31/01/2025

Paolo Taviani’s Leonora addio (2022): A Look at Cultural Politics “Through the Eyes of Those Who Are No Longer”

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

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07/08/2026

“Swan Songs: Philosophical Reflections on Death, Time, and Memory in Testament Films” is out now!

We are pleased to announce the completion of the Special Issue “Swan Songs: Philosophical Reflections on Death, Time, and Memory in Testament Films”, guest edited by Vasco Baptista Marques and Susana Viegas for Arts. The Special Issue brings together seven original articles examining testament films from a philosophical perspective. Rather than approaching filmmakers’ final works merely as […]
06/08/2026

New Open Access publication by Susana Viegas

We are pleased to share that the book chapter “Derrida on Cinema’s Spectral Images: Time, Repetition, and Belief” by PI Susana Viegas is now available in Open Access through the publisher Brill. Published in “Derrida and Film Studies”, edited by Kamil Lipiński and Andrzej Marzec (Brill, 2025), the chapter explores Jacques Derrida’s reflections on cinema […]
06/08/2026

Join us at the Goethe-Institut Portugal for the cycle “Falar sobre a morte (nunca matou ninguém)”!

Organized by the Goethe-Institut Portugal, with contributions from the FILM AND DEATH team, Death Café, the association Doulas do Fim da Vida, and many other partners, the festival Falar sobre a morte (nunca matou ninguém) [Speaking About Death (Never Killed Anyone)] will open on September 17 at 5:00 pm with the interactive sound installation Memorial […]
03/08/2026

Join Anderson Santos and Lucas Ferraço Nassif at the Centro Português de Psicanálise

On September 1, 7:00 PM, the Centro Português de Psicanálise (R. da Assunção 7, 2º) will host a talk by Anderson Santos, moderated by Lucas Ferraço Nassif, on “Félix Guattari: Psicanálise e o Paradigma Ético-Estético”. This presentation will be in Portuguese. This presentation addresses the shift initiated by Félix Guattari within psychoanalysis, as he proposes […]
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