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

Putting into dialogue scholarly studies on Italian Fascism with a wide range of newly identified film and media history resources, the authors reconstruct and compare the career paths of Paola Ojetti (1911-1978) and Maria Basaglia  (1908-2000) in the 1930s and early-1940s, with a specific focus on their cinema-related activities such as dubbing, film criticism, screenwriting and on-set assistance. By shedding light on the microhistory level of professional  routines and social interactions, the article seeks to contribute to a history of women workers in Fascist Italy’s cultural sector grounded in the concrete life experiences of women intellectuals. The career paths of Ojetti and Basaglia  show that the mastery of foreign languages was a key requisite for women wishing to enter the field of cultural production: translation work was considered especially fitting to women because it was generally poorly paid, mostly  carried out at home, held in lower esteem than authorial work, and thus perceived as less threatening to male privilege. The cases of Ojetti and Basaglia also show that no matter their talent and diligence, women intellectuals in  Fascist Italy often had to put themselves under the mentorship or in the employ of male colleagues, who enjoyed greater civil liberties and career advancement opportunities than their female counterparts. The women who met  these conditions accessed the cultural sector, working through the ranks of a specific branch, reaching out to one another to create useful networks of mutual support and collaboration, and eventually building an eclectic and at times non-normative career for themselves. While confirming the existence of a repressive system that exploited women’s intellectual work, the article proposes that there were ways for women to partially break through the narrow 
boundaries of subordinate work established by the discriminatory policies of the Fascist regime.

Paola Ojetti and Maria Basaglia: Two Women Workers in Fascist Italy’s Cultural Sector by MICHAEL GUARNERI - STELLA SCABELLI 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. Moving from an overview of women’s below-the-line labour, this analysis examines the remarkably scarce female presence in production mid-management roles (such as production supervisors and production and unit managers) in the postwar years.  Highlighting the challenges of doing historical research on below-the-line roles, particularly when these are held by women, the article discusses the careers of some of the few women active in mid-management positions such as  Jone Tuzi, Anna Davini, Bianca Lattuada, Mara Blasetti and Cecilia Bigazzi. Finally, the quantitative analysis performed on Anica data is complemented by a micro-historical analysis based on interviews conducted with unit manager  and production supervisor Rosalba di Bartolo, who worked in the Italian film industry for four decades between the 1960s and the early 2000s.

Women in Italian Film Production (1949-1976): Mid-Management Roles as Seen through Anica Data and Oral History by MARIA IDA BERNABEI is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

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. The article reviews her  career path and her approach to film production and then examines the discourses, representations and self-representations concerning Piperno and her professional identity, analysing several sources, including the REIAC collection,  publications that gather together the oral testimonies of Piperno and her co-workers, and the biographical documentaries about her and her family history made with Luigi Faccini. The main goal is to investigate how Piperno negotiated, over the course of her career, her status, and her professional identity in relation to her gender and with regard to broader debates about the role of the producer in the Italian film and television industries.

“Una ragazza che si arrangia:” Notes on the Film Producer Marina Piperno by CHIARA GRIZZAFFI is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

For several years, studies on media production have cut radio work out of consideration. This is due to the structural and economic lightness of the audio medium, which employs fewer people than the audiovisual sector in  percentage terms; it is also due to the flexibility of professional roles, which are often subject to reshuffling and overlapping; and finally, to an unstable factor in the evolutionary dynamics of the medium, which has continually  changed formats, technologies and organisation models over the last century. The dearth of academic work on radio production is much more evident if we focus on gender issues, and even more when looking at the Italian  landscape in comparison with similar international realities. Therefore, the article aims to review a wide range of sources on the ways in which the role of women in radio production has been studied in scholarly contexts across the  world. Then it briefly traces the state of the art of radio studies in Italy and in particular the gaps and opportunities of production studies applied to radio, proposing ways in which Italian scholarship on radio can and should “catch up”.

