Italian Cinema in the Present Tense: New Narrative Practices from Adaptation to Transmedia and Transnational Cinema
Millicent Marcus’ work pioneers an approach to adaptation that sees the mediation of a literary work via film as an “extended chain that includes an imagined pretextual history based on lived experience, memory, and dream” (Filmmaking By the Book ix). The adaptive process is “the sum total of a series of encounters” (ix): institutional, semiotic, personal. In her landmark work, Marcus considers the works of Luchino Visconti, Vittorio De Sica, Pier Paolo Pasolini, the Fratelli Taviani, and Federico Fellini, arguing that in the process of adaptation, filmmakers must come to terms with a multivalent cultural past. In these two days of study, we propose to bring theories of adaptation into dialogue with the new narratives, new voices, and new media in contemporary Italy. Italian director Susanna Nicchiarelli (Il terzo occhio, Cosmonauta, Sputnik 5, La scoperta dell’alba, Per tutta la vita) will attend as a guest artist to discuss the topic of intermediality through her work. We envision this event as an opportunity to advance relevant discussions on current artistic trends, genres, and forms of production that are affecting cinema and its intersections with other texts, media, and transnational productions.
The event takes place on Friday, Nov. 13 and Sat., Nov. 14, 2015
Franklin and Marshall College, Lancaster, PA