eBook

Luchino Visconti and the Alchemy of Adaptation

Hennessey, Brendan

2021,2024

Overview

Since the beginning, much of Italian cinema has been sustained by transforming literature into moving images. This tradition of literary adaptation continues today, challenging artistic form and practice by pressuring the boundaries that traditionally separate film from its sister arts. In the twentieth century, director Luchino Visconti is a keystone figure in Italy's evolving art of adaptation. From the tumultuous years of Fascism and postwar Neorealism, through the blockbuster decade of the 1960s, into the arthouse masterpieces of the 1970s, Visconti's adaptations marked a distinct pathway of the Italian cinematic imagination. Luchino Visconti and the Alchemy of Adaptation examines these films together with their literary antecedents. Moving past strict book-to-film comparisons, it ponders how literary texts encounter and interact with a history of cultural and cinematic forms, genres, and traditions. Matching the major critical concerns of the postwar period (realism, political filmmaking, cinematic modernism) with more recent notions of adaptation and intermediality, this book reviews how one of Italy's greatest directors mined literary ore for cinematic inspiration.

• Publisher: SUNY Press,State University of New York Press
• Subject: and Performing Arts : Film Studies / Area Studies : Italian Studies / ART / Techniques / General / Criticism and interpretation / European Studies / Film adaptations / Film Studies / History and criticism / Language & Literature / LITERARY CRITICISM / Comparative Literature / LITERARY CRITICISM / European / Italian / Literature : Comparative Literature / PERFORMING ARTS / Public performances / Visconti, Luchino, 1906–1976 / Visual Culture
• ISBN: 1438484992, 9781438484990, 1438484984, 9781438484983, 1438484976, 9781438484976