Traditional film histories present “Neapolitan cinema” as a distinct segment of Italian silent cinema, but “Neapolitan” hints at a lower cultural form, signaling a prejudice rooted in anti-southern bias, contingent with the unification of Italy.With Bertini, Roberti, Serena, Antamoro, the Lombardo family (and several others) Neapolitan cinema- or, more accurately, the cinema made in Naples – represented mainstream Italian silent cinema, but circumscribed by a geographic designation not attributed to coeval films made in Rome or Turin.Specific characters of Neapolitan film production derive from the cross-class culture the metropolis developed in the performing arts and music. These forms, rooted in Commedia dell’arte and opera buffa, united classical and folk expressions, low and ligh, tragedy and comedy, and originated sceneggiata and macchietta. Neapolitan cinema was inter-media, realistic, popular, and a modern version of artisanship and family enterprise. Less studied is the patriotism Neapolitan songs and cinema expressed. All these traits belong both to mainstream productions made in Naples and to Elvira Notari’s films.A re-definition of the context in which Notari operated allows us to focus on her specific contribution and her innovative position as a southern Italian woman at the forefront of the production of popular culture.

Giuliana Muscio is Professor of Cinema at the University of Padua, Italy. She held the position of Visiting Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the University of Minnesota. She is the author of Hollywood’s New Deal and of the forthcoming Napoli/New York/Hollywood, and of articles both in Italian and English. She was among the founders of Women and the Silent Film.

Chiarina la modista (Chiarina the Milliner) is a 1919 film by Elvira Notari, probably inspired by Carolina Invernizio’s novel Storia di una sartina (A Dressmaker’s Story, 1892), published in a feuilleton. The plot’s location is Naples. Since the film is lost, we are not sure of its fidelity to that novel as an intersemiotic translation. We aim to interpret the lost film by quoting diversified sources in order not to study the film philologically, but to understand the tensions and themes of the coeval female narrative. In fact, both the film and the novel were addressed to a female reception of the popular narrative, in which fashion appears as a typical trait of the female characters. Notari herself had been a milliner, so her interest in fashion was genuine. The phenomenon of the working woman had not often been considered in Italian cinema until then, and women’s consumption of such stories defined them as a real perspective on social practices and habits.

Rossella Catanese, PhD from Sapienza University of Rome, is adjunct professor of Italian Cinema and Society at Lorenzo de’ Medici (Florence branch of University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill). She has been a tutor for the academic Master course in Digital Audio/Video Restoration at Sapienza. She has several publications in peer-reviewed journals and books, and participated in international conferences in Europe. She has also published a monograph, Lacune binarie, and an edited collection Futurist Cinema.

Lukács wrote that “in the ‘cinema’… man has lost his soul, but he gains his body instead”. And women? Elvira Notari’s cinema is a rebellious women’s body ‘cinema’, challenging the time they live in so as to claim their own passions at any cost and feel free to choose. However, these are women who, while recovering their body, lose it. A Santanotte (1922) and E’ piccerella (1923) are stories of upset bodies and open a space for gender reflection on the difficult relationship between women and the representation of the body in cinema.

Giovanna Callegari holds a PhD in Gender Studies (University Federico II, Naples, Italy). She has published and lectured extensively on topics including imagination, body and representation; women and cultural representation in visual arts and cinema; aesthetic education and ethics of relationships, subalternity and alterity. Since 2007 she deals with philosophical practices concerning arts and education. She has collaborated with journals like La camera blu. Journal of gender studies (University Federico II, Naples), Shift. International Journal of Philosophical Studies, Quaderni di Cinema Sud, International Association of Women Philosophers (IAPH-Italia), and she is a member of Filosofia Fuori le Mura Association, and worked also together with Mediateca Santa Sofia (Naples City Council-Department for Social Policies, Youth Services and Equal Opportunities).

