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Ritratto di un’autrice. Il cinema di Gabriella Rosaleva [Portrait of a female auteur. The cinema of Gabriella Rosaleva] This dissertation is an expression of my interest for the role of women in film and media, which I have started to develop when I was working on my MA thesis. As is well known, the work of women is often underestimated in - and sometimes even completely erased from - the history of cinema. More specifically, I have decided to focus on Gabriella Rosaleva, an Italian filmmaker who has worked in film and television mainly during the 1980s and the 1990s. After an introductory chapter, I have focused on the reconstruction of Rosaleva’s biography and, subsequently, on the social and cultural context on which she has worked. In the central part of my dissertation I have extensively analysed her films. Starting from the description of the materials I have gathered during my research, I have examined the structural (narrative and stylistic) elements of Rosaleva’s cinema, outlining the recurrent motives and the most original and “personal” traits of her production - which I have further investigated in the conclusive chapter. Besides her cinematic oeuvre, I have also analysed in-depth a series of different texts, including her novel and a number of subjects, screenplays, and treatments for films that never got made. The second volume of the thesis presents an ample iconographic appendix and gathers a selection of her cinematic writings, which have been preserved from the decay of time through digitization.

Around Goliarda Sapienza, who passed away in 1996, a prolific research is underway, which mainly examines her literary aspect, at a time when her books have crossed the national borders to become such literary success as L’arte della gioia. We know very little about her short yet intense career as an actress – on both theatre shows and movies – and especially about her intense role in the film industry, behind the camera, as assistant director, screenwriter, voice-over actress or assistant to actors, never fully credited along her partner, director Citto Maselli. This work aims at highlighting an original aspect in Sapienza, adding a new key point both in her artistic life and in the national film scene. The main focus is on her role as screenwriter as decisively revealed in detail by an intense and rich unpublished epistolary between her and Maselli, over the 50s and the 60s. Letters, diaries and several statements helped outlining a more precise and detailed artistic profile, which led to ascertain Sapienza’s role as screenwriter, especially for the film I delfini (1960), specific case study of this work. The unpublished documents examined here prove to be extremely rich of information and cast an entirely new light on Goliarda Sapienza’s artistic figure and on Citto Maselli’s films.

Studies into home movies have traditionally and internationally focused on male figures, thereby promoting the notion of an exclusively patriarchal genre. The present work addresses such a trend and explores the work of a significant group of Italian female film amateurs from the 1930s. By investigating the bulk of private films produced and disseminated at the time, the present study focuses on small gauge productions by women with special attention to their approach to cinema and their way of making cinema, what prompted them to use the camera and explore different montage techniques. This investigation combines gender reading to the notions of slow motion production and the relevant and different narrative and figurative topoi. The peculiarities of the different genres here analysed - including diary, autobiography, travel stories, and didactic experimentation, to name a few - mark a significant turn from a traditionally patriarchal view of family cinema, thereby moulding the narrative so as to produce stories whose only limit is a woman's desire and they joy to recount the self though images of daily life, family life, maternity, travel and fesitivities.