Bibliography

This page brings together the main studies, essays, and publications devoted to Elvira Coda Notari and to the historical, cultural, and cinematic context in which her work developed. It is an ever-expanding bibliography, available to scholars, enthusiasts, and anyone wishing to explore more deeply the path of the first woman director in Italian cinema.

[Curated by Coraline Refort, last updated June 2026]

Monographs

Amabile, F., Elvira, Einaudi, 2022: “Love and motherhood, misery and triumph, rebellion and regret. The true story of a woman who defied her era. In this compelling novel, set in Naples at the beginning of the twentieth century, a bold and determined heroine pursues with pioneering tenacity a passion – filmmaking – that only men were allowed to indulge.” (Einaudi.it)

Aprà, A., Bernardini, A., Martinelli, V., Pistagnesi, P., Napoletana: Images of a City, Fabbri Editori, 1993.

Argentieri, M., L’occhio del regime. Informazione e propaganda nel cinema del fascismo, Vallecchi, 1979.

Bernardini, A., Martinelli, V., Il cinema italiano degli anni venti, Cineteca Nazionale del Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, 1979.

Bernardini, A., Il cinema muto italiano 1910. I film dei primi anni, Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, 1996: “The volume is part of the series in which the author – in collaboration with Vittorio Martinelli – reconstructs the Italian film production of the early years. 1910 is the year in which the national production and distribution structure shows considerable confidence from both a technical and expressive point of view. Italian cinema moves away from the French model and experiments with new genres closer to its own cultural tradition: historical-biographical costume films continue to be made, but painted backdrops are increasingly replaced by location shooting, ‘from life’, in the places where the narrated events had actually occurred. New paths are also explored through films based on theatrical and literary texts, and especially through works belonging to the comic genre. Following the substantial historical introduction, the volume includes filmographic entries arranged alphabetically by title. Each entry provides information on credits and cast, censorship data, print lengths, subjects and reviews, production companies, and alternative film titles. The volume is available individually or in the box set covering the years 1905-1912.” (Fondazione CSC)

Bertellini, G., Italy in Early American Cinema: Race, Landscape, and the Picturesque, Indiana University Press, 2009.

Bevilacqua, P., De Clementi, A., Franzina, E., Storia dell’emigrazione italiana. Partenze, Vol. 2, Donzelli Editore, 2001.

Bruno, G., Nadotti, M., Off Screen: Women and Film in Italy, Routledge, 1988.

Bruno, G., Streetwalking on a Ruined Map: Cultural Theory and the City Films of Elvira Notari, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1993. https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691025339/streetwalking-on-a-ruined-map?srsltid=AfmBOor3yHpprNDIGaPtOIFK4-6NUpy3EN0v4lDDRd86DFtowkFrmIUd[Society for Cinema and Media Studies’ Katherine Singer Kovács Book Award, Best Book on Cinema, 1995].

Bruno, G., Rovine con vista. Alla ricerca del cinema perduto di Elvira Notari, La Tartaruga Edizioni, Milan, 1995.[Premio Filmcritica-Umberto Barbaro, Best Book on Cinema, 1995]

Bruno, G., Rovine con vista. Napoli e il cinema di Elvira Notari, Quodlibet, Macerata, 2023. https://www.quodlibet.it/libro/9788822920362
A fundamental volume in the critical rediscovery of Elvira Notari from the 1990s onward, this book has deeply influenced subsequent scholarship and numerous media productions devoted to the director. It still stands today as one of the most authoritative and comprehensive research resources, in both Italian and English, on Elvira Notari’s work and cultural context. “A beautiful book… Rovine con vista can be read as the account of a journey. One begins to move and follows two tracks: one, rigorous and immensely valuable, is the accurate analytical reconstruction of Elvira Notari’s cinema. The other, only lightly concealed behind a ‘high’ critical filter that is never forbidding, is the personal tension of the woman who wrote the book. Speaking as a director, it feels as though there now exists a text that might even invite me to a cinematic transposition, an impossible remake, of a film that in fact no one can any longer see. Beyond its critical commitment, it is for this creative and vital tension that I am grateful to Giuliana.” Mario Martone

Clarke, D., The Cinematic City, Routledge, 1997.

