Abstract
Gabriella Cangini appears to have made four films between 1968 and 1973, more than either Liliana Cavani or Lina Wertmuller in the same timeframe. Despite a wealth of archival documents and sources confirming her role as director and screenwriter, there is absolutely no information about Cangini in the literature, with the exception of the odd one-line film dictionary entry amounting to a shrug, and less authoritative sources suggest she may have never been involved in film production at all. Starting with the case of Cangini, this article discusses some of the broader and complex dynamics of exclusion based on gender and citizenship in Italian genre cinema of the 1960s and 70s.
Keywords: mondo, Italian cinema, gender inequality, citizenship, intersectionality
Gabriella Cangini appears to have made four films between 1968 and 1973, more than either Liliana Cavani or Lina Wertmuller in the same timeframe. Despite a wealth of archival documents and sources confirming her role as director and screenwriter, there is absolutely no information about Cangini in the literature, with the exception of the odd one-line film dictionary entry amounting to a shrug, and less authoritative sources suggest she may have never been involved in film production at all. Starting with the case of Cangini, this article discusses some of the broader and complex dynamics of exclusion based on gender and citizenship in Italian genre cinema of the 1960s and 70s.
Keywords: mondo, Italian cinema, gender inequality, citizenship, intersectionality
Consider two posters of the same film – an obscure Italian mondo feature from 1970 called Riti segreti that is virtually impossible to find, with the exception of a magenta-tinted 35mm copy held in the Cineteca di Bologna archives.
Riti segreti (1970)
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Secret Rites (1971)
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The first poster features the film’s Italian title in huge font, along with images of two women – one dancing in a bikini top, the other naked and bathing. In the bottom left corner of the poster, a series of presumably shocking traditions are listed in all caps, including, for example, ‘IL TEMPIO DEI MASTURBATORI’ (‘the temple of masturbators’) and ‘GLI UOMINI SENZA SESSO’ (‘men without a sex’). Right under the film title, listed as director of photography and music composer, is the name Ramiro Arango. Underneath it, we are told that the film was directed by a ‘G. Cangini’. The second poster, featuring the English title Secret Rites, is much busier.
Under an all-caps heading proclaiming ‘SEE HELL ON EARTH!’, we get the same list of rites and rituals adapted for US audiences (‘SEE: Sons who burn their fathers!’) accompanied by a wealth of collaged stills that evoke the two mainstays of all mondo films: sex and shock. In small print, at the bottom of this US poster, we read that the film is ‘Directed and Produced by Ramiro Arango’. No other credits appear on this version of the poster, except for that of the film’s North American distributor, Joseph E. Levine. This article will focus on unpacking the discrepancy between the two posters, and the figure of ‘G.’ Cangini, who mysteriously disappears from the latter. What might seem like an odd footnote in the history of this much-reviled Italian strand of horror film, will, I hope, reveal some of the broader and complex dynamics of exclusion based on gender and citizenship in Italian cinema.
Over the past two years, as part of a research project on gender inequality in the Italian film industry, a team of researchers, including myself, have been collecting data on Italian feature films with permission for distribution in the period that goes from the institution of the first organic film law, also known as the Corona Law (1965), all the way up to today. [1] When the historical data had been collected, one of the first things I wanted to do was to verify – or, I hoped, contest – a foundational historiographical narrative regarding women’s relationship with the film industry in Italy: that during the ‘golden years’ of Italian cinema, which roughly include the 1960s and early 70s, there were only two women directors consistently making feature-length films. [2] The data did in fact seem to confirm that, apart from the two household names of Liliana Cavani and Lina Wertmuller, who made their debuts around that time, women directors with a consistent relationship with the national film industry were extremely few and far between in the period 1964 –1975. Most of them appeared to have one, maybe two feature film titles attached to their name throughout their career, as the examples of Anna Gobbi, Elda Tattoli, Perla Peragallo, Dacia Maraini, Maria Virginia Onorato, Elsa de Giorgi and Elfriede Gaeng demonstrate.
There was, however, one name that stood out, appearing four times over the span of five years: Gabriella Cangini, according to the official documentation held at the State Archive, was the director, screenwriter, producer and even music composer of four different projects between 1968 and 1973 – more than either Cavani or Wertmuller in the same timeframe, and a prolific turnaround even by the genre filmmaking standards of the time. What was also surprising was the realisation that all four film titles present in the documentation – Che mondo…. Porca miseria!!! (1968), Riti segreti (1970), Io credo (1973) and Mi sento topo, oca, scimmia… (1973) – belonged to the mondo genre. A type of shockumentary film just past its peak during those years, mondo had had some major successes at the box office but was also heavily criticised for its exoticising, white patriarchal and misogynistic gaze. [3]
The poster for one of the earliest examples of mondo, Women of the World (Franco Prosperi, Gualtiero Jacopetti, Paolo Cavara, 1963), showcases the type of spectacular, faux–reportage rhetoric adopted in the marketing of these titles: ‘UNBELIEVABLE! INCREDIBLE! YET EVERY LIVING SCENE IS REAL!’ In line with exploitation film marketing of the time, the poster goes on to list the collection of spectacles represented in the film: ‘SEE: The notorious “window girls” of Hamburg! [...] Sex rituals of the primitive women of Borneo and Africa!’, and so on. One of the most famous contemporary denunciations of the genre came from New Yorker critic Pauline Kael, who declared mondo filmmakers to be ‘the most devious and irresponsible [ones] who have ever lived’. [4] Before finding out about Gabriella Cangini, I had never heard of a woman mondo film director, never mind one working during the original wave of this pseudo-documentary genre that spawned so many horror and slasher spin-offs in later decades.
Despite the wealth of archival documents and print sources confirming her role as director and screenwriter, however, there is absolutely no information about Cangini in the literature. With the exception of the odd one-line film dictionary entry amounting to shrug, no mention is ever made of her or her films in the rich literature on the genre, whereas less authoritative sources suggest she may have never been involved in film production at all. In mondo-style rhetoric one might be tempted to ask: Is Gabriella Cangini one of the most DEVIOUS filmmakers that ever lived, or did she NEVER EVEN EXIST??
