Travelling Through Memory: Transgender Road Narratives in Contemporary Italian Documentaries

ABSTRACT

The narrative of the journey has become a dominant visual trope in the representation of transgender identities. This article examines three Italian documentaries that engage with the trans road narrative, beyond the metaphor of gender transition: C’è un soffio di vita soltanto (2021), Una nobile rivoluzione (2014), and Porpora (2021). By focusing on the use of cinematic transitions as moments of dis-connection that simultaneously elicit processes of transformation and memorialization, the article explores how Italian trans documentaries have redeployed travel narratives as occasions for pinpointing individual stories and mending collective history. In these films, the visual motif of the journey dissolves the binary between moving and staying in place, to become a fitting metaphor for a shared memory that, like any identity and like cinematic images, is enduring precisely because it is in motion.

SOMMARIO

Il tema del viaggio è diventato un topos dominante nella rappresentazione visiva di identità transgender. Questo articolo esamina tre documentari italiani che utilizzano il tema del viaggio trans al di là della metafora di transizione di genere: C’è un soffio di vita soltanto (2021), Una nobile rivoluzione (2014), and Porpora (2021). Interpretando l’uso delle transizioni cinematografiche come momenti di dis-connessione in grado di generare al contempo processi di trasformazione e memorializzazione, l’articolo indaga come i documentari trans italiani abbiano reinterpretato il tema di viaggio come un’occasione per fissare nel tempo storie individuali e ricucire la storia collettiva. In questi film, il motivo visivo del viaggio dissolve il binarismo tra movimento e staticità, facendosi metafora di una memoria condivisa che, proprio come qualsiasi identità e come le immagini cinematografiche, permane nel tempo solo rimanendo in movimento.

KEYWORDS:

• Italian trans documentaries
• travel narratives
• gender transition
• cinematic transitions
• collective memory
• remediation

PAROLE CHIAVE:

• documentari trans italiani
• narrazioni di viaggio
• transizione di genere
• transizioni cinematografiche
• memoria collettiva
• riparazione

Acknowledgements

I thank Simone Cangelosi, Daniele Coluccini, and Vittorio Martone for their help with this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 C’è un soffio di vita soltanto, dir. Matteo Botrugno and Daniele Coluccini (Kimera Film, 2021).

2 Una nobile rivoluzione, dir. Simone Cangelosi (Kiné, Pierrot, la Rosa, Cangelosi, 2014).

3 Porpora, dir. Roberto Cannavò (Humareels, 2021).

4 Una nobile rivoluzione was produced by Cangelosi and two small production houses (Kiné, and Pierrot e la Rosa), with the sponsorship of the Emilia-Romagna Region’s Film Commission and the Cineteca di Bologna. The film participated in the 32nd edition of the Torino Film Festival, and won a special mention at the Festival Mix Milano (an international festival of gay and lesbian cinema). Also Porpora was produced by a small studio (Humareels), with the sponsorship of the city of Bologna and the Emilia-Romagna Region, among others. The film was featured in various Italian festivals, including the international film festival of trans cinema Divergenti, the Social World Film Festival, and the Mediterraneo Video Festival. C’è un soffio di vita soltanto achieved greater media visibility: it participated in international festivals, including the Filmfest München, Queer Lisboa, and Torino Film Festival, and is currently available for streaming on the Rai Play platform.

5 Nicole Seymour, ‘Trans Ecology and the Transgender Road Narrative’, in Oxford Handbook Topics in Literature. (online edn, Oxford Academic, 16 December 2013) <https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199935338.013.152> [all links cited in the notes were last accessed on 24 March 2023].

6 By Hook or By Crook, dir. Harry Dodge and Silas Howard (Artistic Licence, 2001).

7 Transamerica, dir. Duncan Tucker (ContentFilm International 2005).

8 Creature, dir. Parris Patton (7thArt, 1999).

9 Eliza Steinbock, Shimmering Images: Trans Cinema, Embodiment, and the Aesthetics of Change (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019), p. 12.

10 Laurella Arietti and others, eds, Elementi di critica trans (Rome: Manifestolibri, 2010), p. 20.

11 Ibid., p. 20.

12 See Danila Cannamela, ‘Italian Trans Geographies: Retracing Trans/Cultural Narratives of People and Places’, Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 27.4 (2022), 600–22.

13 Maud Ceuterick, ‘Queering Cultural Memory Through Technology: Transitional Spaces in AR and VR’, Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media, 21 (2021) <https://www.alphavillejournal.com/Issue21.html≥.

14 Steinbock, p. 5.

15 Steinbock, p. 8.

16 Sole Anatrone and Julia Heim, ‘Introduction’, in Queering Italian Media (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2020), pp. 1–12 (p. 10).

17 Rosalind Galt and Karl Schoonover, Queer Cinema in the World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), p. 36.

