Finding the real in the magic: what Cecilia Mangini gave us

by Allison Grimaldi Donahue

Watching Cecilia Mangini’s documentaries shortly after her passing this January, I found
myself wishing I’d had the chance to be in the presence of this woman who confronted
prejudices by filming people, places, and ideas that were more than taboo – they weren’t
even considered worthy of discussion for too many years. She was asking questions
about the time she lived in, questions regarding workers’ rights, women’s rights, and
human rights that others still haven’t had the courage or inclination to investigate. The
radical nature of her thinking and artmaking, and its dialogue with marginalised
members of society, became more pronounced in an ever more commodified,
commercially-oriented world – defined, in her words, by “television, the social state and
consumerism”. Her work stands out for its interest in using the camera to find the
knowledge and wisdom offered by people and places that are often overlooked or
undervalued. Listening to a recording of her speak on a panel at International Film
Festival Rotterdam last year, I realise I’d never once heard her voice in any of her solo-
directed documentaries. It’s as if she didn’t want to overpower her subjects with
authorial guidance: being the director was enough. She attended the festival at the age of
92; in her panel appearance it becomes clear that her belief in making disruptive films
and her fight against injustice never slowed. Asked about the future of women in
filmmaking, she said that women should be themselves, should not fall into commercial
traps, should not worry about pleasing male producers, or seeking anything less than the
most honest story. She felt urgency in giving a voice to the marginalised, to share
multitonal stories about women, workers, children, the poor, victims of war. She had a
vision for a better Italy. In a 2018 interview with Martina Trocano, Mangini stated,

My ‘feminism’ doesn’t exist. Feminism isn’t a part of everything.

There are people, and along with them, animals, plants, insects,
everything that lives, that thinks, that intuits and feels…the most
important is égalité, the equality of all humans, men, women,
homosexuals, lesbians, transgender people.[1]
 
From her images, still and moving, one sees that Mangini sought to show human life in
all of its diversity and dignity; this culture that she defended belongs to all of us.
 
During that same roundtable in Rotterdam she was asked how she got into filmmaking
and this answer, too, revealed her energy and wit: “I became a filmmaker because of my
terrible mother,” she said with a smile, while going on to explain that her mother
wouldn’t let her eat bananas because they were touched by Black hands. Mangini talked
about Italy’s colonial past with disgust, and about her work with Pier Paolo Pasolini,
about how people treated him badly because of his homosexuality and how his personal
life didn’t bother her at all, despite public feeling.[2] Mangini, in her work as well as her
relationships, chose the side of the marginalised, whether they’d been placed there
because of who they were or what they believed or because of the role they had been
forced to occupy. She was interested in the position of women on the margins,
particularly elderly and working-class women; through them she shows us the struggles
of a country moving from a traditional society to a modern, individualist nation. Essere
donne (1965), or Being Women, the film for which Magnini is perhaps best known,
illustrates this well. In it, Mangini takes us through the difficult lives of women who
worked in Italian factories and tobacco plants from Milan to Apulia during the years that
were labelled latterly il boom economico: the “economic miracle”. She shows us families
who have had to emigrate north from Southern Italy to find work. The film offers a
reflection on the thousands who moved to Milan to work in chemical production, heavy
machinery, or construction and to Turin to work for the likes of Fiat and Olivetti.

Poor infrastructure, endemic corruption and organised crime, lack of education, and
outright racism coming from Northerners – who believed Southerners to be lazy, stupid,
or even criminal – made industrial development in the South extremely challenging.
Thousands of Southern Italians emigrated after the Second World War, not only to the
north of Italy but to Germany, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia.
Women who moved away from their own extended families were forced to choose
between working and caring for their children with little to no support. Grandparents
were often left to raise these children across the rural South. Midway through the 30-
minute Essere donne, we have a break from the male narrator. (Interestingly, many of her
films, even those that focus on female stories, are narrated by male voices. These are
often the voices of her male collaborators, including Pasolini and anti-fascist journalist
Felice Chilanti, but perhaps she was hoping the male voice would allow her to pass
through censorship more smoothly and quietly force male viewers to listen, to take what
was being said more seriously.) We hear a woman’s voice, without seeing her face, as
she talks about deciding to get an abortion when faced with the economic and social
hardships of raising another child: "When one child arrives after another, the priest
comes and says, don’t deny the Lord a soul. Yes, because we already had two children
and it wasn’t possible to have another. And like that, I had two abortions. And then he
repeated, begging, do not deny the Lord a single soul.” Abortion wouldn’t be legalised in
Italy until 1978, 13 years after this film was made – and though legal, it can still be
prohibitively challenging to find a doctor to carry out the procedure in many parts of the
country even today. Issues and rights regarding work, gender parity, and the place of
religion in the civil state aren’t yet resolved, not in Italy, not anywhere. Watching Essere
donne I am struck by the prescience of Mangini and the women she speaks with, by the
fact these poorly paid and overworked women know the labour and reproductive rights
they ought to have, if only they are asked.