Mondo shockumentaries exemplify the problematic tension between the epistemic and spectacular functions of the audiovisual: the shock value of mondo largely proceeds from their appeal to a near-scientific approach to ‘visuality-as-the-dispenser-of-self-evident-truth’. [5] In this article, instead, no such ‘shocking truths’ are revealed. Rather, based on the case of Gabriella Cangini, I examine two arenas in which physical evidence can prove untrustworthy: the audiovisual, as exemplified by mondo films, and the archival, in the case of the ambiguous role Gabriella Cangini did, or did not, play in their production. I use archival data and traces of para-cinematic texts to try to answer some questions: did Cangini make these films, then fall into oblivion (as many other genre directors of the time did)? Was her Cuban husband, the much older Ramiro Arango, the one behind the film production? As I’ll show, film reviews from outside of Italy, and dedicated mondo fans, seem to suggest as much, making no mention of Cangini except as the ‘young actress’ Arango was married to. In this scenario, Cangini’s signature on piles of documents was perhaps a way for the non-Italian Arango to get access to film funding and distribution, which at the time (and actually until very recently) was reserved for films whose cast and crew had Italian nationality. But does this exclude the possibility that she was involved in the production too?
The case of Gabriella Cangini serves to reflect on the complex question of women’s visibility in the archives, revealing uneasy intersections of exclusion when citizenship is taken into account. As feminist film scholars and historians, we often fight to redress the absenting of women professionals by illuminating names omitted from the records into film historiographical narratives. Yet, as will become clear, Cangini/Arango procure us with an example in which the presence of women’s names in the archives might, perhaps, stand in for their material absence. This type of reversal permits Gabriella Cangini’s name in the archives, film dictionaries and on online databases, yet unofficial sources slowly make her disappear; she becomes invisible before the researcher’s eyes. Recovery from the archive through that most solid of traces, the official document, proves unreliable. It is a powerful reminder that data requires the work of contextualisation, of embodied histories that move beyond the visibility/invisibility axis to disentangle the gendered and racialised structures at the heart of the industry. Such work involves both the recuperation of women and their work, and, as Genevieve Yue calls it, ‘patiently observing the scenes of their disappearance’. [6]
The world of mondo
Mark Goodall suggests that the impetus to mix ethnographic aesthetics with sensationalist spectacle for the shocked delight of Western audiences goes at least back into the 1930s. [7] Even so, the idea of mixing the cine-reportage feel with elements of shock and curiosity was launched in Italy in 1959 with Alessandro Blasetti’s Europa di notte (1959), although it wasn’t until 1962, with Gualtiero Jacopetti, Paolo Cavara and Franco Prosperi’s Mondo cane that the genre achieved notoriety and eventually cult status. [8] The genre’s formal innovations, such as Jacopetti’s shock cut, [9] were used to crudely juxtapose Western and othered traditions in a way that, although superficially suggesting continuity between the two, actually reinforced the worst misogynist, racist and neo-colonial stereotypes of the time. To cite one example from Mondo cane, a smash cut takes us from a shot focusing on the breasts of a blonde, bikini-clad Western woman happily seducing a flock of sailors, to those of a woman in Papua New Guinea apparently breastfeeding a piglet. The smash cut is accompanied by a fast zoom and the music shifts equally abruptly from mocking to jarring – in case you didn’t know how you’re meant to feel about this transition. The general tenor of mondo, as one critic put it, was to present ‘primitive rites and civilised wrongs’, [10] that, despite formal claims to the contrary by the filmmakers, were demonstrably staged – although to what extent audiences understood this or cared is a different subject. [11] Seminal figures, such as Third Cinema exponents Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, described Jacopetti’s Africa Addio (1966), nominally about the decolonisation process taking place in many African nations at the time, as a fascist attempt to denigrate the African people’s desire for liberation, presenting them as incapable of doing anything but ‘wallow in abject anarchy once they escape from white protection’. [12] Despite such explicit condemnations, the genre enjoyed success at the box office and international acclaim. Mondo cane was famously in competition at Cannes, and Riz Ortolani’s score was nominated for an Academy Award. Africa Addio won a David di Donatello, but was banned in fourteen countries, and the Italian minister who was meant to hand over the award to Jacopetti refused to do so. [13]
1960s mondo also helped spur a range of horror genres such as the cannibal film, the zombie film, the eco-horror film, and found footage horror film in subsequent decades. [14] As Alexandra Heller-Nicholas suggests in her book on found footage horror films, mondo’s legacy can be felt in the more recent blockbuster ‘found footage’ horror subgenre in the possibility, rather than certainty, of authenticity. [15] We can describe this shift, perhaps, as that from mondo exploitation marketing strategies of the 60s (‘this is REAL, can you believe it?!’) to the suspension of fictionality, the ‘what–ifs’, of contemporary found footage horror (‘this is what this would look like if it were real’). One of the aesthetic elements that often remains a constant as the marker of real or performed authenticity is that of ‘poor’ image quality. The epigraph to Secret Rites is a disclaimer suggesting that the crew often had to secretly film the ritual scenes in 16mm, and that ‘the authenticity of the scenes justifies any loss of photographic quality’, an excuse that didn’t always work with the Italian censorship board, who rejected the application for distribution for Che mondo... porca miseria based on its lack of technical and artistic quality. The relationship between real or faked ‘low quality’ and cult film fandom remains central, as the use of amateur (or ‘amateur’) shooting in beloved found footage horror films shows, as well as what Heller-Nicholas calls the mystique and cultural capital gained by mondo-style films the more they lose in film quality due to the ‘copies-of-copies-of-copies’ circulated amongst fans. [16]
Archival traces
When Cangini/Arango created their production company, the Italian branch of Arango films, in 1966, they were at the peak of the mondo hype. A close look at the available archival and bibliographical sources regarding their work reveals a complex epistemological terrain. Riti segreti’s State Archive folder itself reflects the difficulty of disentangling the details of the couple’s production activity. The cover reads: ‘Vietnam verità a colori; Verità; L’uomo: top secret; Riti segreti (formerly L’uomo: top secret).’ Within the folder, we find financial plans for at least two different film titles (L’uomo e la bestia and Porca miseria) submitted on the exact same day and featuring the same total budget: 72,489,500 lira, as well as various documents submitted along the same timeline for the following titles: L’uomo e la bestia; Porca Miseria; Che mondo… Porca miseria!!!; Vietnam verità a colori; L’uomo: Top Secret; and Mi sento topo, oca, scimmia…. The financial plans, along with all other official documents, feature the signature of Gabriella Cangini as sole administrator of the production company, whose only other founding member is Ramiro Arango. One of the submitted documents declares that shooting for the film will take place abroad, and asks for special permission to do so (a deroga). This is because Italian law of the time required filming in Italy as part of the attributes taken into account for the assignation of Italian nationality (which producers needed in order to get access to tax breaks and ensure national distribution). The document for the deroga declared that the crew members who would travel abroad were Gabriella Cangini, director, and Ramiro Arango, camera operator. The financial plan declared that the full budget for the production would be covered by Gabriella Cangini, Ramiro Arango and Arango productions, and would not supersede the tourist currency – no capital would therefore be transferred abroad.