18 Stefania Voli, ‘Prefazione: La geografia (trans)gendered di Porpora’, in Porpora Marcasciano, L'aurora delle trans cattive: Storie, sguardi e vissuti della mia generazione transgender (Rome: Alegre, 2018), IBooks.

19 Anatrone and Heim, p. 3.

20 Ibid.

21 Steinbock, p. 8.

22 Rebecca Bell-Metereau, Transgender Cinema (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2019), p. 47.

23 Caden Mark Gardner, ‘From the Margins: What the Archives Show Us About Trans Cinema and Audiences’, The Criterion Collection, 27 January 2021 <https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/7254-from-the-margins-what-the-archives-show-us-about-trans-cinema-and-audiences>.

24 Ibid.

25 Additional information about the two archives can be found on their websites: <https://mit-italia.it/progetti/archivist/> and <https://www.out-takes.org/en_US/home>.

26 Dalila Missero, Women, Feminism and Italian Cinema: Archives from a Film Culture (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021), pp. 5–6.

27 T. J. Demos, Radical Futurisms: Ecologies of Collapse, Chronopolitics, and Justice-to-Come (London: Sternberg Press, 2023), p. 61.

28 Jacques Derrida, ‘Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression’, Diacritics 2.2 (1995), 9–63 (p. 9).

29 Ibid.

30 Steinbock, p. 5.

31 I am readapting here some observations of Sergio Rigoletto on Ferzan Ozpetek’s Le fate ignoranti in ‘Sexual Dissidence and the Mainstream: The Queer Triangle in Ferzan Ozpetek’s Le fate ignoranti’, The Italianist, 30.2 (2010), 202–18 (p. 212).

32 See Giuseppe Gariazzo, ‘“C’è un soffio di vita soltanto”, le scelte di Lucy e la libertà del corpo nel suo desiderio’, il manifesto, 11 January 2022 <https://ilmanifesto.it/ce-un-soffio-di-vita-soltanto-le-scelte-di-lucy-e-la-liberta-del-corpo-nel-suo-desiderio>.

33 Here I am referring to Sara Ahmed’s notion of queer re-orienting, in Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006).

34 My use of the expression ‘queer temporality’ is indebted to queer studies theories that have engaged with the notion of temporality through various approaches and outcomes — to criticize the heteronormative and capitalist conception of (re)productive future (Lee Edelman), to explore the slippery time frame of as-yet-unrealized utopia (José Esteban Muñoz), to investigate alternative forms of representation (Jack Halberstam) and to explore temporal gaps and narrative detours that can generate a transformative relation with the present (Elizabeth Freeman).

35 Avatar, dir. James Cameron (20th Centry Fox, 2009).

36 Ahmed, p. 17.

37 Karen Barad, ‘On Touching —The Inhuman That Therefore I Am’, differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 25.3 (2012), 206–23 (p. 219).

38 Seymour.

39 Amarcord, dir. Federico Fellini (PiC, Warner Bros, 1973).

40 Satyricon, dir. Federico Fellini (Produzioni Europee Associate, 1969).

41 La città delle donne, dir. Federico Fellini (Gaumont Italia, 1980).

42 Un borghese piccolo piccolo, dir. Mario Monicelli (Cineriz, 1977).

43 Todo modo, dir. Elio Petri (PIC, 1976).

44 This is further explored in Felliniana (dir. Simone Cangelosi and Luki Massa), a long interview that Di Folco did with Gianluca Farinelli in 2010.

45 I Clowns, dir. Federico Fellini (Rai, 1970).

46 Federico Fellini, see no. 39.

47 Solitudine, dir. Romano Scavolini (1966).

48 For additional details see Danila Cannamela, ‘A Trans Revolution and its Contradictions: An Interview with Simone Cangelosi’, in Italian Trans Geographies, ed. by Danila Cannamela, Marzia Mauriello, and Summer Minerva (Albany, NY: Suny Press, 2023), pp. 263–74.

49 Il sogno e l'utopia: Biografia di una generazione is a theatrical piece that Marcasciano created and has performed in theatres across Italy since 2017; Porpora Marcasciano: AntoloGaia: Vivere sognando e non sognando di vivere. I miei anni settanta (Rome: Alegre, 2016).

50 See Cannamela, ‘Italian Trans Geographies’.

51 See Laura Schettini, ‘L’insostenibile leggerezza del genere tra storia e biografia’, in Porpora Marcasciano, AntoloGaia (Rome: Alegre, 2016), pp. 9–20.

52 Paul Ginsborg, A History of Contemporary Italy: Society and Politics 1943–1988 (London: Penguin, 1990).

53 Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 37.

54 On the femminielli, see Paolo Valerio and Eugenio Zito, Femminielli: Corpo, Genere, Cultura (Naples: Dante & Descartes, 2019).