek tragedy and the drama of Antigone in particular.10 As Pastorino
(2010, p. 329) has pointed out, Io, l’altro is structured according to
the Aristotelian rules of unity of time, space, and action. Other critics
have recognized its theatrical quality by defining it as a ‘metaphysical’
drama. This metaphysical quality is enhanced by the fact that most of

the action takes place on board Giuseppe and Yousef’s fishing boat, drift-
ing on the flat surface of a perfectly calm sea, which suggests visually
that the two fishermen’s journey has no direction, that their periplus is
charting, rather than new territories, the fluid spaces of their own psyche.
Moreover, the symbolic valence of certain visual images confirms the
director’s interest in the psychological, as well as the social, dimension of
his characters’ conflicts. Giuseppe struggles between his friendship with
Yousef and his duty to defend order against an imagined terrorist threat,
exactly as Antigone is divided between her allegiance to the state and her
loyalty to her brother and piety. When Giuseppe and Yousef argue over
the fate of the dead woman’s body, they re-enact Antigone’s inner con-
flict and display the specular quality of their relationship.
But while Antigone’s female voice is strong in Sophocles’ play, in
Melliti’s film the unknown drowned woman is voiceless. It is Yousef
who tells her story—recognizing her physiognomy as Somali,11 identify-
ing her as a Muslim ‘sister,’ and remembering his own journey from the
other shore across the Mediterranean. It is Giuseppe that completes the
narrative, when he finds a picture of a little girl—presumably her daugh-
ter—in the folds of her dress. Though Melliti’s camera focuses in close-
up on the young woman’s beautiful face, it resists the sexualization of
the black female body—its characterization as a black Venus—typical of
the colonial period and lingering in cinematic representations of black
women. On the contrary, she is constructed as ‘a religiously identified,
maternal figure,’ which evokes the Christian iconographic model of the
Madonna (O’Healy 2009, p. 177). Expanding in postcolonial terms
Derrida’s notion of spectrality, O’Healy reads the sudden appearance of
the woman as a ghostly figure: ‘the uncanny presence of the black wom-
an’s body in Melliti’s film signals a return of the repressed memory of
Italian colonialism’ (p. 177). The picture of the dead woman’s daugh-
ter contributes to the spectrality of the encounter: the child is present
only as a simulacrum, a figural memory that at best has existence in an
unknown elsewhere, and at worst has lost her life alongside her mother.
Her absence haunts the viewer to the same extent as the dead body of
her mother, questioning assumptions about the ‘journey of hope’ and
the generative potential of migration. It is not by chance that these spec-
tral presences emerge from the waters of the Mediterranean, a liquid lim-
inal space where, as Chambers writes, ‘the present is not merely haunted
by the past, but is shot through with heterogeneous fragments whose
redemption can only render the world unhomely,’ and reveals ‘the dis-
quieting stubbornness of a yesterday that refuses to disappear into the
stillness of the ordered archive’ (2005, pp. 317–18).
Unruly and unbounded like the sea itself is another female figure that
haunts Io, l’altro: the two men’s fishing boat, which, following the tra-
dition of feminine gendering for sea vessels, carries the name ‘Medea,’
written both in Italian and Arabic on its hull. The myth of Medea,
immortalized in the eponymous tragedies by the Athenian Euripides and
the Roman Seneca, dramatizes the challenges of the encounter between
Greek civilization and other cultures, according to most critical inter-
pretations. Medea is the foreigner par excellence, the immigrant that is
tolerated as long as she conforms to a certain model of behavior, as a lov-
ing wife and mother in the household of her Greek husband, Jason, but
whose status in the polis is utterly unstable. When Jason abandons her
to marry the Corinthian king’s daughter, in order—he claims—to secure
a future for his descendants, Medea turns from hospes into hostis, from
guest to enemy, to the city of Corinth and her own family. Her speech to
Jason, in which she reminds him of all that she has sacrificed for him, is
also an indictment of the prejudice that makes her disposable, as a refu-
gee and an exile from her own land:
And in return you honored me
with contempt, betrayal, a replacement wife.
… Now your promises are worthless.
… So, as an exile where should I go? Home
to my father whom I betrayed for you? (Euripides 2011, vv. 503–507)
Medea’s speech emphasizes Jason’s betrayal of her trust—a grave crime

against the gods and herself, especially after she has saved his life and
abandoned her family and country for him—and exposes his hypocrisy.
As Medea laments,
all of us judge by sight and not by knowledge.
Because I’m an outsider I know this better than most,
and have worked hard to fit in,
[…] even so I’m a target of suspicion. (Euripides 2011, vv. 228–233)

Moved by her account of women’s lot, ‘bred so exquisitely/and pur-

posefully for mistreatment’ (241–242), the chorus of the women of
Corinth promise to keep silent about her violent plans for justice. She
will go on to kill the king of Corinth, Creon, as well as his daughter,
and complete her vendetta by assassinating her own two young sons.
Medea’s frightful gesture destabilizes the audience in its response: if on
the one hand she deserves pity for her suffering as a scorned woman, she
becomes monstrous as a mother when she murders her own children.
Her decision to kill her own children is at once a symptom of her irre-
pressible barbarian spirit, which undermines the family structure at the
basis of a stable social order, and a subversion of woman’s ‘natural’ nur-
turing instinct.
Like the woman whose name it bears, the boat, too, subverts its func-
tion as a safe space that protects its passengers from the forces of nature.
Boats and ships are charged symbols in different literary traditions: per-
haps most famously in Dante’s poetic universe, ‘la navicella’ of his artis-
tic talent opens Purgatorio (I.2), while in Paradiso ‘la piccioletta barca’
(I.1) is the limited human capacity to understand divine mysteries; both
boats, in turn, offer a counterpoint to the ship in which Ulysses takes
his ill-fated sea-voyage beyond the Pillars of Hercules in Inferno XXVI.
In some cultures, the boat is also a maternal symbol, an image of the
protective space of the mother’s womb (Cooper 1978, p. 152) and of its
reproductive powers. As Medea rejects the naturalization of her nurtur-
ing function and turns against her own children, so the ‘Medea’ becomes
the stage for a ‘clash of civilizations’ provoked by political interests that
contribute to the transformation of the Mediterranean into a ‘Solid Sea,’
as the Milanese group Multiplicity has called it. As Chambers explains:
‘The overall project of Solid Sea considers how the Mediterranean basin
is rapidly being transformed and ‘solidified’ through the impositions of
frontiers, controls and the increasing rigidity of identities tied to specific
forms of passage: touristic, mercantile, military’ (2005, p. 324). Melliti
(2007) explicitly connects the genesis of his film project with the post-
9/11 geopolitical landscape, and explains how he conceived of it as ‘a
cultural project to discern and resist the neo-conservative trends that aim
to bring the world to a clash of civilizations’ (my trans.). Medea and the
unnamed mother recovered from the sea are both ghostly reminders of
the effects of these trends in global politics: if the Somali woman’s dead
body is a visual reminder of the neo- and post-colonial forces at play in
the Mediterranean, Medea’s tragedy foregrounds the disintegration of
the social pact that is the consequence of European exclusionary policies
and politics. As we have seen, this failure affects women in particular, as

migration is a highly gendered experience in terms of labor opportuni-
ties, power structures, and family dynamics and expectations.
Melliti and the other filmmakers whose work I have discussed in this
essay explore the liquidity of the Mediterranean, the fluidity of water-
ways, rivers, and lagoons, both as a dangerous crossing and a potentially
liberating alternative to the rigidity of borders and identities. By recu-
perating long-standing cultural traditions and figurations, these directors
visually associate watery spaces with the life-giving powers of mother-
hood. The migrant mothers in their films travel along rivers and canals
or cross the sea, reflecting the realities of contemporary migration flows
from Eastern Europe and across the Mediterranean, but also charting a
different map of Europe, one whose borders are not fixed, but are con-
stantly changing according to the movements of tides, rain, water lev-
els. The directors thus emphasize the status of Europe as a peninsula,
characterized by a double border—both solid and liquid—that chal-
lenges the possibility of a fixed identity and helps de-center it through
a movement of ‘re-volt, turn[ing] itself toward the other’ (Saffioti 2007,
p. 222). It is this turning toward the other, this maternal embrace of the
other in a gesture of hospitality, grounded in the empirical experiences
of maternity, that these directors propose through their explorations
of migration—a political gesture that is steeped in the liquid ethics of
Mediterranean hospitality.
Notes
1. Among the few exceptions is Giuseppe Tornatore’s thriller, La sconosciuta
(2006), which Francesco Pascuzzi examines in his contribution to this
volume. Noteworthy are also Roberta Torre’s Sud Side Stori (2000),
where the story of Romeo and Juliet is reversed in tragi-comic key in the
relationship between Toni Giulietto, a singer from Palermo, and Romea
Wacoubo, a Nigerian sex worker, and Marina Spada’s Come l’ombra
(2006), a delicate exploration of female friendship and hospitality set in
the Milanese metropolis (see Faleschini Lerner 2015).
2. On interdisciplinarity, see Stimpson 2016. After analyzing the theoretical
writings of Dewey and Braidotti, as well as Coetzee’s novel Waiting for
the Barbarians (1980), Catherine Stimpson concludes that ‘interdiscipli-
nary and diverse, the nomadic humanities examine the widest possible
variety of intersecting movements, mobilities in time and space, including
the forces that would immobilize them’ (2016).
3. It is important to note that Braidotti makes a careful distinction between

nomad and migrant. The migrant has different social connotations from
the nomad, and a different relationship with the dominant culture of her
destination country. Unlike the migrant or the exile, as Braidotti writes,
the nomad is neither homeless nor compulsively displaced, but rather, is
‘the kind of subject who has relinquished all idea, desire, or nostalgia for
fixity’ (Braidotti 2011a, p. 22).
4. On maternal desire, see de Marneffe 2004. In her book, de Marneffe
calls for a feminist theorization of maternal desire beyond classic femi-
nism’s ‘matrophobia.’ See Hallstein 2010 for a discussion of feminist
matrophobia.
5. The dramatic dilemma created by family separations due to migration
does not only regard migrants whose destination is Europe. The number
of unaccompanied minors crossing into the USA after harrowing jour-
neys from violence-ridden Central American countries has reached, for
example, staggering numbers (See Rosenblum and Ball 2016).
6. On Chinese women’s migration to Italy, see Baldassar et al. (2015).
7. This is actually one of the calculations that led to Spain’s guest workers
program for the agricultural and food industries, which favors migrant
women with dependent children because they are more easily disciplined
and have a stake in returning to their home countries. On the Spanish
case, see Mannon et al. (2011).
8. Li’s shift from factory work to a more visible form of employment as a
barista parallels a trend in Chinese migrant labor in Italy. See Ma (2013).
9. On the film’s casting choices, see Pell (2010).
10. Melliti’s admiration for Greek civilization emerges clearly from Roberto
Capucci’s documentary, ‘Diario di bordo,’ appended to the DVD version
of the film.
11. Ironically, Yousef replicates here the process of physiognomic identifica-
tion of which he is himself a victim when the police chief stops him to
check his papers, and, off screen, to which the actor Martorana is sub-
jected by airport authorities when he travels (Pell 2010, p. 199).
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Palgrave Macmillan.
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[online], 11/12. Available at http://www.rhizomes.net/issue11/braidotti.
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Princeton UP.
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one. Milano: Feltrinelli.
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Literature Studies, 42(4), 312–327.
Chambers, I. (2008). Mediterranean crossings: The politics of an interrupted
modernity. Raleigh, NC: Duke UP.
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Thames and Hudson.
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& M. Naas, Trans.). Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP.
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Trans.). Stanford: Stanford University Press.
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The complete Euripides (Vol. 5). Oxford: Oxford UP.
Faleschini Lerner, G. (2015). Forme di ospitalità urbana nel cinema delle
donne: Marina Spada, Anna Bernasconi e Giulia Ciniselli. In L. Cardone &
S. Filippelli (Eds.), Filmare il femminismo. Studi sulle donne nel cinema e nei
media (pp. 141–150). Pisa: ETS.
Falcinella, N. (2009). Mar Nero. Interview with Federico Bondi [online].
Available at http://www.balcanicaucaso.org/aree/Italia/Mar-Nero-44592.
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Cambridge UP.
Hallstein, D. L. (2010). White feminists and contemporary maternity: Purging
matrophobia. New York: Springer.
Ma, S. (2013). Chinese Migrants Step Out of Factory Shadows in Italy. DW
[online] May 27, 2013. Available at http://www.dw.com/en/chinese-
migrants-step-out-of-factory-shadows-in-italy/a-16835199. Accessed June
15, 2016.
Mannon, S., Petrzelka, P., Glass, C., & Radel, C. (2011). Keeping them in their
place: Migrant women workers in Spain’s Strawberry Industry. International
Journal of Sociology of Agriculture and Food, 19(1), 83–101.
de Marneffe, D. (2004). Maternal desire: On children, love, and the inner life.
New York: Little, Brown & Company.
Marcus, M. (2015). Federico Bondi’s Mar Nero: Channelling the geographic
unconscious. In E. Bond, G. Bonsaver, & F. Faloppa (Eds.), Destination Italy:
Representing migration in contemporary media and narrative (pp. 365–375).
Bern: Peter Lang.
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Feminism. Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP.
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workers in Naples, Italy. Sociology, 45(3), 396–412.
O’Healy, Á. (2009). “[Non] è una somala:” Deconstructing African Femininity
in Italian film. The Italianist, 29, 175–198.
O’Healy, Á. (2016). Bound to care: Gender, affect, and immigrant labour. In G.
Lombardi & C. Uva (Eds.), Italian political cinema (pp. 57–67). Bern: Peter
Lang.
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ema of Emanuele Crialese. Ecozon@ [online], 4(2), pp. 49–66. Available at
http://dspace.uah.es/dspace/bitstream/handle/10017/20307/history_
Past_ecozona_2013_N2.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y. Accessed September
12, 2016.
Pastorino, G. (2010). Death by water? Constructing the “other” in Melliti’s Io,
l’altro. In G. Russo Bullaro (Ed.), From Terrone to Extracomunitario: New
manifestations of racism in contemporary Italian cinema (pp. 308–340).
Leicester: Troubador Italian Studies.
Pell, G. (2010). “Terroni di mezzo:” Dangerous physiognomies. In G. Bullaro
(Ed.), From Terrone to Extra-Comunitario: New Manifestations of Racism in
Contemporary Italian Cinema (pp. 178–218). Leicester: Troubador.
Rich, A. (1976). Of woman born. Motherhood as experience and institution.
Boston: Norton.
Rich, A. (1986). Notes toward a politics of location. In Blood, bread, and poetry.
Selected prose 1979-1985 (1st ed., pp. 211–231). New York: Norton.
Rosenblum, M., & Ball, I. (2016). Trends in unaccompanied child and family
migration from Central America. Fact sheet of the Migration Policy Institute
[online]. Accessible at http://www.migrationpolicy.org/research/trends-
unaccompanied-child-and-family-migration-central-america. Accessed August
4, 2016.
Saffioti, F. (2007). Geofilosofia del mare. Parma: Diabasis.
Saffioti, F. (2010). Il ‘Sud’ come frontiera geosimbolica. California
Italian Studies [online], 1(1). Available at http://escholarship.org/uc/
item/8x70d7fx. Accessed July 5, 2016.
Segre, A. (2011). Synopsis of Io sono Li [online]. Available at http://www.
iosonoli.com/en/sinossi/. Accessed June 16, 2016.
Stimpson, C. (2016). The Nomadic Humanities. LA Review of Books [online]
7/12/2016. Available at https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-nomadic-
humanities/. Accessed July 26, 2016.
Filmography
Bondi, F., dir. (2008). Mar Nero. Italy, Romania, France: Film Kairòs.
Crialese, E., dir. (2011). Terraferma. Italy and France: Cattleya.
De Seta, V., dir. (2006). Lettere dal Sahara. Italy: Metafilm and MiBAC.
Lombardi, G., dir. (2011). Là bas. Educazione Criminale. Italy: Eskimo,
FiglidelBronx, and Minerva Pictures.
Melliti, M., dir. (2006). Io, l’altro. Italy: Trees Pictures and Sanmarco Films.
Placido, M., dir. (1990). Pummarò (Tomato). Italy: Cineuropa 92, Numero
Uno, and RAI.
Segre, A., dir. (2011). Io sono Li (Shun Li and the Poet). Italy and France: Jole
Films and Aeternam Films.
Spada, M., dir. (2006). Come l’ombra (As the Shadow). Italy: Film Kairòs and
Ombre Film.
Torre, R., dir. (2000). Sud Side Stori (South Side Story). Italy: Gam Films,
Istituto Luce, Rai Cinema.
Author Biography
Giovanna Faleschini Lerner (Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania) is Associate
Professor of Italian at Franklin & Marshall College. She is the author of The
Painter as Writer: Carlo Levi’s Visual Poetics (Palgrave 2012), and of numerous
essays and articles on twentieth-century and contemporary Italian literature and
cinema, which have appeared in major Italian Studies journals. Her research inter-
ests include women’s and gender studies, interart studies, and film and media
studies. She is currently at work on a book project on migrant cinema in Italy.
PART IV
Transmedia Motherhood
CHAPTER 12
Voicing Italian Childfree Women

on New Media: The Lunàdigas Project
Giusy Di Filippo
Childfree Women
Childlessness and the postponement of parenthood are different aspects
of a significant low-fertility trend in Italy that is one of the lowest in
the Western world. Multiple social and economic factors have led to a
radical transformation of traditional family patterns that have resulted
not only in the well-known phenomenon of a reduction in births but
also in the increasing average age of women who either marry or have
their first child.1 While other important factors are also shaping a new
idea of family—on 25 February 2016 the Italian Senate approved a law
providing same-sex couples with most of the rights of marriage, exclud-
ing co-parenting (stepchild or joint adoption) and reproductive rights
(IVF for lesbian couples)—another significant aspect is emerging in this
scenario: childfree women are becoming an increasingly large group in
Italy. Recent estimates of permanent childlessness for the female cohorts
born around 1965 reveal that childless women constitute approximately
25% of this slice of the population (Tanturri et al. 2015, p. 20).2 Women
G. Di Filippo (*) 
University of New Hampshire, Durham, USA
e-mail: giusy.difilippo@gmail.com