All of this points to the fact that these films were conceived as low-budget productions, possibly meant to result from a trip Cangini and Arango took abroad between 1968–69. The submission of financial plans for multiple film projects might be explained as part of the standard practice of mondo and other genre filmmakers to recycle footage and outtakes into new film projects: according to some accounts, Mondo cane, Mondo cane 2 and La donna nel mondo all derive from footage shot during the same trip around the world, a hypothesis that would match Jacopetti’s claim that they had shot millions of metres of film. [17] This hypothesis appears to be confirmed by the two existing film copies of the Cangini/Arango collaborations at the Cineteca di Bologna. Suffering from acetate film base degradation, otherwise called vinegar syndrome, the total of eight reels apparently belong to two separate titles, Riti segreti and L’uomo: Top Secret, but the film is exactly the same. Faithfully reproducing the original mondo recipe, it is a travelogue-style series of vignettes staged as authentic, with a sardonic voiceover and an imposing soundtrack that reserves pathetic irony for the West and tragic wonder for the ‘rest’. It includes some mondo thematic mainstays, such as footage of dead bodies, trans people represented as bizarre oddities, violence between man and animal, titillating scenes of naked women, and surgery. With the exception of an extra opening credit, in Japanese, for L’uomo, which suggests the latter version was meant for distribution in Japan – an avid consumer of Italian mondo – the differently titled reels feature identical footage. [18] But who directed the footage?
G. Cangini
On the nulla osta document, which amounts to permission for distribution, for Riti segreti, Gabriella Cangini is presented as the director, screenwriter and composer, while Ramiro Arango is credited as the cinematographer. Her name also appears on most of the (few) online and print sources that mention the film, from the State Archive documentation to Wikipedia articles and Italian film dictionaries such as Roberto Poppi’s 2002 edition. The brief paragraph Poppi dedicates to Cangini reads: ‘Documentarist about whom there is no information,’ and describes her films as modest documentaries along the lines of the much more professional ones by Gualtiero Jacopetti. [19] As mentioned at the start of this article, the Italian film poster further confirms Cangini as the film director, although it is impossible not to notice the discrepancy in the presentation of names. As opposed to her husband’s full first and last name occupying the bottom-right corner under the credit of ‘ideazione fotografica e musica originale’ (thus in contradiction with the nulla osta documents suggesting Cangini was also in charge of the music), Cangini’s own last name, under the credit of director in the bottom-left corner, is preceded only by her first name’s initial.
Intentional or not, the masking of the gender of Cangini’s name is hard to ignore, as is the prime placement of the cinematographer’s name on the poster. The previously mentioned US poster and a 1973 Spanish poster of the film both list Arango as the director, whereas Cangini’s name is nowhere to be found. More interestingly still, print newspapers from the US announcing the film’s premiere there, such as the Daily News (October 15, 1971), and a scathing review of Riti segreti that came out four days later in the New York Times, never mention Cangini’s name in any capacity, presenting the film as directed and produced by Ramiro Arango. [20] The announcement of the New York premiere at the Forum Theatre suggests it must have been staged as quite the event: in line with promotion strategies employed in the marketing of exploitation films of those years: audiences were invited to come meet ‘the TALLEST MAN who ever walked the Earth!’, and were promised Secret Rites kits or special souvenir photos (‘YOU with the Giant!’). As Erin E. Wiegand points out, advertising campaigns for exploitation films often ‘went above and beyond to promise spectacles that they often failed to deliver’, and this seems to have been the case with Secret Rites. [21] A. H. Weiler, the New York Times critic, remained deeply unimpressed by the film’s attempt to emulate the likes of Mondo cane which, we get the sense, he was not particularly fond of either. He expresses his disappointment at the lack of quality of form and content through unlikely phrases such as ‘unspectacular vignettes of phallus worshippers’. [22] Weiler’s review is in line with what Wiegand describes as the deterioration of the term mondo in US film critical discourse by the late 60s, with reporters using the term ‘simply as pejorative shorthand for “exploitation,” “camp” and – appropriately – an exhausted film cycle’. [23] Indeed, Weiler presents the film as a ‘melange of colour footage produced, directed, photographed or collected by Ramiro Arango, a Cuban living and working in Rome’ and concludes that ‘despite a prologue noting that Mr. Arango toured 15 countries over a five–year period to compile these “Secret Rites”, the trip, all things considered, wasn’t absolutely necessary’. [24]
Irrefutable evidence
Since the Fascist period, filmmakers have had to face stringent regulations regarding the definition of an ‘Italian film’. Nationality, as Barbara Corsi describes, has long been the ‘ideological mainstay – and taboo’ of Italian cinema. [25] Ever since the first description of Italian nationality in a 1927 regulation (as films produced in Italy by creative and technical crew that is majority Italian, and with an Italian script), subsequent regulations have attached firmly to this principle. At least in part as an instrument of protection and support of the national cinema against the ever-menacing presence of Hollywood films, a film that can prove its Italianness largely through the citizenship of the film’s cast and crew has always enjoyed the privileges of the state machine, including tax breaks and a guaranteed place on Italian screens. The first organic film law, voted in 1965 (and therefore in effect when Cangini and Arango were making their films), reasserts the use of the instrument of Italian nationality as a tool for the financing of national production: in fact, ever since 1949’s Andreotti Law, a film that could prove its Italian nationality was exempt from the so-called ‘dubbing tax’ imposed on foreign films.