Dall’Asta, M., Non solo dive. Pioniere del cinema italiano, Cineteca di Bologna, 2008.

Faccioli, A., Mosconi, E., Divine. Nuove prospettive sul cinema muto italiano, Mimesis, 2022.

Foster, G.A., Women Film Directors: An International Bio-Critical Dictionary, Greenwood Publishing Group, 1995.

Frasca, S., Italian Birds of Passage: The Diaspora of Neapolitan Musicians in New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.

Giuli, A., InVisibili: le pioniere del cinema, Electa, 2025.

Jandelli, C., Le dive italiane del cinema muto italiano, Cue Press, 2019.

Laterza, C., Donne intrepide. Vol. 8: Attrici & Registe, Libroza, 2023.

Masi, S., Franco, M., Il mare, la luna, i coltelli. Per una storia del cinema muto napoletano, Tullio Pironti, 1988.

Miscuglio, A., Kinomata. La donna nel cinema, Dedalo Libri, 1988.

Muscio, G., Napoli/New York/Hollywood: Film Between Italy and the United States, Fordham University Press, 2018: “Napoli/New York/Hollywood is an absorbing investigation of the significant impact that Italian immigrant actors, musicians, and directors – and the southern Italian stage traditions they embodied – have had on the history of Hollywood cinema and American media, from 1895 to the present day. In a unique exploration of the transnational communication between American and Italian film industries, media or performing arts as practiced in Naples, New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, this groundbreaking book looks at the historical context and institutional film history from the illuminating perspective of the performers themselves – the workers who lend their bodies and their performance culture to screen representations. In doing so, the author brings to light the cultural work of families and generations of artists that have contributed not only to American film culture, but also to the cultural construction and evolution of ‘Italian-ness’ over the past century. Napoli/New York/Hollywood offers a major contribution to our understanding of the role of southern Italian culture in American cinema, from the silent era to contemporary film. Using a provocative interdisciplinary approach, the author associates southern Italian culture with modernity and the immigrants’ preservation of cultural traditions with innovations in the mode of production and in the use of media technologies (theatrical venues, music records, radio, ethnic films). Each chapter synthesizes a wealth of previously understudied material and displays the author’s exceptional ability to cover transnational cinematic issues within an historical context. For example, her analysis of the period from the end of World War I until the beginning of sound in film production in the end of the 1920s delivers a meaningful revision of the relationship between Fascism and American cinema, and Italian emigration. Napoli/New York/Hollywood examines the careers of those Italian performers who were Italian not only because of their origins but because their theatrical culture was Italian, a culture that embraced high and low, tragedy and comedy, music, dance and even acrobatics, naturalism, and improvisation. Their previously unexplored story – that of the Italian diaspora’s influence on American cinema – is here meticulously reconstructed through rich primary sources, deep archival research, extensive film analysis, and an enlightening series of interviews with heirs to these traditions, including Francis Coppola and his sister Talia Shire, John Turturro, Nancy Savoca, James Gandolfini, David Chase, Joe Dante, and Annabella Sciorra.” (Fordham University Press)

Petricelli, A., Riccardi, S., Cattive ragazze. 15 storie di donne audaci e creative, Sinnos, 2nd edition, 2017.

Pravadelli, V., Le donne del cinema. Dive, registe, spettatrici, Laterza, 2014.

Redi, R., Camerini, C., Cinecittà 1: industria e mercato nel cinema italiano tra le due guerre / Mostra internazionale del Nuovo Cinema, Marsilio, 1985.

Redi, R., Ti parlerò… d’amor. Cinema italiano fra muto e sonoro, ERI, 1986.