Both in her life and on screen, Leda Gys was a woman who was able to represent the bond between tradition and modernity. When she started working with the producer Gustavo Lombardo, she became the quintessential Neapolitan woman. By linking popular entertainment with images of a city evolving towards modernity, Eugenio Perego’s comedies are an interesting case study. These comedies emphasize the link between the particular kind of Leda Gys-woman and the narrative and production system of Neapolitan cinema in the 1920s. I will focus in particular on an analysis of Napule … e niente cchiù (1928), a wonderful example of a musical comedy.

Anna Masecchia is a researcher in Film Studies at the Federico II University in Naples. Her work focusses on the construction of popular images and performing studies. She recently published Maddalena, Clara e le altre: la vita sognata dello schermo, in G. Carluccio, E. Morreale, M. Pierini (ed. by), Intorno al neorealismo. Voci, contesti, linguaggi nell’Italia del dopoguerra, Milano 2017.

North Africa is usually thought to be fundamentally patriarchal, and the role played by women in cultural development is marginal. The history of Arab and African women in the film production is quite hidden, but it is very rich. In Tunisia, Haydée Tamzali (1906-1998), daughter and collaborator of Albert Samama Chikly, one of the most remarkable of all Arab and African film pioneers, played a great role in cinema development. She wrote, starred in and edited the first Tunisian movies Zora (1922) and The Girl from Carthage (1924), where the heroine refuses to go through with a wedding. In Egypt, women pioneers such as Aziza Amira (1901-1952), Bahiga Hafez (1908-1983) and Assia Dagher (1908-1986) played an important role as actresses, producers and directors in the development of a national film industry.

Gina Annunziata holds a PhD in Visual Studies from the University of Siena – The Italian Institute of Human Sciences (SUM). She teaches History of Cinema at the University of Naples, L’Orientale, and at the Academy of Fine Arts of Naples. She is also a member of the Scientific Committee of the Academic Book Series “Postcolonial Film and Media Studies”, directed by L. De Franceschi for the Italian publisher Aracne (Rome). Her principal research interests lie on otherness in Italian Cinema and on North African Cinema and the Middle East.

Out of the numerous productions by Elvira Notari, the three films that have entirely survived –’A Santanotte (The Holy Night, 1922), E’ Piccerella (The Little Girl’s Wrong, 1922) and Fantasia ‘e surdato (Soldier’s Fantasy, 1927)- belong to what can be defined as sceneggiata films. Sceneggiata means “scene sulle canzoni” (scenes on songs) and refers primarily to a popular theatrical genre based on Neapolitan songs. As in the theatre, sceneggiata films make use of pre-existing popular songs as the source and trigger for the narrative, while during the film showings the songs were performed live by musicians and popular singers. This mixture of theatrical, musical and cinematographic forms was peculiar to several entrainment spectacles that became fashionable in Naples at the beginning of twentieth century, like the ones held in venues as caffé chantant and cinema chantant. This paper aims to analyse the interrelation between cinematic forms and Neapolitan songs in Elvira Notari’s films, linking this case study to the more general issues of performativity, intermediality and vernacular in early cinema.

Sonia Campanini is Professor for Film Culture at the Institut für Theater-, Film- und Medienwissenschaft of Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main, where she is responsible for the master program “Film Culture: Archiving, Programming, Presentation”. Her research and teaching interests encompass film history and theory as well as film archiving and film curatorship, with a special interest in the material, technological, aesthetic and memorial dimensions of audio-visual heritage. She has published in peer-reviewed international journals and books, co-edited L’archivio/ The Archive (2012) and is in the process of revising her doctoral dissertation Film Sound in Preservation and Presentation for publication.

