Three complete features, two shorts, and four fragments are all that survives of the 160 movies Elvira Notari, Italy’s first female filmmaker, made between 1906 and 1930. She was incredibly prolific, even founded her own studio based out of Naples, Dora Film. And yet, you’ve likely never heard of her, the loss of nearly the entirety of her work effectively silencing her. But director Valerio Ciriaci seeks to give her back her voice with Elvira Notari: Beyond Silence, his engaging documentary that’s part history lesson, part present-day investigation, part celebration of how one artist can inform another.
Clips from the little surviving footage from Notari’s filmography are employed extensively throughout the documentary, lending credence to her status as a great artist; we catch glimpses of mesmerizing close-ups (the definition of “We had faces”), sensual encounters, and hand-colored frames that make the movies appear even more stunningly contemporary. Working primarily between documentary and melodrama, her films are both vibrant snapshots of Italian life at the advent of the twentieth century, and female-focused narratives that forthrightly detail the unfair burdens placed on women. Her earliest surviving feature, 1922’s ‘A Santanotte, for example, follows a working girl who is abused by the father she care for a coveted by a man she does not love.” Movie-making may have been and still is a male-dominated industry, but the film points out how the cultural specificity of her Neapolitan background helped pave the way for her to not only direct, but write, produce, and open a studio. It’s generally acceptable in Naples for a woman to ply a trade and run a business; filmmaking is just another form of labor. Frequently working alongside her husband and later casting their son in almost all of her movies, Notari made her business a family affair, until censorship from Italy’s fascist regime (although Notari, in a testament to her business intellect in addition to her creativity, had two prints of her films made, one to send to the censors, allowing her to ship the secret uncensored second copy to the U.S. for safekeeping) and personal strife prompted her to retire and withdraw until her death in 1946.
Elvira Notari is bolstered by the participation of several scholars and artists— including Giuliana Bruno, a professor who published a book about Notari in 2023, and Cristina Vatielli, a photographer working on a project about Notari— but they serve a function beyond mere talking heads. A support group for women uses frames from Notari’s films as the basis for embroidery products, allowing her work to evolve and take on new shades of meaning. Vatielli’s photo project includes using models styled as Notari and her husband Nicola, imagining scenes from their lives at home as parents to their newborn son, and as work partners, inventing new methods of editing film and location scouting. As Vatielli states, these photos aren’t mere recreations, but ways of filling the space in the silences that the lack of knowledge about her have spawned.
Ciriaci’s film serves a similar purpose, noting that most histories of Italian cinema begin with neorealism, which roughly began in the early 1940s; the 1910s and 1920s are just a blip, undeserving of their clear artistic merit. At the start of the documentary, the filmmakers pay a visit to the building where Notari once lived, and question the civilians around the area about her. None of them knew who she was, let alone that she resided where they now do. That’s a gap that everyone who watches Elvira Notari: Beyond Silence will walk away having filled.
Elvira Notari: Beyond Silence had its world premiere at the 2025 Venice Film Festival in the Venice Classics section. Runtime: 90 minutes.
Katie at the Movies 