Giuliana Bruno on Elvira Notari, Italy's Forgotten Silent Cinema Pioneer

Giuliana Bruno, a prominent visual studies scholar born in Naples in 1957 and now teaching at Harvard University, discusses her research on Elvira Notari (1875–1946), the first and most prolific Italian female filmmaker. Notari directed over sixty feature films, more than one hundred newsreels, and numerous short films commissioned by immigrants in the Americas between 1906 and 1930. Only three features and a handful of fragments survive. Bruno's book 'Rovine con vista: Napoli e il cinema di Elvira Notari', recently republished by Quodlibet, reconstructs Notari's career and her production company Dora Film. Bruno discovered that Notari left no interviews or writings, a silence she respects and highlights. Notari's husband, Nicola Notari, often received credit for her work. Bruno also found that Notari established Dora Film d'America with a distribution office on 7th Avenue in Manhattan, reaching Italian immigrant communities in New York, São Paulo, and Buenos Aires. The research, begun in the mid-1980s before the internet, involved 'streetwalking' through Naples and New York. Bruno's concept of 'emotional geography' originated with this book. She also uncovered the roles of other early Italian female filmmakers and women film editors, including Notari herself, who started by hand-coloring film stock.