Setting one of the most attractive cases of her time –and probably in all time movies-, Anna Magnani uniqueness offers one of the most compelling cases to consider an essential debate around star studies: the authorship of performers, and the autonomy of women’s creation in film. As an actress, as well as a fictional character and as a subject of History, she represents a level of freedom and independence that transcend a subordinate status of the systems and codes, and confronts the social, aesthetic, and creative background of her time while setting the basis of what we can consider a creation of onesown. She confirms how a star can encapsulate the essential questions of the cinema of her time: managing, negotiating andinmanycasesalsoreconstructingthem.Bornatthebeginningofthetwentiethcenturyalongwith the cinema itself as well as the first social movements of cultural modernity, Anna Magnani turns her work into a chronicle of her era. Hers is a profile of her time with connections to contemporaries – such as Roberto Rossellini or Simone de Beauvoir–, and anticipates the coordinates of modernity in the expression of new paradigms around femininity in film, stardom, and film performance. On reflecting some main question of her work such as gender identity, reflection on stardom and performance as a tool of self-representation, this proposal will address Anna Magnanis’s style from its very sense of authorship, considering her status as a plastic creator and ideologist of her own worK.
BIO:
Docente universitaria, ricercatrice e giornalista culturale. Insegna Storia del Cinema alla Scuola Ufficiale di Cinema di Catalunya (ESCAC) ed è parte integrante del grupo di ricerca CINEMA dell'Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcellona), dove attulemente collabora in un progetto di ricerca sul desiderio femminile nel cinema spagnolo del Franquismo. Ha pubblicato diversi articoli sull'influenza delle attrici nella politica e l'estetica dei media audiovisivi e si è dottorata con una tesi sull'opera filmica di Anna Magnani. La sua ultima pubblicazione sull'attrice italiana è il testo "Verso un divismo del corpo. Anna Magnani e la performance dell'esperienza" (In "El cuerpo erotico de la actriz bajo los fascismos. España, Italia, Alemania 1939-1945, a cura di Núria Bou e Xavier Pérez -Catedra, 2018-).