The phrase “the personal is political” was used to highlight the connection between personal, lived experiences and greater political structures during the second wave feminist movement of the 1960s and 70s. While this idea was coined in reference to women’s oppression in the home, its message is still believed and practiced in political commentary today. Director Alina Marazzi’s films We Want Roses, Too and For One Hour More With You both highlight and challenge the ideas of motherhood and femininity that women were faced with in the 1960s and 70s through a filmic juxtaposition of personal and political storytelling. We Want Roses, Too is

composed of found footage from around the time of the second wave movement. Marazzi manipulates old advertisements, interviews, home movies, diaries, and footage from the movement to showcase how the second wave impacted women both individually and on a larger

scale. For One Hour More With You is a much more personal piece wherein Marazzi uses her grandfather’s home footage and her mother’s diaries to document her mother’s life and eventual battle with depression and suicide. Both of these films use similar mediums of storytelling through found footage and diaries, which allows them both to highlight how gendered political and social expectations of the time hurt women on an individual level.

Because We Want Roses, Too uses a plethora of different kinds of footage, there are many ways in which motherhood and domesticity is established as a social construct used to limit women to the private sphere. In particular, Marazzi manipulates multiple advertisements from the time period to highlight how women were expected to behave in society and what roles they were allowed to fill. Towards the beginning of the film, Marazzi manipulates old print ads from the 1960s in conjunction with a song that describes the ideal, marriageable woman. In all of these images, the women are being gazed upon or pursued by men, thus implying that a woman’s goal should be to grab the attention of men in such ways. Then later in the film, Marazzi uses an animated commercial for detergent from the time period to highlight the absurdness of societal expectations surrounding a woman’s role in the home. The ad depicts a conventionally beautiful woman, competing with other women for who can produce the cleanest rag after shining a man’s (assumingly her husband’s) shoe. The woman is then presented with a winning trophy for the cleanest rag by a panel of white, male judges. This clip alone would show the audience how the appreciation of women was limited to achievements in the home and through being a mother and wife, but Marazzi shows this ad in conjunction with an old interview with a real, Italian housewife. While going about her morning chores, the woman talks about how “You don’t find out what marriage entails until it’s too late.” and that women must find reasons to leave the house so “you don’t suffocate indoors.” (Marazzi, 2007). By using a dated advertisement that frames the expectations of women, along with an interview from a women living these expectations, Marazzi is calling attention to the fact that limiting women’s worth to the home is absurdly demeaning. By bringing together both personal accounts and greater reflections of the society in this sequence, Marazzi is emphasizing the connection between societal constructions of motherhood and how they can hurt real women, an issue that was adinmently fought by second wave feminists.

But interviews and advertisements aren’t the only mediums Marazzi uses to draw this personal connection. Throughout We Want Roses, Too is narration from three different diaries of women who lived and experienced the damages of women’s oppression during the second wave. Each diary refers to different issues of the feminist movement, such as abortion rights, constructs of femininity and sexuality, and relationships to other women. The mear use of these gives the film’s subject a more personal context that helps showcase the feminist movement’s progression through real accounts and experiences. The diaries’ contents are deeply personal to the women who wrote them, but when used with footage from the time like advertisements and interviews, they give the film’s footage a much deeper context (Benini 137, 2011). For example, the film starts by looking at what the construction of motherhood and marriage meant, and how it limited women to a very particular, domestified role. After framing this issue, Marazzi then brings in the diary of Anita, a young women who struggled mentally in understanding who she is in relation to her family and herself. Anita’s narration mentions how her father’s conservative ideas about a woman’s role in society have left her feeling lost and unsure of who she is, since the constructs of heteronormative practices don’t seem to make sense to her. The expression of these concerns through Anita’s eloquently troubled voice gives these issues very real context, that lets the viewer know how they affected women personally. The thoughts of the diaries are then reflected back and reiterated through the use of interviews and other found footage mediums, thus creating a direct link between women’s personal and political issues of the time.

