Tomorrow November 13th the Italian Institute of Culture of New York will host the presentation of the exhibition inVisibles. The Women Who Pioneered Cinema | inVisible. The pioneers of cinema, a project conceived by the undersecretary to the Ministry of Culture, Lucia Borgonzoni. The meeting will take place the same Borgonzoni and Antonio Saccone, president of Cinecittà. The opening will be preceded by a press conference at 16.30 and followed by an open reception to the public.
The exhibition will officially open on November 14, and will be open until January 30, 2026, from Monday to Friday from 9 to 18. The initiative aims to highlight the contribution of seventeen women who, between the beginning of the twentieth century and the 1940s, played a decisive role in the birth and development of cinema. Among them, well-known and less well-known figures who worked in Italy, France and the United States, when the film industry still moved the first steps.
In the period of silent cinema, the female presence in the sector was much more extensive than the later stories have left to be understood. In the United States, for example, screenwriters were ten times more numerous than men between the end of the 19th and mid-1920s. Many of these professions did not confine themselves to acting but assumed technical and managerial roles, founded production houses and helped define the language of the new artistic medium.
The idea of inVisible arises from the desire to recover forgotten or neglected materials: fragmentary films, scripts, period magazines and documents kept in public or private archives. This research work allowed us to return visibility to a group of authors whose work had long been obscured by the male dominance of the next cinema.
The exhibition follows a chronological order, from the director Elvira Notari, pioneer of Italian cinema, of which in 2025 marks the 150th anniversary of birth, up to Rosetta Calavetta, voiced by some of the most famous protagonists of the screen. In the middle, fifteen other female figures representing a generation of emancipated and unconventional authors and interpreters.
The exhibition proposes a reading of the cinema of origin as a space of experimentation and freedom, in which women played a decisive role in shaping stories and characters that anticipated the themes of independence and female self-determination. A long-standing invisible contribution, which today becomes recognized and documented through this initiative.
L’articolo In New York an exhibition on women who invented cinema before cinema proviene da IlNewyorkese.
