Originally Posted Here for a Friday film column on Screen Women at Kubrick on the Guillotine.
Today begins Christina Newland‘s new column, which concerns the portrayal of women in the cinema (with reference to the works of scholars Laura Mulvey, Molly Haskell and others). Screen Women is intended to provoke discussion and debate about particular films or issues surrounding women. This column is interested in films that appear or have been cast by critics as traditional, retrograde, or even misogynistic, in films that are considered stone-cold feminist classics, and in films that are tellingly silent when it comes to the subject of women, ignoring female subjectivity in favour of the masculine concerns of their story or genre. In this essay, Christina gets the ball rolling with a few brief thoughts on the body of work of one of the greatest actresses to grace the screen, Anna Magnani.
In the interest of foregoing cliché, I’ll try to avoid expounding on the fact that Anna Magnani is one of the most prominent actresses of European art house cinema, one that stands proudly and unabashedly as a feminist icon. Needing neither auteur backing nor a particular star vehicle to make evident her elemental, formidable talent, she is difficult to compare to her contemporaries.
A woman born into abject poverty in working-class Rome and not reaching wider fame until her middle age, Magnani not only managed the crossover into English-speaking films, but worked with several Hollywood luminaries like Sidney Lumet and George Cukor. Her most famous role was the tragic young partisan of Rome Open City (1945) – but she also worked with Jean Renoir, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Luchino Visconti. In short order: she was the woman Rossellini left for his infamous affair with Ingrid Bergman; she befriended Tennessee Williams and he decided to write The Rose Tattoo for her; and it was rumoured that Marlon Brando feared her outshining him. Onscreen, she was steadfastly ordinary in appearance – a woman neither voluptuous nor beautiful in the traditional sense of the Italian movie star, like Sophia Loren or Claudia Cardinale. And yet, she is so wildly self-assured, so fiercely confident, that she radiates an almost-queenly power.
