The recognition of the struggle. Memory and subjectivity in Italian feminist documentaries

Abstract

Once considered, together with the French one, as the strongest women’s movement in Europe, today Italian feminism is experiencing a moment of great transformations and is more than ever pushed to question itself about new future challenges, as it confronts itself with new forms of visual representation that try to follow these transformations (Gribaldo & Zapperi, 2012). This contribution looks at the way in which contemporary documentaries that thematise feminism retrieve the dimension of struggle and memory, addressing both a past considered by many still significant, and a future in which feminisms are increasingly an active part of the social debate. To this purpose, the essay examines two significant examples, Girls, life trembles by Paola Sangiovanni (2009) and Feminism! by Paola Columba (2016), to insert them in a broader reflection on the value of the documentary medium as an instrument of social and political commitment.