Women Working in Radio. Methodological Approaches Comparing Italy and the International Context by MARTA PERROTTA is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

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. However, these policies often prove to be ineffective. Until now, most research has focused on analysing women’s labour in film production. However, in September 2021 the  European Audiovisual Observatory delivered a cross-country assessment of the gender imbalance in six audiovisual professional categories in European TV fiction. Considering the increasing interest in the audiovisual seriality sector,  the aim of this paper is to conduct an exploratory analysis of the employment situation of women in the production of Italian TV series using IMDb as a data source. We focus on and discuss the intersections between women and  labour through the production of Italian free-to-air and pay platform TV series in 2016-2019. By retrieving IMDb data for more than 8,000 credits, we evaluate and discuss gender inequalities, segregation and mobility patterns in the Italian audiovisual workforce and raise methodological challenges in relation to the use of online sources in gender-based studies of Europe’s screen industries.

Women’s Labour in TV Series Production: A Comparative Analysis of Italian Generalist TV and Pay Platforms (2016-2019) by MARTA ROCCHI is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

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. Although sample analysis proved to be more effective in mapping behind-the-scenes roles rather than on-screen representation, we argue that the original findings obtained may extend  beyond the boundaries of the crime genre. Despite some positive trends, data on the different production roles reveal a bleaker scenario, with strong gender inequalities in top positions, and Italian dramas show a substantial lack of  diversity regarding gender identity, race, and geographical origin. Although the share of female leads and co-leads aligns with the international scenario, more specific insights into crime narratives’ characters reveal a still very  unbalanced situation, where only 21% of professional detectives are women, and leadership positions and supervisory power continue to be almost exclusively held by men.

Unsuitable Jobs for Women. Women’s Behind-the-Scenes Employment and Female On-Screen Representation in Italian TV Crime Drama by VALENTINA RE - MARICA SPALLETTA is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

In the mid-to-late 2000s, the digitalization of film production in Italy carried a promise of increased diversity and cultural pluralism due to the lower entry barriers. About a decade later, in 2016, the so-called Franceschini law introduced a revision of the norms regulating public funding which included a mandate for greater inclusivity. Did these developments fulfill their promise? The article answers this question empirically by investigating the roles occupied by women within Italian film productions and co-productions that obtained clearance (nulla osta) for national theatrical distribution between 2017 and 2021. We examine the gender composition of each film for ten heads of  department involved in its production, drawing on the database produced by the CENTRIC/CineAF project. We proceed to correlate gender balance with a set of structural features (genre, format, budget). Finally, we examine the  makeup of the creative teams in which women were involved, and their evolution over a period of sixty years (1964-2021). We argue that the promise of increased diversity in Italian cinema was only marginally kept. We  demonstrate that the centrality of female professionals is greater in low-budget cinema and that women’s careers still suffer in terms of progression, continuity and longevity compared to those of their male counterparts. In  conclusion, we highlight the limits of existing gender equality policies, evaluate the risks hidden in the processes of feminization of some of the professions (such as pay drop), and reflect on the promises and limits of big-data  approaches in counteracting discrimination and supporting pluralism and equity.

Heaven Can Wait? Gender (Im)balance in Contemporary Italian Film Crews by MARIAGRAZIA FANCHI - MATTEO TARANTINO - ROSA BAROTSI is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

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? The responses provided by the Italian women directors participating in the seminar highlighted the importance of female solidarity within and across creative professions, that is the idea of “fare squadra” or “fare rete”, working together rather than singularly, and adopting an approach akin to Italian feminism’s pratica delle relazioni. Previously, in the 2016 edition of their annual seminar on women in the cinema and audiovisual industries, the FAScinA group explored the idea of relationality or female collaboration in film taking as its starting point the ideas proposed in Luce Irigaray’s 1994 publication, Essere due (“Almeno in due. Donne nel cinema italiano”. https://fascinaforum.org/2020/10/22/almeno-in-due-donne-nel-cinema-italiano/). The conference organisers proposed that in  order to exist and present themselves as subjects, women had to “essere (almeno) due”/ “to be at least two”, thereby taking advantage of the energy and the resources provided by female relationships. The papers presented at the  conference traced a range of cinematic relationships, both on and off screen, that displayed strategies promoting collaboration and proximity. This paper builds on the on-going dialogue on female collaboration in the film industry,  through the analysis of two contemporary Italian films, Amanda (2022) and Giulia (2021), which explore on and off-screen collaborations, challenge prevailing cultural norms, and engage in feminist practices that explicitly contest  mainstream cinematic genres and traditional representations of gender on screen.

Relational Feminist Practices On and Off-Screen: The Case of Amanda (2022) and Giulia (2021) by BERNADETTE LUCIANO is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0