Mangini's definition of realness or authenticity extends beyond class. It is

about complexity, about holding the picture-postcard vision of Italy
imagined from abroad against the daily lives of all sorts of Italian people
Giorgio Agamben wrote that “[…]the contemporary [artist] is not only the one who,
perceiving the darkness of the present, grasps a light that can never reach its destiny; he
is also the one who, dividing and interpolating time, is capable of transforming it and
putting it in relation with other times.”[3] Mangini is recording, in both her films and her
photographs, what’s lost and what’s to come. She never asks us to abandon all traces of
traditional values and culture. Rather, she reinterprets these things, recalling their link to
the ancient. Each member of society, for Mangini, has great value, an important role –
and she looks to the past to guide us to the future. Her work will always seem
contemporary as long as we live under systems of capitalism and patriarchy, under
threats to democracy, and regimes of neurotypicality; she made films that show darkness
but in that darkness, she shines light on those who are willing to fight, or who are willing
to uphold traditions at risk. Mangini recognises that the past, while seeming to inhibit the
present or progress, in fact resists the capitalist agenda of turning people into workers
alone; the traces of the past that surface in Mangini’s films show the necessity of
spirituality and belief to survival. She is critical of the status quo and its blind adherence
to growth. In Rotterdam last year, she was asked by an audience member if she and the
other panellists saw themselves as public intellectuals. An intellectual, Mangini said,
should not just be a person who reads and repeats the ideas of others; instead, “the real
intellectual asks questions […] through effort, finding new answers to questions.” In her
films, she upholds this belief that intellectual curiosity can be found in any context, and
by going to sites of resistance – even quiet resistance – she allows the ideas of all kinds
of intellectually curious people to come to the fore, regardless of their class status.

The subjects in her films open themselves up to her through the camera: she uses her
camera as a roving, secular confessional. Those who are able reveal themselves through
words, but just as often her subjects express themselves through monosyllables and body
language. In Brindisi ’65 (1966), some men sit in a classroom at the Monteshell factory,
a crude oil refinery which has just been built in the titular Southern city. In the
classroom, we see a group of workers. An off-screen voice asks them if they have any
criticism to offer the company on how their working conditions might be improved. The
room fills with tension and the camera moves to each face, to their reticent eyes; the men
do not speak. The voice pushes: “Something must be imperfect; you must have
something to say.” Then suddenly there is a chorus of “no”s and one voice that says,
“niente da dire”: nothing to say. Mangini focuses first on the men’s faces and hands. We
enter into their unspoken thoughts as they avert their eyes, stare down at their desks,
fiddle with pens and paper. The scene shifts to shots of men in a dark room, their faces
silhouettes, disclosing what is really wrong with the work, with the risks, with the salary.
One man points out that when the company discovered that he was a labour activist they
cut him off from the others, placing him at a solitary work station where he would see no
one for his entire shift; he says, “Here inside we aren’t citizens, here there is another
law.” Then we’re back in the classroom and into the light. The off-screen voice presses
the workers. Finally, someone speaks up, “I am speaking for everyone. We came to
Monteshell because it allowed us to improve both our economic and technical position. I
speak for everyone. […] If they disagree, they can say something for themselves.” Here,
Mangini inserts other voices into her edit to show that this man doesn’t speak for all; the
factory owners provide jobs, but, as some men bravely express, they don’t pay enough,
and they demand too many hours. The few men who say this do so without showing
their faces, or only after they’ve quit or been fired. In their opinion, the Monteshell
factory raises the quality of life for those on top while keeping the workers in a
precarious position. We watch scenes of managers at lavish dinners drinking champagne,
laughing. One man speaks up at the end – he has protested, he says, but only 40 of his
more than 3,000 fellow workers are members of the Italian General Confederation of
Labour. Mangini does not pass intratextual judgment these men, neither for their fear nor
for their inability to collectivise. As the workers see it, industrial power is pitted against
them, and resistance seems futile – this is their reality and she is there to record it.