The parameters for recognition of nationality were (and continue to be) very specific, including the nationality of each member of the creative and technical team. As Corsi and others suggest, the Italian nationality prerequisite has functioned for many decades as a hindrance for European collaborations. [26] Less commented upon has been the fact that this regulation excludes – or renders vastly less attractive – film professionals without Italian nationality who lived and worked in Italy, including Italians without access to citizenship. It seems that, although Arango was Cuban, he had Spanish nationality, at least according to the documents submitted by Gabriella Cangini to the Ministry of Culture. A 1968 document including a full crew list, submitted to declare the beginning of shooting (this time under the title Vietnam Verità a colori) shows Arango’s name and nationality (‘spagnolo’) underlined and with an arrow drawn next to it. As the only non-Italian member on this list, one can’t help but wonder if that threat of exclusion from state support was at least part of the reason for Cangini’s signature.
As noted in the introduction, the work of recuperation in feminist film history has a complex relationship with the archive. Giuliana Bruno uses official documents to prove that, despite some foundational texts of film historiography that describe Elvira Notari’s husband as the director of the myriad silent films produced by the Neapolitan Dora Film company, she was in fact at the helm of the family company, making her, by all accounts, the first woman director in Italy. Notari’s signature on nulla osta documents from the censorship board functions here, for Bruno, as irrefutable evidence.27
Credits are also epistemologically slippery. As a producer recently told me, you can do whatever you want with credits – it’s the contracts that count. Perhaps that’s partly what Jolanda Benvenuti, Roberto Rossellini’s editor, meant when she refused to think much of her exclusion from the editing credits for Rome Open City (1945), one of the most celebrated films in Italian history. As Dalila Missero describes, her name was substituted for that of her more well-known male colleague, Eraldo da Roma, in what Benvenuti described as an accepted praxis of the time. Yet, Missero points out, the financial statements function as irrefutable proof of her importance, as Benvenuti’s pay was higher than da Roma’s (64,875 lire over 60,000).28
In Italy of the 1960s and 70s, attribution was often a contested space, especially so in a film industry characterised by what is often euphemistically called an artisanal approach to production, and by the widespread practice of adopting Anglo-sounding pseudonyms or even allonyms. When Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars (1964) first came out in Italy, for instance, the choice to adopt the fake US-American name Bob Robertson was dictated by a desire to attract audiences to a film of a genre that was hard to associate with the Italian national context. The worry that an Italian film derivative of a US film genre would be derided did it not convincingly attach onto a fake ‘American’ identity proved unfounded, and the success of the spaghetti western moved the distributors to turn Bob Robertson back into Sergio Leone for the film’s international release.29 In accounts of genre cinema of those years we are often faced with gaps and contradictions between official documentation, film credits, testimonies and secondary literature that can remain unresolved, especially when it comes to films that enjoyed limited success at their time of release.
To give another example I came across during my research, the ‘Jawsploitation’ film Tentacoli, which came out in 1977, at the heels of the box office success of the Spielberg film it hoped to capitalise on, credits the film’s direction to the pseudonym O. Hellman. This ‘mockbuster’ monster film, which substitutes a giant octopus for Jaws’ shark, was produced by Ovidio Assonitis, a Greek-Egyptian director and producer who was married to the Italian screenwriter Sonia Molteni. Nulla osta documents and other official production data appear to confirm that O. Hellman was in fact Molteni’s nom de plume, a fact reproduced in secondary sources such as film dictionaries. At the same time, other secondary sources, as well as some of the film’s posters, and interviews with Assonitis himself, suggest unequivocally that he was the director of Tentacoli as well as O. Hellman’s other films. In his dictionary of Italian film directors, Poppi explains that for several years it was assumed Sonia Molteni was behind the pseudonym O. Hellman, but this information has proven unfounded – although no sources are cited in support of this hypothesis.
As Dalila Missero sums it up, private relationships between film professionals were, and arguably still are, ‘essential aspects of the artisanal mindset that characterized the Italian film industry’.30 Within this environment, where familial bonds, patriarchal structures and the ethnonational project were constantly interweaving, she rightly points out that gender, race, as well as class biases have to be reckoned with in our work. Compounding many of the contradictions of intersectional structures of exclusion of the time, the case of Cangini emerges as an example that evokes, at the same time, the familial and class dynamics, misogyny and racialised ideas about citizenship that formed the arena of filmmaking in Italy during those years. Did Cangini participate in the film production, then, like Jolanda Benvenuti, let those who cared more about taking credit do so? Did Arango use gender and class privilege to get around Italian racist regulations, in a way that perhaps someone else in his position might not be able to? These kinds of questions are not reserved for the obscure annals of film history: recently, the Italian David di Donatello film awards announced that they would finally admit into competition films by Italian filmmakers without access to Italian citizenship. This ends a form of prejudice that had led – to cite just one example – to the exclusion of Il silenzio, a short film representing Italy in Cannes in 2012, from consideration for the award because the directors, Farnoosh Samadi and Ali Asgari, did not have Italian citizenship. The decision followed in the footsteps of a small but equally important amendment to the most recent Film Law (2016). One of the main criteria for access to state funding is no longer restricted to Italian or EU nationality, and will now also include fiscal residence in Italy. This small step towards expansion of access to second generation and racialised filmmakers to the national film industry was accompanied by the more publicised series of incentives aiming towards gender equity in the sector. For the first time in Italian history, these incentives were introduced as an attempt to address the enormous and persisting discrepancies in the employment of men and women in the Italian film industry. Although it’s too soon to tell, results so far have been minimal on both counts.
As I’ve tried to show, the claims to authenticity Secret Rites makes as a film text leave one in constant doubt, as do its paratexts, ephemera and even archival documentation regarding the true identity of its creators. Like the suspicion of untrustworthiness that accompanies the viewing of mondo documentaries, the point is not so much to discover whether this is truth or trick, but to open a conversation about the significant role that the intersections of gender, class and citizenship play in the shifting ground of Italian genre filmmaking of the 1960s and 70s.
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska–Curie grant agreement No 891966.
Footnotes
Under an all-caps heading proclaiming ‘SEE HELL ON EARTH!’, we get the same list of rites and rituals adapted for US audiences (‘SEE: Sons who burn their fathers!’) accompanied by a wealth of collaged stills that evoke the two mainstays of all mondo films: sex and shock. In small print, at the bottom of this US poster, we read that the film is ‘Directed and Produced by Ramiro Arango’. No other credits appear on this version of the poster, except for that of the film’s North American distributor, Joseph E. Levine. This article will focus on unpacking the discrepancy between the two posters, and the figure of ‘G.’ Cangini, who mysteriously disappears from the latter. What might seem like an odd footnote in the history of this much-reviled Italian strand of horror film, will, I hope, reveal some of the broader and complex dynamics of exclusion based on gender and citizenship in Italian cinema.
