A Cinema of Poetry: Aesthetics of the Italian Art Film

by Joseph Luzzi

Overview

Explores the poetics and aesthetics of the Italian art film in Rossellini, Antonioni, Fellini, and other groundbreaking directors.

A Cinema of Poetry brings Italian film studies into dialogue with fields outside its usual purview by showing how films can contribute to our understanding of aesthetic questions that stretch back to Homer. Joseph Luzzi considers the relation between film and literature, especially the cinematic adaptation of literary sources and, more generally, the fields of rhetoric, media studies, and modern Italian culture.

The book balances theoretical inquiry with close readings of films by the masters of Italian cinema: Roberto Rossellini, Vittorio De Sica, Luchino Visconti, Michelangelo Antonioni, Federico Fellini, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Bernardo Bertolucci, and others. Luzzi's study is the first to show how Italian filmmakers address such crucial aesthetic issues as the nature of the chorus, the relation between symbol and allegory, the literary prehistory of montage, and the place of poetry in cinematic expression—what Pasolini called the "cinema of poetry."

While Luzzi establishes how certain qualities of film—its link with technological processes, capacity for mass distribution, synthetic virtues (and vices) as the so-called total art—have reshaped centuries-long debates, A Cinema of Poetry also explores what is specific to the Italian art film and, more broadly, Italian cinematic history. In other words, what makes this version of the art film recognizably "Italian"?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781421419848
Publisher:	Johns Hopkins University Press
Publication date:	03/30/2016
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	232
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.70(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Joseph Luzzi is a professor of comparative literature at Bard College. He is the author of Romantic Europe and the Ghost of Italy, which received the MLA’s Scaglione Prize for Italian Studies; My Two Italies, a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice; and In a Dark Wood: What Dante Taught Me about Grief, Healing, and the Mysteries of Love.

Table of Contents

Preface xi

Introduction: Toward a Poetics of the Italian Art Film 3

Part 1 Neorealist Rhetoric and National Identity

1 The Chorus of Neorealism 19

2 Beyond Beauty: Cinematic Allegory and the Question of Italy 36

Part 2 Cinemas of Poetry

3 Rossellini's Cinema of Poetry: Voyage to Italy 53

4 Poesis in Pasolini: Theory and Practice 70

Part 3 Aesthetic Corsi and Ricorsi

5 Threat of the Real: Fact and Image in Antonioni 89

6 Chiasmus, Italian Style: Rhetoric and Ideology in The Leopard and The Conformist 107

7 Verbal Montage and Visual Apostrophe: Zanzottos "Filo" and Fellini's Voice of the Moon 124

Epilogue: Art Film Redux: Cinepoetics in the New Millennium 143

Notes 161

Works Cited 189

Index 205

What People are Saying About This

Millicent Marcus

Luzzi brings a set of powerful resources to his new study: a vast erudition, an ear finely attuned to inter-arts allusions, and an ability to discern the workings of poetic tropes within the language of cinema. The result is a deepened understanding of the category of the aesthetic as it relates to Italian film criticism and an affirmation of the riches that this body of canonical films offers to scholars and lay connoisseurs of the seventh art.

From the Publisher

Luzzi brings a set of powerful resources to his new study: a vast erudition, an ear finely attuned to inter-arts allusions, and an ability to discern the workings of poetic tropes within the language of cinema. The result is a deepened understanding of the category of the aesthetic as it relates to Italian film criticism and an affirmation of the riches that this body of canonical films offers to scholars and lay connoisseurs of the seventh art.
—Millicent Marcus, Yale University

Editorial Reviews

A thought-provoking and well-written investigation of the role of history and realism in Italian cinema and the role played by the centuries-long tradition of poetry (or more precisely, poesis) in this quest.
—Emiliano Perra, H-Italy

Ambitious, inventive, learned, and largely successful, A Cinema of Poetry . . . brilliantly analyzes the art in the art film by showing how Italian cinema uses a chorus or expresses itself through allegory . . . This impressively intelligent re-description of the tradition surely takes its place alongside other necessary histories of Italian cinema.
—Choice

Luzzi’s inter-art encounters between literary and visual forms reanimate the cinematic texts he discusses. The book is not a reductive reincarnation of national identity or a nostalgic reanimation of the art film. It is a brave undertaking to think toward the future through poetic tropes gleaned from the past ‘as the source for a cinematic rebirth.
—Journal of Modern Italian Studies

What makes this particular publication stand out is its focus on inter-art within the discussion of cinema of poetry along with its ability to capture and keep the attention of both specialists and people with a general interest in the subject. Luzzi’s writing style is comfortable to read and the many examples and references, both textual and visual, give a clear demonstration of the ideas and theories which are discussed in the various sections of the book. These positive characterizations of Luzzi’s work will benefit and motivate future research surrounding the combination of inter-art and cinema of poetry, as well as Italian cinema history in general.
—Italica

From the Publisher

A thought-provoking and well-written investigation of the role of history and realism in Italian cinema and the role played by the centuries-long tradition of poetry (or more precisely, poesis) in this quest.

H-Italy - Emiliano Perra

Luzzi’s inter-art encounters between literary and visual forms reanimate the cinematic texts he discusses. The book is not a reductive reincarnation of national identity or a nostalgic reanimation of the art film. It is a brave undertaking to think toward the future through poetic tropes gleaned from the past ‘as the source for a cinematic rebirth.

Journal of Modern Italian Studies

What makes this particular publication stand out is its focus on inter-art within the discussion of cinema of poetry along with its ability to capture and keep the attention of both specialists and people with a general interest in the subject. Luzzi’s writing style is comfortable to read and the many examples and references, both textual and visual, give a clear demonstration of the ideas and theories which are discussed in the various sections of the book. These positive characterizations of Luzzi’s work will benefit and motivate future research surrounding the combination of inter-art and cinema of poetry, as well as Italian cinema history in general.

Italica

"Ambitious, inventive, learned, and largely successful, A Cinema of Poetry ... brilliantly analyzes the art in the art film by showing how Italian cinema uses a chorus or expresses itself through allegory... This impressively intelligent re-description of the tradition surely takes its place alongside other necessary histories of Italian cinema."

Choice

A thought-provoking and well-written investigation of the role of history and realism in Italian cinema and the role played by the centuries-long tradition of poetry (or more precisely, poesis) in this quest.

H-Italy