Masters of Two Arts: Re-creation of European Literatures in Italian Cinema (Toronto Italian Studies)
Carlo Testa
Language: English
Pages: 336
ISBN: 0802084753
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
The movie screen has been the forum for many star pairings: Bogart and Bacall, Tracy and Hepburn, and Fellini and Kafka. While this latter combination might seem slightly unexpected or improbable at first sight, Carlo Testa's Masters of Two Arts demonstrates that pairings of famed directors and writers are commonplace in modern Italian cinema. Surprisingly, the study of the interrelation between Italian cinema and European literature has been almost completely neglected in film scholarship. Testa addresses and attempts to correct this oversight with nine in-depth analyses of the one-on-one rapport between an Italian filmmaker and a .classic. name in modern European literature. Looking at combinations such as Pasolini and Sade, Rossellini and Stendhal, and Visconti and Mann amongst others, Testa uses theoretical as well as historical methods, showing how the respective text undergoes not 'adaptation' but full 're-creation' (as defined by Èizenshtein) in a different art form and, even more importantly, in a new cultural context.
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had always belonged.4 Once Wilhelm is ennobled with the diploma that consecrates him as an interpreter of praxis, Mignon can 'leave' - she can vanish and live forever in the world beyond,5 guaranteeing from On High, ne varietur, her language: the language of art, cast as an absolute interpretive grid on the sound and fury of brute, uncontextualized facts. Divorces, Italian Style Francesca Archibugi's Mignon Has Left is a film about hermeneutic divorces. Mignon Has Left puts Goethe's canonic
narrow dark alley. It is significant that the normally unfocused Karl at once notices the dirt in the building - a dirt that materializes and objectifies the nausea that permeates his relationship to the world: What did alarm him as he pulled the wagon into the corridor was the dirt there, although he'd been expecting it too. It wasn't, when he looked at it more closely, any tangible sort of dirt. The stone flags in the passage had been swept almost clean, the whitewash on the walls wasn't old,
barely one printed page long. It describes the journey (or, more precisely, the beginning of the journey) by which Karl and his fellow workers ride a train to the unspecified inland location where the Theatre's promise of unconditional acceptance - physical and metaphysical - is to be fulfilled. Only now, Kafka writes, does Karl realize the immensity of the American continent: On the first day they travelled over a high mountain range. Blue-black formations of rock approached the train in sharp
taken to task. One of the complaints most frequently voiced is that the more authors write and publish in an autobiographical mode, the more difficult it becomes to disentangle fact from fiction and to offer a reliable reconstruction of their actual experiences. At an extreme, the genre of autobiography can perhaps be argued to be by definition a forgery: after all, why would writers attempt to cajole us (or their own superegos) into accepting one particular interpretation of their lives, unless
interrogating the only serious extant Zhivago that the conclusion of Yurii's life is not something like the last episode in a syrupy love story, but the altogether unromantic indictment of the bloodthirsty catharsis called Russian revolution - love, rats, blood, mosquitoes, hunger and typhus and all. While none of these facts is kept particularly secret by Pasternak's text, and I can thus advance claims to no special talent for pointing them out, doing so at least has the merit of offering an