Women in history: Elvira Notari the first director

AND in Naples that Elvira Coda discovers the new Parisian show called “cinemà”. A barker acts as a doorman and all it takes is two cents to see the famous Lumière brothers’ train come out of the wall. She has just arrived from Salerno, where she was born in 1875, with father, mother, brothers and the burden of not being married yet at the age of twenty, practically a guarantee of spinsterhood. And indeed in the Neapolitan capital he met Nicola Notari, his age, photographer and illustrator, and the spark was immediate. At the moment she is content with designing hats and has put her teacher’s diploma in the drawer.

The passion of Elvira Notari

«Day and night I thought about when we met, you were with your father, to see the Passion of Christor. You were beautiful, I remember every detail of your face, the graceful smile, the elegant dress” he writes to her, already lost. A religious film forms the backdrop to their first look and is truly an omen. In fact, love at first sight is double: amorous and professional. He is a penniless painter of landscapes and still lifes, an illustrator without great fortune, but he has a job that gives him a living: «Every morning I go around the photographers in Naples, they give me packs of photos and I take them home. I sit down, with the brush and aniline I put pink on faces, red on lips, green on leaves, black and blue on clothes. My sister Olga gives me a hand. We color the photos, they pay well».

Elvira and Nicola get married immediatelyon August 25, 1902. Five years later, in 1907, they have a photographic laboratory and three childreni, Eduardo, known as Gennariello, Dora and Maria. It is Dora who gives her name to the family business, la Dora Film, where everyone has their role. She, Elvira, has earned the nickname Marshal for her authoritative attitude: she knows how to command everyone’s respect and film producers need the Notari studio to color the frames by hand, one by one.

Elvira Notari, daughter of Vesuvius

It is the beginning of a great adventure told in the book The daughter of Vesuviusby Emanuele Coen (SEM), who has the great merit of remember the figure of the first female director of Italian cinema. Because the laboratory is only a starting point, as Coen tells us: «Elvira and Nicola start making short films intended to precede or conclude the show. The Augurals, short films that welcome the audience into the room, arouse their curiosity and put them at ease, and Goodbyes, in which they greet the spectators by imprinting simple scenes on the film: two street urchins chasing each other, a baby in a cradle making faces, the walk of ladies and gentlemen along the Caracciolo seafront. A new gold rush in which Elvira churns out ideas continuously and Nicola is her armed wing, the machine operator who transforms dreams into reality.”

The audience identified with the characters

And Elvira and Nicola’s dream also begins take shape: produce your own films. The editing room looks like «a tailoring workshop. Paradoxically, the great innovation of the century, ‘o mbruoglio int’o lenzuolo, the scam inside the sheet, rests on the skills of the young artisans hired on a piecework basis. A manual, repetitive, underpaid job, which requires infinite patience just like sewing, wallpaper decoration, porcelain painting. Jobs for women.”

Elvira is a woman. Ambitious. She does everything, even if the Dora film by law must be registered to Nicola. Although her day is exhausting, she finds time to read: «the serial novels by Carolina Invernizio, Assunta Spina by Salvatore Di Giacomo, The pleasure by D’Annunzio, A woman by Sibilla Aleramo. Until, one fine day, the revelation arrives: The belly of Naples» says Coen. Matilde Serao becomes an idol for Elvira. She is also a journalist, the first woman to have founded and directed a newspaper in Italy.

Elvira begins to shoot her films on the streets: gangs of boys who beat each other up, a little girl saved from the waves, a seamstress seduced by a “good” young man: «Elvira talks about her Naples, the city of lowlifes and street urchins, of unbridled passion and betrayals, of seductresses and seduced women, of orphans and mothers, of murders and suicides, of madness. She gives voice to the excluded and repressed emotions, she redeems the misery of the humble. This is why the public identifies with her characters.”

Elvira Notari’s women go against the grain

She is especially interested in the lives of women. In Medea tells the story of a daughter of Maria from the Annunziata orphanage in Naples. In Crazy Rosaa, a news story. Truculent stories, «outside the respectable canons that require us to remain on the tracks of good feelings», very close to bloody serial novels, up to films like The red dwarffor which she writes the screenplay and edits together with her husband, where the protagonist Raffaella, new Justine, finds herself dealing with an evil dwarf who she believes to be her brother and who instead, in a Lombrosian way, is as ugly as he is evil and a liar..

Elvira’s cinema is silent, but set to music: music is so important that she «purchases the cinematographic reproduction rights of all the songs competing at the Piedigrotta festival» in order to make a film based on the one that won. A brilliant idea. The protagonist of She’s smalltaken from the song of the same name by Libero Bovio, is the busty mathematics teacher of her son, hired as an actress.

Even Elvira occasionally switches to the other side of the cameraand she does well: she also teaches acting, suggesting an intense, realistic and measured style, very different from the interpretations bordering on caricature that are popular with Francesca Bertini and Lyda Borelli.

The struggle with censorship, which is based in Rome, is constant. They insist on details, such as certain risqué captions (“He intended that kiss to flicker like a tongue of flame throughout his entire person”, what a scandal!) but what What really burns are Ersilia’s female figures, so different from the standardized profile and alien to the sexist and patriarchal vision of society. With the advent of fascism, criticism of his films became more detailed: in those films the country doesn’t make a good impression on us, so they can’t circulate abroad, for example in the United States. But they get there anyway and they love it in Little Italy.

To think that his films are homemade: the performers, including friends and relatives and above all his son Gennariello, who became a star, «they follow Elvira’s orders, who wants them to be natural. When filming ends she prepares food for the crew. From the electrician to the leading actor, everyone toasts the success of the film in a crescendo of ruby ​​red bottles of Cilento. Every time the end of filming turns into a whole day long party». There will be dozens of these parties. When Elvira retired in the 1930s, overwhelmed by the costs of sound that she was unable to sustain, she had a very long filmography of over 60 feature films.

The last movie

The latest film by Notari gira is commissioned by an association of Italians in New York devoted to the patron saint of their country, Christian Triumph: «Gennariello takes on the role of San Pellegrinowith his brothers in faith they preach the Gospels and for this they are arrested and tortured.” There is no lack of a femme fatale who tries to corrupt the holy man, but ends up converting too, while the future saint and his brothers are promptly martyred. «In Italian cinemas it is a fiasco, while in the United States the communities of Italian origin appreciate it».

Even without the need for too many saints, when he died in Cava de’Tirreni on 17 June 1946, at the age of 71, the “marshal” Elvira had achieved her personal little big miracle. Here I am.

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