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One of the founding fathers of neorealism in the postwar period in Italy, Antonio Pietrangeli went on to focus his lens upon the female subject. Eight of his ten full-length films feature female protagonists. This study seeks to better understand both his achievements and his failings as a feminist auteur as well as analyse his films by applying new critical and theoretical approaches. Pietrangeli’s representations of women struggling with questions of identity was a revolutionary act in the 1950s and 1960s. The book makes a case why we should recuperate these films today since the standards for representing women in film continue to fall behind the reality of women’s lives off-screen.
“Along with Antonioni, the lesser-known Antonio Pietrangeli remains Italy’s pioneering director of female subjectivity. Van Ness gives his entire body of work—a dozen films and seminal writings—an extraordinary assessment back to back with the feminist consciousness of our times. The encounter is nothing less than mesmerizing.” —Thomas Harrison, Professor of Italian, University of California at Los Angeles, USA
List of Illustrations; Acknowledgments; Vita; Introduction: Antonio Pietrangeli, A Brief History; Chapter 1: Pietrangelian Film Theory: From Neorealism to Feminism; Chapter 2: Maid from the Margins: Il sole negli occhi; Chapter 3: The Coming of Age of a Teenage Bride: Nata di marzo; Chapter 4: Legally Bound: Political Realism and Prostitution in Adua e le compagne; Chapter 5: Fantasmi a Roma: Sur- Realism and the Time- Image; Chapter 6: The Dora Problem: La parmigiana , Piatti, Pietrangeli and Freud; Chapter 7: Too Much Woman: Marriage, Power, and Excess in La visita; Chapter 8: Breaking Faith: Il magnifi co cornuto , Envy and the Crisis of Vision; Chapter 9: Io la conoscevo bene … Or did I? Antonio Pietrangeli, the Author and the Actress; Conclusion: Antonio Pietrangeli, Feminism and Film Theory; Bibliography; Index.