La prima serie degli «Annali» ha via via raccolto i contributi scientifici promossi dalla Scuola Superiore delle Comunicazioni Sociali dell’Università Cattolica. Questa seconda serie intende proseguire l’impegno della prima con una periodicità più stretta e con la più ampia disponibilità a quanto la ricerca scientifica, anche al di fuori della Scuola, va elaborando in ordine alla Comunicazione Sociale.

The essay traces the most recent developments in Feminist Film Theory from the new psychoanalytic approaches (such as Trauma Studies) to the historical work on Early Cinema and, finally, the convergence between gender and globalization studies. The essay offers an extremely articulated picture and provides a key for a heuristic interpretation of the main cultural and social processes affecting the contemporary world.

Despite the accusation of abstraction and of lacking of an historical base, the Feminist Film Studies have considerably contributed to the historical research, underlining the cultural value of performance and of the act of watching. The analysis and comparison of two texts belonging to the cinema of the origins make explicit the function of cinema as an instrument for the definition of gender identity. It also stimulates a reflection on the values associated with women at the beginnings of the last Century. In particular the essay detects a strategy of representation of women enhancing their creativity and freedom versus the one of men, alienated and subject to production logics.

The bond which has been tied between cinema and visual arts in the first decades of the last century finds its paradigmatic expression in the ways of representing women. The comparison between the woman-owl interpreted by Pina Menichelli and Marchesa Casati’s pictures immortalized by Boldini’s brush highlight the strong and lively exchange among expressive forms and give back an idea of unconventional and eccentric femininity. This model meets the need of the cinema to accredit itself as a new form of art (highlighting the closeness with painting and literature, evidence of that complex system of referrals among ‘media’ which will consolidate in the following decades), more than the intention of conveying a different, more modern concept of woman.

The essay investigates the representation of femininity in the films about family. The analysis develops between the reconstruction of the figure of woman in promotional texts aimed at promoting the recovered use of domestic technologies in the first decades of the century. It also examines the presence/absence of the mother’s figure in films about family. It shows a framework full of implications, and in which what appears (and what does not appear) reveals a different and unexpected sense and meaning. In particular the woman, despite not being the architect nor the protagonist of the shooting, confirms herself as Deus Ex Machina of the filmed memories of the family.

It is easy to envisage a correlation between Zampa’s film, L’onorevole Angelina, and the inclusion (at least formal) of women in the Country’s political life in the Second postwar period. Yet in addition to reflecting a social transformation (supported by the declared realism of the film), the work responds to a purely cinematographic logic. Angelina’s character perfectly adheres to the figure of Mrs. Magnani, emphasizing her best known features and underlining the point of her star like parable. Perhaps more than representing the reflection of a new prototype of woman, both Angelina, and Mrs. Magnani work as models of aspiration in a reality in which freedom and equality of rights are still far from being reached.

The essay seeks in the Domestic film production of the 1950s, the tracks of the debate about the presentation and approval of the Italian law Merlin. With a sensitivity heightened by the Neorealistic season, the Italian cinema denounces the most critical aspects preventing the process of rehabilitation and reintegration of prostitutes, exposing them to public judgment and sentencing them to live on the fringe of society.