The popular culture that manifests itself through the new media, above all the cinema, has a connotation of a very distinct type. In the U.S., the early twentieth century identified itself as a period of the feminization of products aimed at an emerging mass consumption. Debates arose on this topic in different environments, as the fear of a radical change, being perceived ever more concretely, began to spread. In the Italian immigrant context, the increasing presence of women among the audiences of vaudeville performances – which anticipated later singing and film shows – was thought to be the cause, since a constant and obsessive interest in leisure-time activities distracted women from caring for their families. But the time was already right for a definitive change. In the first half of the 1900s, Italy had many women figures interested in the cultural panorama, notwithstanding the restrictive fascist rules on the entrepreneurial autonomy of women. Among those women who produced texts and pursued lifestyles that influenced collective sensibilities was Elvira Notari. Those women included writers, journalists, actresses, producers and singers. This paper will focus on some of those female performers who through their specific idiom contributed towards creating a new model of the female musician and a gender perspective.

Simona Frasca holds a Ph.D. in History and Analysis of Musical Cultures from Sapienza University, Rome. She is a member of the Scientific Committee of the Centro Studi Canzone Napoletana at the Federico II University in Naples, and a former Fulbright Researcher at the Calandra Institute (CUNY). Her last book, Italian Birds of Passage [Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2014], is on the topic of the early sound reproduction era and its relation to popular music production and Italian migration to the United States.

Through an analysis of Serao’s fictional and journalistic contributions on film and theatre, I will argue in this paper that with her self-positioning as mediator for, and in relation to, her middle-class female readership, she initiated ordinary middle-class women (however consciously and strategically) into cultural fields as individual agents, consumers, and critical respondents of the theatre performances they attended and the films they watched. In the second half of the paper, I will turn to a close reading of Ubaldo Maria Del Colle’s 1917 film adaptation of Serao’s realist sentimental gothic novel Castigo (1893), about an adulterous and incestuous love-triangle. I will argue that through its transmission from page to screen, Serao was able to showcase ‘theatrically’, and for a much wider and diverse audience than previously, the city of Naples as spectacle, in contrast to Naples’ belly as seen in her political treatise Il ventre di Napoli (1884). As mediator to her female readership in her writings on film, and as celebrator of her city on the silver screen, she was exceptional in her engagement with the film industry as an Italian and Neapolitan woman writer.

Dr. Katharine Mitchell is the author of Italian Women Writers: Gender and Everyday Life in Fiction and Journalism, 1870-1910 (University of Toronto Press, 2014). She has co-edited a number of books and special issues of journals, and published articles and chapters on women as performers and writers. Her current project is on middle-class women as spectators or theatre and opera performers. She is also co-editing a book on Matilde Serao’s transnational receptions and networks. She works at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, Scotland, where she has lectured on Italian literature and culture for seven years.

The tarantella dance has been a long-lasting topos of silent cinema. Strictly linked to the culture which produced it, Tarantella “starred” not only in Italian film productions, but also in foreign films, where this dance was considered a Neapolitan speciality, despite its regional variants and notwithstanding the shift brought about by the change of film genre and dance category (namely, ballet or folk dance). This presentation aims to provide an overview on the variants of Tarantella in silent cinema, declined in its diverse regional versions and dancing styles. It will also highlight the flection of the meaning behind them and what this implies for the female body.

Elisa Uffreduzzi (Ph.D., University of Florence) is a key expert in dance and silent cinema. Her recent publications include the book La danza nel cinema muto italiano (Aracne, 2017) and the essay “Camille de Morlhon tra danza, commedia e pantomima” in L’immagine colore (Artdigiland, 2016). Since 2016 she has been collaborating with the Media Ecology Project (Dartmouth College).

Women – actresses, directresses, female producers – are strikingly more prominent in early cinema than in the later decades. Film as film without sound and therefore without the spoken word was one of the reasons for this fact. The “silent” cinema presented female filmmakers and viewers with specific possibilities of participation in societies passing into modernity. In this context Elvira Notari chose her own path and pursued it – a different path than that chosen, for example, by Asta Nielsen around the same time in Berlin.

Heide Schlüpmann studied Philosophy in the 1960s, i. a., in Frankfurt am Main. She has been a passionate movie-goer since the 1970s. In the 80s she studied early cinema. She installed Film Studies at the Goethe-University Frankfurt am Main and held her professorship from 1991 until 2008. Afterwards she began working for the Kinothek Asta Nielsen e.V.

