ABSTRACT
The brave new world of globality is identified with ‘mobile’ subjects and a lifestyle that differs substantially from the years prior to World War Two in Europe. Social and political changes took place in both Britain and Italy that altered the contours of these two nations, and cinema and television played a critical role in the cultural changes. This chapter compares a number of woman’s films produced in Britain and Italy in the 1960s, involving dynamic images of the corporeal body, geography, music, fashion, landscape and media forms that underscore the transnational dimensions of 1960s cinematic culture involving portrayals of gender. In Britain, altered portraits of femininity emerged in Girl with Green Eyes
(1964), The Knack … and How to Get It (1965) and Darling (1965), largely connected to the world of the metropolis, and actresses such as Rita Tushingham and Julie Christie became icons of swinging femininity (Geraghty 1997; Luckett 2000). These films resemble those made in other West European cinemas of the decade in their shared concern with the re-fashioning of the culture and politics of femininity within the emergent society of consumption. Such films are structured around physical journeys within and across regional and national borders as well as conceptual journeys across boundaries of social class, generation and sexuality; voyages in space and time that present a clear departure from the earlier woman’s film which ‘most often revolves around the traditional realms of woman’s experience: the familial, the domestic, the romantic’ (LaPlace 1987: 139). The popular British costume dramas of the 1940s do not ‘foreground family as an issue’ but instead create a fanciful site of sexual pleasure (Harper 1987: 190). A more hybrid generic form, the swinging 1960s film adopts a cinematic language that invokes different clothing fashions, hairdos and mises en scène for addressing femininity (and masculinity). These films have been celebrated as dramatizing changes that ‘had a fundamental effect on society and the environment’ (Murphy 1992: 139). After years of privation, the decade ushered in an affluent society in which traditional attitudes toward gender and sexuality, the feminine body, courtship, the family, maternity and social class appeared to be crumbling in the wake of the permissive society. Legislation that allowed for modest changes in relation to marriage, divorce, homosexuality, family planning and abortion (Hall 2000:167-85) helped to
reconfigure conceptions of the nation, its institutions and its inhabitants. The British cinema expressed these promises and threats to an emerging society and its culture in its films. Corresponding changes were also manifested in Italy and identified with what
came to be known as the Economic Miracle. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Italy was largely a ‘backward’ country characterized by a low standard of living that was most marked in the south of the country where ‘more than 2,700,000 families were classified as “poor” or “needy”, equivalent to a quarter of the total population … [o]nly 7% of households had electricity, drinking water, and an indoor toilet. Illiteracy was still widespread’ (Duggan 1998: 262). By the mid-1960s the economic situation had changed noticeably. Southerners began to migrate to the industrial north, to cities such as Rome, Turin and Milan, and participated in the growing prosperity exemplified in the production and purchase of Italian cars, motorcycles, and office and domestic appliances, and the growing popularity of Italian fashion was manifest both nationally and internationally. Technological strides brought new social mores into existence, and changing
modes of femininity suggested a national rebirth (Buckley 2000; Gundle 1999; Reich 2004). In the 1950s, a voluptuous and fecund figure of woman emerged, identified with Sophia Loren, Gina Lollobrigida and Silvana Mangano. Their narrow waistlines, full breasts, shapely legs and ‘unruly’ behaviour embodied a challenge to Catholic views on marriage, maternity and family. Moving into the 1960s, Monica Vitti’s star image offers a cinematic portrait of femininity that grapples critically with these issues. Having made her name in the existential explorations of director Michelangelo Antonioni, she also appeared in more genre-defined films, including her first foray into Britain with the stylized spy thriller Modesty Blaise (1966). Vitti’s comedy vehicle La Ragazza con la Pistola (The Girl with the Pistol, 1968) assumes a more explicit relation to transnational cinema, and is consonant with certain British comedies that highlight a conflict between tradition and modernity.
