In the opening frames of the 1922 Neapolitan melodrama È piccerella, the screen erupts into what the intertitles describe as an “orgiastic pandemonium of Bacchantes.” It is a visceral, unvarnished glimpse of Naples’s Candelora festival, where the camera lingers not on the grand architecture, but on the fringes: an obese man drinking exultantly from a pint glass, and a pauper gleefully flashing a mouth with only two remaining teeth.
This was the world of Elvira Notari, a Elvira Notari low-life cinema pioneer who captured the grit, squalor, and raw sensuality of early 20th-century Italy. As the country’s first and most prolific female filmmaker, Notari didn’t just direct stories. she documented a social reality that the subsequent fascist regime would spend decades trying to incinerate from the national memory.
Operating through her company, Dora Film—which she ran alongside her husband and cameraman, Nicola—Notari directed 60 feature films and hundreds of shorts, and documentaries. Her work was characterized by an anthropological gaze, focusing on the marginalized, the deviant, and the desperate. Yet, due to systemic censorship and the physical destruction of negatives, only three of her features survive in full: ’A Santanotte (1922), È piccerella, and Fantasia ‘e surdato (1927).
The Aesthetics of the Street and the ‘Sceneggiata’
Notari’s cinema was deeply rooted in the sceneggiata style—a form of Neapolitan musical drama where live musicians interacted with the emotional beats of the film. This format allowed her to export a specific, raw version of Neapolitan identity to emigrant communities worldwide, evoking a potent, often painful nostalgia.
Unlike the sanitized versions of Italy later promoted by the state, Notari’s films embraced the carnality of the streets. In È piccerella, she explores the fraught relationship between Margaretella, a manipulative woman, and Tore, a man so besotted he steals from his own mother to fund his beloved’s expensive tastes. It was this refusal to hide the “ugly” side of society—theft, infidelity, and poverty—that eventually placed her in the crosshairs of the state.
Giuliana Bruno, whose 1992 research in Streetwalking on a Ruined Map helped reconstruct Notari’s career, suggests that the director possessed a keen class consciousness. For Notari, the dirty alleyways of Naples weren’t merely a picturesque backdrop for melodrama; they were the lived reality of the people she filmed. This approach presaged the Italian Neorealism movement that would emerge after World War II, though Notari was operating decades earlier.
Erasure by the ‘White Telephone’ Regime
As Benito Mussolini’s fascist regime tightened its grip on Italian culture, the “low-life” realism of Notari became an ideological liability. The regime sought to project a unified, wholesome, and disciplined image of Italy. This led to the rise of “white telephone” films—glamorous, escapist comedies featuring wealthy characters in pristine settings, designed to distract the public from the socio-economic decay of the era.
The conflict reached a breaking point with a 1928 fascist censorship law. The legislation specifically denied approval for films that depicted “stallholders, beggars, urchins, dirty alleyways, and people dedicated to dolce far niente” (the sweetness of doing nothing). The law outlawed the incredibly milieu that defined Notari’s cinematic universe.
| Period/Year | Key Event | Impact on Notari’s Work |
|---|---|---|
| Early 1920s | Peak of Dora Film | Production of 60 features and hundreds of shorts. |
| 1928 | Fascist Censorship Law | Outlawed depictions of Neapolitan poverty and “urchins.” |
| 1930 | Closure of Dora Film | Company folded due to censorship and costs of “talkies.” |
| 1946 | Death of Elvira Notari | Died in obscurity in Cava de’ Tirreni. |
Notari attempted to survive by bowdlerizing her earlier works to meet the new standards, but the financial and creative pressure was insurmountable. The prohibitive cost of transitioning to sound films, combined with state hostility, forced Dora Film to fold in 1930. Notari spent her final years in retirement near her birthplace of Salerno, dying in 1946 as a largely forgotten figure.
A Hidden Lineage: From Naples to New York
Whereas the fascist regime succeeded in silencing Notari during her lifetime, the DNA of her work persisted, particularly within the Italian-American experience. The sceneggiata films she exported were staples in the “Little Italy” theaters of New York, influencing generations of immigrants.
This connection is evident in the work of Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese. Coppola’s grandfather, Francesco Pennino, was a songwriter and film exhibitor who imported these silent melodramas. The influence is subtly woven into The Godfather Part II, where a 1917 flashback depicts an audience reacting to the same kind of nostalgic, emotional music that accompanied Notari’s films.
the “pullulating” street scenes and the juxtaposition of joyful community gatherings with sudden, brutal violence in films like The Godfather and Goodfellas mirror the rhythms of Notari’s street festivals. Even the sordid, heaving atmosphere of Times Square in Taxi Driver echoes the “orgiastic pandemonium” Notari captured in Naples a century prior.
Recovering the Silence
Today, a concerted effort is underway to restore Notari to her rightful place in cinema history. The Elvira Notari National Committee was established last year to mark the 150th anniversary of her birth, aiming to preserve the fragments of her work and study her role as a feminist pioneer.
Central to this revival is the documentary Elvira Notari: Beyond Silence, produced by Antonella Di Nocera and directed by Valerio Ciriaci. Because Notari left no diaries and gave no interviews, the filmmakers used a collaborative approach, inviting modern photographers, novelists, and musicians to interpret her “artisanal” approach to cinema.
For Di Nocera, Notari is more than a historical curiosity; she is a symbol of the struggle against erasure. The documentary argues that the silencing of Notari by the state mirrors the ways women continue to be marginalized in contemporary narratives.
The recovery of Notari’s legacy continues through a series of international screenings. Elvira Notari: Beyond Silence is scheduled for a screening at the Film Forum in New York on April 6, followed by a tour of the United Kingdom throughout April and May.
We invite you to share your thoughts on the erasure of cinematic history and the rediscovery of pioneers like Notari in the comments below.