In her films, she upholds this belief that intellectual curiosity can be found
in any context, and by going to sites of resistance – even quiet resistance –
she allows the ideas of all kinds of intellectually curious people to come to
the fore, regardless of their class status.

As with many documentary filmmakers, talking with, learning from, and sometimes
embedding herself among her subjects was central to her work, but Mangini, crucially,
was also in some sense a member of the communities she filmed in the south of Italy.
She was born in Mola di Bari in 1927 and in 1933 moved with her family to Florence,
not only to reunite with her Tuscan side of the family, but because of the economic crisis
the south endured during the 1930s. Later, when she returned to Puglia to make films
such as Tommaso (1965) and Brindisi ’65, her politics came from a personal place. Her
experiences in both the north and south affected how she saw the economic and cultural
divide widening between the two regions. Her films highlight some of the reasons that,
still today, the South of Italy faces economic hardship.

In an interview in the 2016 book Visioni e Passioni: Fotografie 1952-1965, Mangini

explains how her work with the camera began. This conversation with fellow filmmaker
and collaborator Paolo Pisanelli is one between friends; he helps Mangini, aged 89 at the
time of the interview, remember events that she has not thought of in decades. Mangini’s
start in photography and film stemmed from her desire to show real people and places.
She recounts how she and her husband, Lino Del Fra, were on the Aeolian islands north
of Sicily when they decided to wander away from the populous beaches; “volevamo
l’Italia vera”, she says – we wanted the real Italy. What she may have meant by “real” is
of course knotty and contentious. In one sense she is the middle-class outsider looking in
on the grittier lives of the working class — an over-romanticised view. However, her
definition of realness or authenticity extends beyond class. It is about complexity, about
holding the picture-postcard vision of Italy imagined from abroad against the daily lives
of all sorts of Italian people. It is on these islands that she began taking her sun-filled
photographs of mineral and man, making images that offered mystery rather than a
caricature of Italy and Italians. On being a photographer, she told Pisanelli: “It means
taking away all of our preconceived ideas and going in search of…not of truth, truth
doesn’t exist. It’s going in search of something much more profound than truth,
something absolutely hidden […] and photography, like everything that is an icon,
reveals it.”[4]

Mangini managed during her early years as a photographer and then as a documentary
filmmaker, beginning in 1958 with Ignoti alla città, to illuminate something about Italy
for many of her fellow Italians, something as particular as it is common. One has to
wonder what the general public felt upon seeing her films (which were most often
screened in cinemas before the feature the audience had come to watch) and seeing
themselves revealed in such a way.[5] In La Canta delle Marane (1962), we see young
men, boys really, creating a new world for themselves, a world with its own set of rules
and codes of conduct. Written with Pier Paolo Pasolini in 1961, the film brings us to the
outskirts of Rome in what seems like a parallel universe dictated by violence and
thievery, but where there is also a tender brotherhood and mutual protection. She films
the boys swimming, wrestling, shouting – she never catches them speaking calmly to
one another. Shot in colour, the waters where the boys play appear so green as to be
idyllic. It is reality, but it’s not the realism one expects. It is a constructed realism,
something Mangini and Pasolini share. Eschewing any interest in actors or polished
language, both artists took the language of the everyday, of the streets, of the poor, and
with those they built stories.

