Archival experiences: Cecilia Mangini and Mara Blasetti

Entering a personal archive means gaining access to someone’s life, meeting someone unknown before and, in a certain sense, invading a personal space. Depending on the type of archive, you will find more or less personal objects and documents, but all of them tell a story, an individual’s story. Sometimes this story is strongly related to his or her work, but in some instances it is more personal. For this reason, it is with a sort of reverential respect, almost on tiptoe, that I inspect and rummage into someone’s papers.

My last experience with personal archives concerns two women that played a significant role in the history of Italian cinema: Cecilia Mangini and Mara Blasetti, whose collections are held at the Cineteca of Bologna. As part of my work within the Women in Italian Film Production project, my task was to examine their archives and select materials for digitalization. The materials were selected with the aim of showing these women’s lives and work behind the scenes, while also revealing how they viewed and remembered their work. What did they do? How did they work? How did they consider their work? Did they value what they did? Did they consider it worthy of being taken as a model by future generations? With all these questions in mind, I started searching and researching.

What I found were two worlds, two lives, two women who did their job with passion and dedication. Mangini’s archive (that is actually the Mangini-Del Fra collection, and includes the work she did with her husband) is bigger than Blasetti’s, and it shows more aspects of the private sphere, such as letters exchanged with her husband in which both archival research and moments of their personal lives are discussed. The archive collects many documents related to her husband’s work, but fortunately also many papers and materials related to hers - which gives us a chance to get to know her and her work behind the camera.

Blasetti’s archive, on the contrary, collects a lot of working materials, brochures, working plans, and so on. At first glance, this seems a much more professional archive. However, it hides something very personal, which reveals Blasetti’s personality: it contains many of her planners, in which she noted down a great deal of information about her life. She was an obsessive writer, and used to take notes of every event, from a simple breakfast with a friend to a working lunch with a colleague. Mangini’s and Blasetti’s archives are so different and so alike at the same time. They both were created and organised by their owners, and reveal some aspects of these female professionals’ personalities. They are not only a testimony of their work, but also a representation of themselves. Thanks to these archives, I had the opportunity to meet a director and photographer - Mangini - and a production supervisor - Blasetti - and, above all, two women who dedicated a significant part of themselves to Italian cinema.

Clara Giannini