In the essay, "Becoming Visible: Personal and Collective Histories in Susan Caperna Lloyd and Maria Mazziotti Gillan’s Documentary Films," by Elisabetta Marino, the author examines how a film about Maria expands on the reading of her poetry.
EXCERPT
"Writers and artists Maria Mazziotti Gillan and Susan Caperna Lloyd have captured this struggle in their multi-faceted work, forcefully portraying their alienation, the self-erasure that often came with trying to succeed in America, as well as their proud assertion of their ethnic identity. This essay sets out to investigate the ways they both used documentary films—The Baggage (2001) and All That Lies between Us (2007)—as a means to restore visibility, reclaim complexity, and give voice to the Italian American experience...All That Lies Between Us, a 55-minute documentary film by Kevin Carey and Mark Hillringhouse, shares its title with the poetry collection Maria Mazziotti Gillan published in 2007. It visually complements the volume, which explores various themes, such as personal and collective family memories, broader reflec-tions on the future in its continuity with the past, and the intention of embracing one’s fragility, transforming it into strength, while exorcising fears and frustrat-ing feelings of inadequacy. Both Mazziotti Gillan’s artistic output and Carey and Hillringhouse’s documentary film compellingly exemplify what Mary Jo Bona refers to when emphasizing the capacity for resistance among some American writers of Italian origin, “engaged in making visible the fact that Italian Ameri-cans exist contrary to their own tendencies towards self-negation and subscription to an outmoded dependence on the cultural code of silence: omertà ”
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Maria Mazziotti Gillan's newest poetry collection is When the Stars Were Still Visible (2021). Other recent publications are the poetry and photography collection, Paterson Light and Shadow, and the poetry collections What Blooms in Winter and The Girls in the Chartreuse Jackets, a pairing of her poems with her paintings.
Maria's artist website is MariaMazziottiGillan.com and her poetry website is MariaGillan.com.
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