Marco Grosoli will give a talk at University of Massachusetts Amherst, organized by its Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures and the Film Studies Program.
Abstract At the time of its release in 2022, Leonora addio was welcomed mostly as a harmless cinematic oddity. Yet there is more than meets the eye. For one thing, Leonora addio, the first film that Paolo Taviani authored without his brother Vittorio (who died in 2018) in more than 60 years, is a quintessential “film testament”, recapitulating and condensing an entire career. Recounting the grotesque (real-life) journey of the burial, cremation, exhumation, transfer (from Rome to Sicily) and re-burial of Luigi Pirandello’s corpse over more than ten years, and showing in the last thirty minutes an adaptation for the screen of “The Nail” (the last novella by the renowned Sicilian writer), Leonora addio is rife with Pirandello-esque mirror games between the writer’s death and Vittorio’s, and more generally with allusions to the intellectual legacies of either.
Less obviously, though, the film also daringly thematizes the exploitation of cultural value as well as its political implications – particularly in the specific Italian context and, implicitly yet unmistakably, in the present day too.
My talk will analyse Leonora addio paying particular attention to this subtext, to Deleuze’s “crystal images” (pervasively informing the structure of Leonora addio), to the film’s many nods to Kaos (a 1984 Pirandello adaptation for the screen by the Taviani, analysed in this talk mainly through the lens of Lacanian gaze theory) and to the role of death in both films.
February 13, 5PM, Harther Hall 301
📸 Leonora addio [2022], by Paolo Taviani