Reso, P., Elvira Coda Notari. Tracce metelliane di una pioniera del cinema, Terra del Sole, 2011.

Ricci, C., Il cinema in penombra di Elvira Notari, LFA Publisher, 2016: “A journey through the history of Italian cinema – and beyond – through the life, gaze, and works of the first Italian woman director: Elvira Notari. A portrait of an entrepreneur and of her family, decidedly unconventional for the time in which we find ourselves – the early twentieth century – who nevertheless succeeded in turning her films into both history and legend. The story of a strong and independent woman who transformed her art and her love for her city into her profession, managing to create, produce, and direct more than one hundred films of which, unfortunately, only three survive: ‘A Santanotte, ‘E Piccerella and Fantasia ‘e surdato. It is part of the history of Naples. It is part of the history of our country. It is the history of cinema which, with Elvira Notari, becomes a woman for the first time.” (LFA Publishers)

Rubino, C., Cinematografo a Napoli. Appunti sulle origini (1896-1989), Immagine, Associazione italiana per le Ricerche di Storia del Cinema, 1982.

Speranza, P., La Film di Elvira. La prima regista donna del cinema italiano (1875-1946), CinemaSud, 2016.

Troianelli, E., Elvira Notari pioniera del cinema napoletano (1905-1930), Euroma La Goliardica, 1993.

Verdicchio, P., Bound by Distance: Rethinking Nationalism Through the Italian Diaspora, Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1997.

Articles

Ben-Ghiat, R., “The Italian Cinema and the Italian Working Class”, in International Labor and Working-Class History, 59, 2001, pp. 36-51.

Bruno, G., “Le films di Elvira Notari (1875-1946)”, in Lapis, 2, March 1988.

Bruno, G., “Elvira Coda Notari und der neapolitanische Film: ein historisches Panorama”, in Frauen und Film, 56-57, 1993, pp. 4-24.

Bruno, G., “Voyage to Naples: a City Viewed, Traversed, and Displayed”, in Adriano Aprà (ed.), Napoletana: Images of a City, The Museum of Modern Art – MoMA, 1993.

Bruno, G., “City Views: Naples and the Cinema”, in MoMA, 15, 1993, pp. 14-15.

Bruno, G., “City Views, the Voyage of Film Images”, in David Clark (ed.), The Cinematic City, Routledge, 1997, pp. 46-58.

Bruno, G., “In viaggio tra Napoli e New York: immagini di città in ‘transito’”, in Giuliana Muscio and Giovanni Spagnoletti (eds.), Quei bravi ragazzi: Il cinema italoamericano contemporaneo, Marsilio, 2007.

Bruno, G., “Elvira Notari: Cinema e migrazione culturale”, in Monica Dall’Asta (ed.), Non solo dive. Pioniere del cinema italiano, Cineteca di Bologna, 2008, pp. 137-148.

Bruno, G., La Dora Film emigra in America, in Tiziana Grassi and Catia Monacelli (eds.), Segni e sogni dell’emigrazione. L’Italia dall’emigrazione all’immigrazione, Ministero degli Affari Esteri and Università La Sapienza, Rome, 2009. With Eurilink DVD-ROM.

Bruno, G., “City Views: The Voyage of Film Images”, in Giuliana Muscio, Joseph Sciorra, Giovanni Spagnoletti and Anthony Julian Tamburri (eds.), Mediated Ethnicity: New Italian-American Cinema, John D. Calandra Italian American Institute, 2010, pp. 77-92.

Bruno, G., “La Dora Film D’America: il cinema nel sogno americano”, in Enzo Caffarelli, Mina Cappussi, Tiziana Grassi, Delfina Licata and Gian Carlo Perego (eds.), Dizionario Enciclopedico delle Migrazioni Italiane nel Mondo, SERItaliAteneo and Fondazione Migrantes, 2014.

