Elvira Notari (10 February 1875 in Salerno – 17 December 1946 in Cava de' Tirreni), Italy's earliest and most prolific female filmmaker, made over sixty feature films and about a hundred shorts and documentaries. She is credited as the first woman film director whom directed more than sixty feature films and about 100 documentaries, quite often writing the subjects and screenplays, inspired by Naples. She is credited as the first woman film director.
Born Elvira Coda, she married Nicola Notari. Together they founded Dora Film, and she became the first Italian woman to create a family film production company. She directed the films, while he worked as a cameraman. Their son, Eduardo or 'Gennariello,' based on a character he played, worked as an actor in many of the films. Eduardo nicknamed his mother, “The General" (La Marescialla), based on her strong will and determination displayed in her film company. In an example, tears on screen for her films had to be real, brought up from a ‘painful or emotionally sensitive detail of a player’s private life,’ rather than the use of glycerin for artificial tears.
The feature films made by Notari were often based on Neapolitan (especially middle-class women) forms of drama. Notari shifted to the sceneggiata, a hybrid theatrical form drawing on popular dramatic songs and the variety stage, by the early 1920s, and shot on the streets of Naples using non-professional actors. The amateur actors gave realistic vibes to her films, while each of Notari's scenes utilized the street as a natural stage filled with lights, crowds, and their voices alike, rather than shot in a Cinecittà. Notari defined her passionate dramas as part of a series defined by her as grandi lavori popolari (“great popular works”). Elvira Notari relied on women's literature when it came to the development of her ideas. In her “female melodramas” she focuses on the female perspective. Elvira had a tendency of portraying the "dark woman", the femme fatale, a woman who deviated from the norm.
Censorship in Italy had come down on Dora films. The films shined a light on aspects of Italian life that many found unsuitable to be portrayed. The films often dealt with “crude language and sexual undertones" and the fascist regime became a terrible enemy to her work resulting, after many years, in the cause of the decline of the Dora Films that eventually ended its producition.
Elvira moved to Cava de ‘Tirreni, near Salerno, where she retired and eventually passed on December 17, 1946.
I had the wish to pay tribute to Elvira Notari and her talent and courage as a woman to challange with her works stereotypes, a patriarchal culture and censorship putting women, middle-class and working class at the centre of her works. Her creativity was a major break through in film making, actually anticipating what will be known worldwide as Realismo Italiano. She created her own visual language, a code made of colors that highlighted the moods of the characters, but especially her camera work that gave space to the people, to real people, to the city, to its architectures, roads, views.
Her contribute to depict Napoli, the neapolitans, is of cultural importance. A society famous to be a very complex system, chaotic and turbulent, what I like to call a glitch city, and with a technic called databending, I glitched parts of films, scenes depicting the protagonists, the actresses and the actors, the context, the city and the streets, and the people.