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-56675-7_12
236 G. Di Filippo
who are voluntarily childless (‘childfree’) are categorized in opposition to

those who do not currently have children but want children in the future
(‘temporarily childless’) and those who want (or wanted) children but
are (were) unable to have them because of fertility problems (‘involun-
tarily childless’) (Bloom and Pebley 1982, pp. 204–206).
What all women without children have in common is that their fertil-
ity choices are subjected to public scrutiny. The reasons for such atten-
tion lie in the fact that women’s bodies have become through time ‘a
direct locus of social control’ (Bordo 1993, p. 13). In Gender Trouble,
Judith Butler argues that the maternal body is ‘an effect or consequence
of a system of sexuality in which the female body is required to assume
maternity as the essence of its self and the law of its desire’ (2008, p.
125). Along the same trajectory, in her book In Spite of Plato, while ana-
lyzing the myth of Demeter, the Italian philosopher, Adriana Cavarero,
affirms that the myth also underlines the reduction of maternal power,
in the male-dominated political and philosophical tradition, to ‘a mere
reproductive function of the womb,’ a ‘“receptacle” for birth’ (1995, p.
67). However, it is also worth noticing that, as Peterson and Engwall
affirm: ‘There are exceptions to the demand to reproduce,’ as ‘very
young women, women approaching the menopause, lesbian and bisex-
ual women, women with disabilities, single women or women not in
an approved heterosexual relationship’ (2013, p. 377) can be criticized
for their desire of being mothers. As ‘normal’ childless women fail to be
‘the “receptacles” for birth’ (Cavarero 1995, p. 67), not only are their
wombs empty, but also the women themselves are considered ‘empty,’ as
Mardy Ireland, in her book Reconceiving Women, highlights: ‘Virtually
all these women have historically been viewed by society as in some way
empty’ (1993, p. 131). Gillespie underlines that despite groundbreak-
ing progress made to contrast a stereotypical, ideal, patriarchal construc-
tion of womanhood in the Western world, second-wave feminism—Betty
Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963); Shulamith Firestone’s The
Dialectic of Sex (1970); Nancy Chodorow’s The Reproduction of
Mothering (1978)—has failed ‘to challenge the idea of a fixed, innate
or inherent imperative in women for motherhood’ (2000, p. 232).
Moreover, while progressive social changes have granted women more
freedom in their lives in terms of education, relationships, and career,
culturally constructed images regarding mothering and non-mother-
ing are still significantly present in twenty-first-century discourse. The
provision of food and childcare, which identify women with ‘nature’,
12 VOICING ITALIAN CHILDFREE WOMEN … 237
undoubtedly forces a connection between woman and motherhood and

also covertly suggests that childless women are ‘unnatural.’ According
to Gillespie, the social role and the meaning of the term woman itself
have been considered as an empty space that has been filled with domi-
nant discourses about what is and is not deemed ‘naturally appropriate’
for women and for women’s bodies and their activities. Thus mother-
hood has become part of a hegemonic ideal of femininity that reconciles
nature and patriarchal rules: ‘The nurturance of children has historically
been seen to be what women do, and mothers have been seen to be what
women are, constituting the central core of normal, healthy feminine
identity, women’s social role and ultimately the meaning of the term
woman’ (225, emphasis in original).
As childfree women fail to conform to the imposed ideal of femi-
ninity, they are scrutinized, considered resistant to their ‘stereotypical’
responsibilities, viewed with suspicion and sometimes with disgust by
society (Bartlett 1994, pp. 161–185; Letherby and Williams 1999, p.
723). Negative stereotyping of childfree women includes their descrip-
tion as selfish, abnormal, immature, bitter and child-haters (Rich et al.
2001, pp. 226–247). Childfree women are also depicted as not being
capable of sustaining personal relationships and as over-invested in career
or work (Ireland 1993, p. 8). Stereotypes clearly play an important role
in reinforcing the inexorable equation of women and motherhood,
thus excluding any other possible option in terms of personal identities.
Ireland states: ‘What has been absent or missing in the inexorable equa-
tion of women and motherhood is the social recognition that women,
like men, can develop healthy personal identities that do not include the
role of parent’ (Ireland 1993, p. 14).
The childfree phenomenon is indeed somewhat peculiar in Italian soci-
ety for the centrality of the family unit, and the obligations and support
that family members owe to both nuclear and extended family. This situ-
ation has obviously come at a high price for Italian women, who have
been—and still are—often relegated to perfect mother and housewife
roles. On a symbolic level, as Benedetti points out, maternity in Italy is
still ‘worshipped in its manifestation as the sacrificial mother of Christ and
feared in its representation as Medea’s annihilating power’ (2007, p. 4).
As a consequence, maternity is captured in a trap of symbolic patriarchal
associations that have historically and traditionally been understood as
238 G. Di Filippo
essential parts of stereotypical, patriarchal womanhood in Italian society.

On a practical level, familism3 in Italy has implied and (still) implies a
strong division of gender roles, with an increase in women’s time spent
on housework and childcare that corresponds to a reduction in their time
reserved for paid work and free time. While it is beyond the scope of this
contribution to analyze in detail how Italian women are pressured into
an imperative model of motherhood as a natural state of womanhood, it
will be important to underline how in a familist country such as Italy, an
increase in women’s labor-market participation has often times not coin-
cided with a rise in men’s domestic duties, and thus has resulted in a dual
burden for women (Tanturri and Mencarini 2004, p. 111).
Recent interventions such as Perché non abbiamo avuto figli: Donne
‘speciali’ si raccontano (2009) by Paola Leonardi and Ferdinanda
Vigliani, and more recently Una su cinque non lo fa: Maternità e altre
scelte (2012) by Eleonora Cirant, and the documentary film Stato
Interessante (2015) by Alessandra Bruno, which explores the lives
of eight women close to their forties and their questioning of enter-
ing into motherhood, show an increasing interest in the phenomenon
from women’s perspectives. In most cases, however, Italian newspapers
and newsweekly articles look at the topic of being childfree from a cou-
ple’s perspective. For example, the headline of the November 14, 2013,
issue of the Italian weekly magazine L’Espresso, featuring a quote from
Elena Pulcini, a social philosophy professor at the University of Florence,
focused solely on Italian childfree couples. Pulcini depicted Italian
childfree couples as driven by ‘a tyrannical desire for self-assertion.’
Furthermore, articles are often accompanied by images of beautiful cou-
ples on a beach, suggesting that the childfree have free time and dispos-
able cash to spend on exotic vacations.
Internet media plays a pivotal role in addressing the topic from mul-
tiple women’s perspectives. First, childfree women can connect with
each other through Internet support groups and online resources, thus
closing the geographic gap that might have prevented a sense of shared,
communal identity in the past. While offline contexts represent a ‘limit-
ing opportunity for childfree identity co-construction’ (2014, p. 168),
online contexts, according to Moore, represent a great opportunity for
women unable to meet in person for a variety of reasons: ‘Online com-
munities allow individuals to come together in large numbers that would
be cost- and time-prohibitive in face-to-face settings. Individuals who
have made the choice never to have children may never meet a person
who identifies as childfree in their offline life’ (2014, p. 168). Secondly,

Internet media promotes identity construction for many childfree
women (Moore 2014, p. 175). The rise of communities online, includ-
ing blogs and forums such as childfreezone.it, and Facebook groups such
as Childfree Italia and Non tutte le donne vogliono i figli, constitute a
space where childfree women have come together as a result of a shared
experience. While resisting the dominant narratives around themselves
and the invisibility they have faced, and are still facing, childfree women
have begun to construct new identities. In doing so, they reveal that the
web offers an interactive space that makes counter-discourses possible for
them.
The webdoc called Lunàdigas by Nicoletta Nesler and Marilisa Piga
is a representative example of this kind of space. In January 2015 Nesler
and Piga made their webdoc available on the Internet, and, starting in
January 2016, have made it part of a larger project that blends together
the webdoc itself, a section called ‘Monologhi Impossibili,’ another
section that includes an archive for press reviews on the project and,
finally, a blog. The project also includes a section for a movie that is cur-
rently in production, a section about the authors and a section called
‘Multimedia.’ While functioning as a plot outline for a movie currently in
production, the webdoc is mainly intended to give voice to many Italian
women—although some men are also part of the webdoc—who have
deliberately chosen not to be mothers.
In this essay, drawing from Mardy Ireland’s definition of ‘potential
space’ for women and from Burbules’s definition of ‘rhetorical place’, I
argue that with their project, Nesler and Piga seek to finally open up a
‘potential space/place’ on the Internet that permits an interpretation of
non-maternal identities as equivalent alternatives to maternal identities
in the Italian context. I also argue that such potential space represents
not only a space, but also what Burbules defines as a web-based rhetori-
cal place, where authors, interviewees, and users can find themselves part
of a shared communal identity while further developing what Ong has
defined as ‘second orality.’ Furthermore, drawing from Cavarero’s defini-
tion of women’s power, I also contend that this project paves the way for
the struggle to return that power to women. Women’s power, according
to the philosopher, also resides in the choice of non-reproduction.
Ireland offers an insightful historical examination of the development
of female identity without motherhood from a psychoanalytic point of
240 G. Di Filippo
view. Using what she learned from over one hundred interviews with
women, she outlines three types of women who are not mothers: the
‘traditional woman: childless,’ the ‘transitional woman: childfree and
childless,’ and the ‘transformational woman: childfree:’
The traditional woman highlights the process of mourning the loss of a

potential identity and/or relationship. The transitional woman embodies
the struggle to become aware of the interplay of conscious and uncon-
scious aspects of identity. The transformative woman illustrates the com-
mitment of individual effort that this awareness requires in order to pursue
a life of one’s own. (1993, p. 91)
While envisioning the potential of the redefinition of non-maternal iden-

tities, Ireland also claims the importance of the redefinition of the miss-
ing maternal part—the absence—as ‘a potential space’ for women:
Because society has so long associated the feminine with the maternal, it
is sometimes difficult to view other developmental paths as anything other
than substitutes for that which is missing. The redefinition of ‘absence’ as
‘potential space’ permits an interpretation of female identity development
in which non-maternal identities are equivalent alternatives to, and not
substitutions for, maternal identities. (1993, p. 127)
Although at first it would seem that only what Mardy Ireland would call
‘transformative women’ are part of the Lunàdigas project, it is interest-
ing to note that all three types of women described by the author are
represented; I would further argue that most of them are ‘transforma-
tive’ to different degrees.
Along Ireland’s same trajectory, Italian philosopher Cavarero, while
reviewing the Demeter myth as an allegory for the appropriation of
women’s sexuality and their power to give birth, highlights women’s
power to withhold that same power, to refuse to generate. According
to the Italian philosopher, maternity is: ‘A sovereign figure of female
subjectivity, who decides, in the concrete singularity of every woman,
whether or not to generate. For this sovereign figure, the act of generat-
ing is a prerogative rooted in her power—and therefore in her choice—
to carry it out’ (Cavarero 1995, p. 64). If maternity is undoubtedly
culturally and discursively constructed by the symbolic patriarchal order,
what Cavarero underlines is that Western androcentricity has ultimately
deprived women of the possibility of their fertility choices.
The potential space described by Ireland also becomes a powerful

rhetorical web/online place. Burbules draws attention to what makes
the web a rhetorical place rather than a rhetorical space. He highlights:
‘Calling the Web a rhetorical space captures the idea of movement within
it, the possibility of discovering meaningful connections between ele-
ments found there; but it does not capture the distinctive way in which
users try to make the Web familiar, to make it their space— to make it a
place’ (2006, p. 78) (emphasis in the original). Drawing from this distinc-
tion, I would suggest that Lunàdigas not only opens up a ‘potential space’
for non-maternal identities but also becomes a childfree women’s rhetori-
cal place as: ‘when users are in a place, they always know where they are,
and what it means to be there’ (p. 78). Furthermore, the way the project
has been designed underlines the importance of a potential place that also
favors the oral culture that has become an important feature of the ‘elec-
tronic media’ characterized by Ong in his book Orality and Literacy: The
Technology of the Word (1982) as a ‘secondary orality’ that resembles more
that of ancient Greece than that of post-Gutenberg society. In Lunàdigas,
while ‘second orality’ can refer to the lack of formal register used in the
project’s blog and in its group discussion clips, I would argue that a sec-
ond orality can also refer to the way users discuss the content of the pro-
ject by blog or by email exchange, or simply by talking to friends who
don’t have access to the Internet for whatever reason.
In the following sections, I will examine how, responding to many
Italian childfree women’s call to voice their desires, their longings and
their needs, Nesler and Piga interactively construct a ‘potential space’ for
childfree women and challenge the dominant representation of woman-
hood in Italian society. I will first describe the project; I will then explore
the multiple meanings implied in the name Lunàdigas, and explore
how Lunàdigas opens up a potential space for childfree Italian women
and, finally, how the project represents a situated struggle, that is to say,
Italian childfree women’s struggle to define themselves and their views
not only against male perspectives but also in contrast to ‘traditional’
mothers’ perspectives.
Lunàdigas: The Webdoc Project

In the section called ‘progetto’, Nesler and Piga center their narrative
about their project development around a sudden sense of urgency that
has led them to bring this project to fruition: ‘L’idea di dedicare questo
242 G. Di Filippo
nostro lavoro alle donne senza figli è arrivata all’improvviso, proprio

come un’urgenza messa via da troppo tempo’ (www.lunadigas.com).
The two authors commissioned the Italian demographic institute Eurisko
to do research about the childfree phenomenon in order to obtain the
necessary data and statistics required to shape their project. According
to the research, childfree women are concentrated mainly in the north-
ern part of the country (especially the north-west). While we can find
childfree women in rural areas, data shows their concentration is slightly
higher in urban areas (with over 500,000 inhabitants). The age groups
most represented are those between twenty-five and fifty-four. A distinc-
tive characteristic of the group is a medium-high or higher level of edu-
cation (almost 19% are university graduates, and 37% have a high school
diploma; respectively, these statistics for the total population of Italian
women are 9% and 27%). Their income is high or medium-high: they
are entrepreneurs, executives, or self-employed, but also factory workers
(although to a lesser extent). Students, housewives and retired women
are under-represented.
Having the commissioned data in mind, Nesler and Piga shaped their
webdoc project as a neighborhood of a city with its buildings and traf-
fic noise as the soundtrack. Authors describe the webdoc on the newly
renovated webpage as an Italian neighborhood in the fifties: ‘Alcuni edi-
fici, una stazione, un caffè, un museo. Il webdoc di Lunàdigas ci accoglie
così, in un quartiere ideale degli anni Cinquanta disegnata al tratto’
(www.lunadigas.com). There are several buildings and a train station that
are clickable icons. There are five clickable buildings. Near the train sta-
tion, users can find an icon called ‘In altre parole.’ As for the buildings,
three of the icons include materials called ‘testimoni’; one includes mate-
rials called ‘artiste’ and, finally, the last building includes materials called
‘ragionamenti.’ The icon called ‘In altre parole’ includes four interviews
with journalist and expert myths and traditions author, Bruna Dal Lago
Veneri, with feminist and author Lidia Menapace, with writer, journal-
ist and psychotherapist Claudio Risè (interviewed by Moidi Paregger),
and, finally, a conversation between sociologist Paola Leonardi and
feminist Ferdinanda Vigliani that focuses on their experiences and their
book, which is a collection of interviews of ‘special women’ called Perché
non abbiamo avuto figli: Donne ‘speciali’ si raccontano (2009). ‘In altre
parole’ also includes a written contribution by Guido Orange that ana-
lyzes the phenomenon from an anthropological point of view, the results
that came out of the research Nesler and Piga commissioned from the
Italian demographic institute Eurisko, and, finally, a radio interview of

the two authors, who talk about the project.
The skyscraper on the webdoc, which includes a group of materials
called ‘testimoni’—the first of three sections dedicated to ‘testimoni’—
provides users with a collection of interviews of five women: Alessandra
Bonacci, writer Melissa Panarello, Nela Matas, teacher Nives Simonetti,
and feminist and journalist Lea Melandri. The section also includes an
interview with Michael Scott Hughes, who, being homosexual with no
desire to have children whatsoever, describes his own childfree experi-
ence from this particular point of view. A Le Corbusier-style building
includes the second collection of ‘testimoni’ with six interviews: these
interviews include women such as Carla Slanzi, Cinzia Mocci, the astro-
physicist Margherita Hack, and a conversation between the two feminists
and philosophers Nora Racugno and Annarita Oppo, who talk about
their free choice of non-mothering; additional interviews deal with invol-
untary childlessness (Cinzia Mocci) and mothering as a ‘natural’ aspect
of womanhood (Ilaria Bernabè, Valentina Prisco, and Eleonora Prisco
discuss the issue in light of their study in the field of obstetrics). The
third collection of ‘testimoni’ comprises five interviews of childfree
women, including Seventies’ doctor and social activist Afra Carubelli,
Francesca Carta, Kathia Deidda Mocci, Laura Grasso, and psychologist
Elba Teresa De Vita. An interview with Enrico Gioffrè, who also explains
why he has never been interested in becoming a father, is also part of this
section.
The section called ‘Artiste’ includes seven interviews with childfree
female artists: theatre actress/director and singer Gisella Vacca, mul-
tidisciplinary artist based out of Florence, Letizia Renzini, sculptress
Monica Lugas, actress Veronica Pivetti, and, finally, writer and journalist
Valeria Viganò. On the other hand, while musician and singer Rossella
Faa explains that she could not have children and that she feels like a
mother when she creates her songs, actress Monica Trettel, who is a
mother, chooses to talk about a German Benedictine abbess Hildegard
of Bingen, who was a doctor, writer, composer, philosopher, polymath
and Christian mystic. Hildegard is also considered to be the founder of
scientific natural history in Germany.
Lastly, the section called ‘ragionamenti’ includes three conversations
among women. The first conversation is divided in two parts. The first
part is called ‘Cena delle donne al Melograno, Firenze’; the second part
is called ‘Cena delle donne al Melograno, Firenze. Rami secchi? Aqrah?’
244 G. Di Filippo
The second conversation within a group of female friends is called ‘Le

amiche di Monica.’ The last conversation called ‘Verona Rugby Ragazze’
is a conversation within a group of female rugby players from Verona.
In January 2016, the section called ‘Monologhi Impossibili’ was
moved out of the webdoc and thus is now part of the main page of the
project itself. Nine imagined monologues of famous women from the
past are part of ‘Monologhi Impossibili.’ A monologue of the personi-
fication of the Capitoline She-Wolf is also part of this group. While the
popular fashion doll Barbie, the world-famous designer Coco Chanel,
the poet and short stories writer Dorothy Parker, the heroine of France
Jeanne D’Arc, and, finally, the Marxist theorist, philosopher and revolu-
tionary socialist Rosa Luxemburg, talk about their lives and their deliber-
ate choice of not having children, the noblewoman Adelasia di Torres,
the sculptress Camille Claudel and the artist Dora Maar talk about their
frustrated feelings about being mothers. While describing the encoun-
ter with Romolo and Remo, the Capitoline She-Wolf defines herself as a
‘surrogate mother.’
Lunàdigas: Naming the Private

