The Box Set

Screenwriter, producer, director, editor, distributor, acting teacher: Elvira Coda Notari (1875-1946) is now recognised as the first woman filmmaker in Italian cinema. At the helm of Dora Film in Naples, between 1906 and 1930 she made around sixty fiction feature films and hundreds of shorts and documentaries, distributed in Italy and the United States. With strength and originality, her cinema captured both the light and the shadows of its time, bringing to life indomitable, popular, and strikingly modern female figures.

Cineteca Nazionale del Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia presents the Blu-ray/DVD box set gathering all the surviving films by Elvira Notari preserved in its archives, including the recently rediscovered fragment of Carmela, la sartina di Montesanto (1916). The intertitles are accompanied by subtitles in English, French, and German.

All the works feature scores by Silvia Cignoli, Enrico Melozzi, and Michele Signore. The box set also includes materials of great historical and documentary value: the frame stills come from the Archivio Fotografico di CSC-Cineteca Nazionale, while the extras include Paper Print photographs from the lost film A Piedigrotta (1920), preserved at the Library of Congress, and portraits of Elvira Coda Notari held in the Fondo Martinelli / Cineteca di Bologna.

The box set is completed by an 80-page bilingual Italian-English booklet, with contributions by Gina Annunziata, Giuliana Bruno, Gabriella Buontempo, Maria Coletti, Monica Dall’Asta, Lucia Di Girolamo, Antonella Di Nocera, Simona Frasca, Cristina Jandelli, Anna Masecchia, Giuliana Muscio, Maria Assunta Pimpinelli.

The publication of the box set is part of a broader path of rediscovery, study, and enhancement of Elvira Notari’s work, also initiated through the Elvira 150 programme, conceived by Antonella Di Nocera (Naples, 10 February – 30 April 2025), and now further advanced by the work of the Comitato Nazionale per le celebrazioni del 150° anniversario della nascita di Elvira Coda Notari, committed to promoting knowledge of her work, the circulation of her films, and new opportunities for study and exchange.