(Dis)ordini del visibile. Corpi, soglie, femminile nel Cinema Indipendente Italiano

Issue 235 of the Engramma journal, entitled (Dis)ordini del visibile. Corpi, soglie e femminile nel Cinema Indipendente Italiano, was developed within the framework of the PRIN 2022 project A Case of Minor History? Agency and Dissent in Italian “Independent” Cinema, between Art and Counter-Information, Viewing Modalities, and Experimental Film-Format Practices (1961–1976). The issue investigates how Italian Independent Cinema reconfigured the conditions of visibility through practices of dissent, aesthetic experimentation, and alternative forms of spectatorship. Rather than understanding disorder as the absence of order, it approaches it as a productive instability within the visible: a site where bodies, images, media, and relations challenge established regimes of representation. Within this perspective, the feminine emerges not as a thematic category but as a critical lens through which to examine the distribution of visibility, agency, and appearance in moving images. The essays collected here explore these questions from different angles. In Il corpo delle immagini, Simona Arillotta examines Lilan (1964–1965), Nelda (1969), and Anna (1972–1975), proposing the feminine as a relational field through which bodies, images, and visibility are constituted. In Migrazione nel Fiore d’eringio di Massimo Bacigalupo. Passaggi, riemersioni, trasformazioni, Cosetta Saba analyses the film’s network of mythic and cultural references, showing how notions of femininity destabilize systems of call, response, and prescribed identity. Jennifer Malvezzi’s Un viaggio nell’inconscio tecnologico del cinema sperimentale focuses on Pierfrancesco Bargellini’s Trasferimento di modulazione (1969), locating disorder within the photochemical processes that interrupt and transform the material emergence of the image itself. In I corpi di Anna. Spettri, materia, immagine, latenza, Carmelo Marabello explains how in the film Anna, by Alberto Grifi and Massimo Sarchielli, the process of filming – and thus of stabilising the image in a cinematic form, that is, from ½-inch magnetic tape to 16mm via the vidigraph – is not a transition from one form of recording reality to another, but a recorded flow; and in this sense, what it reveals is what manages to emerge within an indexical field. In “Sentirmi chiamare amato, sentirmi / amato sulla terra”. Il cinema di Anna Lajolo e Guido Lombardi tra iconologia militante, vis poetica e fonte antropologica, Chiara Dionisi investigates collaborative filmmaking practices that redistribute authority and redefine relations between filmmakers, subjects, and communities. Sabrina De Crescenzo’s Il lavoro del sensibile. Dissenso, discontinuità e decostruzione nel Cinema Indipendente Italiano develops a dialogue between Spinoza and Rancière to interpret Italian Independent Cinema as a field in which affects, bodies, and images transform the very partition of the sensible. Dionisi’s conversation “Ho soffocato le parole nel mio ventre”. L’Es e l’esperienza filmica terapeutica, conducted with Pia De Silvestris, further expands the historical understanding of the Cooperativa Cinema Indipendente through personal testimony, archival recovery, and reflections on collective film practice. The concluding section presents recent research outcomes connected to the PRIN project. Cosetta Saba introduces the Filmografia del Cinema Indipendente Italiano 1961–1976; Carmelo Marabello presents the work currently in progress on an Atlas of Italian Independent Cinema; Rossella Catanese discusses the volume Italian Experimental Cinema and Moving-Image Art. New Paths, New Perspectives (edited with Jennifer Malvezzi); Giuseppe Bambagioni reviews Stefano Miraglia’s Donda Retrieved: Inquiry Into a Disappearance; and Luka Bagnoli and Elisa La Boria with Verifiche incerte present the results of the advanced film laboratory developed at the University Iuav of Venice. Taken together, the contributions show how Italian Independent Cinema continues to operate as a dynamic archive whose images, bodies, and media practices remain capable of questioning dominant visual orders. By bringing together historical inquiry, theoretical reflection, archival research, and contemporary forms of reactivation, the issue highlights the enduring relevance of this “minor history” for understanding the politics and aesthetics of visibility.