Being childfree women themselves, Nesler and Piga seek to invert the
taboo of not having children into a choice and to publicize and name the
private. Thus the ‘public’ becomes personal, and the ‘private’ becomes
public. While underlining that both she and Nesler have been looking
into the private, Marilisa Piga also brings up that they looked at the topic
according to their belief, grounded in the seventies, that the private is
the political:
Intanto mi pare che noi abbiamo un po’ lasciato da parte tutto

quell’aspetto che
riguarda il sociale, abbiamo davvero guardato molto al privato, forse per-

ché, anche per
ragioni di età, veniamo da quegli anni in cui si diceva che il privato è il

politico, quindi
questo ci è sembrato anche un modo per affrontare l’argomento. (Marra

2015, p. 192)
Naming undoubtedly has power and significance in this context. The

equivalent of the word ‘childfree’ does not exist in the Italian language.
Being accompanied by prepositions or negations, other possible options
such as ‘senza figli’ or ‘non mamme’ undermine the meaning of a condi-
tion that implies a sense of a deliberate choice. On the other hand, while
an English term such as ‘childless’, which defines the state of not giv-
ing birth to children only in terms of an absence of motherhood, has
not been extensively used in Italy, the other English term ‘childfree’ is
becoming increasingly popular. By defining themselves ‘childfree’ in
forums, Facebook groups, and blogs, many Italian women are starting to
name themselves and putting emphasis on their individual choices, values
and intentions, thus reaffirming their agency ‘through the suffix “-free”
rather than “-less”’ (Bartlett 1994, p. 163).
In opposition to the current trend, Nesler and Piga have decided to
choose a term that was unknown to the majority of Italian speakers.
The two authors have learned about the term lunàdiga from the female
Sardinian artist Monica Lugas, who had already used this name for some
of her sculptures: white ceramic nipples locked in rabbit cages. They
decided to adopt the pluralized version of the word lunàdiga, which is
a word from the Sardinian dialect used to indicate a sheep without off-
spring. Interestingly enough, the term—which would be the equivalent
of the word ‘lunatica’ in Italian—underlines a sense of sterility for sheep,
due to their bad mood (luna storta in Italian). While overtly implying
that moodiness and mental instability are ‘natural’ attributes of female
reproductive subjects in the animal world, the reference to the latter also
parallels the image of the ‘insane woman’ as part of the Western cul-
tural framework in which the ideas of both femininity and insanity—that
have been a powerful definition for ‘deviant’ female behaviors—have
been constructed. Furthermore, the term Lunàdiga retains—according
to Nesler and Piga—a sense of beauty, musicality and uniqueness that is
suitable to indicate childfree women:
La scelta di questo termine è dovuta intanto al suono che questa parola

ha, che è bello, morbido, e alla sua unicità. Noi l’abbiamo trasposta sulle
donne che hanno scelto di non avere figli. In italiano non c’è un’unica
parola senza una negazione davanti: senza figli, non madri, e tutto il cam-
pionario che sappiamo. Essendo così unica, sembrava un bel modo, sin-
tetico e nuovo di definire le donne che compiono questa scelta. (Marra
2015, p. 191)
246 G. Di Filippo
The choice of a name such as Lunàdigas becomes not only a powerful

tool for women in naming themselves and their own experiences, but
also provides a name for that ‘potential’ virtual ‘space’ where they can
gather together and as a marginalized group are able to ‘struggle to
name their own experiences for themselves in order to claim the sub-
jectivity, the possibility of historical agency’ (Harding 2008, p. 186).
According to Nesler and Piga, the new word has provided childfree
women with the opportunity to position themselves in a shared commu-
nal identity: ‘La cosa bella che è successa è che [la parola] è stata adottata
da tutte le donne che hanno conosciuto e conoscono e si avvicinano a
questo nostro progetto e che ne fanno parte, che tra loro si definiscono
lunàdigas al plurale e lunàdiga al singolare’ (Marra 2015, p. 191).
Ann McClintock suggests: ‘As Antoinette in Wide Sargasso Sea says:
“Names Matter.” Names reflect the obscure relations of power between
self and society, and women’s names mirror the degree to which our sta-
tus in society is relational, mediated by our social relation to men’ (1995,
p. 269). Although—as already mentioned—the name Lunàdiga itself
reflects the power relations between feminine identity and society, Nesler
and Piga seek to invest it with new meaning by breaking the obscure
relations of power between childfree women and society. The self-nam-
ing process raises issues of gender identity, social subordination, and
intellectual independence, involving self-awareness and self-evaluation,
and women’s empowerment in Italian society.
A ‘Potential’ Space/Place
Ireland claims the importance of the redefinition of the missing mater-
nal part—the absence—as ‘a potential space’ for women. I would argue
that with data and statistics as a foundation, through their webdoc,
Nicoletta Nesler and Marilisa Piga seek to finally open up a ‘potential
space’ on the Internet that gives a voice to ‘non-maternal identities’ as
‘equivalent alternatives to, and not substitutions for, maternal identi-
ties’ (Ireland 1993, p. 127). In an interview with Emilia Marra, Nesler
underlines that the public admittance of childfree or childless women to
not having children creates an awkward atmosphere. At the same time,
this circumstance confines women into a space of pity due to the gaze of
those—men and women with children—who rely on the assumption of
maternity as the default option for every woman: ‘Quando una donna
in pubblico dice io i figli non li ho, cade immediatamente un’atmosfera
strana, un po’ fatta di silenzi, forse più espliciti anche di certe parole,
fatta di sguardi quasi di commiserazione (poveretta, non ha potuto…)’
(2015, pp. 192–193). Women with children may play an important
role in this case, as sometimes the female gaze defines a space of unspo-
ken ‘violence.’ While talking about her decision to not have children,
Giovanna Morena highlights in the webdoc that what struck her was the
‘ferocious’ gaze of women with children: ‘Lo sguardo più feroce è delle
donne. Non ho trovato uomini così feroci come le donne’ (www.lunadi-
gas.com). While bringing judgment into sharp relief, Lunàdigas not only
subverts that space of commiseration into which childfree or childless
women are confined by others’ gazes, but also reverts the multiple situ-
ations in which childfree women have felt obliged to provide an answer,
a public response to justify their choice. In her interview with Nesler and
Piga, Emilia Marra pinpoints another possible definition of this ‘poten-
tial space’ as a space that is a missing metaphorical space in Italian con-
temporary society, as well as an unthought space in Italian women’s
reflections, where the childfree choice needs to be conceptualized as a
viable option: ‘Possiamo dire che attraverso l’identificazione di un ter-
mine, un’operazione semantica quindi, e attraverso la volontà di mettere
in gioco la propria esperienza personale avete ritagliato uno spazio che
era rimasto impensato nella riflessione sull’essere donna?’ (Marra 2015,
p. 192). Nesler not only agrees with this perspective but also reinforces
this idea by underlining that a great number of women write emails say-
ing: ‘Finally we are talking about it’: ‘Sembrerebbe di sì, non perché lo
pensiamo noi, ma perché rispondiamo a mail che ci arrivano attraverso il
sito e il webdoc, e sono veramente tante le donne che dicono ‘finalmente
ne parliamo,’ quindi direi che la risposta è la loro’ (Marra 2015, p. 192).
Nicholas Burbules defines the web as a rhetorical ‘place’ rather than a
‘space’, as a place is ‘a socially or subjectively meaningful space’ (2006,
p. 78). In his formulation, this rhetorical place has ‘navigational and
semantic elements’ such as an ‘objective, locational dimension: peo-
ple can look for a place, find it, move within it’ and also a ‘semantic
dimension: it means something important to a person or group of peo-
ple, and this latter dimension may or may not be communicable to oth-
ers’ (2006, p. 78). According to Burbules, ‘calling the Web a rhetorical
place suggests […] that it is where users come to find and make mean-
ings, individually and collectively’ (2006, p. 78) (emphasis in the origi-
nal). Drawing from Burbules’ definition of the web as a rhetorical place,
I would argue that by becoming a virtual space that encompasses the
248 G. Di Filippo
collection of many different stories and narratives, told mainly by women

with the great desire of sharing their own experiences, the project also
becomes a rhetorical place, as users know where they are (either if they
came across it or they looked for it) and they know what it means to be
there. Thus the web project becomes their space—their own place.
In order to create such a potential place, not only the name—as seen
before—but also the content and the structure of the project respond
to the need of broadening definitions and web surfing experiences. As
far as the structure is concerned, the authors define the navigation as a
multi-sensory experience: ‘Avventura ipermediale e multisensoriale che
associa elementi audio, video e testuali in un’architettura flessibile e in
continua evoluzione’ (www.lunadigas.com, emphasis in the original).
Far from proposing a linear narrative where the destination of the story
is pre-determined, the webdoc project—which is a work in progress—
through the integration of a combination of multimedia assets, provides
users with the experience of moving through the document via clusters
of information, and interacting with them according to their curiosity.
Not only the blog, but also the way the project has been designed, aim
at building a place that encourages the interaction of ideas and opinions
as well as the expression of women’s innermost thoughts and feelings. In
the interview with Emilia Marra, Marilisa Piga underlines the importance
of a virtuous circle that—starting from public speaking—has encouraged
a greater awareness in those women who took part in the project, which
in turn has led them to talk more about their situations: ‘Per molte è
stata la prima vera occasione per pensare i perché di questa scelta, e piano
piano si è creato un bel circolo virtuoso: il racconto pubblico permette
una maggiore consapevolezza, che porta a sua volta a raccontare di più
l’essere-lunàdiga’ (Marra 2015, p. 192). While dealing with ‘electronic
media’, Walter Ong affirms that ‘secondary orality’ represents one of
the main features of the ‘electronic media’, as it resembles more that of
ancient Greece than that of post-Gutenberg society. Indeed, the way the
project has been designed underlines the importance of a potential place
that also favors oral culture. While monologues and some interviews use
a formal register blog, many interviews and the section called ‘ragiona-
menti’—where groups of people discuss their own choices—resemble
everyday speech. I would argue that the project also favors a ‘secondary
orality’, as Lunàdigas allows for the stories not only to be watched and
watched again, read and read again but also to be told and told again.
While many users watch or read (another feature of the project) the
interviews, they will probably talk about them with close friends to share
their feelings and their thoughts.
As far as the content is concerned, while attempting to take into
account as many arguments as possible for being childfree women,
Lunàdigas also includes not only childfree women’s interviews but also
imagined monologues of well-known women from the past, interviews
of childless women and also of some mothers and of men as well. While
the main concern is about childfree women, the project also shows that
it is fundamental to expand categories and perhaps to think and develop
ideas that go beyond the conventional approaches. Lunàdigas, in fact,
does not present itself as a childfree women’s niche but rather as a poten-
tial place that seeks to go beyond strict definitions, as well as to break
down the rigid dichotomy between categories, such as mothering and
non-mothering.
Although it has the merit of being among the first projects to address
this important topic in Italy from multiple perspectives, it seems that
Lunàdigas portrays the situation from a white-woman-centered perspec-
tive. It can be argued, in fact, that while relying on data by Eurisko, the
project does not take into account the diversity of the female popula-
tion (i.e., women born in Italy to foreign parents or born abroad and
naturalized) that constitutes contemporary Italian society. It seems that
those allowed to speak are white ‘Italian’ women, with a few excep-
tions; oftentimes they are well-known women: ‘donne speciali,’ as part of
the title of the book by sociologist Paola Leonardi and feminist thinker
Ferdinanda Vigliani, also interviewed in Lunàdigas; oftentimes they
are from Sardinia. Regarding media participation, media theorist Jean
Burgess argues: ‘The question that we must ask about “democratic”
media participation can no longer be limited to “who gets to speak?”
We must also ask “who is heard, and to what end?”’ (2006, p. 203).
Extending the definition further to a ‘democratic’ medium such as a
webdoc, I would argue that the question that we must ask still needs to
be: ‘Who gets to speak?’ While under-represented childfree white Italian
women, gays and lesbians, childfree men, and Sardinian women ‘get to
speak,’ other Italians of foreign descent are perhaps still waiting to ‘get
to speak.’ Nonetheless, the webdoc is a work in progress that shows the
great potential of becoming more and more inclusive.
Lunàdigas is undoubtedly a rhetorical place that calls for users’ par-
ticipation. First, through a blog, the project further develops the build-
ing of a sense of community (without the physical community) where
250 G. Di Filippo
‘members believe themselves to be part of a large, caring, and like-

minded community whose members they scarcely know’ in person
(Gergen 1991, p. 215). Although the blog does not have many com-
ments yet, Nesler and Piga are also looking not only for feedback but,
more importantly, for users to have an opportunity to share their expe-
riences on a variety of subjects related to mothering and non-mother-
ing. One user, Lara, through her comment, highlights not only that
this blog project is about sharing and discussing information, but that
Lunàdigas represents a rhetorical opportunity to speak her own mind
without censorship: ‘Mi chiamo Lara e sento il bisogno di scrivervi per
dirvi GRAZIE. Conoscendovi ho sentito la necessità di parlarvi di me,
scusate se sarò prolissa, parlo poco ma quando scrivo non riesco a smet-
tere’ (www.lunadigas.com, capital letters in the original).
The webdoc project is a powerful potential space and place that both
literally and figuratively seeks to carve out a space to think about femi-
nine identities unshackled from reproduction, thus also showing, on a
variety of different levels, that the so-called maternal instinct has been
discursively constructed throughout the centuries. As a woman at Cena
delle donne al Melograno in the webdoc affirms: ‘Non mi è mai pas-
sato per l’anticamera del cervello o dell’utero di voler un figlio nella mia
vita. Questo a dimostrazione del fatto che l’istinto materno non esiste’
(www.lunadigas.com). While it can be argued that this is not true for
every woman, this statement and the project itself clearly speak for those
women whose choice of no reproduction has been often questioned and
labeled as ‘unnatural.’
Transforming the Italian Context

As already mentioned, Mardy Ireland in Reconceiving Women (1993)
outlines three types of women who are not mothers: the ‘traditional
woman: childless,’ the ‘transitional woman: childfree and childless,’ and
the ‘transformational woman: childfree.’ I would argue that in this pro-
ject most of the women are ‘transformative,’ as they all have in common
a resistance to pronatalist cultural discourses, a resistance that implies the
potential of ‘transforming’ the idea of femininity in Italian society. Most
of the ‘traditional women’ in the project have come to terms with the
idea of not being mothers, and most ‘transitional women’ have shifted
their identification away from the maternal or have adjusted their mater-
nal identification by restructuring their social roles and redirecting their
lives (Ireland 1993, p. 40). Many ‘transformative women,’ ‘by develop-

ing alternative forms of creative work as the main focus of their lives …
are giving birth to additional forms for female identity’ (Ireland 1993,
p. 93). This project undoubtedly represents a situated struggle, that is
to say, Italian childfree women’s struggle to define themselves and their
views not only against male perspectives but also in contrast to ‘tradi-
tional’ mothers’ perspectives. If Cavarero argues that maternal power
consists not only in the power to give birth, but also in the power to
withhold it, to refuse to generate, most of the women in Lunàdigas
reinforce their maternal power by either describing the reasons for their
choices or by deconstructing and struggling against many discourses
about childfree women. I will analyze only some aspects of this power: in
particular, how some women in the project are concerned with defying
the stereotypes that surround childfree and also childless women leading
to labels such as ‘rami secchi’; how others tell how they have expressed
maternal feelings in different circumstances such as working on pieces
of art, or singing and playing an instrument; and how still others con-
centrate on the charge of selfishness and irresponsibility. Women in the
project feel empowered to speak against the stereotypes associated with
childfree women and try to move to more nuanced and reflective repre-
sentations. Many women in the project talk about their experience of dis-
approval or being stigmatized for their decision by a society that believes
that they are not ‘real mothers’ unless they have given birth. Women
without children have often been referred to with labels such as ‘mula,’
‘segnata da Dio,’ or ‘ramo secco.’ While the word ‘mula’ links directly
to the animal world, as mules are infertile, the phrase ‘segnata da Dio’
points to a possible feeling of guilt in that it suggests the divine sphere
does not allow certain women to have children. On the other hand, the
term ‘rami secchi’ clearly refers to a condition that compares the situ-
ation of not being reproductive not only to the dimension of infertil-
ity but also to that of death. A ‘ramo secco’ is, in fact, a dead branch.
Feminist Lea Melandri underlines how this is a misogynist definition that
diminishes the role of women in society as they are exclusively linked to
the idea of reproduction. In addition, this definition situates women in a
superimposing biological determinism. The Italian feminist states:
Non mi piace perché la trovo di una profonda misoginia. Profonda perché

fa riferimento alla fertilità, la donna vista essenzialmente come colei che
produce figli, genera figli, quindi collegata con la natura, alla terra, quindi
252 G. Di Filippo
alla fecondità, alla fertilità. Quindi è un’immagine, come dire, che fissa la
vita delle donne in una sorta di determinismo biologico. Quindi direi che è
proprio l’espressione peggiore. (www.lunadigas.com)4
Another way to uncover stereotypes is when some women refer to a

negative relationship with their own mothers as a justification for not
becoming mothers themselves. In this way, they simultaneously uncover
the stereotypes of the quintessentially happy mother who finds fulfill-
ment in her children and suggest that, if a woman chooses to have chil-
dren, she must enjoy motherhood. Giovanna Morena affirms that she
decided not to have children when she was only nine years old because
her mother suffered from recurrent episodes of major depression, and
she did not want her child to feel what she felt during her mother’s
depression episodes: ‘Decisi di non fare figli a nove anni perché mia
madre era molto malata e molto depressa. Quando avevo nove anni
ebbe una crisi molto grossa e decisi di non volere figli e neppure cor-
rere il rischio di far soffrire un figlio come stavo soffrendo io.’ Although
accused of being children-haters, women in the project show that there
are other ways to ‘mother’ than biological mothering, in which they
can express and experience nurturing. Journalist and philosopher Ida
Dominijanni affirms: ‘Abbiamo fatto bene a non fare figli, perché abbi-
amo messo al mondo dell’altro.’ While underlining that women should
have children only if they really want to be mothers, astrophysicist
Margherita Hack—who died in June 2013—expressed her own experi-
ence of mothering as a professor in the form of scientific training and
professional guidance of her own students: ‘La mia eredità? L’ho lasciata
agli allievi, ne ho avuti tanti. Una persona dovrebbe mettere al mondo
una creatura solo se sente veramente questo desiderio.’ Musician and
singer Rossella Faa explains that she could not have children and that
she feels like a mother when she creates her songs: ‘Ho ritrovato il mio
senso materno in altre cose. Mi dà il senso di creazione, di figliolanza,
generare dei brani di musica. Mi appaga molto. Questo potrebbe essere
il mio piccolo dono al mondo come lo è mettere al mondo un figlio.’ On
the contrary, journalist and writer Valeria Viganò, while comparing crea-
tivity to motherhood, does not believe that a book can be compared to
a son or a daughter. What happens for released books is opposite to the
sorrowful process, at least for Italian mothers, of grown-up children who
leave the house: ‘Pur non avendo figli ho cercato di creare attraverso la
letteratura, attraverso i miei libri…. Non credo che si possa definire un
libro come un figlio. La creazione artistica non è una perdita quando va

