Summary

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"?

Choice Review

Ambitious, inventive, learned, and largely successful, A Cinema of Poetry surveys Italian film from Rossellini to Bertolucci, with an epilogue that takes the story up to the present. What poetry means is sometimes ambiguous because often it is indeed literary poetry--that is, films that include or adapt poems (a tradition this reviewer outlines in Derek Jarman and Lyric Film, 2004). Yet poetry is often better understood to mean poetics, as in the chapter on chiasmus, in which Luzzi (Bard College) sets Visconti and Bertolucci next to novelists Giuseppe di Lampedusa and Alberto Moravia. Above all, the book brilliantly analyzes the art in the art film by showing how Italian cinema uses a chorus or expresses itself through allegory. Rossellini and Fellini are given fascinating treatments; Pasolini's theories about cinematic poetry are beautifully set forth, although only his Decameron is discussed. But the description of Antonioni feels unnecessarily familiar. Still, this impressively intelligent re-description of the tradition surely takes its place alongside other necessary histories of Italian cinema, such as Marcia Landy's Fascism in Film: Italian Commercial Cinema, 1931-1943 (CH, Nov'86) and Millicent Marcus's Italian Film in the Light of Neorealism (CH, Jan'87). Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty. --Steven C. Dillon, Bates College