“When a Film is Beautiful, I Remember it”: Natalia Ginzburg at the Movies

Cinema occupies a sizable part of Natalia Ginzburg’s ample corpus of articles in the press. Some of her film reviews have been reprinted in her collections of essays Never Must You Ask Me (Mai devi domandarmi), Imaginary Life (Vita immaginaria), and We Cannot Know It (Non possiamo saperlo), but most of her film criticism, such as her 40 film reviews for the column “Cinema” in the weekly newspaper Il Mondo, remains uncollected (and untranslated). This chapter aims to reconstruct Ginzburg’s self-portrait as a spectator: a self-portrait refracted in her uncollected film reviews and in her literary narratives. This self-portrait bears her unmistakable stylistic markers and her recurring thematic concerns, revealing an original approach by way of the mirror of the Big Screen. When read together, her cinematic and literary writings allow us to grasp the remarkable coherence of Ginzburg’s thought with respect to an artform, and a language, that she paradoxically experienced as both familiar and alien, relatable and distant.