agli altri.’ Since they regarded motherhood as a significant responsibility
that negated their freedom of lifestyle and compromised their independ-
ence, some of the women in the project share that they decided to dedi-
cate their lives to achieving their own professional goals. In a dialogue
between philosopher Nora Racugno and her partner Annarita Oppo,
Racugno affirms that she decided that she wanted to devote her time to
herself, to her studies, to her job and eventually to her political commit-
ments, while trying to give birth to herself:
Ho deciso che la mia più grande aspirazione era costruirmi una libertà
nell’ambito della quale io potessi prima di tutto rendere conto soltanto
a me stessa, intanto dedicare il mio tempo allo studio, alla professione, e
poi è diventato anche un impegno politico… Prima di mettere al mondo
per esempio un figlio, io ho pensato che dovessi mettere al mondo me, e
quest’impegno mi ha catturato talmente tanto che sono ancora qui che ci
provo.
Nora Racugno also describes her partner’s motherhood as a sacrifice

that implies the necessity of selflessness to a certain degree: ‘Ecco quello
che io lamento delle donne che hanno avuto figli,’ contends Racugno,
‘quantomeno della maggior parte e tra queste ci sei tu purtroppo, è che
il figlio comunque ha sempre la priorità su ogni altra cosa, anche sulle
cose che si afferma siano essenziali per la propria esistenza.’ If childfree
women face stigma for choosing not to have or to rear children for so-
called selfish reasons, Racugno highlights her awareness of the implica-
tions of motherhood while showing that her alleged selfishness derives
from a precise choice. On the other hand, while accused of being self-
ish, women in the project also underline that one is not automatically
a good mother just because one has children. The reality is, underlines
actor Veronica Pivetti, that there are many bad mothers around: ‘È un
lusso fare un figlio. Prova ne sono le orrende madri che ci sono in giro
che creano complessi e difficoltà ai figli.’ While blaming bad mothers,
however, Pivetti shows that it is extremely difficult to deconstruct the
Western Italian cultural framework in which bad mothers and childfree
women are assigned qualities that describe them as women that do not
fit the expected social norms.
Nesler and Piga seek to show that multiple ways of ‘giving rise to
new femininity discourses, distinct from motherhood’ (Gillespie 2000,
254 G. Di Filippo
p. 224) are possible in Italian society. The advancement that this pro-
ject supports is not merely individual but mainly collective. While
deconstructing powerful stereotypes and showing a nuanced represen-
tation of Italian childfree women, the project also seeks to go beyond
culturally constructed categories such as mothers and non-mothers,
by instead using categories such as mothers, childless women, and also
gay men and lesbian women with no desire of having children, in the
hopes of expanding our own notion of the issue that is investigated at
different levels. Although the blog and the project are powerful tools
of reflection and expression for those women who find their own place
in Lunàdigas, it is worth remembering that blogging and having the
opportunity to surf the web and explore the project still remains an activ-
ity that is available to those who are on the empowered side of the digi-
tal divide. Neverthless, Lunàdigas constitutes a powerful tool for voicing
the almost unspeakable decision or desire to not be mothers of those
Italian women whose discourses are marked as separate from the main-
stream and are in some way excluded. The result is to carve out a space
for a definition of feminine identity that is unshackled from reproduc-
tion. Furthermore, the project also carves out a space that becomes their
place, where not only Nesler and Piga but also all the other women who
participate in the project, whether as interviewees or users, are trying to
rewrite the rules on femininity and reproduction and also the rules on
how to represent women in Italy today.
Notes
1. See Eurostat data at: http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/portal/page/por-
tal/population/data/database.
2. The first quantitative and qualitative study in Italy about voluntary child-
lessness carried out in five provincial capitals (Padua, Udine, Florence,
Pesaro, and Messina) (Tanturri and Mencarini 2004 and 2008) reveals that
a third of the women without children interviewed (aged 40–44 years) live
with a partner and are voluntarily childless. They have greater gender equity
within marriages; they are inclined to be less traditional, non-religious,
employed in a professional occupation, and to have experienced marital dis-
ruption. These women find sources of fulfillment other than motherhood,
and in some cases consider a child to be an obstacle to their achievements.
3. On familism and women in Italy, see Ruspini 2015, pp. 64–76.
4. From now on, unless otherwise indicated, all quotes are from the inter-
views on lunadigas.com.
Works Cited
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Virago Press.
Benedetti, L. (2007). The tigress in the snow: Motherhood and literature in twenti-
eth-century Italy. Toronto, Ont.: University of Toronto Press.
Bloom, D., & Pebley, A. P. (1982). Voluntary childlessness: A review of the
evidence and implications. Population Research and Policy Review, 1(3),
203–224.
Bordo, S. (1993). Unbearable weight: Feminism, western culture & the body.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Bruno, A., dir. (2015). Stato Interessante. B7B film. Rai 3 TV channel.
September 17.
Burbules, N. (2006). The web as a rhetorical space. In I. Snyder (Ed.), Silicon
Literacies: communication, innovation and education in the electronic age
(pp. 75–84). New York, London: Routledge.
Burgess, J. (2006). Hearing ordinary voices: Cultural studies, vernacular crea-
tivity and digital storytelling. Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural
Studies, 20(2), 201–214.
Butler, J. (2008). Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity (3rd
ed.). New York: Routledge.
Cavarero, A. (1995). In spite of plato: A feminist rewriting of ancient philosophy.
New York: Routledge.
Chodorow, N. (1978). The reproduction of mothering: Psychoanalysis and the soci-
ology of gender. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Cirant, E. (2012). Una su cinque non lo fa: Maternità e altre scelte. Milano:
Franco Angeli.
Eurostat. (2015). http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/portal/page/portal/population/
data/database. Web. Accessed August 3, 2016.
Firestone, S. (1970). The dialectic of sex: The case for feminist revolution. New
York: Morrow.
Friedan, B. (1963). The feminine mystique. New York: W.W. Norton.
Gergen, K. J. (1991). The saturated self: Dilemma of identities in contemporary
life. New York: Basic Books.
Gillespie, R. (2000). When no means no: Disbelief, disregard and deviance as
discourses of voluntary childlessness. Women’s Studies International Forum,
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Harding, S. (2008). Subjectivity, experience and knowledge: An epistemol-
ogy from/for rainbow coalition politics. Development and Change, 23(3),
175–193.
Ireland, M. S. (1993). Reconceiving women: Separating motherhood from female
identity. New York: Guilford Press.
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Leonardi, P., & Vigliani, F. (2009). Perchè non abbiamo avuto figli: Donne ‘spe-
ciali’ si raccontano. Milano: Franco Angeli.
Letherby, Gayle, & Williams, C. (1999). Non-motherhood: Ambivalent autobi-
ographies. Feminist Studies, 25(3), 719–729.
Marra, E. (2015). Progetto Lunàdigas. Intervista a Marilisa Piga e Nicoletta
Nesler. La deleuziana—rivista online di filosofia—crisi delle biopolitiche
europee, 1, pp. 190–193.
McClintock, Anne. (1995). Imperial leather: Race, gender, and sexuality in the
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Moore, J. (2014). Reconsidering childfreedom: A feminist exploration of discur-
sive identity construction. Women’s Studies in Communication, 37(2), 159–180.
Ong, Walter J. (1982). Orality and literacy: The technologizing of the word.
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Peterson, H., & Engwall, K. (2013). Silent bodies: Childfree women’s gendered and
embodied experiences. European Journal of Women’s Studies, 20(4), 376–389.
Rich, S., et  al. (2001). “Unnatural”, “Unwomanly”, “Uncreditable” and
“Undervalued:” The significance of being a childless woman in Australian
society. Gender Issues, 28(4), 226–247.
Ruspini, E. (2015). Role and perceptions of women in contemporary Italy. In
A. Mammone, E. G. Parini and G. A. Veltri (eds.) The Routledge handbook of
contemporary Italy: History, politics, society (pp. 64–76). London, New York.
Tanturri, M. L., & Mencarini, L. (2004). Time use, family role-set and child-
bearing among Italian working women. Genus, 60(1), 111–137.
Tanturri, M. L., & Mencarini, L. (2008). Childless or childfree? Paths to volun-
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Tanturri, M. L., & Mencarini, L., et al. (2015). State-of-the-art report: Childlessness
in Europe, Tech. Rep. 32, Families and societies working paper series.
Author Biography
Giusy Di Filippo is a lecturer at the University of New Hampshire. She holds
a Ph.D. in Italian from the University of Wisconsin Madison, with a disserta-
tion on women’s writing in the Italian Literature of Migration. Giusy Di Filippo
has written articles on Joseph Conrad, Carlo Goldoni, on motherhood and
murder. Her article ‘Musica e migrazione: ritmi e significati contemporanei’
has been published in January 2017 in the volume La Memoria Delle Canzoni.
Popular Music e Identità Italiana, edited by Alessandro Carrera and published
by Puntoacapo. Her article ‘“Straniero A Chi?” Canzoni e Seconde Generazioni
Nell’Italia Contemporanea’ has been published in January 2017 in the volume
Attraversamenti: Cultura italiana nel terzo millennio, edited by Fulvo Orsitto
and Simona Wright and published by Cesati Editore. She is the co-author of a
textbook on Italian migration literature for advanced students of Italian, pub-
lished in 2017 by Edizioni Farinelli.
CHAPTER 13
Motherhood 2.0: Una Mamma Imperfetta

and the Representation of ‘Imperfect
Motherhood’ in New Media
Maria Elena D’Amelio
We live in an age of media moms. The movie industry has released titles
such as Knocked Up (2007) and Juno (2007), Baby Mama (2008), Soccer
Mom (2008), and Bad Moms (2016), while American reality television
has been inundated with programs such as Birth Stories (2012) and Teen
Mom (MTV). As Elizabeth Podnieks affirms, mothers are nowadays so
pervasive in popular culture that we even create a new lexicon to define
mothers in their various identities in contemporary culture, such as
mompreneurs, momoirists, mozillas, celebmoms, and so on (Podnieks
2012, p. 4). In Italy, while the on-demand platform Sky imported the
above-mentioned U.S.-based reality shows and even produced their
Italian versions (16 anni e incinta), in 2013 the online site of newspa-
per Corriere della Sera launched the critically acclaimed and successful
web-comedy Una mamma imperfetta (from now on UMI), created and
directed by Ivan Cotroneo.1 The web series’ first season was released on
M.E. D’Amelio (*) 
Research Fellow, Center for International Relations, University of the
Republic of San Marino, Montegiardino, Republic of San Marino
e-mail: elena.damelio@gmail.com

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-56675-7_13
258 M.E. D’Amelio
the Internet in 2013 on Corriere.it, and then later broadcasted on the

television channel Rai 2. A second season followed the same iteration,
first released online then aired on television. The series also had a movie
spin-off, Il Natale della mamma imperfetta, released in theaters only for
Christmas Day in 2013, and then broadcasted on Rai 2 on December
27, 2013.
UMI is, thus, an original experiment of what Henry Jenkins called
the ‘convergence culture’ of the new media landscape. Jenkins defines
convergence as ‘the flow of content across multiple media platforms,
the cooperation between multiple media industries, and the migratory
behavior of media audiences who will go almost anywhere in search
of the kinds of entertainment experiences they want’ (2006, p. 2). As
Cecilia Penati claims, indeed, UMI can be defined as ‘webseries going
mainstream’, as it was produced through a collaboration between old
media (movie companies and TV) and new media (the Corriere.it web-
site), thus targeting a wider and older audience than the regular web-
series produced so far in Italy, such as Freaks! and The Pills (Penati 2013,
p. 49). UMI is indeed a media product where ‘old and new media col-
lide’ (Jenkins 2006, p. 2), and where the target audience comprises spec-
tators across multiple media platforms, from the web to TV and cinema.
This approach proved to be successful for the migration of the web series
to TV, since it already targeted an audience that is equally familiar with
web and TV consumption. UMI’s spectatorship strategy therefore aims
to include both the younger web-generation, with its more progres-
sive view of gender roles and women’s rights, and a more traditional
TV-based audience. This dual strategy is reinforced by the content of the
series, a comedy show that alternates between representation of tradi-
tional family structures and alternative and more progressive representa-
tions of motherhood, such as same-sex parenting, single parenting, and
reversals of gender roles in child-caring.
I will begin this article by showing how the series engages with and
problematizes the idea of ‘the perfect mom’, a post-feminist celebration
of mothering centered on motherhood as empowerment among eco-
nomically elite white women (Negra 2009, p. 65). I will focus on how
UMI addresses the discourse of hyper-maternity in Italian society, center-
ing its critique on the deconstruction and parodic vision of the perfect
mom through its opposite, the imperfect mother. I will critically exam-
ine these maternal representations in UMI and seek to contextualize
them within the conflicting and often contradictory discourses around
13 MOTHERHOOD 2.0: UNA MAMMA IMPERFETTA … 259
motherhood in contemporary Italy, focusing in particular on the rep-

resentation of the working mother. Finally, I will analyze the character
of Marta, a happily self-described ‘bad mother,’ and how her parodic
extreme version of careless motherhood works to expose the presence of
conservative discourses of self-sacrificing motherhood in Italian society.
Drawing on feminist media studies, cultural studies, and film and media
history, I seek to explore how UMI aims to challenge preconceived
notions of traditional motherhood representations in the Italian media
landscape, and why the series is only partially successful in negotiating
the representation of new models of motherhood for both online and
TV consumption.
Media Aesthetics, Motherhood,

and the Subject’s Position
Every episode of UMI opens with the main character, Chiara, looking at
the camera and directly addressing her fictional audience. The web series’
format itself, thus, recalls the practices and the aesthetics of social media:
Chiara is a blogger mom who keeps a video-journal of her everyday life
as a working mother.
In her study of representations of motherhood in Twentieth-century
Italian literature, Laura Benedetti claims that literature has devoted very
limited space to mothers as subjects; the representations of motherhood
in Italian literature are often images of the mother seen through the eyes
of their offspring, therefore lacking ‘the ability to assume a position of
enunciation, of saying “I”’ (Benedetti 2007, p. 6). In UMI, the daily
struggles of motherhood are the subjective experiences of Chiara, who
in this case assumes a position of enunciation that empowers her expe-
rience as mother, with her agency as a subject. This format, therefore,
recalls the tradition of female confessional writing, from the second-wave
feminist consciousness-raising novels of the 1960s to the contemporary
post-feminist ‘mommy lit’ that emerged in the 1990s (Whelehan 2012,
p. 162), and centers on the representation of a woman’s experience of
motherhood, as narrated through her own words.
As noted by Whelehan, the main difference between the novels
about the motherhood experience of the 1960s and the mommy lit
of the 1990s is in regard to the different value attributed to the feel-
ing of inadequacy and guilt that haunted many mothers’ experience.
Representations of ‘bad mothers’ at the height of second-wave feminism
260 M.E. D’Amelio
were meant to ‘better interrogate gender politics and patriarchal power’

(Whelehan 2012, p. 147) in order to problematize motherhood as an
institution, as defined by Adrienne Rich (1977). This emergence of new
representations of motherhood in mommy lit and media starting in the
1990s is instead more preoccupied with anxiety about identity, often
communicated through humor and parody, which highlights the cur-
rent obsession over the idea of perfect motherhood. However, as Genz
and Brabon affirm, chick lit’s confessional tone and its reliance upon the
subjective voice results in the ‘failing to move out of the protagonists’
personal sphere and relate the process of confession to a wider context
of female discrimination and social inequality’ (2009, p. 87). Moreover,
as both Whelehan and Negra claim, popular fiction about contempo-
rary motherhood too often resolves the work/childcare dilemma with
a retreat to a simpler life and the consequent abandonment of a more
demanding career (Whelehan 2012, p. 157, and Negra 2009, p. 2).
Therefore, the unattainable model of perfection, which over-achiev-
ing middle-class heterosexual women seem to be chasing, results in a
1950s-style backward comeback to the joy of a stay-at-home mom, in
films such as Baby Boom (1987), Kate and Leopold (2001), Raising Helen
(2004), and the television show Providence (NBC).
The first season of UMI problematizes this apparently insoluble
dilemma between being a good mother and being able to ‘have it all’
through the humorous daily fight between Chiara and her friends—the
imperfect moms—and the antagonists, the perfect mothers embodied by
the ‘playful mom’, ‘organic mom,’ and the worst of all, ‘perfect mom’
Mariolina. While Mariolina’s perfection is often satirized and never pro-
posed as an attainable model, it is still taken by Chiara as a measure of
her own failure as a mother, and her inability to optimally balance a
work/life agenda.
My aim is to analyze how UMI confronts and confounds the myth of
perfect motherhood that dominates the current cultural climate, while at
the same time it also fails to recognize the structures of power that are
still responsible for the continuing persistence of the work/motherhood
dilemma. In doing so I will first explore the critical literature on the ‘per-
fect motherhood’ and ‘bravura motherhood’ discourses and examine
how they are negotiated in the web series. Secondly, I will provide a close
analysis of Episode 8 and its depiction of the working mother. Finally,
I will focus on the character of self-proclaimed ‘bad mother’ Marta, as
UMI’s attempt to criticize through comedy and excess the fetishization

of the maternal instinct still present in today’s Italian society at large.
Perfect Motherhood
In this section, my aim is to explore UMI’s representation of different
models of motherhood and their relationship with post-feminist dis-
courses in Italian society. To do so, it is first necessary to historicize its
maternal representations from post-WWII to the present, in order to
contextualize the globalizing post-feminist discourse within the Italian
culture. The vast majority of critical work about the mother and the
maternal in film has been written about in the Anglo-Saxon academic
world from the 1970s and 1980s on, and maternal melodrama has
claimed center stage. Movies such as Stella Dallas (1937), Now Voyager
(1942), Imitation of Life (1959), and Mildred Pierce (1945) have been
the subjects of endless essays, as maternal melodrama achieved privileged
status, especially among feminist scholars, for its psychoanalytical themes
of mother-child bond, sacrificing versus phallic mother, and questions of
class and race in relation to motherhood.2 According to Arnold, a com-
mon goal of the literature produced in this era is ‘to understand not only
how the mother or the maternal is represented in film, but, most impor-
tantly, what the function of this representation is’ (Arnold 2013, p. 17).
Specifically, Ann E. Kaplan noted that Hollywood cinema has a tendency
to represent the mother either as the good, nurturing one, prone to self-
sacrifice, or her complete opposite, the bad phallic mother who neglects
her offspring (Kaplan 2013). For Kaplan, motherhood is determined as
good or bad according to ‘how willing the mother is to sacrifice her own
desires in order to care for a child’ (Arnold 2013, p. 23).
A similar dichotomy can be traced in Italian cinema, where the nur-
turing, self-sacrificing mother occupied a central place in postwar melo-
dramas, a popular genre that spanned from the late 1940s until the late
1950s, with a series of films starring the couple Amedeo Nazzari and
Yvonne Sanson and directed by Raffaello Matarazzo. Yvonne Sanson’s
characters are often mothers in distress who sacrifice happiness and
health for the sake of their children, perpetuating the trope of the Mater
Dolorosa that has been a central cultural topos in the Italian imaginary
since the 1900s (Orsi 2016, p. 95).3 The motherhood-sacrifice equa-
tion was famously criticized by Sibilla Aleramo in 1906 in her work Una
262 M.E. D’Amelio
Donna.4 In the aftermath of WWII, Italy witnessed a revamping of the

