by Stefano Vaccara
NEW YORK (UNITED STATES) (ITALPRESS) – Full room, attentive audience and participation, and the feeling of assisting not only the projection of a film, but the return of a deleted memory. At the Manhattan Film Forum, one of New York’s independent cinema temples, on Monday the American premiere of the documentary Elvira Notari: Beyond Silence has recorded the whole sold out for a figure that has remained too long on the margins of film history. The film, directed by Valerio Ciriaci and produced by Antonella Di Nocera, brings back to the center of the scene Elvira Notari, pioneer of Italian cinema, first female director in our country, author of over 60 films between the Ten and Twenty of the twentieth century. A vast production, of which today only fragments, three feature films and few documentaries survive, but sufficient to return a surprisingly modern visual language, able to anticipate the neorealism of decades.
It is precisely this tension between absence and rediscover the heart of the documentary: not a simple biography, but a work that questions the way history selects, forgets and, sometimes, returns. Elvira Coda, born in Salerno in 1875, moved to Naples, where he assumed the surname Notari after his marriage to Nicola Notari in 1902. It was progressively erased first by fascist censorship, which badly endured the raw realism of his works, and then by an official historiography that ignored the contribution for a long time. After the screening, the Greek room remained for a long Q&A, a sign of involvement gone far beyond cinematic curiosity. To dialogue with the public, moderated by the historical artistic director Bruce Goldstein, were director Ciriaci, producer Di Nocera and scholar Giuliana Bruno, professor at Harvard and author of the fundamental volume Streetwalking on a Ruined Map: Cultural Theory and the City Films of Elvira Notari, from which the path of rediscovery that also inspired the documentary.
Bruno, together with other film historians, brought to light, since the 1970s, a filmography that was likely to disappear permanently. The evening at the Film Forum has thus assumed the value of a symbolic event: to bring Elvira Notari back to New York, a city she never visited but that already in the 1920s welcomed her films in the Little Italies, in front of immigrant communities who recognized in those images her life, her contradictions and her nostalgia. The success of Dora Film, the production house of the Notari family, was such as to lead to the opening of a seat in New York, on Seventh Avenue, where films were produced specifically for the public of the Italian emigrants, documentaries capable of evoking parties and rites of the countries left behind.
In this sense, the American premiere was not only a distributive stage, but a return, almost a circle that closes between past and present, between Naples and New York, between memory and oblivion. On the margins of the projection, the testimonies to the Italpress of the director Valerio Ciriaci, producer Antonella Di Nocera and the historian of the cinema Giuliana Bruno, who, together with clips of the film, allow to enter the heart of a project that is together cinema, research and political act: return visibility to those who have been excluded from the official story. After the New York preview, the documentary will continue its tour in the United States with screenings in universities, cultural institutions and festivals, from Cleveland and Rochester to Pittsburgh, Los Angeles and San Diego. The trip will also touch cities like Indianapolis, St. Louis and Detroit, bringing the story of Elvira Notari from one coast to another of the country.
– photo xo9/Italpress –
(ITALPRESS).