Marazzi uses narration in a very similar way in her other film For One Hour More with You, which tells the story of her mother’s life and struggle with clinical depression. Because this film only tells the story of Marazzi’s mother, Liseli, all of the narration and storytelling is from Liseli’s diaries and letters. Unlike We Want Roses, Too, this film starts with the personal and then expands into the political by linking the message of her mother’s depression and suicide to societal expectations of motherhood and femininity. Liseli remarks on how the responsibilities of being a stay at home mother make her feel unhappy and alone, which then makes her think something is deeply wrong with her. Because she was raised by a society that has very specific expectations of women (marriage, motherhood, etc.), her inability to feel satisfaction from them makes her think there is something inherently wrong with her, and that it is because of her own flaws she isn’t happy to be a mother (Bergonzoni 249, 2011). Of course to a contemporary audience, the manifestation of these issues is understood as a fault of societal expectations and not personal deficiencies. Marazzi helps her audience understand this through the use of her mother’s diaries and internal thoughts, which mentions Liseli feeling inadequate compared to her mother, who she believes is the perfect mother and wife due to her outward beauty and consistent happiness. This comparison along with many other quotes from Liseli show the audience how her internalization of female perfection and motherhood affected her sense of self in a very negative way, thus contributing to her depressive mental state. Without outrightly making this connection to the political issues of the time, Marazzi is demonstrating how the expectations of women in the 1950s and 60s led some women to feel incomplete in their domestified lives, which was one of the the main issues faced by the feminist movement in Italy.

Marazzi doesn’t just highlight these issues of motherhood and societal expectation in her films, but works to challenge them. After framing the ideas of domesticity and women’s expectations through diary narration, interview clips, and manipulation of advertisements in We Want Roses, Too, Marazzi then challenges them through the use of found footage from the feminist movement in Italy. There are many clips throughout the film that show different aspects of the movement and its work, such as consciousness raising groups, protests, and feminist recruitment videos. Because these clips were originally made by feminists for other women, their messages are inherently resistant to the narrative of domesticity and female oppression, thus making their use in the film a source of opposition to women’s traditional role in the patriarchy.

These not only document the work being done by feminists group, but provide context as to how the movement was changing Italian society and law. Their use gives the film a linear progression through time that follows the growth of the feminist movement, thus directly relating the diary narrations and interview clips to a greater political context. The type of feminist footage used is then correlated to what issue the film is looking at, based on the movement’s timeline. Towards the beginning, most of the clips from the movement consist of consciousness raising groups where women are expressing their personal grievances with societal oppressions. Then later in the film there is footage of the feminist movement thriving through the depiction of large protests or feminist films made to popularize the movement. Marazzi pairs this progression with the diary entries and the different issues discussed in them. For example, the last diary used is from a woman named Valentina who was a feminist activist in the Italy’s movement. Out of the three diaries, Valentina is arguably the most ‘liberated’ since her diary’s focus is on her relationship to the movement and other women, while the other women’s diaries focus on their relationships with men. Valentina’s words discuss a whole new set of issues for women’s selfhood that doesn’t directly pertain to men, but to other women and how they help form each other’s sense of self (Bonifazio 176, 2010). In placing Valentina’s diary towards the end of the film, Marazzi is emphasizing how the movement itself challenged the way women thought of themselves, by encouraging them to think of themselves in relation to other women, and not just men (Bonifazio 176, 2010). These entries then match with feminist footage that encourages women to join the movement, so they can talk freely about their sexuality and other women-related issues. So while the footage is itself oppositional, Marazzi’s use of them in conjunction with Valentina’s diary creates a connection between personal and greater political resistance.

In For One Hour More with You, Marazzi challenges societal norms through the message and narration of her mother’s diaries. Liseli discusses feelings of inadequacy and unhappiness that are caused by her comparison of herself to her mother and societal expectations. This lense of understanding is resistant to traditional storytelling in that the woman gets to narrate her own story, with no influence from other people, especially the men in her life. In recounting her mother’s life and suicide through Liseli’s own words, Marazzi is challenging the traditional narratives that her mother lived in during the 1950s and 60s, wherein men controlled women’s roles and stories. During the second wave, women speaking out and having female voices be heard within the mainstream narrative was an act of resistance to patriarchal norms (Bergonzoni 251, 2011). By mirroring this in her films through female narration, Marazzi is using second wave tactics of resistance to create a theme of feminist opposition in both her films.