cult of the Virgin Mary, in line with Pope Pius XII’s emphasis on Italian
women as primarily Christian mothers (Benedetti 2007, p. 76). Raffaello
Matarazzo’s melodramas anticipated and negotiated this emphasis cen-
tering on the Mater Dolorosa, the sacrificing mother that, according to
Kristeva, is a patriarchal construct of idealized motherhood invested in
the masochistic fantasy of self-sacrifice: ‘this motherhood is the fantasy
that is nurtured by the adult, man or woman, of a lost territory; what is
more, it involves less an idealized archaic mother than the idealization of
the relationship that binds us to her’ (1985, p. 114).
Following the radical social transformations of Italy during the eco-
nomic boom, such as the legalization of divorce in 1970s and the 1978
abortion law, the feminism movement of the 1970s rejected motherhood
as a dangerous force that would draw women back into domestic oppres-
sion. However, motherhood regained center stage from the mid-1980s
on in the popular media and press, with the publication of a plethora of
mothering manuals and a shift in the representation of mothers in mass
media, which has been theorized as the ‘new momism.’ Related to the
pre-WWII discourse of intensive mothering, the new momism of the
1990s is ‘as pernicious as the happy housewife of the 1950s’ (Whelehan
150), as it is defined by Douglas and Michaels as a ‘set of ideals, norms,
and practices, most frequently and powerfully represented in the media,
that seem on the surface to celebrate motherhood, but which in reality
promulgate standards of perfection that are beyond our reach’ (Podnieks
2012, p. 11).
The first episode of Season 1 opens with Chiara trying to record her
video blog (from now on, vlog) about her daily life, while being con-
stantly interrupted by the demands of her husband and their kids. She
then tries to record it at work, only to be reprimanded by her co-worker
for wasting her time. Chiara finally records her vlog in the early morn-
ing, at home, acknowledging that it is one of the rare moments of
quiet she has had in days. In her first post, Chiara states that she is an
imperfect mother because she always runs late and fails to accomplish
all her daily tasks. Her arch-nemeses are the perfect mothers, who seem
to have everything under control, are always impeccably dressed, bake
cakes, and entertain their kids with multiple fun activities. These per-
fect moms highlight the ‘enduring retroactive myth of perfect mother-
hood’ (Whelehan 148), updated to contemporary cultural obsessions,
such as organic food, educational playtime, helicopter parenting, and so
on. Indeed, in Episode 9, ‘Mamme perfette: il decalogo è questo,’ ‘fun

mom’ accuses the quartet of mothers who are Chiara’s closest friends of
not playing enough with their kids; ‘organic mom’ criticizes them for
not cooking and baking organic food; and ‘perfect mom’ Mariolina’s
judgmental attitude confirms Chiara and her friends’ feeling of inade-
quacy in the task of motherhood.
Mariolina, the perfect mother in UMI, is the parodic embodiment of
traditional ideas about sacrificing motherhood, combined with the new
post-feminist discourses about hyper-maternity and ‘supermom’ ide-
ology. According to Negra, bravura motherhood is a discursive system
that is in place to counteract how the age of reproductive technology
put in crisis the notion of pregnancy as ‘natural’ and primarily a wom-
an’s thing (2009, p. 68). Under the new bravura terms of motherhood,
mothers are now called upon to cultivate and be responsible for every
aspect of their kids’ life, from homework to meals to after-school activi-
ties. In almost every episode of UMI, Chiara is asked to help her kids
with homework, drive them to soccer and dance classes, prepare their
meals and even organize their closets. Inevitably, Chiara fails to live up
to her kids’ expectation of perfection, while Mariolina meets those stand-
ards consistently. Thus, Chiara and her friends are self-defined imper-
fect mothers because they cannot live up to the expectations of bravura
motherhood, ‘a gendered model that advises mothers to expend a tre-
mendous amount of time, energy, and money in raising their children’
(Podnieks 2012, p. 11).
In this way, the show pinpoints how absurdly unfair expectations
about bravura motherhood are in contemporary Italian society, where
women are still expected to singlehandedly carry the burden of child-
care and housework while also working outside the house, a burden that
doesn’t fall on men’s shoulders in equal ways, as the show highlights.
Mother, father, and two school-age children, a boy and a girl, com-
pose Chiara’s nuclear family. The gender dynamic between Chiara and
her husband Davide is very traditional: Chiara is in charge of everything
that relates to the domestic sphere, from cooking to grocery to house-
cleaning, on top of her work as a statistics expert, and Davide is often
seen as coming home late from work and turning on the TV immedi-
ately. This representation of traditional and outdated models of gender
labor division in the house may seem at odds with the progressive take
that UMI adopts for other issues, such as same-sex parenthood, working
motherhood and so on. Moreover, Chiara’s son often thanks the mother
264 M.E. D’Amelio
for ‘making him a boy,’ as he acknowledges that women are expected

to work consistently more than men, both inside and outside the house,
for less social and even financial recognition. As Chiara Saraceno writes,
issues of equal opportunities, gender equality, and work/life balance are
still not a priority in the Italian policy making agenda (2003, p. 224).
The unfairness of the social demands on mothers compared to those on
fathers are represented and negotiated in UMI through humor and par-
ody. Postmodern media productions often use parody as a major form
of self-reflexivity, as a form of imitation characterized by ironic inversion
(Hutcheon 1985, p. 6). The parodic extremization of gender roles in
UMI allows the web series to both address an audience that is the pre-
ferred target of the new momism discourse, and to expose the contradic-
tory and often conservative side of such discourse.
The series positively represents the struggles of Chiara and her friends
to live up to standards of ‘good mothering’ that are often rooted in
the idealization of the mother as naturally caring for her offspring, thus
effacing the work that motherhood involves. As Neyer and Bernardi
claim, ideologically conflating biological and social motherhood ‘denies
that motherhood is work’ (2011, p. 165). A large body of feminist schol-
arship has indeed demonstrated that motherhood seen as the ‘natural’
and necessary consequence of being a woman is instead a social, histori-
cal, legal, political, and philosophical construction (Neyer and Bernardi
2011, p. 165). However, unlike second-wave feminism, which considers
motherhood as complying with the patriarchal system, thus asserting that
the refusal of mothering is the only act of resistance, post-1980s femi-
nist theories refuse to conceptualize ‘woman’ and ‘mother’ as fixed cat-
egories. This refusal opens the possibility of a more nuanced vision of
a woman’s identity, in which ‘being a mother is rather seen as a part of
woman’s identity, equal to many other identities which a woman might
acquire’ (Neyer and Bernardi 2011, p. 167). Moreover, Scarparo and
Luciano point out that since the 2000s, the debates about the complex-
ity of motherhood have been carried on not only in academia and in
feminist presses, but also in the public space of the Internet, where an
increasing number of mothers have used memoirs, blogs, popular media
and websites to reflect on and discuss their supposedly unnatural and
non-maternal feelings of anger, frustration and loneliness (see Scarparo
and Luciano’s article in this volume).
Post-feminism, Media, and Motherhood

UMI’s female-centered narrative, and its focus on relevant contemporary
topics such as working versus stay-at-home moms, good and bad par-
enting, lesbian mothers, self-care, and sacrificing motherhood, poses a
number of questions about post-feminist media representations of moth-
erhood and social change in Italy. Post-feminism in media studies and
popular culture has often been associated with strong female characters
such as Lara Croft, with sexually ‘liberated’ women such as the quartet of
Sex and the City, or with Helen Fielding’s ‘chick heroine’ Bridget Jones,
who has become the ‘poster child’ of postfeminist singlehood (Genz and
Brabon 2009, p. 1). Indeed, UMI centers on four women’s friendship
and thus recalls post-feminist shows such as Sex and the City, as ‘post-
feminist romantic comedies and “chick lit” thrive on strong female
friendship and tales of women juggling impossible commitments’ (Tasker
and Negra 2005, p. 109). Moreover, as Sex and the City’s quartet each
represented a specific type of ‘liberated’ woman, UMI’s quartet members
each represent a specific type of mother: Chiara is the nurturing one,
Claudia is anxious and career-oriented, Irene is the absent-minded intel-
lectual, and Marta is the bad, careless mother.
The association between post-feminism and chick lit proved to be crit-
ically controversial, as theorists alternatively see post-feminism in popular
media as empowering women or, on the opposite, supporting a back-
lash agenda. Popular media representations that have been character-
ized as ‘post-feminist’ often carry contradictory meanings, due in part
to the impossibility of offering a single definition of post-feminism, as
it ‘emerges in the intersections and hybridization of mainstream media,
consumer culture, neo-liberal politics, postmodern theory and, signifi-
cantly, feminism.’ (Genz and Brabon 2009, p. 5). A particular point of
contention is the commodification of feminist principles in a pre-pack-
aged post-feminist chick-lit sold as commodity. As Negra and Tasker
point out,
To some extent, the problem post-feminism poses for scholars interested in

engaging with contemporary gender culture resides precisely in its charac-
teristic double address. The achievement of certain important legal rights
and enhanced visibility for women (in areas including law, politics, and edu-
cation) are positioned alongside a persistently articulated dissatisfaction with
266 M.E. D’Amelio
the rhetoric of second-wave feminism. Thus, the continuing contradiction

between women’s personal and professional lives is more likely to be fore-
grounded in post-feminist discourse than the failure to eliminate either the
pay gap or the burden of care between men and women (2005, p. 108).
Negra is particularly critical of post-feminism, claiming it has caricatured

and distorted the political and social goals of feminism into the parody
of the rigid, anti-romance, bra-burner angry woman, offering in contrast
‘the pleasure and comfort of (re)claiming an identity uncomplicated by
gender politics, postmodernism, or institutional critique’ (2009, p. 2).
Genz and Brabon, however, dissent with such a fixed definition of post-
feminism, affirming that ‘post-feminism is both retro- and neo- in its
outlook and hence irrevocably post-. It is neither a simple rebirth of fem-
inism nor a straightforward abortion (excuse the imagery) but a complex
resignification that harbours within itself the threat of backlash as well as
the potential for innovation’ (2009, p. 8).
In her book What a Girl Wants, Diane Negra reaffirms that the
popular-culture landscape is dominated by the paradigm of women’s
life choice, especially regarding complex issues such as work and moth-
erhood. In other words, post-feminism prefers to reduce the work/
life balance to a feminized dilemma rather than acknowledge the struc-
tural gender inequalities that still permeate the work environment in a
capitalistic society (3). Employing both Negra’s critique of the ‘women’s
choice’ discourse and Genz and Brabon’s problematizing of the term
post-feminism, I will analyze Episode 8 of UMI’s first season, centered
on the vexata quaestio about whether it is preferable for mothers to stay
at home or to work. My claim is that this emblematic episode summarizes
the complex and often contradictory representations of motherhood in
the series, oscillating between progressive stances and backlash messages.
Episode 8 opens with Chiara talking about her work/childcare bal-
ance and wondering if she would be better off as a stay-at-home mom.
Addressing her virtual audience in her vlog daily entry, Chiara men-
tions both Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, who was appointed CEO while
heavily pregnant, and Anne-Marie Slaughter’s much-talked about essay
‘Why Women Cannot Have It All,’ which can be read as a reaction to
the ‘lean in’ philosophy embodied by Marissa Mayer and popularized
by Sheryl Sandberg’s eponymous book. Both Sheryl Sandberg’s book
and Slaughter’s article had a major impact on American culture and on
the discourses that surround women, motherhood, and work, albeit for
opposite reasons. Lean In is a book written by Sheryl Sandberg , the

chief operating officer of Facebook, and Nell Scovell, TV and magazine
writer. The book was written, according to the author, to help women
achieve their goals, specifically to achieve the same success as men in the
business environment. Sandberg’s book received both popular acclaim as
a ‘new feminist text,’ and harsh criticism for being reactionary and just
a corporate-backed campaign in favor of the status quo. While popular
icons such as Oprah Winfrey called her book ‘the new voice of revolu-
tionary feminism,’ feminist theorists such as bell hooks and Susan Faludi
criticized it for ignoring the damaging effects of systemic gender bias
and the concrete systemic obstacles most women face inside the work-
force.5 Specifically, in her article ‘Dig Deep: Beyond Lean In’, hooks
called Sheryl Sandberg’s definition of feminism a ‘faux feminism,’ as ‘it
begins and ends with the notion that it’s all about gender equality within
the existing social system. From this perspective, the structures of impe-
rialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy need not to be challenged.
And she makes it seem that privileged white men will eagerly choose to
extend the benefits of corporate capitalism to white women who have the
courage to “lean in”’ (hooks 2013).
The systemic inequality that plagues the workplace, and not the
lack of will and perseverance, is the real obstacle to achieving equal-
ity on the workplace, according to bell hooks. A similar thesis is at the
center of Slaughter’s essay, which can be read as a reaction to the ‘lean
in’ philosophy. Written by the former Dean of Princeton University’s
Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, the arti-
cle was prompted by a personal experience of the author, who had to
resign from the role of Director of Policy Planning for the U.S. State
Department under U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, due to the
fact that the high demands of her jobs interfered with the wellbeing
of her teenage kids. In her article Slaughter stated that, although in a
privileged position and with the support of her partner, who became
the primary caregiver of their kids during her work in Washington, she
eventually had to return home because her older boy’s personal issues
required her attention. Thus, unlike the ‘lean in’ theory of hard work
and perseverance, Slaughter pointed to a system that is unbalanced in
favor of work over family and childcare, and urges both men and women
to change that system. What she proposes is flexible hours, the possibil-
ity of working from home, and in general fighting the cultural stigma of
the working mother as a less efficient employee. In her words, ‘We must
268 M.E. D’Amelio
insist on changing social policies and bending career tracks to accommo-

date our choices, too. We have the power to do it if we decide to, and we
have many men standing beside us’ (2012).
Slaughter’s essay is mentioned by Chiara in Episode 8, centered on
the work-versus-childcare dilemma. The episode opens with Patrizia
from Naples, one of the followers of Chiara’s vlog. Patrizia, a mother
of three with a job at the Post Office, states that she too is an imper-
fect mom, but she is happy anyway. The episode then cuts to a scene
in which Chiara’s mother-in-law Vittoria picks up her grandchildren
from school and blames Chiara for not being there for her kids because
she has to work. The scene is revealed to be imagined by Chiara, trig-
gered by her guilt about being a working mother, which prompts her to
confide to her friends about her recurrent thoughts of quitting her job.
While stating that she loves her job, Chiara brings in Slaughter’s essay
about women who cannot have it all, to ask whether she should quit her
job and be a stay-at-home mom. The following scene is again a fantasy
in which Chiara, dressed as a 1950s posh housewife, welcomes home her
husband and kids with a smile, congratulating herself for having quit her
job and having had time to clean, cook, bake and even organize the clos-
ets. The scene cuts back to Chiara asking in her vlog entry whether her
family would be happy to have her home all the time. Another one of
Chiara’s fantasies shows her kids being utterly displeased with her ‘heli-
coptering’ presence, and even her husband seems not so happy to have
a housewife as a partner. Eventually she talks to her boss, who claims
her guilt comes from her mother’s era, the 1960s, in which the work-
ing mother was stigmatized. The episode then closes with Chiara looking
fondly, almost lovingly at her desk, before turning off the office lights to
go home. The episode’s message is clear: not only is Chiara presented as
a good employee who loves her job, but she is also praised by her boss
and supported by her husband.
As Whelehan states, while 1970s feminist critiques of motherhood
‘deftly exposed the ways in which the private sphere upheld male power
by finding recourse to nature to explain the highly social evolved role of
the mother in Western society,’ post-feminist chick lit is permeated by
the myth of perfect motherhood and how to obtain it. Often, the way
to obtain it is to give up career and city life and retreat to a backward
move to the countryside, regressing to a nostalgic, mythical past of bliss-
ful domesticity, far from the rat race of having it all (2012, p. 163).
UMI implicitly disagrees with these positions, representing women

like Chiara and Patrizia, who are proud of their jobs and their life out-
side motherhood, along with being dutiful moms. On the surface, the
show seems to take a position more in line with the feminist critique of
motherhood as institution, than with postfeminist fantasies of retreat
and domestic life. However, before the closing scene, Chiara states that
the last words regarding family life versus work dilemma belongs to
Patrizia from Naples, who sent her a video message in which she reaf-
firms how she likes her imperfect life as it is, because it’s what she chose.
Her last words are ‘because I choose so.’ Hence, the show reduces the
work/childcare dilemma down to personal choice, clearly preferring
the working mother as the epitome of the new, liberated, post-feminist
woman.
As Negra points out, the rhetoric of ‘choice’ that permeates post-
feminist fiction centered on motherhood is a distorted rendition of spe-
cific issues of inequality and systemic gender imbalance (2009, p. 4).
When popular media representations reduce this feminized dilemma
of life/childcare to a personal choice, they fail to acknowledge the sys-
temic inequality in the workplace that is the primary cause of the lack of
a healthy work-life balance that most mothers lament. UMI’s reduction
to a mere individual choice recalls bell hooks’ critique of the faux femi-
nism of Sandberg’s book, as she states that ‘it almost seems as Sandberg
sees women’s lack of perseverance as more the problem than systemic
inequality’ (2013).
The show does acknowledge that the opportunity to be both a
mother and a professional is inextricably linked to a workplace that sup-
ports and favors mothers, in the character of Chiara’s boss, who hired
her while she was already a mother and even gave her a promotion
despite the fact that she cannot commit to long hours or to late after-
noon meetings like her childfree colleague can. However, the web series
is quick to point out that a boss like Chiara’s is one in a million, and
does not reflect at all the reality of the Italian workplace.6 That is why
the show functions as a postfeminist fantasy in which major issues such as
work/life balance, the role of fathers and how mothers can continue to
have a career are negotiated in a humorous way, but fail to challenge ‘the
social structures underpinning and influencing women’s place in Italian
society’ (Lazzari and Charnley 2016, p. 3).
270 M.E. D’Amelio
Specifically, Italy has seen its birth rate dramatically drop in the past
20 years and now has record low fertility rates. As Titti di Salvo, Vice
President of the Pd group at the Deputy Chamber, writes for the
Huffington Post, 27% of Italian women leave their jobs after having a
child, not because they don’t like it or they don’t want to ‘lean in,’ but
mostly due to lack of affordable and available childcare options, and a
gendered pay gap that still favors men over women.7 Although progress
has been made, such as maternal and parental leave and finally a law
against the ‘dimissioni in bianco,’8 the work/life dilemma for women is
still not resolved, and continues well into the twenty-first century.
Marta, the ‘Bad Mother’

