Peter Bondanella

Federico Fellini

Manuela Gieri

According to the American Film Institute, La Strada is one of the most popular films in cinema history. The performances of Giulietta Masina as the waif Gelsomina, Richard Basehart as the Fool, and Anthony Quinn as the strongman Zampano, who buys Gelsomina from her mother and takes her with him on the road, have been acclaimed for their power and sometimes ridiculed for their sentimentality. The debates over what these characters and the story they enact represent--a Christian parable, a journey of self-discovery, a tale of beauty and the beast--and the position of the film within the neo-realist genre, continue today. This new translation and critical edition of the continuity script for La Strada is the only accurate guide to the film in any language. The notes to the shooting script enable the reader to reconstruct some of Fellini's changes while shooting the film. The edition also contains an introduction which analyzes the work's place in film history and within the so-called "crisis of neo-realism," and provides for the first time in English a number of articles on the film's production. Fellini's most important interviews and statements on La Strada are included as well. Finally, two of the best critical analyses of the film, by Frank Burke and Peter Harcourt, are reprinted, along with a number of the contemporary reactions by critics from France (Andre Bazin), Italy (Guido Aristarco), and the United States--including a description of its reception at the Venice Film Festival. The illustrations include some of Fellini's original drawings made during the shooting of the film.

LA STRADA

Strada, La

Gian-Paolo Biasin

Essays discuss the texts of Luigi Pirandello, one of the literary giants of this century and present an up-to-date re-evaluations of Pirandello's works, including his poetry, novels, short stories, plays, essays, letters, and memoirs.

Contemporary Perspectives

Luigi Pirandello

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.

Manuela Gieri

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