Elvira of Flavia Amabile

… some lives are straight cast into infinity, some take abstruse shapes, others are harmonic, constant waves. Elvira’s is a ring, a perfect circle.

The author collects the story of Elvira Notari, a young woman who at the beginning of the twentieth century entered a cinema for the first time at the age of 27 and decided that cinema would be her life.
The beginning of this career coincides with the coloring of films and then goes on to write screenplays and direct non-professional actors and actresses (among these also Tina Pica, destined for professionalism and fame), founding Dora Film with her husband.

Elvira was born at the end of the nineteenth century in a world in which women had to stay at home, take care of the family and do jobs that could be done within the four walls.

She, however, has always been curious; she convinces her father Diego to let her attend the normal girls’ school. She reads, looks, explores the world outside her home, amazed by that explosion of colours, noises, flavors and when she moves to Naples with her family she discovers the cinema, a place that tells reality but not only.

Cinema has the great power to tell hidden stories, to bring complex thoughts to light, it can make you dream, cry, laugh, desire.

The creaking of a crank and the hum of the projector invade the large room. A light beam hits the blank canvas. A few seconds later the first images appear. Trembling, at times lopsided and interrupted by sudden shots. Big, real, on their way to the spectators.

The author, with agile and decisive prose, accompanies us day after day in the world that Elvira chooses to live; we know her slowly, we meet her frail when she decides to leave her family with a tear to build a new one of her own with the man with whom she shares smiles and tears, looks and words, dreams and hopes.

We are there when she faces pregnancies and that difficult period, especially in those years, which makes a woman just a mother and invisible to the world except as a function of her offspring; the moment of choice between her third daughter and her identity as a woman and worker will be heartbreaking.

Elvira, as always in her life, will take the less obvious but necessary path for herself and to affirm her own voice but also that of many other women who will find space and light thanks to Dora Film.

There are no choices without sacrifices. There are choices without dignity. He could never have stopped telling the story of his women’s desire for freedom, or the misery of those who live in the alleys of Naples, without denying his previous existence, stopped being Elvira Notari. Emotion is not sold, better to abandon it in a corner, a useless snakeskin. It could be swept away and end up in the waste. Or the unthinkable might happen, someone might pick her up to feel the fragile wonder of her reflexes and decide to keep her as a precious treasure. It’s not up to you to decide. His task is finished. With honor.

There is no room for rhetoric, in the pages of this book there is the life of a woman who must conquer her identity step by step, who must fight every day against inequality, the absolute denial of her work, clichés, the gaze of her neighbors and those who live around her, always ready to judge and point fingers.

Flavia Amabile uses direct, sincere, passionate and never judgmental language, precious for recovering the story of an important woman in the story of the cinematographic world but as often happens forgotten over time.

It is a political act to share the story of a woman who paid for her every personal and work choice but never betrayed her deepest desire, that of telling the life of the people of the alleys, of a true and popular but honest Naples and above all by putting at the center all those women forced to remain silent, to give up, to ask, to be invisible in order to live.

Elvira Coda Notari changed the narrative of the silent cinema of the time by giving “voice” to these women, making them protagonists of an existence that in reality did not have the strength to live.

A professional who paid hard for her stubborn will, receiving the contempt of her “colleagues”, the censorship of the fascist regime and above all the anger of her daughters who saw in her only a woman looking for personal redemption and little listening to their needs.

Every choice implies a renunciation, often painful, sometimes heartbreaking but that of Elvira has allowed many women to see each other again and regain a new awareness, that of power and duty desire.
A story to know.

Source: lalettregeniale.it