Watching Italians Turn Around: Gender, Looking, and Roman/Cinematic Modernity

Abstract

This essay focuses on Alberto Lattuada’s short film “Gli italiani si voltano,” an episode in the film anthology L’amore in città (Love in the City, 1953), as a key text for understanding what is at stake in looking at the city—in particular the city of Rome—in postwar Italian filmmaking. The chapter argues that the weight of looking and the attempt to see anew are both structured as much by what we see in the image as by absences that are the inheritance from Fascist interventions in the urban fabric. The chapter concludes by suggesting some of the ways in which practices of looking and seeing in postwar Italian cinema must contend with the invisible presence of the past.