La briglia sul collo (1974) is a later example of Mangini’s work with “regular people”
from the middle of her career. In this 15-minute film we meet Fabio Spada, a young boy
living in San Basilio, on the outskirts of Rome. He lives with his parents and two
younger siblings in a one-bedroom flat in an isolated neighbourhood where there is only
one bus connecting them to the city centre. Mangini opens the film narrating some
factual information about Fabio’s life, explaining that there is just one state school and
one private Catholic school run by the Church, and no public school, for the 30,000
residents of the area. There are no parks; the children play in courtyards. The film moves
quickly to the life of Fabio, who has been put in a special needs class because he is
disruptive, and whose teacher says he needs to “come back to the flock.” The school’s
director recognises that the boy’s exuberance might come from a place of emotional
distress, yet no one has the tools to help this child or his family. He is called a rebel, a
bad boy, and he comes to identify with and further assume these labels. As in La canta
delle marane, Mangini shows us how young boys are left on their own to fend for
themselves and given little emotional support. He is not seen by the adults in his life for
his better qualities; instead, they are exasperated by him. While the boys in La
canta have each other, Fabio lacks their kind of brotherhood and must face the situation
on his own; this is perhaps a reflection of changes in Italian culture between the 1960s
and 1970s. The shift from an agricultural, rural, religious society to an industrial, urban,
secular one left many people without a solid social constellation, without the elements
that hold a society together. While industrialisation may modernise a culture it also cuts
future generations off from other, more instinctive systems of knowledge.

In both worlds there is the repetition: the daily tasks in the factory or on
the farm, reliance on an old song or prayer to get through a difficult
moment. There is the process of work, of movements the body repeats day
after day. In ritual there are motions, signs, physical actions that affect the
mind.
 
Magic and religion are represented in how Mangini’s films engage with repetition,
process and gesture. Her documentaries can be divided into two categories – the
proletariat and the magical – that, perhaps surprisingly, have more commonalities than
differences. In both worlds there is the repetition: the daily tasks in the factory or on the
farm, reliance on an old song or prayer to get through a difficult moment. There is the
process of work, of movements the body repeats day after day. In ritual there are
motions, signs, physical actions that affect the mind. In the repetitive work of the women
in factories in Essere donne, in the eponymous protagonist’s hopeful look towards the
“petrochimico” (petrochemical) in Tommaso (1965), Mangini shows how Italians during
the post-war period continued to rely on forces outside of themselves in their daily lives.
There are single actors – people move, make decisions – but the voices we hear, like
Tommaso’s as he voices the wish that someone might give him a chance to work and
make more money, are not so different from a prayer, an invocation to a power one
cannot see or touch.

Mangini allows us to listen to voices as they show emotion and to see, up close, faces in
both joy and pain. In many of her documentaries about the South and the quickly
disappearing traditions found there, she collaborated with Pasolini, working together to
build a tangible and unmistakable poetic. I cannot stop thinking about the fact that
Pasolini wrote the lamentations we hear in Stendalì – Suonano Ancora (1960), another
film on which they collaborated. He based the song, in Griko, a dialect of Greek spoken
in Salento, off remnants the women featured in the film could remember, and which had
been passed along through generations going back to the 1800s. And yet, while they may
feel authentic to the outsider, these are reconstructions; in this film Mangini used a
professional actress, Lilla Brignone, to lead the song. But still the women’s cries conjure
up past traumas – the crying is part of traditional women’s ritual, the gendered work of
mourning. Despite the documentary being staged, the cries from the mourners excavate
something deep, powerful, intergenerational. Pasolini the poet and Mangini the image-
maker tap into ancient traditions found not in the specifics of the language but in the
manner in which the body produces such sounds. I think of Dante in Canto XIII of La
Vita Nuova, longing to be with Beatrice as she mourns the death of her father; he is told
to go away, to stay outside of the house, “in keeping with the customs of the city
mentioned earlier, women with women and men with men come together on such sad
occasions, many women gathered where this Beatrice was weeping pitifully…”.
[6] Harnessing this ancient form, Mangini and Pasolini show us something that has
always been a part of us.