Starting from the case of the first Italian motorised crossing of the Sahara Desert in 1937, this lecture aims to discuss the relationship between travel and cinema, stressing the “premediation” (Richard Gruisin, 2010) of cinema in the travelling experience. Working the way an explorer remediates the basic mechanism and processes of travelling (movement, visuality, technological training, mechanical glitches, interruptions, etc.) through early XX century narrative and representational media (excluding cinema), we will discuss the emergence of a cinematic mediation that does not necessarily take to form of a film. By taking this perspective, we want to ask “when” and “where” the cinema medium begins? How the dynamics of passage through different non-cinematic media (in terms of intermediality, and even transmediality, in the early XX century media sphere) help create the environmental conditions for the emergence of a cinematic mediation? How the travelling experience structurally impacts the way these passages mould the media environment of the explorer?

Andrea MARIANI is a Research Fellow at University of Udine. He published L’Audacissimo viaggio. I media, il deserto e il cinema nella microstoria della spedizione Tripoli-Addis Abeba 1937 (Mimesis 2017) and Gli anni del Cineguf. Il cinema sperimentale italiano dai cine-club al neorealismo (Mimesis 2017). He deals with media archaeology, documentary cinema, avant-garde and modernist cultures.

In this paper, I first explore the film sceneggiate as a new source for Notari’s filmmaking and describe the ways in which she transposed formal aspects of the traditional sceneggiate art form to film. Using filmic and non-filmic documentations, such as print-specific details, censor reports, copyright descriptions and trade journal advertising, I then address the American reception of Notari’s sceneggiate ‘A Santa Notte (A Holy Night) and E’ Piccerella (The Little Girl’s Wrong), among others. In conclusion, I consider how Notari’s live, interactive film sceneggiate performances may have functioned as a “liberating force” for Italian immigrants by providing an alternative public sphere and cultural practice in which self expression and a collective mode of reception may be considered a form of“vernacular modernism.

Kim Tomadjoglou is an independent audio-visual curator, programmer and historian with a special interest in the work of women film pioneers, amateur and itinerant filmmakers, and collectors. She has preserved and restored films by Elvira Notari and Alice Guy, among others. Currently, she is a contractor for the Library of Congress Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division, researching the role of mandatory copyright in motion picture collections development. Her most recent publications include: Co-editor, and Introduction, Film History, vol. 29: 1, Special issue, “Mexican Silent Cinema” (2017), and“Film Compilation: the border, bricolage and La Venganza de Pancho Villa,” Vivomatografías, issue 2, 2016. She is in the process of revising her doctoral dissertation, On the Border: The Transnational Media Practice of Fronterizo Empresarios Félix and Edmundo Padilla, 1916-1937 for publication.

Amateur films show moments in everyday and family life, but also journeys, collective rituals and public events. Like other sources of private memories (diaries, letters, amateur photographs), these films offer a large pool of individual gazes on events that have marked many aspects of our society. Mainly shot in the substandard formats 16mm, 9.5mm, 8mm and Super8 between the early Twenties and the late Eighties of the last century, they bear witness to the transformation of landscapes and lifestyles, offering the opportunity to observe the influence of historical events on people’s habits and everyday life. Among this huge private film heritage, there are films shot by Italian-American families — Italian families who emigrated to the United States in the last century — in which we can discover some peculiar moments in their daily life and their relationship to their native country. I will trace the specific archival “itinerary” through the home movie collection of the Lombardi family so as to give a new access to these private films and the history of emigration they contain.

Karianne Fiorini is an independent film archivist and curator. She is co-founder of Archivio Nazionale del Film di Famiglia (Italy), where she was Manager of Film Collections between 2003 and 2015. She is currently running projects on preserving and presenting the amateur film heritage in Italy and in the United States, and working on a catalogue raisonné of the work of the German filmmaker Helga Fanderl.

