Quodlibet, 2023
A great city, Naples — with its streets, its vistas, its iconographic universe, its cinematic vocation — seen across the years through the eyes of two women. Elvira Coda Notari (1875–1946), the first and most prolific Italian female filmmaker, produced between 1906 and 1930 more than sixty feature films, around a hundred short newsreels, and numerous brief documentaries commissioned by Neapolitan emigrants who had settled in America — until fascist censorship and the transition to sound forced her production company, Dora Film, to cease operations. Giuliana Bruno, born in Naples, moved to New York in the 1980s and there began to reconstruct a particular moment in the history of her native city: the moment in which, alongside cinema, modernity was born — with its innovative languages of movement, new means of transportation, arcades or passages, and the other technological and urban transformations that revolutionized modes of perception between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Drawing on film fragments, frames, scripts, and writings unearthed through extensive archival research conducted in Italy and the United States among the surviving traces of Elvira Notari’s pioneering work and that of Dora Film, Rovine con vista makes its own the worldview of a forgotten director who sought, with her camera, to capture the city and its ways of life “from life.” The result is a wide-ranging inquiry that encompasses cinema and photography, literature and art history, popular culture, theatrical stages, magazines, architecture, and the history of medicine.
“A beautiful book… Rovine con vista can be read as a travel narrative. You set off and follow two threads: one, rigorous and extraordinarily valuable, is the precise analytical reconstruction of Elvira Notari’s cinema. The other, barely concealed beneath a ‘high’ yet not impenetrable critical filter, is the personal tension of the woman who wrote the book. Speaking as a filmmaker, it is as though a text now exists that could even invite me toward a cinematic transposition — an impossible remake of a film that in fact no one can see any longer. It is for this creative and vital tension, as much as for its critical commitment, that I am grateful to Giuliana.” — Mario Martone