Abitare la crisi: spazialità femminili nei COVID film

In her "Atlas of Emotions: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film" (2002), Giuliana Bruno suggests greater disciplinary contamination among the fields of feminist theory, geographical studies and film scholarship, sustaining the idea that looking «with geographical eyes at feminist film theory» – that is, also, approaching sexual difference in terms of space – would disclose a whole new and promising territory of research. Drawing upon theorizations on the cultural construction of space and its gendering sparked by the spatial turn, in recent times this territory at the intersection of cinema, space and gender has been explored from a variety of perspectives. Only a few studies, however, have examined in a comprehensive manner cinematic representations of women’s spatialities. Namely, "Spaces of Women’s Cinema: Space, Place and Genre in Contemporary Women’s Filmmaking" (2019) by Sue Thornham, "Affirmative Aesthetics and Wilful Women: Gender Space and Mobility in Contemporary Cinema" (2020) by Maud Ceuterick and "Wandering women. Urban Ecologies of Italian Feminist Filmmaking" (2023) by Laura Di Bianco. Adopting a similar theoretical framework, "Cinema, Gender, and Everyday Space: Comedy, Italian Style" (2015) by Natalie Fullwood, focuses on a more general discourse on gendered identities and spaces. With the aim of contributing to this debate, the present research project explores the dimension of feminine spatialities in the cinematography produced in the historical period in which it has been most challenged, that is during the COVID-19 pandemic. As in the medical field it is often required to discontinue medications that suppress symptoms in order to make a proper diagnosis, similarly, this study is grounded on the theoretical premise that spatial restrictions due to the COVID-19 restrictive measures allow for observing the relationship with space in a condition akin to that of a scientific laboratory, under the scrutiny of a microscope. Following the pioneering methodological framework outlined in the initial research works in the area of study, the focus is placed on an in-depth analysis of few selected films among a sample, with the ultimate goal of drawing a cartography of ways of being-in-the-world that are inherently and intimately feminine, even and especially so in an era of isolation and confinement. Thus, within what is gradually emerging in academia and film criticism as the genre of ‘COVID films’, three cinematic works – Giulia (Ciro De Caro, 2021), iSola (Elisa Fuksas, 2020) and Songbird (Adam Mason, 2020) – have been selected to serve as case studies for analysis among a corpus of 86 films produced worldwide over the period 2020-2024. The analysis of the sample clearly shows a tendency to cluster around specific cinematic genres, hence, taking to account the profound and significant link between space and genres, the selection of the case studies mirrors this pattern.