Filming a Woman’s Life: Maria Occhipinti, Giuliana Saladino and two Re-Elaborations of Sicilian Impegno

In the light of Carolyn Heilbrun’s statement on women’s lives having to be “considered in the absence of a structure of critical or biographical commonplaces” (Writing a Woman’s Life, 20), our contribution examines two documentaries, Con quella faccia da straniera (2012) and Come scrive una donna (2013), respectively depicting the lives of Maria Occhipinti (1921-1996) and Giuliana Saladino (1925-1999). Through a reconstruction that combines archive materials, interviews to family and friends and excerpts from the authors’ texts, the documentaries powerfully retrieve the voices of two protagonists that embody a unique facet of Sicilian female subjectivity, one that openly opposes any predictable or traditional perspectives on women. Occhipinti and Saladino ultimately inspire and motivate two filmic experimental journeys in which they stand out as entirely autonomous from any dominant, patriarchy-inspired configuration of sexual roles. The essay will examine how the documentaries focus on the women’s social and intellectual engagement (impegno), and whether this newly found centrality obtained through a visual narrative effectively reads against the grain of a canonical perspective on women during twentieth-century Sicilian history. Furthermore, the contribution investigates to what extent the encounter between figures of a marginal literary tradition and the adoption of a biographical approach in contemporary documentary filming may be a productive way to establish the writers outside of their usual marginal zone. Attention will thus be paid to the directors’ thematic and practical choices (e.g., hybridization of visual techniques), in order to investigate the context in which these documentaries have been produced and distributed.