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Chapter 9 - Io la conoscevo bene … Or did I? Antonio Pietrangeli, the Author and the Actress

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 May 2020

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Summary

Classical criticism has never paid any attention to the reader; for it, the writer was the only person in literature. We are now beginning to let ourselves be fooled no longer by the arrogant, antiphrastical recriminations of good society in favour of the very thing it sets aside, ignores, smothers, or destroys; we know that to give writing a future, it is necessary to overthrow the myth: the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.

— Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” 1968

The Death of the Cinematic Auteur

This last chapter of my study will discuss Pietrangeli's portrayal of Boom-era actress, Adriana Astarelli (Stefania Sandrelli), in the final full-length film he would complete as director, Io la conoscevo bene (1965). As part of his ongoing investigation into the psychology of his female protagonists, Pietrangeli turns the camera back on itself to show how the male-dominated fields of cinema, television, advertising and modeling are based on the fetishizing and hence the deconstruction of the female subject. To show how this deconstruction of the female subject in turn objectifies and commodifies her, Pietrangeli takes great pains to demonstrate how cinema has a hand in this process, making his film a sort of meta-reification of Adriana, a commentary on the functioning of the male gaze and its effects on the object-to-be-looked-at. Its contribution to cinema, in a post-Mulvey world, is unique and forward-looking, devastating in its realism and formal style. For this reason, it is considered by many critics, myself included, to represent the height of Pietrangelian poetics.

To briefly summarize the plot, this episodic film shows Adriana as she navigates the sleazy and ruthless world of show business, piecing together a career as a model/ actress/ hostess. Her upward career ambitions are consistently threatened by the potential of being seen as a prostitute, a position to which the numerous male journalists, businessmen and acquaintances try to submit her. Despite this, Adriana soldiers on, until one morning, after a long night out, after we the spectators have witnessed time and again the professional and personal disillusions and humiliations she has suffered, she decides to take her own life.

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Antonio Pietrangeli, The Director of Women
Feminism and Film Theory in Postwar Italian Cinema
, pp. 209 - 228
Publisher: Anthem Press
Print publication year: 2020

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