DWF
donnawomanfemme
Roma, Editrice coop. UTOPIA, 1986-

Venus's squint, 1998, n. 37-38

EDITORIAL, Venus's squint, pp. 2-3

The editorial presents and comments upon the topic of this issue, which deals with the formation of the imaginary and with the mole of cinema in this process. The articles look at different aspects of the question, also analysing some films by women directors.

PARIANI Laura, Cinemasin, pp. 4-10

The author is a writer who has recently published a collection of short stories, La perfezione degli elastici (e del cinema). Here she narrates the conflict between a sexuophobic morality which condemned the cinema, and the fascination the movies had for a group of young girls - dreamers more than spectators - of the Po valley, many decades ago. The story is written in standard Italian, but with many words and expressions in the dialect of the Lombardia Po valley, to underline on the one hand its provincial dimension, on the other the force of a conflict which was also to do with the process of modernisation.

GIARDINI Federica, On the Imaginary, again, pp. 11-18

Why has cinema become such a fulfilment of primary needs? The author reconsiders the conceptions of the imaginary according, on the one hand, to Lacan and on the other to Irigaray and Feminist Film Theory. She then argues that pleasant and unpleasant bodily affections inform the sense of our representations and relationship. Affections are the body of sense. According to Kristeva, this is the real "political revolution", against images which engulf us denying the possibility of our making a sense of our own.

MASI Paola, What is not shown at the cinema, pp. 19-25

Presenting a map of the film archives set up by women in Italy, the author identifies the criteria for their formation and use. She then puts forth an hypothesis for an "archive of desire". "Thinking at/as a woman spectator, the archive should try and offer her a greater possibility of active participation than usually at the cinema: the possibility to manipulate, repeat, transform, apprehend, learn from a film; and at the same time it should invite her to confront the women who decided to collect and preserve that film".

CROTTI Milena, The cracked mirror, pp. 27-30

In order to retrace the changes in the reception of women spectators, the author looks at her experience in organising for seven years, with other women of the Centro di Documentazione Lidia Crepet in Padua, series of showings and discussions of films from a feminist point of view. There is now a tradition which allows women to have their own, different sites in the collective imaginary; so the female gaze can now crack an imaginary built on the mystification of the feminine, through - for example - Greta Garbo or Judy Garland.

SPINELLI Simonetta, I've dissected Queen Christina, pp. 31-45

The author looks at her experience of taking part - as a personally involved spectator - in "Immaginaria", the lesbian film festival organised by the lesbian cultural association "Visibilia". The festival, which in 1997 was granted an award by the Regione Emilia-Romagna for its high cultural value, collects and presents lesbian films form all over the world, especially those not available through commercial channels. The films shown are by professional directors but also by amateurs, both single women and groups, and deal with the stories, problems, sexuality, itineraries, fantasies, of a lesbian community which by representing itself also constructs itself.

DE MIRO Ester Carla, The divided self. Female identity in Margarethe von Trotta's films, pp. 47-60

All the women in von Trotta's films - de Miro argues - are marked by a new way of living their being women, with a hard found dignity and an inevitable, dramatic conflictuality. In her analysis of the language of these films, de Miro begins with an hypothesis: "The divided self which dominates von Trotta's films is also a metaphor for her work"; thus, a radical transgression is made visible: i.e. "the difficult task, for a woman, of entering the symbolic realm without forfeiting her originary link with the maternal, the unsayble, the physical-instinctual" - on the contrary, succeeding in representing it though cinematic discourse.

GOPALAN Lalitha, Avenging women, pp. 61-72

The author discusses the escalation of violence in Indian films, interpreting it as a way of staging the conflictual representations which influence our public and private fantasies on national and sexual identities. She analyses some filmic representations of rape and revenge to investigate the way in which they attempt a reformulation of the relationship femininity/violence.

CELESTE Diana, The body as writing in Jane Campion's The Piano, pp. 73-78

The author analyses the three main figures in The Piano. Through their clothes, postures, tattoos, their bodies speak the relationship these characters institute with the world; they are a form of "writing", as the body is marked with the symptoms of a search for an autonomous desire, for a self-determined self-interpretation.

GARGANO Antonella - PIETRANGELI Monica, Writing: Utopia or Damnation? Thinking of Ingeborg Bachmann, pp. 79-91

In this section of the journal, a feminist scholar of some standing (Antonella Gargano) introduces a younger scholar. In this article, the author analyses Bachmann's theoretical and fictional production in the light of her idea of the literary work as a space which must be opened to a new perception, a new feeling, a new awareness of reality.

MULVEY Laura, Pandora's Box: Topographies of Curiosity, pp. 93-110

"A secret thing may be hidden away, in a concealed place, but a secret meaning must be transformed into a code. One can be simply discovered by the eye, the other has to be deciphered. The topographies of the Pandora myth move between the two. While the box has the space of a dangerous secret that can literally be opened and revealed, its significance for myths and iconography of the feminine is coded and has to be deciphered through theory". Thus Mulvey introduces her investigation; since "the myth of Pandora is about feminine curiosity, but it can be only decoded by feminist curiosity, transforming and translating her iconography and attributes into the segments of a puzzle, riddle or enigma".

ARCARA Stefania, The dove and the serpent. Feminist strategies of a Victorian Lady, pp. 111-123

The article discusses the travel writings of Emily Lowe, a rather anticonformist Victorian lady; one of those "unprotected females", i.e. women travelling without a male escort, who in the l9th century chose to explore the world. Lowe, who want to Norway and then to Sicily, made an art of her being "unprotected", and her writings are full of interesting remarks and unusual advice to other women willing to follow in her steps. Her writing is "marked by a difference", and in part anticipates a female/feminist subjectivity, but on the whole "it perpetuates the white, bourgeois, imperialist subject".