Over the past two years, as part of a research project on gender inequality in the Italian film industry, a team of researchers, including myself, have been collecting data on Italian feature films with permission for distribution in the period that goes from the institution of the first organic film law, also known as the Corona Law (1965), all the way up to today. [1] When the historical data had been collected, one of the first things I wanted to do was to verify – or, I hoped, contest – a foundational historiographical narrative regarding women’s relationship with the film industry in Italy: that during the ‘golden years’ of Italian cinema, which roughly include the 1960s and early 70s, there were only two women directors consistently making feature-length films. [2] The data did in fact seem to confirm that, apart from the two household names of Liliana Cavani and Lina Wertmuller, who made their debuts around that time, women directors with a consistent relationship with the national film industry were extremely few and far between in the period 1964 –1975. Most of them appeared to have one, maybe two feature film titles attached to their name throughout their career, as the examples of Anna Gobbi, Elda Tattoli, Perla Peragallo, Dacia Maraini, Maria Virginia Onorato, Elsa de Giorgi and Elfriede Gaeng demonstrate.
There was, however, one name that stood out, appearing four times over the span of five years: Gabriella Cangini, according to the official documentation held at the State Archive, was the director, screenwriter, producer and even music composer of four different projects between 1968 and 1973 – more than either Cavani or Wertmuller in the same timeframe, and a prolific turnaround even by the genre filmmaking standards of the time. What was also surprising was the realisation that all four film titles present in the documentation – Che mondo…. Porca miseria!!! (1968), Riti segreti (1970), Io credo (1973) and Mi sento topo, oca, scimmia… (1973) – belonged to the mondo genre. A type of shockumentary film just past its peak during those years, mondo had had some major successes at the box office but was also heavily criticised for its exoticising, white patriarchal and misogynistic gaze. [3]
The poster for one of the earliest examples of mondo, Women of the World (Franco Prosperi, Gualtiero Jacopetti, Paolo Cavara, 1963), showcases the type of spectacular, faux–reportage rhetoric adopted in the marketing of these titles: ‘UNBELIEVABLE! INCREDIBLE! YET EVERY LIVING SCENE IS REAL!’ In line with exploitation film marketing of the time, the poster goes on to list the collection of spectacles represented in the film: ‘SEE: The notorious “window girls” of Hamburg! [...] Sex rituals of the primitive women of Borneo and Africa!’, and so on. One of the most famous contemporary denunciations of the genre came from New Yorker critic Pauline Kael, who declared mondo filmmakers to be ‘the most devious and irresponsible [ones] who have ever lived’. [4] Before finding out about Gabriella Cangini, I had never heard of a woman mondo film director, never mind one working during the original wave of this pseudo-documentary genre that spawned so many horror and slasher spin-offs in later decades.
Despite the wealth of archival documents and print sources confirming her role as director and screenwriter, however, there is absolutely no information about Cangini in the literature. With the exception of the odd one-line film dictionary entry amounting to shrug, no mention is ever made of her or her films in the rich literature on the genre, whereas less authoritative sources suggest she may have never been involved in film production at all. In mondo-style rhetoric one might be tempted to ask: Is Gabriella Cangini one of the most DEVIOUS filmmakers that ever lived, or did she NEVER EVEN EXIST??
Mondo shockumentaries exemplify the problematic tension between the epistemic and spectacular functions of the audiovisual: the shock value of mondo largely proceeds from their appeal to a near-scientific approach to ‘visuality-as-the-dispenser-of-self-evident-truth’. [5] In this article, instead, no such ‘shocking truths’ are revealed. Rather, based on the case of Gabriella Cangini, I examine two arenas in which physical evidence can prove untrustworthy: the audiovisual, as exemplified by mondo films, and the archival, in the case of the ambiguous role Gabriella Cangini did, or did not, play in their production. I use archival data and traces of para-cinematic texts to try to answer some questions: did Cangini make these films, then fall into oblivion (as many other genre directors of the time did)? Was her Cuban husband, the much older Ramiro Arango, the one behind the film production? As I’ll show, film reviews from outside of Italy, and dedicated mondo fans, seem to suggest as much, making no mention of Cangini except as the ‘young actress’ Arango was married to. In this scenario, Cangini’s signature on piles of documents was perhaps a way for the non-Italian Arango to get access to film funding and distribution, which at the time (and actually until very recently) was reserved for films whose cast and crew had Italian nationality. But does this exclude the possibility that she was involved in the production too?
