Masters of two arts : re-creation of European literatures in Italian cinema / Carlo Testa.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Carlo Testa demonstrates that while pairings of famed directors and writers are commonplace in modern Italian cinema, the study of the interrelation between Italian cinema and European literature has been almost completely neglected in film scholarship.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

Testa (Univ. of British Columbia, Vancouver) focuses on the use Italian filmmakers have made of French, German, and Russian literature, placing filmic "re-creations" in their cultural contexts and explaining how they interpret the material and make it their own. Discussing homological and "epigraphic" re-creations, films that merely allude to or quote from a literary text, Testa analyzes Francesca Archibugi's Mignon D'e Partita and Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, along with Fellini's use of Kafka's Amerika in Intervista. Coextensive re-creations include Gogol's The Overcoat and Alberto Lattuada's Il capotto, Tolstoy's Father Sergius and the Tavianis' Night Sun, and Pasolini's Salo and Sade's Les 120 journees. Turning to "mediated" re-creations, the author examines Rosi's Carmen and Moretti's Palombella rossa. Testa has a lot of fun showing how Stendhal's masterpiece Vanina Vanini "fights back," reasserting its superiority over Rossellini's attempt to turn it into a film about the risorgimento. He concludes with an enlightening look at Visconti's re-creation of Mann's Death in Venice, paying careful attention to the role the "orientalist-meridionalist tradition" plays in Der Tod in Venedig. Including a detailed introduction and conclusion, extensive explanatory notes, and a filmography, this study complements Testa's Italian Cinema and Modern European Literatures, 1945-2000 (CH, Nov'02). ^BSumming Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above. S. Vander Closter Rhode Island School of Design