HASS Inaugural Lecture Professor Danielle Hipkins

Lost and Found: Girlhoods on the Italian Screen

Danielle Hipkins is Professor of Italian Studies and Film at the University of Exeter. She has published widely on gender representation in postwar Italian cinema. She was a co-investigator for the AHRC-funded project ‘Italian Cinema Audiences’, focusing on cinema-going in 1950s Italy, with the universities of Bristol and Oxford Brookes (2013-2016). The research team produced the book Italian Cinema Audiences: Histories and Memories of Cinema-going in Post-war Italy (Bloomsbury, 2019). Since February 2021 she has been Principal Investigator of the AHRC-funded project ‘A Girls’ Eye-view: Girlhood on the Italian Screen since the 1950s’ (2021-2024), together with Romana Andò (Università la Sapienza), through which she continues her research on the relationship between gender and generation in the consumption of Italian cinema and television.

From postwar Italian Neorealism to ‘commedia all’italiana’ of the sixties, girls’ limited roles in Italian cinema reflected a male-dominated industry and society. No longer depicted as victims in need of rescue, girls became desirable and whimsical incarnations of the booming economy of the early 1960s, and ultimately the commodified sex object par excellence: the television showgirl. Standing in for risk or pleasure, all these depictions had in common their use of the girl as symbol of male rejuvenation and validation, a pattern that continued to haunt her depiction through to the early 2000s. However, recently several factors have radically transformed her representation in Italian cinema and television: rebellion against the sexualised images associated with Silvio Berlusconi’s television, increasing numbers of women in the film and television industries, and a new attention to female audiences that has accompanied growth in quality television and the arrival of the streaming platforms. No longer defined solely by a sexual coming of age, I argue that Italian screen girlhoods, diverse and relational, offer new ways of understanding female identities in Italy.

Event Venue

University of Exeter Queen's Building LT1, The Queen's Drive, Exeter, United Kingdom