The case of Gabriella Cangini serves to reflect on the complex question of women’s visibility in the archives, revealing uneasy intersections of exclusion when citizenship is taken into account. As feminist film scholars and historians, we often fight to redress the absenting of women professionals by illuminating names omitted from the records into film historiographical narratives. Yet, as will become clear, Cangini/Arango procure us with an example in which the presence of women’s names in the archives might, perhaps, stand in for their material absence. This type of reversal permits Gabriella Cangini’s name in the archives, film dictionaries and on online databases, yet unofficial sources slowly make her disappear; she becomes invisible before the researcher’s eyes. Recovery from the archive through that most solid of traces, the official document, proves unreliable. It is a powerful reminder that data requires the work of contextualisation, of embodied histories that move beyond the visibility/invisibility axis to disentangle the gendered and racialised structures at the heart of the industry. Such work involves both the recuperation of women and their work, and, as Genevieve Yue calls it, ‘patiently observing the scenes of their disappearance’. [6]
The world of mondo
Mark Goodall suggests that the impetus to mix ethnographic aesthetics with sensationalist spectacle for the shocked delight of Western audiences goes at least back into the 1930s. [7] Even so, the idea of mixing the cine-reportage feel with elements of shock and curiosity was launched in Italy in 1959 with Alessandro Blasetti’s Europa di notte (1959), although it wasn’t until 1962, with Gualtiero Jacopetti, Paolo Cavara and Franco Prosperi’s Mondo cane that the genre achieved notoriety and eventually cult status. [8] The genre’s formal innovations, such as Jacopetti’s shock cut, [9] were used to crudely juxtapose Western and othered traditions in a way that, although superficially suggesting continuity between the two, actually reinforced the worst misogynist, racist and neo-colonial stereotypes of the time. To cite one example from Mondo cane, a smash cut takes us from a shot focusing on the breasts of a blonde, bikini-clad Western woman happily seducing a flock of sailors, to those of a woman in Papua New Guinea apparently breastfeeding a piglet. The smash cut is accompanied by a fast zoom and the music shifts equally abruptly from mocking to jarring – in case you didn’t know how you’re meant to feel about this transition. The general tenor of mondo, as one critic put it, was to present ‘primitive rites and civilised wrongs’, [10] that, despite formal claims to the contrary by the filmmakers, were demonstrably staged – although to what extent audiences understood this or cared is a different subject. [11] Seminal figures, such as Third Cinema exponents Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, described Jacopetti’s Africa Addio (1966), nominally about the decolonisation process taking place in many African nations at the time, as a fascist attempt to denigrate the African people’s desire for liberation, presenting them as incapable of doing anything but ‘wallow in abject anarchy once they escape from white protection’. [12] Despite such explicit condemnations, the genre enjoyed success at the box office and international acclaim. Mondo cane was famously in competition at Cannes, and Riz Ortolani’s score was nominated for an Academy Award. Africa Addio won a David di Donatello, but was banned in fourteen countries, and the Italian minister who was meant to hand over the award to Jacopetti refused to do so. [13]
1960s mondo also helped spur a range of horror genres such as the cannibal film, the zombie film, the eco-horror film, and found footage horror film in subsequent decades. [14] As Alexandra Heller-Nicholas suggests in her book on found footage horror films, mondo’s legacy can be felt in the more recent blockbuster ‘found footage’ horror subgenre in the possibility, rather than certainty, of authenticity. [15] We can describe this shift, perhaps, as that from mondo exploitation marketing strategies of the 60s (‘this is REAL, can you believe it?!’) to the suspension of fictionality, the ‘what–ifs’, of contemporary found footage horror (‘this is what this would look like if it were real’). One of the aesthetic elements that often remains a constant as the marker of real or performed authenticity is that of ‘poor’ image quality. The epigraph to Secret Rites is a disclaimer suggesting that the crew often had to secretly film the ritual scenes in 16mm, and that ‘the authenticity of the scenes justifies any loss of photographic quality’, an excuse that didn’t always work with the Italian censorship board, who rejected the application for distribution for Che mondo... porca miseria based on its lack of technical and artistic quality. The relationship between real or faked ‘low quality’ and cult film fandom remains central, as the use of amateur (or ‘amateur’) shooting in beloved found footage horror films shows, as well as what Heller-Nicholas calls the mystique and cultural capital gained by mondo-style films the more they lose in film quality due to the ‘copies-of-copies-of-copies’ circulated amongst fans. [16]
Archival traces
When Cangini/Arango created their production company, the Italian branch of Arango films, in 1966, they were at the peak of the mondo hype. A close look at the available archival and bibliographical sources regarding their work reveals a complex epistemological terrain. Riti segreti’s State Archive folder itself reflects the difficulty of disentangling the details of the couple’s production activity. The cover reads: ‘Vietnam verità a colori; Verità; L’uomo: top secret; Riti segreti (formerly L’uomo: top secret).’ Within the folder, we find financial plans for at least two different film titles (L’uomo e la bestia and Porca miseria) submitted on the exact same day and featuring the same total budget: 72,489,500 lira, as well as various documents submitted along the same timeline for the following titles: L’uomo e la bestia; Porca Miseria; Che mondo… Porca miseria!!!; Vietnam verità a colori; L’uomo: Top Secret; and Mi sento topo, oca, scimmia…. The financial plans, along with all other official documents, feature the signature of Gabriella Cangini as sole administrator of the production company, whose only other founding member is Ramiro Arango. One of the submitted documents declares that shooting for the film will take place abroad, and asks for special permission to do so (a deroga). This is because Italian law of the time required filming in Italy as part of the attributes taken into account for the assignation of Italian nationality (which producers needed in order to get access to tax breaks and ensure national distribution). The document for the deroga declared that the crew members who would travel abroad were Gabriella Cangini, director, and Ramiro Arango, camera operator. The financial plan declared that the full budget for the production would be covered by Gabriella Cangini, Ramiro Arango and Arango productions, and would not supersede the tourist currency – no capital would therefore be transferred abroad.
All of this points to the fact that these films were conceived as low-budget productions, possibly meant to result from a trip Cangini and Arango took abroad between 1968–69. The submission of financial plans for multiple film projects might be explained as part of the standard practice of mondo and other genre filmmakers to recycle footage and outtakes into new film projects: according to some accounts, Mondo cane, Mondo cane 2 and La donna nel mondo all derive from footage shot during the same trip around the world, a hypothesis that would match Jacopetti’s claim that they had shot millions of metres of film. [17] This hypothesis appears to be confirmed by the two existing film copies of the Cangini/Arango collaborations at the Cineteca di Bologna. Suffering from acetate film base degradation, otherwise called vinegar syndrome, the total of eight reels apparently belong to two separate titles, Riti segreti and L’uomo: Top Secret, but the film is exactly the same. Faithfully reproducing the original mondo recipe, it is a travelogue-style series of vignettes staged as authentic, with a sardonic voiceover and an imposing soundtrack that reserves pathetic irony for the West and tragic wonder for the ‘rest’. It includes some mondo thematic mainstays, such as footage of dead bodies, trans people represented as bizarre oddities, violence between man and animal, titillating scenes of naked women, and surgery. With the exception of an extra opening credit, in Japanese, for L’uomo, which suggests the latter version was meant for distribution in Japan – an avid consumer of Italian mondo – the differently titled reels feature identical footage. [18] But who directed the footage?
G. Cangini
On the nulla osta document, which amounts to permission for distribution, for Riti segreti, Gabriella Cangini is presented as the director, screenwriter and composer, while Ramiro Arango is credited as the cinematographer. Her name also appears on most of the (few) online and print sources that mention the film, from the State Archive documentation to Wikipedia articles and Italian film dictionaries such as Roberto Poppi’s 2002 edition. The brief paragraph Poppi dedicates to Cangini reads: ‘Documentarist about whom there is no information,’ and describes her films as modest documentaries along the lines of the much more professional ones by Gualtiero Jacopetti. [19] As mentioned at the start of this article, the Italian film poster further confirms Cangini as the film director, although it is impossible not to notice the discrepancy in the presentation of names. As opposed to her husband’s full first and last name occupying the bottom-right corner under the credit of ‘ideazione fotografica e musica originale’ (thus in contradiction with the nulla osta documents suggesting Cangini was also in charge of the music), Cangini’s own last name, under the credit of director in the bottom-left corner, is preceded only by her first name’s initial.
