Behind Closed Shutters: Unlocking gender through the figure of the prostitute in postwar Italian cinema (1942-1965)

解释银幕上男女表现的主要模式与好莱坞有关，但我们用什么工具来看待其他国家影院的性别表现呢？我们如何将同样的方法应用到其他特定的环境中？本研究试图通过关注1942年至1965年间意大利电影中妓女的表现来回答这些问题。这个角色之所以被选中，是因为她在第二次世界大战之后的20年里在意大利电影中非常流行——这场战争使意大利女性卖淫的存在成为人们关注的焦点。与此同时，越来越多的女性权利意识推动了一场关闭意大利国家批准的妓院的运动。对这一变化的抵制引起了一场突出的公众辩论，这场辩论一直持续到1958年梅林法最终结束的“案件选择”，并对意大利电影产生了重大影响。对电影中女性妓女的仔细文本解读将被置于围绕她的历史话语的语境中。在本书的第一部分中，我将考虑在视觉文化中研究妓女的方法，将卖淫的经验和表现之间的冲突确定为关键的理论挑战。通过文学、歌剧传统、早期电影、天主教、医学话语以及卖淫与国家之间的关系，意大利文化对妓女的理解在特定方面受到了影响。空间的概念支配着许多这样的话语，妓院/街头的二分法是卖淫监管的核心。强调卖淫的历史和表现如何相互作用，我将展示这些空间如何与电影空间的概念重叠。通过将英语国家的观众观影理论与意大利语境相结合，我建议历史上的观众通过电影妓女的形象在不同的空间中上演他们的欲望，并在意大利电影院的具体空间中体验她。书的第二部分确定了女妓表现的四个关键时刻，将关键电影置于该时期所有意大利电影的背景下进行仔细阅读。在这些章节的第一章中，聚焦于从独裁到重建的过渡，我考虑了妓女的形象如何让我们理解战后意大利电影的性别化和国家建设过程及其主导运动：新现实主义。在20世纪50年代后期流行的情节剧中，妓女通常与保守的文化霸权和新现实主义计划的崩溃联系在一起。然而，在下一章中，通过将情节剧视为潜在的意大利“女性电影”，思考对女性之间关系的描述，并考虑到女性观众被忽视的视角，我认为妓女具有多种功能。在第五章中，梅林对20世纪50年代和60年代性别观念的建议的中心地位将通过试图将卖淫问题作为政治问题来解决的电影来探讨。这些后来的电影借鉴了新现实主义伦理，并展示了电影如何成为关于妓院的公共话语的一部分。意大利电影经常将经济繁荣与卖淫联系起来，表达对女性角色变化的担忧。回顾20世纪60年代早期喜剧的兴起，第六章探讨了关于消失的妓院的形象和回忆是如何被滑稽地用来重新塑造僵化的性别角色的。这本书挑战了战后意大利电影中关于性别关系的公认智慧。电影理论的创新运用，与历史背景密切相关，为意大利电影史提供了一个新的视角：在其表现形式和观众中都有性别。

The dominant models for interpreting the representation of men and women on screen have emerged in relation to Hollywood, but what tools do we use to look at gender representation in other national cinemas? How do we adapt the same approaches to other specific contexts? This study attempts to answer these questions, by focusing on the representation of the female prostitute in Italian cinema between 1942 and 1965. This figure has been selected because of her striking prevalence in Italian cinema in the two decades after the Second World War - a war which brought the existence of female prostitution into the spotlight in Italy. At the same time a growing awareness of women's rights drove a campaign to close Italian state-approved brothels. Resistance to this change gave rise to a prominent public debate that carried on beyond the eventual closure of the 'case chiuse' with the Merlin law in 1958 and also had a significant impact upon Italian cinema. Close textual readings of the female prostitute on film will be set in the context of the historical discourses surrounding her. In the first part of the book I will consider approaches to the prostitute in visual culture, identifying the clash between the experience and the representation of prostitution as the key theoretical challenge. Italian culture has been inflected in specific ways in its understanding of the prostitute through literature, operatic tradition, earlier cinema, Catholicism, medical discourse, and the relationship between prostitution and the state. The notion of space governs many of these discourses, the brothel/street dichotomy being central to the regulation of prostitution. Emphasizing how the history and representation of prostitution interact, I will show how these spaces overlap with notions of cinematic space. By adapting Anglophone theories of spectatorship to the Italian context, I will suggest that historical spectators staged their desire in different spaces through the figure of the filmic prostitute, and also experienced her within the concrete spaces of Italian cinemas.The second part of the book identifies four key moments in the representation of the female prostitute, setting the close reading of key films in the context of all Italian cinema featuring the figure in the period. In the first of these chapters, focusing on transition from dictatorship to reconstruction, I consider the ways in which the figure of the prostitute allows us to understand the gendering and nation-building processes of postwar Italian cinema and its dominant movement: Neorealism. The prostitute in the later popular melodramas of the 1950s is typically associated with a conservative cultural hegemony and the collapse of this Neorealist project. However, in the next chapter, by approaching melodramas as potential Italian 'women's films', thinking about the depiction of relations between women, and considering the neglected perspective of the female spectator, I suggest that the female prostitute serves multiple functions. In chapter five the centrality of the Merlin proposal to ideas about gender in the 1950s and 1960s will be explored through films that attempt to tackle the issue of prostitution as a political one. These later films draw upon Neorealist ethics and show how cinema became part of the public discourse about the brothel. Associations between the economic boom and prostitution are often used in Italian cinema to express nervousness about changes in women's roles. Looking at the rise of comedy in the early 1960s, chapter six explores the ways in which the figure and reminiscences about the lost brothels are used comically to reinscribe rigid gender roles. This book challenges received wisdom about gender relations in Italian cinema of the postwar period. An innovative use of film theory, with close reference to the historical context, gives a new perspective on Italian cinematic history: as gendered in both its representations and its audiences.