Reframing Madness with Avant-Garde Film: Lina Mangiacapre’s Feminist Collaboration at the Asylum

ABSTRACT This article addresses Lina Mangiacapre's avant-garde feminist filmography, a body of work that, despite recent growth in Italian feminist film studies, remains a neglected area of study. Specifically, the article investigates Mangiacapre's avant-garde featurette Follia come poesia (1979), the fruit of her two-year occupation of the local Frullone Asylum and artistic collaboration with the institutionalised women there. After situating Mangiacapre within the larger Italian radical psychiatry movement, the article distinguishes her subversive feminist theory and praxis from more mainstream sexual difference theory. Through a critical analysis of Follia come poesia, the article argues that Mangiacapre reframes the concept of madness as more than to-be-cured-ness through cinematography, editing, and sound. It concludes that through cinematic prowess, Mangiacapre provides an audiovisual exhibition of her subversive theory, interrogates conventions surrounding madness, foregrounds the individuality of each incarcerated woman, and constructs a representation of the institutionalised as active, mobile, creative subjects.