Cecilia Mangini

To Be a Documentary Filmmaker

14.11.2023
A COLLECTION OF 5 texts, 5 film pages, 1 event, 1 news item
FR EN IT

Born in 1927 in the southern Italian town of Mola di Bari, Mangini began her career as a photographer. She moved to Rome in 1952 and first came into contact with cinema as an organiser in the Italian federation of film clubs, where she also met her future husband and lifelong collaborator Lino Del Fra. Mangini’s debut film Ignoti alla città [Unknown to the City] (1958), a film about disaffected and alienated youths in Rome’s postwar suburbs, is considered the first documentary ever made by a woman in a very male-centric, post-fascist Italian society. The film was inspired by Pier Paolo Pasolini’s novel Ragazzi di vita [The Street Kids] (1955), which prompted her to ask him to write the commentary for her film, after finding his address in the phonebook. They would collaborate on two more of her films, with Pasolini writing the script for La canta delle marane [The Blues of the Marshes] and Stendalì: suonano ancora [Here They Play Again] (1960).

Mangini’s films penetrate deeply into post-war Italy, where social reconstruction is struggling, especially in the south, and industrialisation is creating precarious conditions in the north. In front of her camera, the daily lives of Italians living socially on the margins become both poetic and political. Their words, but especially gestures, body language and facial expressions, contain a disruptive potential revealed by Mangini’s gaze, which was clearly shaped by neorealism. Perhaps not surprisingly, the young are very often at the centre of her work. As a representation of the future of the country, they caught her interest from early on, as films like Ignoti alla città, La canta delle marane, Tommaso (1965) and La briglia sul collo [The Bridle on the Neck] (1974) clearly show.

Besides her focus on the proletariat and the fate of the young and disenfranchised, Mangini’s filmmaking is also marked by a desire to capture the often disappearing ritual performances of Italy’s southern rural communities. Inspired by the research of Italian anthropologist and philosopher Ernesto de Martino, she records religious and magical rituals, staged or otherwise. Here Stendalì serves as the strongest example, a staged recording of a traditional mourning song in Griko dialect, spoken in the region of Puglia. Gathering the last surviving performers proficient in the art of lament, who live scattered among the small villages of the Grecìa Salentina area of Puglia, she believed funeral chants to be one of the highest forms of poetry. Through her collaboration with Pasolini, who created a Griko “replica” from the only remaining memories of the song, the film helps safeguard the practice from oblivion. Her quietly confrontational documentaries of daily life in Italy were censored for many years. In Mangini’s own words, the Italian system forced documentary filmmakers to act “under the radar like drug dealers”. Driven by a strong libertarian and anarchist sense, she never shied away from pointing an accusing finger at vested political powers. Mainly for this reason, her films have only recently started to be restored and re-exhibited.1

Bram Van Beek

  • 1Following the restoration of Mangini’s films by Cineteca di Bologna a series of retrospectives were held all over the world. Last year, feminist film journal Another Gaze also dedicated a dossier to her work and presented a selection of films on their platform Another Screen.

Texts

Interview with Cecilia Mangini

Andrea Meneghelli, Michela Zegna, 2022
CONVERSATION
09.11.2022
EN IT

I don’t know if I lacked the courage to make a feature film or if I was genuinely attracted by the idea of recounting reality... because that’s the place where you get really close to people. What I was looking for was the cinema of the real, which has nothing to do with the cinema of reality, because the real is what underlies reality, it is what comes up when you succeed in explaining what happens beyond appearances.

Intervista con Cecilia Mangini

Andrea Meneghelli, Michela Zegna, 2022
CONVERSATION
09.11.2022
EN IT

Io non lo so se è stato per non coraggio di fare il film vero oppure per attrazione di raccontare la realtà. Perché nella realtà tu ti avvicini veramente alla gente. Sei a caccia di quello che si può chiamare cinema del reale, che non è il cinema della realtà perché il reale è il fondo della realtà. È quella cosa per cui tu riesci a spiegare quello che succede al di là delle apparenze.

Anne-Violaine Houcke, 2014
ARTICLE
02.11.2022
FR

Pour Cecilia Mangini, après la chute de Mussolini, c’est justement le cinéma qui donne forme aux espoirs de l’après-guerre : le néoréalisme, les films étrangers qui retrouvent la voie des écrans italiens (Vertov et Eisenstein, notamment, auront une influence fondamentale sur son œuvre), les revues de cinéma. En 1951, elle part pour Rome, où elle collabore à diverses revues comme Cinema nuovo, en tant que critique et photographe. Arpentant les marges de la cité, elle découvre un anneau de faubourgs « mal famés », ces borgate que Pasolini raconte dans le roman qu’il publie en 1955, Ragazzi di vita.

Michela Zegna, 2022
ARTICLE
26.10.2022
EN IT

Cecilia Mangini (Mola di Bari, 31 July 1927 – Rome, 21 January 2021) was the first Italian woman with the audacity to step behind the camera to document the socio-political transformations of post–World War II. A photographer, essayist, and filmmaker, she dedicated her whole life to militant cinema, an adjective – she used to say – “that today sounds like a profanity”.

Michela Zegna, 2022
ARTICLE
26.10.2022
EN IT

Cecilia Mangini (Mola di Bari, 31 luglio 1927 – Roma, 21 gennaio 2021) è stata la prima donna che ha osato mettersi dietro la macchina da presa per documentare le trasformazioni sociali e politiche del secondo dopoguerra italiano. Fotografa, saggista, sceneggiatrice e regista ha dedicato la sua vita al cinema militante, un aggettivo che oggi – sono parole sue – “sembra quasi una parolaccia”.

Film pages

Event

News Item

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