As Lazzari states, ‘[w]omen’s options have increased and broadened,
and they can now envisage combining a successful career with mother-
hood, but social structures have not kept pace and in spite of all the fem-
inist gains on contraception, abortion and divorce, “childcare” remains
above all a “female” concern’ (2016, p. 5). Among the quartet of moms
of UMI, three of them are indeed represented in a ‘traditional’ family,
where the women carry most of the childcare burden. The character who
mostly challenges the still traditional view of the mother as the primary
caregiver is Marta. Described by her friends as careless and selfish, Marta
consciously refuses to be trapped in the role of the sacrificing, nurtur-
ing mother. Having given birth to triplets, all boys, she set up a sur-
vival strategy that includes heavily involving her husband in child care,
guilt-free trips to the theatre on her own, and ‘forgetting’ her kids at
her friends’ houses or even at school. While Chiara, Irene, and Claudia
meet their self-described inadequacy at motherhood with feelings of guilt
and willingness to improve, Marta is the only one among the imper-
fect moms group who sees her imperfect condition without any issue.
She is portrayed as strong-willed, cold, and a bit careless, as she always
puts herself and her sanity first, while her husband is depicted as ‘emas-
culated’ and dominated by her will. In the first episode, while Chiara
refuses to even stop at the cafe for breakfast because she needs to run
errands for the entire family, Marta not only decides to open her store
late, but also in the afternoon leaves her three kids at the playground to
go see a movie. If Chiara, the main character of UMI, ‘is presented as
the steady, loving person who time and again met the emotional needs
of her children’ (Feasey 2012, p. 31), Marta embodies the extreme
parodic representation of the bad mother, who often pretends to be sick

and spends weekends in bed, reading and relaxing, while her husband is
forced to take care of the kids and the house, in a parodic reversal of the
traditional patriarchal family.
Especially revealing is the fact that Marta is the mother of three
boys, and she actively refuses the trope of the doting mother who ideal-
izes her sons. Indeed, as Benedetti writes, the model of the nurturing
mother who idealizes the male offspring has been a constant theme in
Italian literature and in social discourses since the mid-1800s, when the
functions of procreation, nursing and education—played by different
individuals up to then—were combined into a single figure: that of the
mother as primary caregiver in the family home. This new role of the
mother as solely responsible for her offspring’s well-being has been seen
as a counterpart of the increasingly widespread cult of the Virgin Mary,
which reached its climax in 1854 with the dogma of the Immaculate
Conception (Benedetti 2007, p. 7), a cult that was revamped in post-war
Italy in line with Pope Pius XII’s emphasis on ‘the Christian mother’ as
‘the true strength and pride of Italy’ (Benedetti 2007, p. 76).
However, both at the turn of the century and in 1970s Italy, two
powerful novels written by women aimed to highlight the contradictions
and limitations imposed on women by this restricted view of mother-
hood. Sibilla Aleramo with Una donna (A Woman, 1906) investigated
the sacrifices that motherhood imposed upon the rights of a woman and
called motherhood a ‘legacy of slavery’ passed from mother to daugh-
ter (Benedetti 2007, p. 8); Oriana Fallaci in Lettera ad un bambino mai
nato explored the ambivalent feelings of a prospective mother dedicated
to ‘those who face the challenge of giving life or denying it’ (Benedetti
2007, p. 9). These two literary examples of women revelling in the trope
of sacrificing motherhood reverberate in the character of Marta, the ‘bad
mom’ of UMI.
As Rebecca Feasey states, the situation comedy is the genre most
capable of responding to and negotiating social, sexual, and attitudinal
developments within society. Thanks to its comedic narrative, this genre
is often able to ‘smuggle’ in progressive and challenging ideas under a
light-hearted veneer (2012, p. 32). In the web series, Marta’s ‘radical’
behavior and apparent carelessness towards her kids is of course func-
tional to the surreal and ironic narrative style of Ivan Cotroneo’s script.
However, her ‘extreme’ representation as a mother who lacks maternal
instinct and subverts traditional gender roles in marriage works as the
272 M.E. D’Amelio
most stringent critique of the climate surrounding Italian motherhood.

Marta’s refusal to conform to an idealized image of motherhood high-
lights the constrictions, limitations, and unattainable requests of perfec-
tion that are imposed upon Italian mothers.
UMI aims to challenge normative notions of womanhood and ideal-
ized motherhood by making it clear that bravura motherhood is unat-
tainable and that mothering children is ‘chaotic, conflict-ridden, and a
constant hassle’ (Feasey 2012, p. 40). The series has the merit of dis-
cussing through irony and surrealism the stigma of bad mothers that
surrounds women who do not conform to the stereotype of the self-
sacrificing, good Italian mamma. However, UMI presents the struggle
to combine work and childcare that imperfect mothers Chiara, Irene,
Claudia and Marta face, as a personal problem based on their own short-
comings, and as such it fails to acknowledge that working mothers are
struggling against ‘corporate inflexibility’ (Feasey 2012, p. 46), work-
place systemic discriminations, and societal pressure to conform to the
unrealizable ideals of middle-class perfect domesticity. In representing
the four protagonist mothers as imperfect, UMI negotiates the complex-
ity of current discourses on motherhood in contemporary Italy, where
women still find themselves torn between strong traditions, contempo-
rary expectations, and new family models that are re-mapping what it
means to be a mother in the age of new media.
Notes
1. Web series are ‘fictional productions made and designed for the Internet
with a series structure, multiple narrative nuclei and an array of specific
rhetorical resources that allow for the telling of fiction’s vicissitudes, with
the aim of capturing and maintaining the viewer’s attention one episode at
a time.’ Romero and Centellas (2008, p. 6).
2. For more on this subject, see Kaplan (2013), Gledhill (1987), Fischer (2014).
3. See also Landy’s essay ‘In the Name of the Mother: Fascist Melodrama to
the Maternal Horrific in the Films of Dario Argento’ in this volume.
4. Sibilla Aleramo is very vocal in her condemnation of the motherhood-sacri-
fice equation: ‘Perchè nella maternità adoriamo il sacrifizio? Donde è scesa
in noi questa inumana idea dell’immolazione materna?’ (1994, p. 144).
5. http://thebaffler.com/salvos/facebook-feminism-like-it-or-not.
6. Chiara Saraceno’s analysis shows that Italy is one of the European coun-
tries with the lowest employment rates for women, and that a high per-
centage of women still quit their jobs after the birth of their children
(Saraceno 2003, pp. 206–207).
7. h ttp://www.huffingtonpost.it/titti-di-salvo/non-e-paese-per-donne-
maternita-italia-_b_7838500.html.
8. ‘Dimissioni in bianco’ (to sign an undated letter of resignation) is an illegal
practice aimed at forcing new employees to sign an undated resignation
letter, together with the signing of the employment contract. This practice
is used above all to be able to fire women employees without any compen-
sation in the event they become pregnant.
Works Cited
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eth-century Italy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Faludi, S. (2013). Facebook feminism, like it or not. The Baffler, 23. Web.
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2016.
Feasey, R. (2012). From happy homemaker to desperate housewives: Motherhood
and popular television. London: Anthem Press.
Fischer, L. (2014). Cinematernity: Film, motherhood, genre. Princeton: Princeton
University Press.
Genz, S., & Brabon, B. A. (2009). Postfeminism: Cultural texts and theories.
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Gledhill, C. (1987). Home is where the heart is: Studies in melodrama and the
woman’s film. London: British Film Inst.
hooks, b. (2013). Dig Deep: Beyond Lean. In The feminist wire, October 23.
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September 15, 2016.
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Jenkins, H. (2006). Convergence culture: Where old and new media collide. New
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Lazzari, L., & Charnley, J. (2016). To be or not to be a mother: Choice, refusal,
reluctance and conflict. Motherhood and female identity in Italian literature
and culture. Intervalla, 1, pp. 94–110.
Negra, D. (2009). What a girl wants? Fantasizing the reclamation of self in post-
feminism. New York: Routledge.
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Neyer, G., & Bernardi, L. (2011). Feminist perspectives on motherhood

and reproduction. Historical Social Research/Historische Sozialforschung,
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Ferrante e la demitizzazione della maternità. Intervalla, 1, pp. 94–110.
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eralista nelle web series?’ 8 1/2(Ottobre), pp. 49–49.
Podnieks, E., ed. (2012). Mediating moms: Mothers in popular culture. McGill-
Queen’s Press-MQUP.
Rich, A. (1977). Of woman born: Motherhood as experience and institution. New
York: Norton.
Romero, N. L., & Centellas, F. C. (2008). New stages, new narrative forms:
The Web 2.0 and audiovisual language. In Hipertext. net-Anuario Académico
sobre Documentación Digital y Comunicación Interactiva. Universitat Pompeu
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Sandberg, S. (2013). Lean in: Women, work, and the will to lead. New York:
Random House.
Saraceno, C. (2003). La conciliazione di responsabilità familiari e attività lavora-
tive in Italia: Paradossi ed equilibri imperfetti. Polis, 17(2), pp. 199–228.
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Author Biography
Maria Elena D’Amelio (Ph.D., State University of New York - Stony Brook)
is Research Fellow at the Center for International Relations of the University of
the Republic of San Marino. She is the author of Ercole, il divo (AIEP 2013),
and of essays and peer-reviewed articles on genre cinema, male stardom, and
film history, including ‘The Hybrid Star: Steve Reeves, Hercules and the Politics
of Transnational Whiteness (Journal of Italian Cinema & Media Studies 2:2,
pp. 259–277), and ‘Stardom’ (Oxford Bibliographies Online: Cinema and Media
Studies). Her current research interests include transnational studies, media
archaeology, and gender representations in film and media.
Appendix
Motherhood on Screen: A Film Catalog

from 1945 to the Present
Amato, Giuseppe, dir.Yvonne la Nuit(Yvonne of the Night), 1949

Yvonne is a cabaret artist who loves and is loved in return by Carlo, an
Italian aristocrat, with whose baby she becomes pregnant. When he dies
in WWI and she gives birth, Carlo’s father takes the baby away and tells
her that the baby is dead. Yvonne’s career and life subsequently unravel
and when she discovers the truth about her child, she decides not to
bring him back into her life.
Antonioni, Michelangelo, dir.L’amore in città(Love in the City),
1953
In the fifth of this six-episode film, Storia di Caterina, by Francesco
Maselli e Cesare Zavattini, the jobless Caterina abandons her young child
at a Catholic orphanage, only to return to claim him again the next day.
Antonioni, Michelangelo, dir.Il deserto rosso(Red Desert), 1964
Giuliana (Monica Vitti) has a young son, Valerio, with her industrialist
husband, Ugo. After a car accident, however, she is unable to overcome
her feelings of alienation and indifference toward life.
Archibugi, Francesca, dir.Mignon è partita(Mignon Has Come to
Stay), 1988
Mignon is a sophisticated Parisian teenager. When her mother sends
her away from Paris to live with relatives in Rome, after her father’s con-
struction company comes under investigation in France, Mignon feels
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017 275

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-56675-7
276 Appendix
abandoned. In Rome, she becomes the center of a series of complicated

romantic entanglements, at the end of which she declares that she is
pregnant in order to regain her mother’s attention.
Archibugi, Francesca, dir.Il grande cocomero(The Great Pumpkin),
1993
A child psychiatrist tries to help Pippi, whose apparent epilepsy is
revealed to be connected to her family dynamics.
Argento, Asia, dir.Ingannevole è il cuore più di ogni cosa(Heart is
deceitful above all things), 2004
Jeremiah is returned to his biological mother after spending six years
with adoptive parents. His mother is a drug user. Her husband abuses
Jeremiah and he is moved to an institutional setting, from which he
moves into his grandparents’ home, where he suffers more abuse. Once
he becomes an adult, his mother tries to reconnect and restore her rela-
tionship with him.
Argento, Dario, dir.Profondo Rosso (Deep Red),1975
After witnessing the murder of a famous psychic, a musician teams up
with a reporter to find the killer, while evading attempts on their lives by
the unseen assailant bent on keeping a dark secret buried.
Argento, Dario, dir.Suspiria, 1977
The first film of the trilogy ‘The Three Mothers,’ loosely based on the
ideas of the three Ladies of Sorrow, about a triumvirate of evil witches
who haunt buildings in three different cities. In Suspiria, the haunted
house is Freiburg’s Tanz Academy, where the American ballet student
Suzy uncovers mysterious and fatal happenings that are orchestrated by a
teacher, Miss Tanner (Alida Valli).
Argento, Dario, dir.Inferno, 1980
In the second film of the trilogy ‘The Three Mothers,’ Alida Valli is
the Mater Tenebrarum, who poses as a caregiver for an elderly resident
of a New York City apartment building, where a poet, Rose, has disap-
peared after reading an ancient book entitled The Three Mothers.
Argento, Dario, dir.Phenomena, 1985
Jennifer is a boarding school student who has the psychic ability to
communicate with insects and uses it to track down a serial killer, who is
revealed to be one of the school’s staff members, Frau Brückner, who is
trying to protect her deformed son.
Argento, Dario, dir.La terza madre(The Mother of Tears), 2007
The last film in The Three Mothers trilogy ends with the destruction
of the Mater Lachrymarum in the collapse of ancient catacombs outside
of Rome.
Appendix 277
Avati, Pupi. dir.Il Papà di Giovanna(Giovanna’s Father), 2008

In 1930s Italy, Giovanna kills one of her classmates, due to a fit of
jealousy, and is interned in a psychiatric hospital. Giovanna’s mental ill-
ness is due to the distance in her family dynamics and her excessive close-
ness to and dependence on her father.
Bellocchio, Marco, dir.L’ora di religione (Il sorriso di mia
madre)(My Mother’s Smile), 2002
The murder of a devout woman by her deranged son is exploited by
her family, who pretend she was a Catholic martyr and launch a process
of canonization.
Bellocchio, Marco, dir.Vincere(To Win), 2009
The story of Ida Dalser, first wife of Benito Mussolini, and her son,
Benito Albino Mussolini, whose existence Mussolini actively hid. Both of
them were institutionalized in psychiatric hospitals and died there.
Bertolucci, Bernardo, dir.Io ballo da sola(Stealing Beauty), 1996
In this coming-of-age story, Lucy Harmon travels to Tuscany to find
out more about her mother, who has recently committed suicide, and
perhaps discover who her father is.
Bondi, Federico, dir.Mar Nero, 2008
Angela is the Romanian caregiver to Gemma, an Italian woman with a
difficult temperament. She has migrated to Italy in order to make it pos-
sible for her and her husband to have and support a family. Angela man-
ages to break through Gemma’s prejudice and they become as close as
mother and daughter.
Bruno, Alessandra, dir.Stato Interessante, 2015
In this documentary, five women without children, between 38 and
43 years old, ask themselves whether they want a child before it is too
late, or whether they should remain childfree.
Brusati, Franco, dir.Il disordine(Disorder), 1964
Mario encounters various characters of the decadent haute-bourgeoi-
sie in Milan while trying to help his sick and needy mother, who lives in
a nursing home.
Capone, Alessandro, dir.L’amore nascosto (Hidden Love),2009
The secrets and hidden pain of a mother recovering from a sui-
cide attempt reveal themselves through a series of sessions with her
psychiatrist.
Castellitto, Sergio, dir.Non ti muovere(Don’t Move), 2004
Based on Margaret Mazzantini’s novel, the film follows Timoteo, a
surgeon, as he rapes—and subsequently imagines he has fallen in love—
with Italia, an Albanian sex worker. When Italia becomes pregnant,
278 Appendix
Timoteo decides to leave his wife for her, but his wife, too, announces
that she is pregnant. Timoteo hesitates and Italia decides to have a clan-
destine abortion, telling Timoteo that she would not be a good mother.
A few months later Timoteo runs into Italia, who eventually dies because
of her botched abortion, despite Timoteo’s attempts to save her.
Castellitto, Sergio, dir.Venuto al mondo(Twice Born), 2012
Gemma decides to visit Sarajevo with her son, Pietro. The two
of them had left Sarajevo soon after his birth during the Bosnian war.
Pietro’s father, Diego, died in the war. But Pietro is not Gemma’s bio-
logical son, as he was conceived by Diego and Aska, who accepted to
serve as surrogate for Gemma.
Comencini, Cristina, dir.Il più bel giorno della mia vita(The Best
Day of My Life), 2002
The secrets of a dysfunctional family are revealed through the perspec-
tive of Chiara, who is about to receive her First Communion.
Comencini, Cristina, dir.Quando la notte(When the Night), 2011
Marina decides to spend her summer vacation in the mountains
in order to help her two-year-old son sleep better. Indeed, she is sleep
deprived and has a hard time managing her temper. She becomes close
to Manfred, her landlord, who helps her find a certain balance in her
relationship with her son.
Comencini, Francesca, dir.Mi piace lavorare(Mobbing), 2004
Anna works as an administrative coordinator in a large company that
has been absorbed by a multinational corporation. Despite her passion
for her job, she is increasingly given meaningless tasks that cause her to
become depressed. Her relationship with her daughter, Morgana, will
give her the will to fight and win a lawsuit against the company, with the
support of the labor unions.
Comencini, Francesca, dir.A casa nostra(Our Country), 2006
A dark view of life in Milan, where lives are driven by greed and
power. The lives of women who wish to become mothers but are unable
to, prostitutes who find themselves pregnant, and unknown fathers cross
paths without ever actually meeting.
Comencini, Francesca, dir.Lo spazio bianco(The White Space),
2009
Maria is single and finds herself unexpectedly pregnant after a short
affair. Her daughter, Irene, is born prematurely and spends three months
in the NICU. This time, spent waiting, is the white, or blank space of the
title.
Appendix 279
Comencini, Francesca, dir.Un giorno speciale(A Special Day), 2012

