Magnani and Me

We begin our coursework in Italian cinema today with Roma, città aperta, perhaps the quintessential Italian neorealist film. Neorealist offerings are a far cry from the Hollywood-happy ending, popcorn-and-soda flicks many U.S. audiences are used to, but the films we watch throughout these seven weeks are a crucial component of Italian history and cultural memory that enrich our readings of our experiences in Italy and cinema more generally.Although there is much darkness in films like Ladri di Biciclette and Umberto D, we begin and end with movies that feature the bright performances of Anna Magnani (the last film being Mamma Roma, by the by). The neorealist narrative is, more often than not, a male-centered one, and so it is through Magnani that I have begun to think about the roles that women do play in cinematic and nationalist histories. Through their marginal presence or glaring absence, we might begin to think about the ways in which the function and depiction of women in film has potentially transformed as the rhetoric of film has evolved.