Giuliana Bruno, Rovine con Vista, 2023

Naples is a great city – with its streets, its views, its iconic universe, its cinematic vocation – seen years later through the eyes of two women.
Elvira Coda Notari (1875-1946), the first and most prolific Italian filmmaker, made more than sixty feature films between 1906 and 1930, a hundred short films on current affairs and numerous short documentaries commissioned by Neapolitan emigrants who had moved to America, until fascist censorship and the transition to sound forced her production company, Dora Film, to cease operations.
Giuliana Bruno, a Neapolitan, moved to New York in the 1980s and began to reconstruct a particular moment in the history of her hometown; one in which, together with cinema, modernity was born, with its innovative languages of movement, new means of transport, galleries or passages, and other technological and urban transformations that revolutionised modes of perception between the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Starting from film fragments, stills, scripts and writings that emerged from extensive archival research conducted in Italy and the United States among what remains to document the pioneering work of Elvira Notari and Dora Film, Rovine con vista embraces the worldview of a forgotten director who sought to capture the city and its forms of life “from life” with her camera. The result is a cross-cutting survey involving cinema and photography, literature and art history, popular culture, theatre, magazines, architecture and the history of medicine.

‘A beautiful book… Rovine con vista can be read as the story of a journey. You set off and follow two tracks: one, rigorous and invaluable, is the accurate analytical reconstruction of Elvira Notari’s cinema. The other, barely concealed by a “high” but not impenetrable critical filter, is the personal tension of the woman who wrote the book. Speaking as a director, it is as if there now exists a text that could even invite me to make a film adaptation, that is, an impossible remake, of a film that no one can actually see anymore. In addition to her critical commitment, it is this creative and vital tension that I am grateful to Giuliana for.”
— Mario Martone