We are fortunate to have Mangini’s reconstructions of archaic rites and rituals in other
films, as well. In La passione del grano (1960), which she made with her husband, she
talks with the few members of a community who remembered their once-vibrant
practices for ensuring a healthy crop in order to make her reconstructions as accurate as
possible. This method coincides with the work of Ernesto De Martino, an influence on
Mangini, who inspired her to turn what he wrote about into films that could be shared
with a larger and perhaps less academic audience than his books. The interest many
artists and scholars took in these traditions at the time underlined the urgency of
recording and understanding long-held rituals that were fading out in a quickly
modernising landscape. Mangini and Del Fra met and worked with De Martino on
Stendalì, discussing how to most accurately represent the songs and gestures associated
with funeral rites. Chiara Galli details how De Martino worked with a number of young
filmmakers like Mangini and Del Fra during the 1950s and 1960s in her article ‘Il
documentario etnografico ‘demartiniano’’ (‘The ‘DeMartinian’ Ethnographic
Documentary’).[7] He would sit and discuss his findings, recordings, and research with
them, understanding how important their work was to his larger project, as well.

De Martino travelled to various regions in the South of Italy, participating in the dying
traditions he later recorded in his many books. His book Sud e magia (South and Magic,
1959) records these rites in Puglia (where Mangini often filmed), including the
tarantismo, a form of mania characterised by dancing that was popularly, and incorrectly,
believed to be caused by a spider bite. His work sets a precedent for respect between
subject and observer when it came to the relationship of these newly Europeanised
Italians to magical thinking and the blending of traditional pagan rituals with Roman
Catholicism. In Sud e magia, De Martino examines why these archaic traditions lived on
in the South, pointing to the uncertain future these populations faced through the
precarious situation of their work, the possibility of natural disasters, and uncontrollable
social factors.[8] Like De Martino, Mangini saw value in these traditions, but she also
turned her eye toward the future. Throughout Mangini’s entire oeuvre, in films such
as Tommaso, Brindisi ‘65, and Essere donne, one can see the the next stage in the
struggle of the modern human that De Martino began to document, that of the non-
religious individualist, so indoctrinated in the belief that he can control his own fate
against injustice, war, discrimination. As if in counterpoint, Mangini herself holds up the
idea of magical thinking in these films, to keep it close, to let us keep a touch of the faith
found in those who appear on screen, as they carry with them some of the spirit of their
histories into a life that is quite similar to our own. In 1968, Mangini directed Sardegna,
a short film which was part of the Italia allo specchio, a 1968 series created by Cinecittà
and the Ministry for Culture to highlight the traditions and industry of each region of
Italy. Here she meant to show the modernising effects of economic development, but in
doing so she doesn’t move solely in a forward-reaching direction; instead she shows us
how folk traditions have value and that the past shouldn’t simply be erased by the
present.

Mangini’s legacy is carried on through younger filmmakers who admired her, including
Pisanelli. Their collaborative film, Two Forgotten Boxes: Trip to Vietnam, made in 2020,
emphasises the range of feeling – from empathy and seriousness to joy – that one sees
emerging over the course of Mangini’s work. In it, Mangini, now an old woman, reflects
on the memories she notices fading, saying “I only remember things by looking at the
pictures.” Pisanelli records Mangini as she goes through the photographs of her and Del
Fra’s trip to Vietnam in 1965, reflecting on their relationship to the people and the
admiration Mangini had for their strength and resistance. As the film flashes between
scenes of Magnini at home in Italy and photographs from Vietnam, one feels that her
compassion for her fellow humans comes into full view. When Mangini shows to the
camera photographs of women fighting in Vietnam, I am particularly struck by her
interest in them, as people fighting for their autonomy and land against US military
might. She says of the Vietnamese: “They never wanted to be victims.” She herself never
saw the marginalised as victims, and perhaps that is where so much of the strength of her
work comes from. Her mission was to record lives lived, but she does something more:
she gives viewers comprehensive portraits – though they may only last for seconds – of a
person’s unique life or struggle. She listens fully to each story, and she grants each
person she films great dignity. The people she presents in her films all want to live a
good life, to take care of themselves and those around them. This seems simple, but it
isn’t at all, because this need for dignity and care is largely ignored by capitalist
patriarchal society, and is considered only secondary to profits and glamour, leaving so
many people either invisible or caricatured across all forms of media.