Bruno, G., “Stadtansichten: Elvira Notari und die Wanderschaft filmischer Bilder”, in Heide Schlüpmann and Fabian Tietke (eds.), Transito. Elvira Notari – Kino der Passage, Kinothek Asta Nielsen, Frankfurt, 2017.

Bruno, G., “The Ruined Map, Relinked”, in Alix Beeston and Stefan Solomon (eds.), Incomplete: The Feminist Possibilities of the Unfinished Film, University of California Press, 2023, pp. 322-348.

Bruno, G., “Immagini di città: in viaggio tra Napoli e New York”, in Sebastiano Maffettone (ed.), Napoli oltre Napoli, Treccani, 2025, pp. 75-88.

Bruno, G., “Le films di Elvira Notari,” in Maria Coletti (ed.), Elvira Notari (1875-1946): La prima regista italiana. I tesori della Cineteca Nazionale, Cineteca Nazionale, Rome, 2026.

Bruno, G., “Le films di Elvira Notari,” Ravenna Film Festival, 2026.

Frasca, S., “La canzone e la pellicola: riflessioni sul film sceneggiata a Napoli”, in Enrico Careri and Anna Masecchia (eds.), Vedi Napule e po’ Mori! Lo spettacolo popolare partenopeo tra canzone napoletana, cinema muto e identità culturali, Libreria Musicale Italiana, 2020, pp. 99-110.

Frasca, S., “Zumpate, speranza e lacrime. La canzone popolare napoletana sul grande schermo”, in Paolo Spagnuolo and Paolo Speranza (eds.), Napoli, calibro 35 mm, dal cinema delle origini a “Gomorra”, Le Milieu, 2022, pp. 268-287.

Frasca, S., “Die Musik ist eine Frau: Aus den Theatern Neapels auf die Bühnen von New York”, in Transito. Elvira Notari – Kino der Passage, edited by Heide Schlüpmann and Fabian Tietke (Kinothek Asta Nielsen, Frankfurt, 2017), pp. 46-53.

Frasca, S., “La canzone al cinema: 150 anni di Elvira Notari”, in ITALICA – ISSN 2325-6672 – 102:3 (2025), pp. 381-393. [10.5406/23256672.102.3.06].

Hanssen, E.F., “Visible Absence, Invisible Presence: Feminist Film History, the Database, and the Archive”, in Ingrid Stigsdotter (ed.), Making the Invisible Visible: Reclaiming Women’s Agency in Swedish Film History and beyond, Kriterium, 2019, pp. 33-48.

Marazzi, M., “Le fondamenta sommerse della narrativa italoamericana”, in Belfagor 55, 3, 2000, pp. 277-296.

Miscuglio, A., “An affectionate and irreverent account of eighty years of women’s cinema in Italy”, in Giuliana Bruno and Maria Nadotti (eds.), Offscreen, Women and Film in Italy, Routledge, 1988, pp. 151-164.

Pozzi, C., De Sanctis, M., “Analisi del restauro di ‘A Santanotte”, in Monica Dall’Asta (ed.), Non solo dive. Pioniere del cinema italiano, Cineteca di Bologna, 2009, pp. 149-158.

Tomadjoglou, K., “I film-sceneggiata”, in Bianco e Nero, 72, 2, 2011, pp. 57-66.

Zapperi, G., “Woman’s Reappearance: Rethinking the Archive in Contemporary Art – Feminist Perspectives”, in Feminist Review, no. 105, 2013, pp. 21-47.

Web References

DiSPaC – Università degli Studi di Salerno, “Elvira Notari. Un dialogo a centocinquant’anni dalla nascita”, 2025, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dzDK0H211DQ

Scalia, R., “Elvira Notari: A Woman in Search of Desire”, in Film International, 2013: https://filmint.nu/elvira-notari-a-woman-in-search-of-desire/

Tomadjoglou, K., “Elvira Notari”, in Women Film Pioneers Project, https://wfpp.columbia.edu/pioneer/ccp-elvira-notari/

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