Presented by Anne Young

In “Seeing Red from the Depths: Daria Nicolodi’s Secret Revenge,” I argued that the actress and screenwriter re-appropriated her own work on Suspiria (1977) and used it in the scripts she wrote for Luigi Cozzi, Paganini Horror (1988) and De Profundis (or The Black Cat) (1989), to comment on her creative and romantic partnership with Dario Argento as well as the danger of male “genius” for creative women.

In these oft-maligned low-budget films, Nicolodi writes female characters whose work is stolen by, or misattributed to, men. In De Profundis, an ancient witch seeks revenge when a cheating husband forces his wife into the witch’s role and tries to “direct” her straight to hell. In Paganini Horror, the titular “genius” plays “forever the screams of his poor bride” on the string of his violin and a “genius” horror director revives his murderous, plagiarizing spirit.

It’s well-known that Nicolodi was salty over her writing contribution to Suspiria, and that her work on Argento’s films has been overlooked. But how to look at something that has been relegated to the status of gossip and the “personal”? While many critics have pointed to Nicolodi’s importance in Argento’s most popular films, there is a hesitance to identify and analyze her creative voice as distinct from her image as his inspiring muse.

In this class, I explore some of the underlying questions that drove my research and ask us to think about ways we can continue to recognize women’s creative contributions which are already there, rather than ask why they are (seemingly) absent. We will discuss the ongoing problem of the erasure of women’s work. How can we prevent it from disappearing to the point it has to be recovered, time and time again?

Part of this discussion is the problem of historizing women’s work in general. This may include reference to the 1970s Italian feminist movement to recognize and compensate women’s unpaid labour, as well as analysis of popular representations of women’s progress. How do we find women’s work when it was often uncredited and/or unpaid? Especially when it fits into the tradition of family labour roles? I suggest that we analyze the representation of these relationships for clues to both the hidden work and the process by which it is erased.

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All talks start at the following local times:
London @ 19:00:00
Berlin @ 20:00:00
New York @ 14:00 pm
Los Angeles @ 11:00 am