Una Cinepresa tutta per sé: donne e cinema di famiglia in Italia

Studies into home movies have traditionally and internationally focused on male figures, thereby promoting the notion of an exclusively patriarchal genre. The present work addresses such a trend and explores the work of a significant group of Italian female film amateurs from the 1930s. By investigating the bulk of private films produced and disseminated at the time, the present study focuses on small gauge productions by women with special attention to their approach to cinema and their way of making cinema, what prompted them to use the camera and explore different montage techniques. This investigation combines gender reading to the notions of slow motion production and the relevant and different narrative and figurativetopoi.The peculiarities of the different genres here analysed - including diary, autobiography, travel stories, and didactic experimentation, to name a few - mark a significant turn from a traditionally patriarchal view of family cinema, thereby moulding the narrative so as to produce stories whose only limit is a woman's desire and they joy to recount the self though images of daily life, family life, maternity, travel and fesitivities.