I have explored in previous posts the character of Diabolik, so I won’t say much about him today, but will focus on his creators, Angela and Luciana Giussani.
The girls will indeed be remembered during the Bologna-based Biografilm Festival.
This international event mainly celebrates important personalities that had an impact on society through films, books and theatre and music performances.
This year’s festival focuses on the boom years in Italy, the 60s, and one section of the event, entitled "Le altre donne di Diabolik" (Diabolik’s other women), will be entirely dedicated to the Giussani sisters.
Angela (1922-1987) and Luciana (1928-2001) can definitely be filed under the "stylish" category: both the girls were part of the Milanese jet set and Angela was a model and an aviator before turning into a publisher and writer and dragging her sister in a "Diabolikal" career.
As young women the girls sported hairstyles à la Grace Kelly, who later on became a model for Diabolik's partner Eva Kant, and looked perfectly ready to start a life made of parties, villas, rich husbands and wealthy families.
Things went differently, though, and soon they discovered a very different life made of battles against censors, tight deadlines and long office hours awaited them.
Turning into entrepreneurial stylish queens of terrors in a male centred society in which
there wasn’t yet much space for female emancipation, the Giussani sisters created a sort of international pop icon, an evil anti-hero that soon turned into the first Italian comic for grown ups.
Davide Barzi’s biography Le Regine del Terrore (Terror Queens) will be presented next Thursday, while 11th June will be "Giussani Day", with debates on Diabolik, and screenings of Andrea Bettinetti’s documentary The Diabolikal Sisters and Mario Bava's film Danger Diabolik.
The "Eva Kant Night" on 11th June also promises to be very interesting since screenwriters and cartoonists will be interacting with the audience to create live a Diabolik story.
The Biografilm Festival event anticipates the renewed interest in Diabolik as film icon, after the recent deal for an Italo-French TV series in 6 episodes that should be released between 2011 and 2012.
I'm very happy to see a festival about the 60s celebrating not only the most obvious icons of the boom years (Fellini's La dolce vita), but also giving the opportunity to younger audiences to get to know and be inspired by other interesting personalities that shaped Italian culture in those years.
In a world with too many plastic women and very few strong icons, rediscovering the Giussani girls will maybe help contemporary
women finding new heroines and icons of style and rediscovering unconventional and rebel women. Hurray for the Giussani sisters then, hurray for the Terror Queens!
Biografilm Festival, 9th-14th June 2010, Bologna, Italy.
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