To record everyday life in post-war Italy was to illustrate the hard road to economic and
social recovery, as well as vast corruption. Mangini took on this challenge because she
believed photography could inspire empathy and change. Kaja Silverman, writing on
photography, notes that it is “an ontological calling card; it helps us to see that each of us
is a node in a vast constellation of analogies.”[9] As I watch Mangini’s films of men
going to work in factories and women letting out primordial cries, I sense she is putting
me back in touch with something that was always mine, something found in my own
intergenerational immigrations and journeys, something in my own constellation of
analogies. Mangini harnesses life in the photograph and the moving image to reveal
others’ vitality to us. These films compel us to take action, to expose injustice and, like
Mangini, to transform beauty, by whatever means we have, into power.
 
[1] Trocano, Martina. Interview with Mangini (translation my own)
https://www.artribune.com/arti-visive/fotografia/2021/01/cecilia-mangini-intervista-inedita-rip-documentario/
[2] Although homosexuality in Italy was decriminalized in 1890, social stigma remained powerful throughout the
20th century. Gays were actively persecuted under the regime of Benito Mussolini and the war years in general.
[…].
[3] Agamben, Giorgio. “What is the Contemporary?” trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedella. in What is an
Apparatus? and Other Essays. Stanford UP. 2009. (53).
[4] http://www.idea.mat.beniculturali.it/attivita/eventi/item/733-cecilia-mangini-visioni-e-passioni-fotografie-
1952-1965
[5] livia interview note
[6] https://digitaldante.columbia.edu/text/library/la-vita-nuova-frisardi/
[7] Galli, Chiara. “Il documentario etnografico ‘demartiniano.’” La Ricera Folklorica. Antropologia visiva. Il
cinema (Apr., 1981), pp. 23-31
[8] De Martino, Ernesto. Sud e magia. Feltrinelli. 9th edition, 2010.
[9] Silverman, Kaja. The Miracle of Analogy, or The History of Photography, Part 1. Stanford UP. 2015. (10-11).

Allison Grimaldi Donahue (Middletown, Conn. USA 1984) is a poet, writer and translator. She’s
author of Body to Mineral  (Publication Studio Vancouver 2016) and On Endings (Delere Press
2019). She has appeared in Another Gaze, Los Angeles Review of Books, Brooklyn Rail, BOMB and
other magazines. She has given performances at Gavin Brown in Rome and Hyper Maremma in
2019. She has been writer in residence at the New York Center for Book Arts and at the Bread Loaf
Conference, as well as an artist in residence at Mass MoCA and MAMbo, Bologna. Her translation
of Autoritratto by Carla Lonzi will be published in 2021 by Divided Publishing.

ESSERE DONNE
1965, 30'

Boycotted and covertly censored by the producers and directors who formed part of the
Commissione ministeriale, which decided on which short should accompany features in
cinema programmes at the time, Essere Donne was a commission from the Communist-
aligned production company Unitelefilm, who had approached a selection of left-wing
filmmakers to investigate fully a collective social problem.
The result is a series of interviews conducted by Mangini with women workers from the olive
groves of Puglia to the factories of Milan. Often filmed as they work at home or at the factory,
these women speak candidly about issues including abortion, housework, unionisation and
boycotts.

“As is always the case with works that constitute a powerful experience and discoveries of an
existential nature, I remain very close to Essere donne. In this case, the experience was that of
the factory, and within the factory the production line, the compartmentalisation, the short
timescales, the confirmation of Gramsci’s teachings on Fordism. The discovery was that of
the women ‘worked’ by the factory, of peasant work, of families, of their relationship to their
hopeless situation, in the initial moment of their (and my) confused questioning of the need
for change.
[...]
I discovered that women are restless, often openly dissatisfied with the existential burden that
weighs upon them, and secretly driven to understand what is not working and how to free
themselves of the endless penalties imposed on them since their childhood. A full awareness
of the system that penalises them – its causes, its reasons – is still lacking. The women are
unconsciously still only becoming complete women.
This embryonic situation applies to me; it applies to all of us; it even applies to those who
refuse to grow. It is undoubtedly down to hindsight and to a contemporary reading of Essere
donne that I now believe that I was instinctively driven to identify myself with all of them –
entering into the film as an olive-picker in Apulia or as a weaver at the loom in the north."