Masters of Two Arts: Re-creation of European Literatures in Italian Cinema (review)

Reviewed by: Masters of Two Arts: Re-creation of European Literatures in Italian Cinema Manuela Gieri (bio) Carlo Testa. Masters of Two Arts: Re-creation of European Literatures in Italian Cinema University of Toronto Press 2002. x, 366. $68.00 'A genre lives in the present, but always remembers its past, its beginning. Genre is a representative of creative memory in the process of literary development.' Mikhail Bakhtin's remarks on the creative ability that genre has to remember its past even though progressing towards new and unforeseen [End Page 367] territories (Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, 1984) become pertinent as one evaluates the complex and yet close relationship cinema has always entertained with literature. Indeed, in its early days the film industry considered literature as a grand reservoir from which one could freely draw material for the transcodification of the old literary memory and the production of a new audio-visual memory, a memory that could constitute the fertile terrain for the formation of a largely shared, and thus popular, cultural discourse. In such a process, most canonized literary genres transferred into film genres, but overall cinema freely treated literature as a large isomorphic text from which to draw themes, motifs, and narrative structures. From the outset, the Italian film industry found in its national literature an equally fertile ground for the transcodification of genres and the transfer of a cultural discourse at times fairly limited in its ability to reach the Italian people, into a medium that would certainly enlarge its audience and soon became the means for production and transmission of a largely shared cultural discourse. Furthermore, cinema also offered Italians the ability to move outside their own borders, and thus acquire international cultural visibility. This doubly coded function of the relationship between literature and cinema - to popularize one's own national culture and acquire international cultural hegemony, or at least, visibility - accompanies the development of the Italian film industry from its outset to the present. Yet, it is unquestionable that, more often than not, a national discourse comes to be shaped in close dialogue with other traditions as well. Notably, Italian literary, cinematic, and largely cultural discourse grew in a close exchange with a number of other European cultures, perhaps most importantly French, German, and Russian. This is the fertile terrain within which Carlo Testa's investigation unfolds in his volume Masters of Two Arts: Re-creation of European Literatures in Italian Cinema. In discussing various cases of cinematic adaptation of major works of European literatures, Testa covers a subject left almost untouched by English scholarship in a book-length study that certainly constitutes a far-reaching contribution to Italian, European, and cinema studies, primarily owing to the author's outstanding knowledge of the literary texts he discusses and of European literatures in general. Masters of Two Arts is a persuasive and thorough close reading of cinematic adaptations, or rather, 're-creations' of the works of European authors such as Goethe, Tolstoy, Kafka, Stendhal, and Mann, who have greatly influenced generations of Italians, and left a lasting mark in the history of Italian cultural tradition. Interestingly, Testa also deals with less influential authors, such as Sade and Pasternak, who offer intriguing cases of transcodification, in Pier Paolo Pasolini's disquieting last film venture Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma (1975) and Nanni Moretti's closure to a significant segment of his personal and professional autobiography with Palombella rossa (1989). [End Page 368] The volume opens with an essential introductory chapter in which Testa clarifies a number of cogent matters, and perhaps most importantly the choice of the literatures considered - French, German, and Russian. While recognizing other influences - American being the most obviously absent - Testa explains that the choice of the three literatures in question was largely due to a personal and biographical connection, since, prior to the writing of Masters of Two Arts, the author worked for a long time on the modern literary productions of France, Russia, and Germany. Testa then provides a useful and engaging explanation of the reasons that led him to privilege 're-creation' over 'adaptation.' Here, the author offers a fairly convincing argument in favour of a term that is...

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