Gina is an aspiring actress. Her mother convinces her to meet a politi-
cian who could advance her career.
Cotroneo, Ivan, dir.Il Natale della mamma imperfetta (The
Imperfect Mom’s Christmas Day),2013
Four mothers, long-time friends, decide to spend Christmas Eve
together with their husbands and kids. But the stress of organizing eve-
rything will put their friendship to a test.
Covi, Tizzia, dir.La pivellina(Little girl), 2011
An aging circus performer, looking for her lost dog, finds a lost child
instead, and she and her husband take her in.
Crialese, Emanuele, dir.Terraferma, 2011
Giulietta is a widow from Linosa who wants to leave the island with
her son to look for a job on the terraferma; her aspirations intersect with
the life of Sara, an Ethiopian migrant who is trying to reach her husband,
who works in Turin, with her son and her unborn baby. Giulietta helps
Sara deliver a baby daughter, who is revealed to be the result of rapes
Sara suffered in a Libyian detention camp.
Crialese, Emanuele, dir.Respiro, 2002
Grazia lives with her fisherman husband and three children in
Lampedusa. Her eccentric behavior puts her often at odds with the local
community, who would like her to leave the island to seek treatment in
Northern Italy. Her relationship with her elder son, Pasquale, is particu-
larly important in the film.
De Sica, Vittorio, dir.La ciociara(Two Women), 1960
Sofia Loren is Cesira, a widow who leaves Rome in advance of the
Allies’ bombing of the city together with her teenage daughter, Rosetta.
When they are gang raped by a group of Moroccan soldiers, Rosetta is
traumatized.
De Sica,Vittorio, dir.Ieri oggi domani(Yesterday, Today,
Tomorrow), 1963
In this film, Sofia Loren plays three different women in three differ-
ent episodes. In the first she is Adelina, a Neapolitan black-market seller,
who chooses to have seven children in eight years in order to avoid being
incarcerated for failure to pay a fine.
Di Gregorio, Gianni, dir.Pranzo di ferragosto(Mid-August Lunch),
2008
Gianni is forced to spend Ferragosto with his 93-year-old mother and
a group of other elderly women. Among them are the mother and aunt
280 Appendix
of his landlord and his doctor’s mother. In exchange for his time, his
considerable debt will be forgiven.
Di Gregorio, Gianni, dir.Gianni e le donne(The Salt of Life), 2011
Gianni is devoted to his elderly mother, his working wife, and his
college-age daughter, but his friend Alfonso persuades him to look for a
younger lover.
Faenza, Roberto, dir.Marianna Ucrìa, 1997
Marianna, a Sicilian aristocrat, is deaf and mute. She is forced by her
parents to marry her elderly uncle, zio Pietro, with whom she has three
children. Their tutor, Grass, introduces her to Enlightenment philosophy
and encourages her independence, which she reclaims when Pietro dies,
and she realizes that her family had always hidden from her the traumatic
reason for her disability.
Fellini, Federico, dir.La strada(The Road), 1954
Gelsomina’s mother sells her to Zampanò for 10,000 Lira, the way
that she had sold her older daughter, Rosa, a few years before.
Fizzarotti, Armando, dir.Te sto aspettanno, 1956
Maria’s adoptive mother encourages her to accept the rich womanizer
Alfredo’s proposal, but after Maria discovers that Alfredo has a child by
another woman, she leaves him and goes back to her first love, Carlo.
Freda, Riccardo, dir.Follia omicida(Murder Obsession), 1981
The film actor, Michael Stanford, is suffering from mental fatigue,
which leads to disturbing behaviors. He thus decides to spend some time
off set with his fellow cast members at his mother’s house. His mother
is a beautiful woman and a gracious host to the film artists, but seems
to harbor hostile feelings toward her son. When her guests begin to be
murdered, all suspicion falls on the disturbed Michael.
Gianpalmo, Livia, dir.Evelina e i suoi figli, 1990
Evelina (Stefania Sandrelli) lives with her difficult adolescent boys, but
the real problems begin when she meets an old flame.
Giordana, Marco Tullio, dir.I cento passi(One Hundred Steps),
2000
The story of anti-Mafia Sicilian activist, Peppino Impastato, who was
killed by the Badalamenti clan in 1978. The film gives emphasis to the
relationship between Impastato and his mother.
Giordana, Marco Tullio, dir.La meglio gioventù(The Best of Youth),
2003
The family saga of the Caratis, who are variously involved in the most
significant events of Italian history from 1966 to 2003.
Appendix 281
Giovannesi, Claudio, dir.Alì ha gli occhi azzurri(Alì Blue-Eyes),

2012.
Inspired by the poetry of Pier Paolo Pasolini, the film tells of the hard
life of two teenagers, Stefano and Nader, in a Roman suburb. Stefano is
Italian while Nader is from an Egyptian family settled in Ostia.
Guadagnino, Luca, dir.Io sono l’amore (I Am Love),2009
Emma left Russia to live with her husband in Italy. Now a member
of a powerful industrial family, she is the respected mother of three, but
feels unfulfilled. Her affair with Antonio, a talented chef and her son’s
friend, precipitates the dissolution of the family.
Marazzi, Alina, dir.Un’ora sola ti vorrei, 2002
Marazzi pieces together the story of her mother, Liseli Hoepli, who
committed suicide when she was a child, through her grandfather’s
home videos, fragments of diaries, letters, and documents from hospital
archives.
Marazzi, Alina, dir.Tutto parla di te (All About You), 2012.
The film tells the story of two women and their encounter. Pauline
is a middle-aged woman who returns to her hometown of Turin after a
fifty year absence; Emma is a dancer and new mother. The two women
meet at a local women’s health clinic that supports pregnant women and
new mothers, where Pauline is helping to set up an archive that collects
stories of women’s maternal experiences.
Maresca, Angelo, dir.La madre, 2013
Based on Grazia Deledda’s novel, La madre, the film follows the spir-
itual crisis that Father Paolo suffers when he falls in love with the young
Agnese. He is tormented by his mother’s feelings of guilt, which she can
assuage only through her son’s priesthood, seen as expiation for her own
sins.
Martone, Mario, dir.L’amore molesto (Nasty Love), 1995
Based on Elena Ferrante’s eponymous novel, the film follows Delia’s
journey through Naples, the city where she grew up, following her
mother’s death by drowning. Delia uncovers disturbing events from her
past that she had buried in her memory and comes to understand her
mother more fully.
Matarazzo, Raffaello, dir.Catene (Chains),1949
The first of Matarazzo’smelodramas often centers on maternal figures.
Guglielmo and Rosa are married and have two kids, Tonino and Angela.
Emilio, Rosa’s ex-boyfriend, blackmails her in order to win her back.
Tonino, mistakenly thinking that her mother is having an affair with
282 Appendix
Emilio, reports her to Guglielmo, who kills Emilio and flees to America,
but is sent back to Italy to stand trial. The only way he can be set free
is if his wife confesses to adultery—so the murder can be considered a
crime of passion—but this estranges her from her family.
Matarazzo, Raffaello, dir.Guai ai vinti, 1954
Based on a novel by Annie Vivanti. Clara and Luisa are raped when
their villa is stormed by Austrian troops after the defeat at Caporetto.
Luisa’s daughter, who has witnessed the violence, loses her power of
speech. When Luisa and Clara discover that they are pregnant, Luisa
seeks an abortion, while Clara decides to continue with the pregnancy.
When her fiancé finds out about the baby, he first rejects her but ends up
being reconciled with her decision.
Melliti, Mohsen, dir.Io, l’altro(I, the Other), 2007
Motherhood is present in this film only indirectly. The boat of the two
fishermen protagonists is called Medea, like the barbarian princess who
killed her children in revenge for Jason’s betrayal. The two men also find
the corpse of a drowned migrant woman carrying a picture of a child,
presumably her daughter.
Monicelli, Mario, dir.Speriamo che sia femmina(Let’s Hope It’s a
Girl), 1986
Elena lives with her daughters, a housekeeper, and various other
women relatives and friends in a farmhouse in Tuscany, after separat-
ing from her husband, Count Leonardo. During one of his visits to seek
money for an investment, he dies in a car accident. His death precipitates
a series of events that seem to threaten the order of the women’s lives.
Moretti, Nanni, dir.La messa è finita(The Mass Is Ended), 1985
Father Giulio returns to Rome after a long mission abroad. Upon his
return, his father leaves his mother for a much younger woman and his
mother commits suicide. His sister, in turn, decides to abort her distant
boyfriend Simone’s child and go to live on her own. Giulio decides to go
to Patagonia and return to his missionary work.
Moretti, Nanni, dir.La stanza del figlio(The Son’s Room), 2001
A psychoanalyst and his family go through profound emotional
trauma when their son dies in a scuba diving accident. Giovanni, the
father, begins to obsessively dwell on the missed chances he had with his
son that might have saved his life. His wife Paola and his daughter Irene
are becoming anti-social in their loss. In the midst of this turmoil, they
uncover a secret in their son’s life that provides healing in a way they
never anticipated.
Appendix 283
Moretti, Nanni, dir.Mia madre(My Mother), 2015

Margherita (Margherita Buy) is a successful movie director who tries
to navigate the challenges of her latest movie and its capricious star while
in the midst of a personal crisis: the fatal illness of her mother, who is
cared for by her brother, played by Moretti himself.
Muccino, Gabriele, dir.Come te nessuno mai(But Forever in My
Mind), 1999
The film explores the generational conflicts between its teenage pro-
tagonists and their parents, at a time of romantic and political turmoil in
their lives.
Muccino, Gabriele, dir.L’ultimo bacio(The Last Kiss), 2001
When Giulia tells her partner, Carlo, that she is pregnant, he is ter-
rified of the responsibility and finds escape in a short-lived relationship
with a young acquaintance; Giulia’s mother also has a middle-age crisis,
and Livia’s and Adriano’s marriage is rocked by her obsession with their
newborn.
Muccino, Gabriele, dir.Ricordati di me(Remember Me My Love),
2003
The Ristuccia family’s apparent harmony is broken when its members’
individual secrets come to light.
Nicchiarelli, Susanna, dir.Il terzo occhio (The Third Eye), 2003
In a spa in Caramanico Terme, six women of different ages and back-
grounds discuss sexuality, motherhood, femininity, and physicality.
Nicchiarelli, Susanna, dir.Cosmonauta(Cosmonaut), 2009
Luciana is the orphaned daughter of a Communist leader whose rela-
tionship with her mother becomes difficult when she decides to remarry.
Luciana finds in Marisa, a member of the local Communist section,
a substitute for her mother, until she clashes with the misogyny of the
party leadership.
Nicchiarelli, Susanna, dir.La scoperta dell’alba (The Discovery of
Dawn),2013.
Caterina e Barbara Astengo grew up without their father, who went
missing after his best friend was killed by terrorist group Brigate Rosse.
As adults, Caterina and Barbara investigate their father’s disappearance.
Pasolini, Pier Paolo, dir.Mamma Roma, 1962
Mamma Roma, interpreted by Anna Magnani, is a former prosti-
tute who tries to redeem herself for the sake of her teenage son, Ettore.
Ettore, however, is arrested for the theft of a radio and dies in prison.
284 Appendix
Piccioni, Giuseppe, dir.Luce dei miei occhi(Light of My Eyes),

2001
Maria is a single mother who struggles to support her daughter, Lisa;
when her friend, Antonio, finds out about her debts, he starts working
for the loan shark in order to help repay Maria’s debt and allow her to
keep her child.
Pozzessere, Pasquale, dir.Verso sud, 1992
Paola is a former inmate and single mother of a young child, who
lives in a children’s home. When she manages to take him away from the
institution, her homeless friend, Eugenio, helps her to run away and to
board a ship to Greece.
Puccioni, Marco, dir.Riparo(Shelter Me), 2008
Anna—who lives with her mother and manages her family’s factory—
and her girlfriend, Mara, are coming back from their vacation in North
Africa when they find that a Moroccan boy has managed to hide in their
car in order to cross into Europe.
Rohrwacher, Alice, dir.Corpo celeste, 2011
Marta and her mother move to Southern Italy from Switzerland and
Marta has to find her way out of childhood and into the future.
Rosi, Francesco, dir.Tre fratelli(Three Brothers), 1981
The death of the matriarch of a Southern Italian family brings back
her three sons and one grandaughter to their native village, where each
of the sons confronts the problems in their lives and the young girl
bonds with her grandfather.
Rosselini, Roberto, dir.Roma città aperta (Rome Open
City),1945
In this neorealist drama, Anna Magnani plays Pina, a pregnant woman
whose life is intertwined with the Resistance movement in Nazi-occupied
Rome.
Rossi Stuart, Kim, dir.Anche libero va bene(Along the Ridge),
2006
Tommi and his sister Viola live alone with their father after their
mother has left them. When she unexpectedly returns, their lives are
turned upside down.
Segre, Andrea, dir.Io sono Li(Shun Li and the Poet), 2011
Li is a Chinese migrant who moves from a textile factory in Rome to a
café in Chioggia while working to pay back the debt that has allowed her
to leave China and settle in Italy. Only when her debt is paid will she be
Appendix 285
able to bring over her eight-year-old son, who is living with her parents.
Her friendship with a local fisherman and her roommate in Chioggia will
give her some solace, but will also cause her trouble.
Segre, Andrea, dir.La prima neve(First Snowfall), 2013
Ten-year-old Michele and his mother Elisa have a tense relationship
after the death of Michele’s father. The arrival into their lives of Dani, a
refugee from Togo, will help Michele heal.
Sindoni, Vittorio, dir.Abbraccialo per me, 2016
Caterina believes her son, Francesco, to be extraordinarily talented.
When they discover that he suffers from a mental disability, she and her
husband become distant. Her daughter, Giulia, though, helps her fight
to provide him with the support he needs.
Soldini, Silvio, dir.Pane e tulipani(Bread and Tulips), 2000
Rosetta, a housewife from Pescara, decides to leave her unfaithful hus-
band and two teenage sons and finds happiness in a relationship with a
waiter, Fernando.
Stambrini, Monica, dir.Benzina(Gasoline), 2001
Stella and Lenni are a lesbian couple who run away after the accidental
death of Lenni’s mother.
Suranga Deshapriya Katugampala, dir.Per un figlio(For a Son),
2016
A Sinhalese woman works as a caregiver in Italy. Her teenage son,
who grew up in Italy, is distant and uncommunicative, and the mother’s
attempts to connect with him are met with silence and indifference.
Tognazzi, Ricky, dir.Mia madre, 2010. RAI TV miniseries.
The story of Nunzia, her husband, and their three children, who
migrate to Turin from Southern Italy.
Tornatore, Giuseppe, dir.La sconosciuta(The Unknown Woman),
2006
Irena was exploited for years as a sex worker. She brought multiple
pregnancies to term but her babies were trafficked on the illegal adop-
tion market. The plot centers around her decision to leave the past
behind and find her youngest daughter.
Verdone, Carlo, dir.L’amore è eterno finchè dura(Love Is Eternal
While It Lasts), 2004
Gilberto has been married to Tiziana for twenty years; they have a
teenage daughter, Marta, who is going through a turbulent adolescence.
When he has a brief extramarital adventure his life undergoes upheaval.
286 Appendix
Virzì, Paolo, dir.La prima cosa bella(The First Beautiful Thing),

2010
Bruno goes back to Livorno to assist his dying mother, and recalls
the most significant episodes of their family life. His mother, Anna,
was extremely beautiful and embarrassingly frivolous—as when she was
crowned ‘Most Beautiful Mother’ during a summer beauty contest. The
flashbacks that punctuate the narration contrast the pain of the past and
the desire for reconciliation.
Virzì, Paolo, dir.Caterina va in città(Caterina in the Big City),
2003
Caterina moves to Rome with her family, following her father’s ambi-
tions. When these ambitions fall apart and her father projects his unhap-
piness onto everyone else in the family, her mother finally expresses her
own feelings of frustration, and her father leaves. Once he’s gone, both
Caterina and her mother can pursue their own interests and ambitions.
Virzì, Paolo, dir.Il capitale umano(Human Capital), 2013.
The destinies of two families are irrevocably tied together after a
cyclist is hit by a jeep the night before Christmas Eve.
Visconti, Luchino, dir.Bellissima, 1951
Anna Magnaniis Maddalena, who drags her daughter to audition for a
role in a film by Alessandro Blasetti, thus trying to vicariously fulfill her
own dreams for movie stardom.
Visconti, Luchino, dir.Rocco e i suoi fratelli(Rocco and His
Brothers), 1960
Rosaria emigrates with four sons from Lucania to Milan in order
to join her eldest son, Vincenzo, after the death of her husband. She
describes herself as the hand to which the five fingers belong and she is a
matriarchal figure of authority in the family.
Wetzl, Fulvio, dir.Quattro figli unici, 1992
Eugenia, a successful journalist, lives with her twelve-year-old daugh-
ter, Micol, her stepson, Paolo, and her boyfriend, Giorgio. Each mem-
ber of the household lives in their own bubble, hardly communicating
or crossing paths. When Paolo disappears, everyone comes together in
looking for him, including Paolo’s father, Eugenia’s former husband,
Ennio.
Gina Mangravite, Maria Elena D’Amelio, Giovanna Faleschini Lerner
Index
A Profondo rosso, 22, 26–29, 31–33,

Abortion, 23, 57, 163, 167, 206, 262, 35, 36, 276
266, 270, 278, 282 Suspiria, 22, 35–38, 276
Academy Awards, 175
Adoption, 2, 118, 120, 122, 235, 285
Aleramo, Sibilla, 261, 271 B
Altman, Robert Banfield, Edward, 170
Short Cuts, 161 Barthes, Roland, 149–151
Ambivalence, 9, 10, 45, 47, 55, 57, Bassi, Annagrazia, 181
59, 61, 62, 64, 65, 72–74, 76, Bauman, Zygmunt, 168, 212, 213
78, 84, 151, 198, 203, 220 Benigni, Roberto
Anni di piombo, 187, 188 Life is Beautiful, 158
Antonioni, Michelangelo Berlusconi, Silvio, 108, 158, 159, 162
Blow-Up, 28 Bernini, Franco, 161
Appatow, Jude Bigelow, Kathryn
Knocked Up, 257 The Hurt Locker, 175, 190
Archibugi, Francesca Bindi, Rosy, 171
Il grande cocomero, 276 Birth, 6, 8, 12, 23, 32, 33, 48, 71,
Mignon è partita, 275 75, 77, 118, 127, 143, 149, 158,
Argento, Asia, 31, 34, 40 162, 164, 166, 197–199, 205,
Argento, Dario 221, 235, 240, 245, 251, 253,
Inferno, 22, 35, 38, 39, 205, 227, 270, 275
276 Blog, 5, 13, 47, 239, 241, 245, 248,
La terza madre, 22, 35, 39, 40, 276 249, 254, 262
Phenomena, 276 Body, 9, 13, 21, 22, 29, 32, 35,
38–40, 53, 56, 59, 60, 64, 67,
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017 287

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-56675-7
288 Index
76, 83, 92, 96, 99, 100, 104, child-hater, 237