Intentional or not, the masking of the gender of Cangini’s name is hard to ignore, as is the prime placement of the cinematographer’s name on the poster. The previously mentioned US poster and a 1973 Spanish poster of the film both list Arango as the director, whereas Cangini’s name is nowhere to be found. More interestingly still, print newspapers from the US announcing the film’s premiere there, such as the Daily News (October 15, 1971), and a scathing review of Riti segreti that came out four days later in the New York Times, never mention Cangini’s name in any capacity, presenting the film as directed and produced by Ramiro Arango. [20] The announcement of the New York premiere at the Forum Theatre suggests it must have been staged as quite the event: in line with promotion strategies employed in the marketing of exploitation films of those years: audiences were invited to come meet ‘the TALLEST MAN who ever walked the Earth!’, and were promised Secret Rites kits or special souvenir photos (‘YOU with the Giant!’). As Erin E. Wiegand points out, advertising campaigns for exploitation films often ‘went above and beyond to promise spectacles that they often failed to deliver’, and this seems to have been the case with Secret Rites. [21] A. H. Weiler, the New York Times critic, remained deeply unimpressed by the film’s attempt to emulate the likes of Mondo cane which, we get the sense, he was not particularly fond of either. He expresses his disappointment at the lack of quality of form and content through unlikely phrases such as ‘unspectacular vignettes of phallus worshippers’. [22] Weiler’s review is in line with what Wiegand describes as the deterioration of the term mondo in US film critical discourse by the late 60s, with reporters using the term ‘simply as pejorative shorthand for “exploitation,” “camp” and – appropriately – an exhausted film cycle’. [23] Indeed, Weiler presents the film as a ‘melange of colour footage produced, directed, photographed or collected by Ramiro Arango, a Cuban living and working in Rome’ and concludes that ‘despite a prologue noting that Mr. Arango toured 15 countries over a five–year period to compile these “Secret Rites”, the trip, all things considered, wasn’t absolutely necessary’. [24]
Irrefutable evidence
Since the Fascist period, filmmakers have had to face stringent regulations regarding the definition of an ‘Italian film’. Nationality, as Barbara Corsi describes, has long been the ‘ideological mainstay – and taboo’ of Italian cinema. [25] Ever since the first description of Italian nationality in a 1927 regulation (as films produced in Italy by creative and technical crew that is majority Italian, and with an Italian script), subsequent regulations have attached firmly to this principle. At least in part as an instrument of protection and support of the national cinema against the ever-menacing presence of Hollywood films, a film that can prove its Italianness largely through the citizenship of the film’s cast and crew has always enjoyed the privileges of the state machine, including tax breaks and a guaranteed place on Italian screens. The first organic film law, voted in 1965 (and therefore in effect when Cangini and Arango were making their films), reasserts the use of the instrument of Italian nationality as a tool for the financing of national production: in fact, ever since 1949’s Andreotti Law, a film that could prove its Italian nationality was exempt from the so-called ‘dubbing tax’ imposed on foreign films.
The parameters for recognition of nationality were (and continue to be) very specific, including the nationality of each member of the creative and technical team. As Corsi and others suggest, the Italian nationality prerequisite has functioned for many decades as a hindrance for European collaborations. [26] Less commented upon has been the fact that this regulation excludes – or renders vastly less attractive – film professionals without Italian nationality who lived and worked in Italy, including Italians without access to citizenship. It seems that, although Arango was Cuban, he had Spanish nationality, at least according to the documents submitted by Gabriella Cangini to the Ministry of Culture. A 1968 document including a full crew list, submitted to declare the beginning of shooting (this time under the title Vietnam Verità a colori) shows Arango’s name and nationality (‘spagnolo’) underlined and with an arrow drawn next to it. As the only non-Italian member on this list, one can’t help but wonder if that threat of exclusion from state support was at least part of the reason for Cangini’s signature.
As noted in the introduction, the work of recuperation in feminist film history has a complex relationship with the archive. Giuliana Bruno uses official documents to prove that, despite some foundational texts of film historiography that describe Elvira Notari’s husband as the director of the myriad silent films produced by the Neapolitan Dora Film company, she was in fact at the helm of the family company, making her, by all accounts, the first woman director in Italy. Notari’s signature on nulla osta documents from the censorship board functions here, for Bruno, as irrefutable evidence.27
Credits are also epistemologically slippery. As a producer recently told me, you can do whatever you want with credits – it’s the contracts that count. Perhaps that’s partly what Jolanda Benvenuti, Roberto Rossellini’s editor, meant when she refused to think much of her exclusion from the editing credits for Rome Open City (1945), one of the most celebrated films in Italian history. As Dalila Missero describes, her name was substituted for that of her more well-known male colleague, Eraldo da Roma, in what Benvenuti described as an accepted praxis of the time. Yet, Missero points out, the financial statements function as irrefutable proof of her importance, as Benvenuti’s pay was higher than da Roma’s (64,875 lire over 60,000).28
In Italy of the 1960s and 70s, attribution was often a contested space, especially so in a film industry characterised by what is often euphemistically called an artisanal approach to production, and by the widespread practice of adopting Anglo-sounding pseudonyms or even allonyms. When Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars (1964) first came out in Italy, for instance, the choice to adopt the fake US-American name Bob Robertson was dictated by a desire to attract audiences to a film of a genre that was hard to associate with the Italian national context. The worry that an Italian film derivative of a US film genre would be derided did it not convincingly attach onto a fake ‘American’ identity proved unfounded, and the success of the spaghetti western moved the distributors to turn Bob Robertson back into Sergio Leone for the film’s international release.29 In accounts of genre cinema of those years we are often faced with gaps and contradictions between official documentation, film credits, testimonies and secondary literature that can remain unresolved, especially when it comes to films that enjoyed limited success at their time of release.