The ending of this film also creates a theme of patriarchal struggle through her mother’s treatment in psychiatric hospitals. During this time, mentally unstable housewives were treated in dehumanizing, terrible ways that left their brains fried and devote of any personality so that they could better fit the mold of the perfect wife and mother. Towards the end of the film, Liseli’s narration comes from her time in mental institutions where she went through many invasive treatments such as narcotherapy and shock-therapy. Her sorrowful recollection of being tied down after one of these treatments gives the viewer a look into how severely unhappy and mentally unwell women were treated during this time. Using this narration with footage of Liseli’s face makes the issue personal to Marazzi’s mother, and thus invokes a feeling of heartache in the viewer. By creating this feeling in the viewer, Marazzi is successfully framing the patriarchal practices as negative and hurtful to women, much like the work of the second wave. This feminist approach is intrinsically oppositional to mainstream constructs of women and motherhood, which gives the film’s ending and final message a subtext of feminist resistance.

Marazzi is also challenging the issues discussed in her films by using the overarching theme of “personal is political”. In For One Hour More with You, the connection between her mother’s feeling of incapability when it came to mothering and the greater pressure on women to fit a certain ideal, is a use of the personal is political. Unlike We Want Roses, Too, FOHMWY doesn’t explicitly mention this idea, yet it is heavily implied throughout her mother’s story, and the film’s ending. The ending of We Want Roses, Too also brings the film’s message back to the individual. After showing the title of the film one last time, implying that the film is over, Marazzi includes one last clip of a classroom of lower class women listening to their legal rights being laid out. The shot is very stagnant, and shows the stoic faces of the women listening to an instructor tell them that “There is no distinction between men and women.” (Marazzi, 2007). This scene is then followed by a  30 year timeline of legal events relating to the movement’s work. The length of the timeline along with the intense, non-diegetic music creates a sense of uneasiness in the viewer about how prolonged progress can take. This ending is taking the contents and message of the film, and pointing them back at the viewer in a call to action. The disturbingly slow legal progression shown in the timeline lets the viewer know how the contents of the film relate to them, and tells the viewer that the work of the second wave is far from over. In doing this, Marazzi is bringing the personal of “personal is political” to the individual viewers by relating their lives to the work of the movement, which brings the message of the film full circle.

Marazzi’s ability to frame and then challenge women’s issues of the 1960s and 70s through her films is a beautiful use of the feminist idea, the personal is political. Her use of real female narration through the diaries from the time period and of her mother not only relates issues of the time to real women’s feelings and thoughts, but also challenges traditional idea of storytelling and narration in documentary filmmaking. While the connection between personal experience and political movements is more clear in We Want Roses, Too due its coverage of the second wave movement in Italy, For One Hour More with You also creates this bridge through the use of her mother’s own words and thoughts. In WWRT the use of different mediums of found footage, such as interviews and advertisements,  also allows Marazzi to manipulate popular ideas surrounding domesticity from the time to seem backwards and oppressive to women, similarly to the work of the feminist movement (Benini 136, 2011). The use of second wave footage then establishes a linearity of the movement through the film, which helps highlight a progression into more radical feminist thought with the help of specifically placed diary narration. Through all of these techniques, Marazzi draws the lines between personal and political experience, a practice that was heavily used by feminists of the second wave. In doing so, Marazzi is practicing feminist thought by encouraging her audience to think of their lives within the greater context of feminism.

Work Cited

Benini, Stefania. “‘A Face, a Name, a Story’: Women’s Identities as Life Stories in Alina

Marazzi’s Cinema.” Studies in European Cinema, vol. 8, no. 2, Oct. 2011, pp. 129–139.

Bergonzoni, Maura. “Alina Marazzi’s Un’ora Sola Ti Vorrei and Vogliamo Anche Le Rose: The

Personal Stands for the Political.” Studies in Documentary Film, vol. 5, no. 2/3, May

2011, pp. 247–253.

Bonifazio, Paola. “Feminism, Postmodernism, Intertextuality: We Want Roses Too (2007).”

Literature/Film Quarterly, vol. 38, no. 3, 2010, pp. 171–182.

Marazzi, Alina. Un’ Ora Sola Ti Vorrei. [Videorecording] = For One More Hour with You.

2002., 2005.

Marazzi, Alina, director. We Want Roses, Too. 2007.

Looks at Alina Marazzi’s film, We Want Roses, Too and For One Hour More and how they convey and challenge expectations of motherhood and domesticity during the 1960s and 70s through the use of found footage and narration.

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