110, 111, 142, 148, 169, 196, childlessness, 235, 243
202, 203, 208, 215, 220, 224, Christian Democratic Party. See DC
225, 227, 236, 264 Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 151
Bondi, Federico Cinema
Mar Nero, 12, 211–214, 216, 220 contemporary, 10, 65, 178, 179
Bongiorno, Giulia, 171 Hollywood cinema, 37, 261
Braschi, Nicoletta, 161, 169 Italian, 4, 5, 7, 8, 10, 65, 71, 73,
Butler, Judith, 130, 159, 236 84, 92, 95, 141, 177, 179,
Buy, Margherita, 122, 140, 283 211, 212, 261
popular, 13
studies. See film studiestransnational,
C 7
Campion, Jane Class, 6, 10, 21, 92, 93, 95, 97, 99–
The Piano, 190 102, 104, 107, 109, 111–114,
Capone, Alessandro 142, 163, 168, 183, 199, 217,
L’amore nascosto, 10, 71–73, 76, 78, 260, 261
79, 84, 86, 277 Comedy, 25, 26, 35, 138, 197, 257,
Carell, Lionella, 178 258, 261, 271
Catholic Church, 178 Comencini, Cristina
Cattani, Fabrizio Il più bel giorno della mia vita, 278
Maternity Blues, 56, 86 Libere, 167, 172
Cavarero, Adriana, 8, 10, 47, 53–56, Quando la notte, 10, 45, 47, 57, 59,
60, 63, 65, 67, 215, 236, 239, 60, 64–66, 278
240, 251 Se non ora quando, 159, 167
Chick lit, 260, 265, 268 Comencini, Francesca
Childlessness, 235, 243, 254 A casa nostra, 157, 278
Children, 23, 24, 26, 27, 45, 48, Lo spazio bianco, 11, 67, 157, 196,
50, 58, 59, 64, 76, 84, 92, 99, 198, 203, 205–208, 278
102, 105, 111, 118, 120, 121, Mi piace lavorare, 157, 278
124, 131, 150, 157, 158, 160, Un giorno speciale, 157, 279
162–164, 168, 170–172, 177, Coppola, Sophia
189, 197, 205, 219, 220, 222, Lost in Translation, 190
229, 236, 243, 245, 252–254, Cotroneo, Ivan
261, 263, 279, 280, 282, 284, Il Natale della mamma imperfetta,
285. See also sons and daughters 258
childbirth, 2, 14, 77, 78 Una mamma imperfetta, 14, 257
childcare, 236, 238, 260, 263, 266, Crialese, Emanuele
267, 269, 270, 272 Respiro, 279
childfree, 13, 14, 235, 237–246, Terraferma, 12, 211, 212, 217,
249–251, 253, 254, 277 219–221, 279
Index 289
D Fathers. See fatherhood

Daughter(s), 8, 10, 11, 24, 34, 40, Fellini, Federico
49–51, 56, 71, 72, 74, 75, 78– 8 ½ / Eight and a Half, 142
80, 82–85, 103, 104, 107, 112, Female subjectivity, 176, 179, 240
121, 122, 124, 126, 129, 132, Feminism
145, 147, 148, 150, 161, 163, feminist studies, 6, 14
165, 166, 176, 177, 179–183, feminist theory, 6, 213
188, 189, 195, 201, 225–227, post-feminism, 265, 266
252, 271, 277–280, 282, 283, Fertility, 1–3, 207, 208, 236, 240, 270
285, 286 Fielding, Helen, 265
DC, 178 Film
Death, 9, 11, 29, 30, 33–38, 40, 83, studies, 4, 5, 8, 133, 191
94, 102, 103, 107, 110, 113, theory, 5, 6, 8, 9, 191
121, 123, 124, 127, 129, 137, Finocchiaro, Anna, 171
138, 140, 141, 144, 147–150, Footage
152, 163, 164, 168, 223, 224, historical footage, 186
251, 281, 282, 284–286
Democratic Party. See PD
Depression, 48, 252 G
De Sica, Vittorio Garrone, Matteo
Ladri di biciclette, 178 Primo amore, 191
Diary. See journal reality, 191
Diotima, 8, 47, 176, 184, 190, 192 Gaze, 23, 37, 74, 75, 77, 82–84, 95,
Disney, Walt, 37, 190 96, 104, 110, 112, 132, 133,
Documentary, 23, 49, 158, 161, 176, 148, 160, 162, 190, 204, 206,
181, 182, 207, 229, 238, 277 215, 221, 246, 247
Dreams, 25, 27, 79, 82, 112, 142, Gender, 3–5, 8, 11, 13, 25, 31, 36,
151, 184, 286 46, 53, 57, 103, 106, 119, 120,
Dugay Comencini, Camille, 169 140, 175, 176, 214, 236, 238,
246, 258, 260, 263–267, 269,
271
F Genealogy, 11, 40, 47, 142, 146, 184,
Fairytale(s), 34, 37, 157, 158, 162 196, 204
Fallaci, Oriana, 271 Ginzburg, Carlo, 28, 29
Faludi, Susan, 267 Giordana, Marco Tullio
Familism, 164, 238 La meglio gioventù, 179, 280
Family Quando sei nato non puoi più nas-
abnormal family, 166 conderti, 191
alternative family, 159 Giuliani, Carlo, 168
crisis of traditional family, 159 Grief, 11, 36, 128, 130, 132, 137,
Fatherhood, 4, 13 138, 149
290 Index
Guadagnino, Luca, 4, 7, 94, 95, 97, Loren, Sofia, 7, 25, 92, 178, 190,
106 196, 279
Io sono l’amore, 4, 7, 10, 91, 105 Los Angeles, 161
Loss, 7, 9–11, 26, 33, 35, 36, 59, 77,
119, 124, 125, 129, 130, 138,
H 139, 148, 150, 187, 222, 240,
Hegel, G.W. Friedrich, 169 282
History, 2, 5, 6, 12, 14, 22, 27, 29, Lucas, Jon, and Moore, Scott
31, 37, 39, 41, 95, 96, 101, 106, Bad Moms, 12, 257
175–177, 185, 187, 189, 196, Luchetti, Daniele
243, 259, 280 Anni felici, 191
Hollywood, 12, 13, 37, 92, 105 La nostra vita, 13
Horror, 4, 9, 21, 26, 31, 33, 34, 38, Mio fratello è figlio unico, 191
41, 201 Lunàdigas, 13, 14, 240–242, 246–
251, 254
I
Internet, 13, 238, 239, 241, 246, 258, M
264 Magnani, Anna, 7, 25, 27, 92, 178,
Italian Communist Party. See PCI 283, 284, 286
Italy, 2, 5–8, 11, 23, 24, 29, 35, 47, Mangold, James
57, 71, 73, 95, 105, 118–120, Kate and Leopold, 260
140, 158, 159, 162–167, 177– Marazzi, Alina
179, 197, 211, 213, 215–217, Tutto parla di te, 10, 14, 45–50, 52,
219, 221, 222, 224, 235, 237, 56, 65, 66
245, 249, 257–259, 262, 264, Un’ora sola ti vorrei, 49, 50, 56, 85,
270–272, 277, 279, 281, 282, 281
284, 285 Marriage
same-sex, 235, 258, 263
traditional, 25, 27
J Marshall, Gary
Journal, 47, 49, 56, 139, 259 Matarazzo, Raffaello, 4, 25, 26, 92,
261, 262, 281
Raising Helen, 260
K Mary, Virgin, 55, 64, 104, 262, 271
Kaplan, Ann E., 6, 92, 261 Maternal (the)
maternal inclination, 10, 47, 54, 59,
60, 65
L maternal indifference, 10, 73, 74,
L’Aquila, 168 84
Lazzarini, Giulia, 141 Maternity, 7, 9, 12, 14, 23, 26, 33,
Liquidity, 212, 221, 228 47, 48, 54, 57, 62, 94, 105, 159,
Index 291
197, 211, 216, 228, 236, 237, Palombella rossa, 144–146

240, 246. See also motherhood Moscow, 184, 185
hyper-maternity, 14, 258, 263 Mother(s)
Matriarch, 10, 11, 91, 284 ambivalent mothers, 7
Mayer, Marissa, 266 bad mothers, 58, 253, 259, 272
McClachty, Gregor imperfect mothers, 7, 263, 272
Soccer Mom, 257 lesbian mothers, 265
McCullers, Michael lost mothers, 10
Baby Mama, 257 mater dolorosa, 6, 22, 26, 104, 261
Media migrant mothers, 12, 211, 228
digital, 5, 27, 41, 254 missing mothers, 182, 240
multimedia, 239, 248 mother-daughter relationship, 6, 8,
news, 23, 185, 205 72, 176, 177, 182, 187, 189,
social, 4, 25, 60, 107, 123, 259, 190
262 mother-son relationship, 6
transmedia, 14. See also murderous mothers, 7, 26
transmediality single mothers, 7, 162–164
Mediterranean, 92, 163, 212, 217, unnatural mother, 77
219, 221, 224, 225, 227, 228 Motherhood, 4–10
Melliti, Mohsen, 224, 225, 227, 228 bravura motherhood, 260, 263, 272
Io, l’altro, 12, 211, 224 liquid, 12
Melodrama, 4, 6, 9, 21, 22, 24–26, motherhood studies, 9
29, 31, 34, 41, 92, 103–105, Mourning, 7, 10, 11, 35, 119, 129,
150, 261, 262, 281 130, 132, 133, 137, 148, 149,
Migration, 7, 12, 211–213, 216, 240
220–222, 224, 225, 228, 258 Muraro, Luisa, 8, 176, 180, 184, 189
Milan, 92, 95, 97, 98, 105–107, 109, Music, 26, 28, 103, 163, 186, 188,
160–162, 277, 278, 286 201, 220
Miscarriage, 205 Mussolini, Alessandra, 22, 23, 277
Missing mothers, 182, 237 Mussolini, Benito, 277
Momcom, 12, 13
Mommy lit, 259
Momoir, 257 N
Morante, Elsa, 168 Naples, 12, 160, 162, 163, 195–197,
Moretti, Nanni 199, 204, 207, 268, 269, 281
Aprile, 139 Natalism, 1, 48, 165, 200, 201
Caro Diario, 139, 141, 149 Nazzari, Amedeo, 25, 26, 261
Habemus Papam, 138, 139, 145 Neonatal intensive care unit (NICU),
La stanza del figlio, 137, 138 12, 196–201, 207
Mia madre, 11, 56, 137, 138, 140, Nesler, Nicoletta, 13, 239, 241, 242,
145, 150, 252 244–247, 250, 253, 254
292 Index
Lunàdigas, 239 R
Nicchiarelli, Federica, 4, 7, 12, 176, Ragonese, Isabella, 172
181, 185–187, 190 Realism
Nicchiarelli, Susanna magic realism, 142
Cosmonauta, 176, 177, 179, 181, Reitman, Jason
183 Juno, 257
Il terzo occhio, 176, 177, 181 Reproduction, 23, 125, 126, 130,
La scoperta dell’alba, 176, 177, 180, 203, 250, 251, 254
181, 187 Rich, Adrienne, 4, 46, 212, 260, 280
Rome, 7, 29, 40, 57, 158–160, 275,
276, 279, 282, 284, 286
O Rossellini, Roberto
Oneiric, 142, 160, 202 Roma, città aperta, 25
Oscars. See Academy Awards
S
P Sandberg, Sheryl, 266, 267, 269
Parenthood, 14, 195, 197, 235, 263. Sanson, Yvonne, 26, 261
See also motherhood Savino, Lunetta, 172
Parker, Rozsika, 10, 45, 60, 73, 78 Screen
Parrella, Valeria, 12, 162, 166, 196, screen studies, 5, 6, 8
199, 205 Sexuality
Lo spazio bianco, 12 sex, 2, 23, 34, 97, 99, 109, 110,
Pasolini, Pier Paolo 118, 277, 285
cinema of poetry, 27, 143, 220 sexual intercourse, 76
Patriarchy, 94, 99, 267 Shyer, Charles
PCI, 144, 176, 178, 184, 185 Baby Boom, 260
PD, 270 Slaughter, Anne-Marie, 266–268
Pietas, 150 Soldini, Silvio
Piga, Marilisa, 13, 239, 241, 242, Giorni e nuvole, 192
244–248, 250, 253, 254. See also Pane e tulipani, 192, 285
Nesler, Nicoletta Son(s), 6, 22, 24, 25, 30, 33, 34, 48,
Post-feminism. See feminism 50–52, 58, 60, 64, 94, 100, 109,
Post-partum depression, 87 112, 123–125, 129, 137, 139,
Psychoanalysis, 5, 6, 73, 76–78, 84, 140, 152, 180, 214, 218, 220,
180 222, 223, 252, 276–286
Sons and daughters, 180
Sophocles
Q Antigone, Creon, Antigone, 159,
Quatriglio, Costanza, 175 224, 225
Sorrentino, Paolo
Le conseguenze dell’amore, 191
Index 293
L’amico di famiglia, 191 110, 148, 158, 159, 177, 179,

Soundtrack, 28, 72, 186, 188, 242 180, 185, 189, 190, 201, 225,
South Korea, 11, 118, 119 239, 241, 246, 260, 267
Spada, Marina, 175
Star, Darren
Sex and the City, 265 W
Subjectivity Wealth, 11, 91, 92, 94, 96–98, 103,
subject, 6, 25, 31, 47, 54, 55, 65, 106, 107, 111, 112, 123, 128
73, 78, 85, 150, 163, 168, Web, 5. See also Internet
176, 179, 180, 183, 184, 214, webdoc(s), 5, 13, 14, 50, 239,
250, 259 242–244, 246–250
Suicide, 24, 34, 49, 71, 72, 83, 85, web series, 13, 14, 257–260, 264,
102, 111, 132, 163, 223, 277, 269, 271
281, 282 Wenders, Wim
Svevo, Italo, 157 Wings of Desire, 144
Wertmuller, Lina
Pasqualino Sette Bellezze, 190
T Winfrey, Oprah, 267
Technology Womb
reproductive, 263 high tech womb, 12
Transmediality, 13 Women
Turturro, John, 141 liberated, 180, 189, 207, 265, 269
white women, 258, 267
women filmmakers, 4, 8, 45,
V 175–177, 179
Veltroni, Walter, 187 women of color, 97, 186
Venturi, Maria, 71, 79, 80 Work, 2, 4–7, 9, 11, 23, 27, 38, 40,
Virzì, Paolo 41, 47, 48, 50, 51, 57, 62, 84,
Il capitale umano, 10, 91, 92, 107, 107, 132, 138, 140, 141, 146,
108 149–151, 157–159, 161, 162,
Visconti, Luchino 167, 168, 175, 176, 190, 203
Bellissima, 286
La caduta degli dèi, 95
Vlog, 262, 266 Y
Voice, 13, 46, 49, 50, 52, 53, 72, Yourcenar, Marguerite, 147
74–76, 79, 83, 84, 103, 108,

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S T U D I E S

More information about this series at

Italian and Italian American Studies

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017944095

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017

Cover illustration: ACTIVE MUSEUM/Alamy Stock Photo

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

1 Introduction: Italian Motherhood on Screen 1

Part I Maternal Ambivalence

2 In the Name of the Mother: From Fascist Melodrama to

3 Maternal Ambivalence in Contemporary Italian Cinema 45

4 ‘A Bad Mother and a Small Heap of Bones:’ Maternal

Part II Lost Mothers

5 Rich Wives, Poor Mothers: Can a Matriarch

6 Mothers at a Loss: Identity and Mourning in La

7 ‘Acquaintance with Grief’: Filmmaking as Mourning and

Part III Motherhood and the Body Politics

8 Francesca Comencini’s Single Moms and Italian Family

9 Gy-neology and Genealogy of a Female Filmmaker: The

10 Unnatural Child Birth: Naples, the Neo-Natal

11 Liquid Maternity in Italian Migration Cinema 211

Part IV Transmedia Motherhood

12 Voicing Italian Childfree Women on New Media:

13 Motherhood 2.0: Una Mamma Imperfetta and the

Giovanna Faleschini Lerner (Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania) is

Fig. 1.1 Posters from the Fertility Day campaign 2

Introduction: Italian Motherhood on Screen

Maria Elena D’Amelio and Giovanna Faleschini Lerner

On July 28, 2016, the Italian Ministry of Health declared September

© The Author(s) 2017 1

Fig. 1.1 Posters from the Fertility Day campaign

group of youths intent on smoking pot indoors (Fig. 1.2). Among the

Fig. 1.2 Poster from the Fertility Day campaign

of traditional patriarchal attitudes toward the family, which, together

secularization of Italian society, the growing concerns for LGBTQ rights,

Segre. Moreover, as we shall explain further, we included a section on

convergence of psychoanalysis, feminist theory, and screen studies, as

and discussed in recent years, precisely in response to the perceived cri-

Tornatore’s La sconosciuta and Chang-dong Lee’s Milyang. Finally, the

In the Anglo-American context, pivotal works such as Rich’s Of

time as critical counter-historical texts that challenge reductive attribu-

wealth and glamour. Presented as literal or metaphorical foreigners, these

‘Genealogies and Gyn-ealogies in Susanna Nicchiarelli’s Films’ utilizes a

a conversation about motherhood as a point of departure for the growth

Podnieks, E. (ed.) (2012). Mediating Moms: Mothers in Popular Culture

Giovanna Faleschini Lerner (Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania) is Associate

In the Name of the Mother: From Fascist

Melodrama is a literary and cinematic form in Italian literary and

© The Author(s) 2017 21

films in their self-conscious examinations of the myths of the mother. His

Fascism, Maternity, and the Nation

an invitation from a co-worker, Mario Fabbrini (Nino Besozzi), to meet

Neorealism, Dark Melodramas,

Neorealism was a form of filmmaking predicated on the aesthetic and

as the embodiment of the ideal quality of resignation in the workings of

Dario Argento and the Giallo

figure with the nation. In contrast to Anna Magnani’s martyred Pina,

Surrealism used to be hard to put on film properly. Although I was reticent

Profondo Rosso and Cinematic Mothers

transfixed. The song plays on the soundtrack at crucial moments and it

murder entails a bloody cutting up of Helga, witnessed by Marc from

supernatural glimmerings while seeking to absorb them back into a con-

Fig. 1.1 Posters from the Fertility Day campaign 2

Introduction: Italian Motherhood on Screen

Fig. 1.1 Posters from the Fertility Day campaign

group of youths intent on smoking pot indoors (Fig. 1.2). Among the

Fig. 1.2 Poster from the Fertility Day campaign

In the Name of the Mother: From Fascist

Fascism, Maternity, and the Nation

Dario Argento and the Giallo

Profondo Rosso and Cinematic Mothers

Mothers, Medical Malpractice, and Murder: Fenomena

Allegory and the Baroque: The Mothers’ Trilogy

Artaud’s Theater of Cruelty and the Neo-Baroque

Maternal Ambivalence in Contemporary

‘A Bad Mother and a Small Heap of Bones:’