ANDLVIRA NOTARI. BEYOND SILENCE
Type: historical-feminist documentary
Direction: Valerio Ciriaci. With Teresa Saponangelo, Giuliana Bruno, Flavia Amabile, Cristina Vatielli, Francesca Consonni, Pippo Santonastaso
She was the first Italian director, but very few cinephiles know her. Also because of his sixty feature films and 200 documentaries only three films and very few fragments remain.
This is why the documentary produced with so much passion by Antonella Di Nocera deserves to be seenbecause it not only fills a historiographical void but also delves into the more complex world of Neapolitan silent cinema and its relationships with society and power.
An image taken from the documentary “Elvira Notari. Beyond silence”
Arrived in Naples from Salerno at the end of the nineteenth centurymarried to a craftsman who colored films, Elvira becomes a director and brings the stories of Neapolitan folklore to the screen, having family members, but also people taken from the street, act. Interviewing, among others, the historians Giuliana Bruno and Giuliana Muscio, the conservative Mario Franco, the writer Flavia Amabile, the musicologist Simona Frasca.
The portrait of a pioneer of cinema but also of a tormented woman is released (left her third daughter in an orphanage), of a captain of industry (opened a branch in New York) and a feminist who knew how to defend the image of women with his films. Worth seeing.
For those who want to discover a hidden face of Italian cinema.
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