Italian playwright Luigi Pirandello (1867-1936) is one of the preeminent figures of the modern European theater. His masterpiece, Six Characters in Search of an Author, set loose a riot during its first performance in Rome in 1921. This play about six unfortunate characters abandoned by their author in the middle of a tawdry drama, is an unsettling, supremely self-conscious work that is ultimately about theatrical artifice and artistic creation itself. Pirandello and Film examines Pirandello's many efforts-none of them finally successful-to transform Six Characters into a movie. The authors examine Pirandello's views on film and its relation to theater, his varying approaches to creating a film adaptation of Six Characters, and the efforts of directors and film moguls in Germany and Hollywood to fashion a cinematic version of the play. The book also presents an array of important documents, including some that have never before appeared in English: a Prologue (or prose sketch) for a 1926 film; a Scenario (a more detailed prose sketch) prepared by Pirandello and Adolph Lantz in the late 1920s for a German film version of Six Characters; an English-language film sketch written in 1935 by Pirandello and Saul Colin; and a letter from Max Reinhardt and the German emigri Hollywood film director Joseph von Sternberg to Saul Colin regarding the proposed film treatment of the play. These documents, together with the authors' critical text, provide a detailed portrait of Pirandello's developing view of film as an appropriate medium for his revolutionary dramatic innovations. Nina daVinci Nichols, a professor of English at Rutgers University, is the author of Ariadne's Lives, Man, Myth & Monument,and two novels: Moira's Room and Child of the Night. Jana O'Keefe Bazzoni, an associate professor of speech at Baruch College, has published articles in The Luigi Pirandello Companion, Performing Arts Journal, and Modern Drama. Maurice Charney, a professor of English at Rutgers University, is the author of All of Shakespeare, Comedy High and Low, and Sexual Fiction.

Contemporary Italian Filmmaking is an innovative critique of Italian filmmaking in the aftermath of World War II - as it moves beyond traditional categories such as genre film and auteur cinema. Manuela Gieri demonstrates that Luigi Pirandello's revolutionary concept of humour was integral to the development of a counter-tradition in Italian filmmaking that she defines `humoristic'. She delineates a `Pirandellian genealogy' in Italian cinema, literature, and culture through her examination of the works of Federico Fellini, Ettore Scola, and many directors of the `new generation, ' such as Nanni Moretti, Gabriele Salvatores, Maurizio Nichetti, and Giuseppe Tornatore. A celebrated figure of the theatrical world, Luigi Pirandello (1867-1936) is little known beyond Italy for his critical and theoretical writings on cinema and for his screenplays. Gieri brings to her reading of Pirandello's work the critical parameters offered by psychoanalysis, poststructuralism, and postmodernism to develop a syncretic and transcultural vision of the history of Italian cinema. She identifies two fundamental trends of development in this tradition: the `melodramatic imagination' and the `humoristic, ' or comic, imagination. With her focus on the humoristic imagination, Gieri describes a `Pirandellian mode' derived from his revolutionary utterances on the cinema and narrative, and specifically, from his essay on humour, L'umorismo (On Humour, 1908). She traces a history of the Pirandellian mode in cinema and investigates its characteristics, demonstrating the original nature of Italian filmmaking that is particularly indebted to Pirandello's interpretation of humour.

First Published in 1993. Contemporary Theatre Studies is a book series of special interest to everyone involved in theatre. This collection of documents is the first attempt in English to bring together a body of material on Luigi Pirandello as multi-faceted man of the theatre. Because relatively few of his works have been easily available to English language readers, he is thought of most frequently as a playwright, the author of Six Characters in Search of an Author and Henry IV in particular, and his contribution to theatre, both in theory and in practice, has tended to be overlooked. Emphasising his role as a director, the book traces the rise and fall of his own theatre company, the Teatro d’Arte where he struggled to instil new practices and comments on Pirandello’s attempts during the years of Fascism to give Italy a national theatre in a European context.

This book explores the cultural, intellectual, and artistic fascination with camera-eye metaphors in film culture of the twentieth century. By studying the very metaphor that cinema lives by, it provides a rich and insightful map of our understanding of cinema and film styles and shows how cinema shapes our understanding of the arts and media. As current new media technologies are attempting to shift the identity of cinema and moving imagery, it is hard to overstate the importance of this metaphor for our understanding of the modalities of vision. In what guises does the "camera eye" continue to survive in media that is called new?

Paul Cooke looks at Hollywood's interaction with national and transnational cinemas, from German Expressionism to Bollywood and Chinese film. While Hollywood has had a huge impact on the medium - doing all the talking in the 'dialogue' - world cinema's economic, aesthetic and political relationship with Hollywood is of profound importance.

The cinephobic novelist who complains to Fitzgerald's tycoon that he will never get the hang of scriptwriting wouldn't give a nickel for the movies. Yet never before the appearance of film had human perception been engaged in such an all-encompassing way by a single art form. In this ambitious investigation of a little-studied narrative genre, Gavriel Moses defines and explores "the film novel," a literary text in which cinema provides the thematic, formal, psychological, and philosophical center. Through close readings of works by the major representatives of the genre—Pirandello, Nabokov, Isherwood, West, Fitzgerald, Moravia, Percy, Puig—Moses develops a suggestive theory of novels that use literature to investigate the central role that film has acquired in human experience. These novels, because of their fascination with filmmaker and spectator alike, and because they anticipate current views of the questions of cinema, remain a tangible presence within the repertoire of literary modernism. Offering insightful discussions of Laughter in the Dark, Lancelot, Kiss of the Spider Woman, and other film novels, Moses shows the depth of the exchange between literature and cinema and illustrates the extent to which the way we tell stories with words has been affected by the movies. His book will be of wide interest to literary scholars, film historians, and students of cinema and the novel.

This book provides needed information on the collaborations between filmmakers and theater personnel before 1930 and completes our understanding of how two art forms influenced each other. It begins with the vaudeville and "faerie" dramas captured in brief films by the Edison and Biograph companies; follows the development of feature-length Sarah Bernhardt and James O'Neill films after 1912; examines the formation of theater/film combination companies in 1914-15; and details later collaborations during the talking picture revolution of 1927. Includes detailed analyses of important theatrical films like The Count of Monte Cristo, The Virginian, Coquette, and Paramount on Parade.

This collection draws on cutting-edge work that crosses traditional disciplinary boundaries to offer new perspectives on the importance of visuality and the imagination in the work of Luigi Pirandello, the great Italian modernist. The volume re-examines traditional critical notions central to the study of Pirandello by focusing on the importance of the visual imagination in his poetics and aesthetics, an area of multimedia investigation which has not yet received ample attention in English-language books. Putting scholarship on Pirandello in conversation with new work on the multimedia dimensions of modernism, the volume examines how Pirandello worked across and was adapted through multiple media. It also brings Pirandello into a cross-disciplinary dialogue with new approaches to Italian cultural studies to show how his work remains relevant to scholarly conversations across the field. The essays in this collection highlight the ways in which Pirandello is engaged not only in literature and theatre but also in the visual arts, film, and music. At the same time, they emphasize the ways in which this multimedia creativity enables Pirandello to pursue complex philosophical thoughts, and how scholars’ interpretation of his works can provide new insights into problems facing us today. Crossing from aesthetics and a study of modernist notions of creative imagination into studies of multimedia works and adaptations, the volume argues that Pirandello should be understood as a thinker in images whose legacy can be felt across the arts and into the realm of 21st-century theories of literary cognition.