To give another example I came across during my research, the ‘Jawsploitation’ film Tentacoli, which came out in 1977, at the heels of the box office success of the Spielberg film it hoped to capitalise on, credits the film’s direction to the pseudonym O. Hellman. This ‘mockbuster’ monster film, which substitutes a giant octopus for Jaws’ shark, was produced by Ovidio Assonitis, a Greek-Egyptian director and producer who was married to the Italian screenwriter Sonia Molteni. Nulla osta documents and other official production data appear to confirm that O. Hellman was in fact Molteni’s nom de plume, a fact reproduced in secondary sources such as film dictionaries. At the same time, other secondary sources, as well as some of the film’s posters, and interviews with Assonitis himself, suggest unequivocally that he was the director of Tentacoli as well as O. Hellman’s other films. In his dictionary of Italian film directors, Poppi explains that for several years it was assumed Sonia Molteni was behind the pseudonym O. Hellman, but this information has proven unfounded – although no sources are cited in support of this hypothesis.
As Dalila Missero sums it up, private relationships between film professionals were, and arguably still are, ‘essential aspects of the artisanal mindset that characterized the Italian film industry’.30 Within this environment, where familial bonds, patriarchal structures and the ethnonational project were constantly interweaving, she rightly points out that gender, race, as well as class biases have to be reckoned with in our work. Compounding many of the contradictions of intersectional structures of exclusion of the time, the case of Cangini emerges as an example that evokes, at the same time, the familial and class dynamics, misogyny and racialised ideas about citizenship that formed the arena of filmmaking in Italy during those years. Did Cangini participate in the film production, then, like Jolanda Benvenuti, let those who cared more about taking credit do so? Did Arango use gender and class privilege to get around Italian racist regulations, in a way that perhaps someone else in his position might not be able to? These kinds of questions are not reserved for the obscure annals of film history: recently, the Italian David di Donatello film awards announced that they would finally admit into competition films by Italian filmmakers without access to Italian citizenship. This ends a form of prejudice that had led – to cite just one example – to the exclusion of Il silenzio, a short film representing Italy in Cannes in 2012, from consideration for the award because the directors, Farnoosh Samadi and Ali Asgari, did not have Italian citizenship. The decision followed in the footsteps of a small but equally important amendment to the most recent Film Law (2016). One of the main criteria for access to state funding is no longer restricted to Italian or EU nationality, and will now also include fiscal residence in Italy. This small step towards expansion of access to second generation and racialised filmmakers to the national film industry was accompanied by the more publicised series of incentives aiming towards gender equity in the sector. For the first time in Italian history, these incentives were introduced as an attempt to address the enormous and persisting discrepancies in the employment of men and women in the Italian film industry. Although it’s too soon to tell, results so far have been minimal on both counts.
As I’ve tried to show, the claims to authenticity Secret Rites makes as a film text leave one in constant doubt, as do its paratexts, ephemera and even archival documentation regarding the true identity of its creators. Like the suspicion of untrustworthiness that accompanies the viewing of mondo documentaries, the point is not so much to discover whether this is truth or trick, but to open a conversation about the significant role that the intersections of gender, class and citizenship play in the shifting ground of Italian genre filmmaking of the 1960s and 70s.
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska–Curie grant agreement No 891966.
Footnotes
- 1. For more on this project, see cineaf.eu. I discussed the methodological and ethical challenges of working with data from a feminist perspective in a presentation at the 2021 Forum Annuale delle Studiose di Cinema e Audiovisivi (‘I film delle donne in Italia. 1965–2015. Il progetto CineAF: un archivio per il futuro’).
- 2. For instance, Tovaglieri, A. (2014) La dirompente illusione: Il cinema italiano e il Sessantotto 1965–1980. Rubbettino Editore.
- 3. Giuliani, G. (2018) Race, Nation and Gender in Modern Italy: Intersectional Representations in Visual Culture. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 121–138.
- 4. Kael, P. (1965) I Lost it at the Movies. Boston, MA: Little Brown, 10.
- 5. Giuliani, 13.
- 6. Yue, G. (2020) Girl Head: Feminism and Film Materiality. New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 131.
- 7. Goodall, M. (2006) ‘Shockumentary evidence: the perverse politics of the Mondo film’. In: Lim, S. H. & Dennison, S. (eds), Remapping World Cinema: Identity, Culture and Politics in Film. London: Wallflower Press, 119.
- 8. Giuliani, 123.
- 9. Goodall, M. (2018) Sweet and Savage: The World Through the Mondo Film Lens. Manchester: Headpress.
- 10. In Goodall, 120.
- 11. Bondanella, P. (ed.) (2019) The Italian Cinema Book. London: Bloomsbury, 175.
- 12. Solanas, F. & Getino, O. (1970) ‘Towards a Third Cinema’, Cinéaste, 4 (3). 1–10.
- 13. Giuliani, 435.
- 14. Heller-Nicholas, A. (2014) Found Footage Horror Films: Fear and the Appearance of Reality. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 3–41; Goodall, M. (2013) ‘Dolce e Selvaggio: The Italian mondo documentary film’. In: Bayman, L. & Rigoletto, S. (eds), Popular Italian Cinema. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 236–7.
- 15. Heller-Nicholas, 7–8.
- 16. Heller-Nicholas, 11.
- 17. Bondanella, 175; Goodall, Appendix.
- 18. I would like to thank Andrea Meneghelli at the Fondazione Cineteca di Bologna film archive for his help.
- 19. Poppi, R. (2002) I registi: dal 1930 ai giorni nostri. Gremese, 87.
- 20. Anon. (1971) ‘Secret Rites’, Daily News, Friday, 15 October, 75; Weiler, A. H. (1971) ‘Secret Rites’, New York Times, 19 October, 51.
- 21. Wiegand, E. (2019) ‘The Margins of Mondo: Tracing Genre through 1960s American ‘Mondo’ Film Discourse’, Film International. 17 (2). 16.
- 22. Weiler.
- 23. Wiegand, 20.
- 24. Weiler.
- 25. Corsi, B. (2012) Con qualche dollaro in meno. Florence: Le lettere, 91.
- 26. Ibid., 92.
- 27. Bruno, G. (2021) Streetwalking on a Ruined Map: Cultural Theory and the City Films of Elvira Notari. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 28–29.
- 28. Missero, D. (2018) ‘Titillating Cuts: Genealogies of Women Editors in Italian Cinema’, Feminist Media Histories. 4 (4). 66.
- 29. Parigi, L. (2001) ‘The Fake Americans of the Italian Cinema’. In: Braddock, J. & Hock, S. (eds), Directed by Allen Smithee. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 213.
- 30. Missero, ‘Titillating Cuts’, 82.