Le Nemesiache are a loosely connected group of feminist friends and acquaintances who came together in 1970 under the auspices of the Italian artist, writer and filmmaker Lina Mangiacapre (1946-2002).¹ She initiated, in her hometown Naples (Southern Italy), the feminist collective which sometimes extended to as many as twelve women, though it was energised by a core group composed of Claudia Aglione, Fausta Base, Silvana Campese, Consuelo Campone, Conni Capobianco, Bruna Felletti, Anna Grieco and Teresa Mangiacapre, among others. With the clear goal: “to bring myth back into the world”², the group (re)introduced mythological and creative ideas and actions to access a new dimension: a cosmic life, with a different set of values, centered primarily on creativity as a means of pursuing freedom.

Although the group’s history represents a landmark in Italian Feminism and was fully engaged with Women’s Liberation Movement, its trajectory is unique on the transfeminist landscape.³ The Neapolitan group fused feminism, mythology, folktales, sci-fi and radical imagination with an interdisciplinary approach encompassing film, performance, critical writing, painting, poetry, music, collage and costume. By interrogating life, personal and professional, in transformative ways, its members sought to re-establish the bonds uniting them with the Universe through an imaginative appropriation of the past and a radical critique the present to shape the future. As written in their first manifesto (1970/72), “Now Nemesis returns, now the origin returns”. It means activating rebellion as a foundation for change. By choosing the name of the ancient Greek deity Nemesis, who represents justice against hubris, Le Nemesiache show that they viewed excessive arrogance as an inherent trait of patriarchal order and therefore called upon Nemesis as the personification or restorer of balance and harmony.

To ensure the continuity of cosmic order, the group embraced a long-lasting engagement with its surroundings, particularly the urban context of Naples: its geomorphic landscape as well as its archaeological ruins and mythological sites, such as Cumae, Lake Avernus, Phlegraean Fields and Capo di Posillipo. This resulted in a practice – including staged protests and occupations of local buildings – anchored in the local territory in order to express a feminism specific to southern Italy. Simultaneously, through a boundless exploration of women’s innermost desires and dreams, the group connected with international struggles, fostering solidarity among the oppressed across diverse contexts. Le Nemesiache’s project was to overcome the boundaries of time and space – the two most oppressive categories, as written in Manifesto Metaspaziale (Metaspatial Manifesto, 1973). The group sought to accomplish this goal through cinema. For the group, cinema became a tool of political activism and a means of historical re-appropriation. According to L. Mangiacapre, moving images are a language that revolve not around any notion of a deceptive, alienated model such as the illusion of concept, but around the possibility of returning to mythosophic thinking; an intuitive, authentic and sensuous knowledge based on the body and myth.

I Rassegna del Cinema Femminista (Feminist Film Festival) organised by Le Nemesiache, Sorrento, 1979, Courtesy Le Nemesiache and Mangiacapra Archive

Rassegna del Cinema Femminista (Feminist Film Festival) organised by Le Nemesiache, Sorrento, 1984, Courtesy Le Nemesiache and Mangiacapra Archive

Their collaborative filmmaking practice fits within two tenets of the Women’s Liberation Movement: the infrastructural formation of collectives based on separatist organising and the practice of consciousness-raising. While mainstream second-wave feminist consciousness-raising relies predominantly on discourse, Le Nemesiache introduced their own form in 1973: the psicofavola (psycho-fable), which involved the entire body in triggering psycho-emotional transformations through gesture, dance and music. Beginning with their psycho-fable performance piece Cenerella (1973/75), Le Nemesiache translated nearly all of their public performances into short films, conjuring performance and video through a collaborative and experimental style that allowed them to engage creatively with self-liberation through thriving ecological gestures. This process offers an understanding of their film images as not fixed within the realm of representation, but rather as an approach of becoming through the weaving together the threads of environmental and social justice. This approach moves beyond second-wave feminist theory and its tension between the deconstruction of gender roles and the search for what was believed to be women’s essence.

Through the camera, their coming together as a group ensured collective survival. As L. Mangiacapra stated, “Cinema is above all memory. Memory also of suppressed and deliberately erased realities”. For example, in both short films Cenerella (1974/75, based on the 1973/75 performance) and Le Sibille (1977), distant memories resurface, and buried pasts emerge through ritual gestures and mythological personifications, announcing new images and languages that reinvent the condition of women in southern Italy. Invoking ancestral power from the city of Naples, they re-enact archaic lamentations to liberate possible futures, summoning an entire panorama of rites, and reviving ancient, forgotten, and neglected forms of memory. This can be seen in Le Sibille, where the image of a woman appears as if from nowhere and denounces the theft of the Sirens’ song. In the same film, “the vanished traces of feminine body-history through the Greek myths which have survived in Neapolitan oral culture”⁴ are connected with the local culture formed around death, ritual and devotion in communion with pre-Christian pagan traditions, a way to re-root themselves differently in the world.

