Primo fascicolo del 2023

INTRODUCTION On Method Building: A Half-Century of Research on Gender and Labour in the Italian Audiovisual Industries by Rosa Barotsi, Gloria Dagnino and Carla Mereu Keating is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

This contribution offers an overview of women’s labour in the Italian film industry between 1949 and 1976, the chronological span examined by the PRIN 2017 project Modes, Memories and Cultures of Film Production in Italy. It applies a thematic criterion to organise data from the Anica database, which aggregates the credits of all feature films and documentary films produced and co-produced in Italy from 1930 onwards...

The article focuses on the figure and the activity of the producer Marina Piperno. Among the few women who had a leading role in the Italian film industry, Piperno was the sole administrator of the REIAC film production company and produced over two hundred works, including documentaries, industrial films, “caroselli”, fiction films and television dramas. Her professional path can be considered “fuori norma” (non-standard) as it was marked by the need to claim her space not only as a woman in a male-dominated field but also as an independent producer interested in conceiving and implementing production practices alternative to those of mainstream cinema...

Influential European research on female representation and employment in the news media and audiovisual industry shows how the sector is dominated by strong gender inequality. Women’s labour is under-represented, underpaid and characterised by high levels of precariousness. European audiovisual regulatory authorities are promoting an increase in gender representation both on- and off-screen through the analysis of existing industry-led practices and the development of non-legally binding recommendations...

This article combines quantitative tools of social research, text-based analysis, and production studies to analyse gender equality and female labour in contemporary Italian TV crime drama. More precisely, we analyse the portrayal of female characters and women’s employment in key behind-the-scenes roles in Italian TV crime dramas distributed from Fall 2015 to Summer 2022. The research has two main goals: first, to understand how crime narratives address gender equality and diversity from a twofold perspective – behind-the-scenes and on-screen; second, to understand if and how a sample analysis, targeting a specific case study, can provide general trends such as those coming from the analysis of broader datasets...

Current statistics presented at the most recent Annual Seminar on Gender Equality and Inclusivity in the Film Industry held at the 2022 Venice Film Festival reveal that the number of women working in the Italian film industry is increasing across professions at a very slow rate, and the growth seems to be primarily in highly specialised technical roles rather than in authorial ones. The detailed statistical work carried out by the research group led to the provocative question posed to a number of practitioners at the 2022 seminar: is cinema a sustainable career for women?

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