Abstract

This paper examines the contribution of Angelina Buracci, a young feminist and pacifist pedagogue, to the early discourse on film in Italy. Published in 1916, her book Cinematografo educativo [educational cinema] is a brilliant counter to the contemporary representation of women filmgoers in the writings of several Italian male modernist intellectuals. Their construction, between 1908 and 1930, of a new canon of spectatorship centered on the figure of the male cinephile and bears traces of a gendered discourse. In the minds of these intellectuals, the “new spectator” was evoked as an alternative to an earlier, female model of spectatorship. Yet, despite their dismissal of women’s significant presence in the early discursive field, a few women writers had already begun carving out their own space in reflections on cinema. Buracci’s essay is an exemplary document in this respect. Not only does it demonstrate the author’s familiarity with the experience of cinema, but it also reveals an extraordinary independence of thought.