In 1977 they transformed into a cooperative, Le Tre Ghinee/Nemesiache, through which members collectively directed, produced and distributed seven 8-mm short films and one multimedia short. Completely autonomous from capitalist and patriarchal infrastructures, the cooperative worked collectively, building their own film sets. Scenography, costumes, lighting and sound – what the group called psycho-costumes, psycho-lights, psycho-music – were created in their bottega della poesia (workshop of poetry). These are a testament to the grassroots experiments in forging connections among women and replacing the patriarchal hierarchies with new forms of collaborative agency and mutual support.

The magic and metamorphic qualities of the camera allowed them to move between interior and exterior, between the public and private, protesting women’s marginalisation by practising “consciousness-raising with the camera”.⁵ They knew that such consciousness-raising could not only happen in the private sphere of their homes or via the closed-door conversations held by their feminist peers, but rather by venturing through the city of Naples.⁶ This can be seen in Il mare ci ha chiamate (1978), for example. The film addresses eco-feminist issues anchored in local social actions. The group protested in the public space by performing radical empathy, sharing in the suffering of the environment, at the time threatened by beach privatisation and pollution of the bay. In Follia come poesia (1979), the result of three years’ work at Frullone, a major psychiatric hospital in Naples, psychiatry and forced confinement are questioned, offering a therapeutic proposal affirming the right of the marginalised to beauty.

Didone non è morta [Dido Is Not Dead], dir. by Lina Mangiacapre, 1987, still frame, Courtesy Le Nemesiache and Mangiacapra Archive

Le Sibille, directed by Lina Mangiacapre with Le Nemesiache, 1977, still frame, Courtesy Le Nemesiache Archive

In both films, the sea is a central character along with women’s bodies: in Follia come poesia psychiatric patients are brought to the sea as part of their care to give them a sense of freedom while in Il mare ci ha chiamate, invocations for ecological justice are made. The viewer witnesses the direct, unmediated union of women’s bodies with the natural environment, asserting ties with ecofeminism. The threshold between the human and (super)natural forces evaporates through gestures, dances, music and their handmade costumes. Viewers also experience concussive moments of intensity and fury, where chants turn to laments, and bodies and voices oscillate between joy and assertiveness, between rage and sadness. This dynamic, unstable consciousness process is distinct from the “visual pleasure” of male cinema.⁷ Le Nemesiache used cinema as a means of liberating imagination and subjectivity but also extended the camera’s ability to engage, provoke events, and experiment, affecting imagination and subjectivity when capturing them on film.

Within research-based cinema, the camera is not considered a tool but an extension of the eye, a form of visual memory. The reality expressed is a (re)discovered and exhibited reality – la scoperta del sé (self-discovery). Through the camera, Le Nemesiache wanted to express the creative possibilities of being a woman without being colonised by male culture.⁸ To this end, and with the intention of constructing a new feminist aesthetic based on a women-specific language expressing a different way of experiencing and participating in film space, in 1976 they founded the feminist film festival La Rassegna del Cinema Femminista: L’altro sguardo. Inaugurated a few of months before Kinomata in Rome and a few years after Musidora in Paris, La Rassegna was one of the first international feminist film festivals in Europe, continuing until 1995 in Sorrento with a programme focusing on a different country each year. The first Rassegna was held at the Cinema Filangeri in Naples and was later conceived as a counter-programme to the International Cinema Meetings in Sorrento. Involving women filmmakers from around the world, Le Nemesiache wanted to promote the development of independent distribution networks and production of feminist cinema. As they wrote, “For us, feminist cinema means a cinema made by women for other women. A cinema where we assert ourselves, our reality, and our own history. A cinema that must constantly fight against the exploitation, use, distortion, commercialisation and reduction of the image of women.”⁹ In the same document, they called for the introduction of a mandatory quota for female professionals on every film set.¹⁰ They also petitioned the Naples city council to establish a creative and cultural centre for women in the Posillipo neighbourhood, where the cooperative was located.

Le Sibille, directed by Lina Mangiacapre with Le Nemesiache, 1977, still frame, Courtesy Le Nemesiache Archive

Follia come poesia [Madness as poetry], dir. by Lina Mangiacapre with Le Nemesiache, 1979, still frame, Courtesy Le Nemesiache and Mangiacapra Archive

Although the Rassegna was supported by local public funds, it was only by working together as a cooperative that the festival was able to survive and maintain its autonomy. L. Mangiacapre’s films were always produced and distributed by Le Tre Ghinee, even though she wrote and directed them. Thanks to this collective work, Le Nemesiache became the only Italian feminist group to produce 35 mm feature films, notably Didone non è morta (1987) and Faust/Fausta (1991), directed and written by L. Mangiacapre and made with the group. In both films, their embrace of the myth becomes a vibrant energy, enabling them to reappropriate the past and reclaim the future, exploring the abandoning of the gender binary. Experimenting with androgyny and alternative gender roles and relations was an important theme in the group’s cultural production, especially from the 1980s, as they proposed a nomadic body and feminist subjectivity in metamorphosis.

In their films, the cosmonaut Amazons of Le Nemesiache unfold the notion of cinema as an imaginative militant practice: a cinema that expresses a vision of the world as a political, emotional, intellectual and physically liberated space in becoming.