The lucid and passionate gaze of Elvira Notari is connected to a pragmatic aim: to catch the boundless and contradictory aspects of Naples. Notari’s oeuvre reflects an emotional path, a profound anthropological and aesthetic necessity, translated into images of everyday life in the former capital city, which proves to be theatrical and excessive thanks to her artistic practice. Everything should remind us of Naples. The rediscovery of partial archive material, sometimes forgotten, focuses our attention on the importance of reconstructing the memory of a city that has found in filmmaking a privileged tool to express its own myth through the discords, gaps and secondary itineraries.

Lucia Di Girolamo has a PhD in Film History. Her books include Il cinema e la città, identità, riscritture e sopravvivenze nel primo cinema napoletano (2014, Ets), and Per amore e per gioco. Sul cinema di Pedro Almodóvar (2015, Ets). She has also an interest the representation of women in silent cinema , especially in Neapolitan productions. Currently, her research is centered on the relationship between myth and the contemporary motion picture industry. From 2008 to 2012 she was managing director of Cinemascope. Indipendent Film Journal, an on-line film studies revue.

Around 1925, the collective expeditions of both Elvira Notari and the Frankfurt School become part of “a multibillion dollar research project designed, in part, around the same task I set myself: an ethnography of modernity” (Dean MacCannell, The Tourist, p. 4). While the filmmaker from Naples creates markers of Naples in her films that also feed the early tourist industry in Europe and the U.S., the tourists from Frankfurt use their stay at the house of Alfred Sohn-Rethel’s uncle at Positano to rethink their current projects “in the light of Naples.” Both parties work on infrastructure and social organization. Instead of confronting apparently “authentic” images of a local filmmaker with apparently “clichéd” fantasies of tourists, I would like to emphasize the joint project of both sides of this constellation: coming to terms with a city whose very infrastructure already puts into question traditional binary observations.

Rembert Hüser has been Professor of Media Studies at Goethe University Frankfurt since 2014. From 2003 to 2013, he was Associate Professor of Film, Media and Cultural Studies in the Departments of German, Scandinavian & Dutch and Cultural Studies & Comparative Literature at University of Minnesota. In 2016 he taught as Max Kade Professor at Brown University.

Besides architectural landmarks, the notorious Vesuvius and the romantic landscapes of the famous bay, visual representations of Naples in the 19^th and early 20^th century focus on street life: the streets of Naples as public spaces and the Neapolitan characters on those streets. Picture postcards and early films portray the city of Naples and its inhabitants for the scopophilic needs of tourists and armchair travellers around the world. The streets and street life of Naples also provide a crucial momentum in Elvira Notari’s feature films, which do not address foreigners in Italy and elsewhere, but rather local audiences in Naples and the region.

Martin Loiperdinger is Professor of Media Studies at the University of Trier. His contributions to film and cinema studies include articles, books, exhibitions, DVDs, and television features. He has been co-editor of KINtop, the German yearbook of early cinema, and of the series KINtop. Studies in Early Cinema. He is conducting the research focus Screen1900 at the University of Trier, and the Importing Asta Nielsen Database at the Deutsche Filminstitut (DIF).

Among the many aspects of Elvira Notari’s cinematic production is the frequent reference to the traditional mode in which Naples and the lively city life there are represented. In Dora Film’s movies, the city plays a decisive role, both in the construction of the story and the definition of the characters. This essay attempts to trace some possible relationships between the interior / exterior, private / public spaces of the city and the female figures in ‘A Santanotte and È piccerella, focusing in particular on the contribution made by the description of the environment to the construction of the female character and the communication of the associated traditional values.

Angela Maria Fornaro attained a PhD in the History of Cinema from the University of Florence with a thesis about tricks and special effects in Italian silent cinema. She worked on Neapolitan movies during her university degree in Naples and developed the different roles which the city and traditional landscape took on in the production of the 1920s. Over the last few years, she has managed a small 16mm film archive and organized activities for schools and children on pre-cinema equipment and the birth of the cinematograph.