Cinema as an Apparatus for Homemaking: Gender Roles from Post-war Neorealism to the Contemporary Italian Scene

The paper presents how the representation of the categories of urban, domestic, individual and collective in Italian Neorealist and New Migrant Cinema enhances a new understanding of migrant and gender subjectivities. Its scope is double-fold: firstly, it draws upon the situation of the gender roles of migrants in post-war neorealist films, and, secondly, it addresses the ways in which contemporary Italian films dealing with contemporary migrants in Rome relate to the post-war neorealist scene. The main objective is to present how cinema, in both cases, functions as an aesthetic apparatus that mediates the homemaking mechanisms of migrants. Special attention is paid to how gender roles contribute to the mise-en-scène of such apparatuses, and to how cinema as an aesthetic apparatus can address and reconstruct the experience of migrant architectures, and the homemaking mechanisms of migrants. The way gender and migrant roles were conceived in Italian Neorealist and New Migrant Cinema was based on the intention to address the fears and anxieties of migrant architecture and homemaking and to challenge the stereotypes that characterise them. In Italian Neorealist cinema, the roles of borgatari and women function as devices of reconceptualization of Italy’s identity, providing a fertile terrain to reflect on the intersections between migration studies, urban studies and gender studies. A point of departure is the remark that, in contemporary Italian cinema – as Aine O’Healy remarks, in Migrant Anxieties: Italian Cinema in a Transnational Frame – one can discern some similarities in “the ways in which films featuring migrants remap the national territory” with neorealist films. The reconfiguration of national narratives that is achieved in the cases of Neorealist and New Migrant cinema in Italy is closely related to the formation of new subjectivities, and to the transformation of the anxieties accompanying migrant architecture into apparatuses of creative processes. Converting the anxieties of migrant architecture and homemaking into their very terrain of exploration, the films of Neorealist and New Migrant cinema in Italy reconceptualize not only the idea of community, but the way it is associated with the reconfiguration of national narratives in cinema as well