About this item
A Cinema of Poetry brings Italian film studies into dialogue with fields outside its usual purview by showing how films can contribute to our understanding of aesthetic questions that stretch back to Homer. Joseph Luzzi considers the relationship between film and literature, such as the cinematic adaptation of literary sources, and more generally the fields of rhetoric, media studies, and modern Italian culture.The book balances theoretical inquiry with close readings of films by the masters of Italian cinema: Roberto Rossellini, Vittorio De Sica, Luchino Visconti, Michelangelo Antonioni, Federico Fellini, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Bernardo Bertolucci, and others. Luzzi's study is the first to show how Italian filmmakers address such crucial aesthetic issues as the nature of the chorus, the relationship between symbol and allegory, the literary prehistory of montage, and the place of poetry in cinematic expression - what Pasolini called the "cinema of poetry.
About the Author
Joseph Luzzi holds a doctorate from Yale and teaches at Bard. He is the author of the memoir, IN A DARK WOOD: What Dante Taught Me About Grief, Healing, and the Mysteries of Love (HarperCollins) , a meditation on the power of great literature to guide us in our most difficult times. Other books include MY TWO ITALIES (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) , the dramatic story of his Italian family's immigration and an insider's look at life in Italy, past and present.
An active critic, Luzzi has written for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Bookforum, the Times Literary Supplement, and many others. His first book, ROMANTIC EUROPE AND THE GHOST OF ITALY (Yale) , received the MLA's Scaglione Prize for Italian Studies, and he is also the author of A CINEMA OF POETRY: Aesthetics of the Italian Art Film (Johns Hopkins) . His work has been translated or is forthcoming in Italian, German, Portuguese, and Korean, and he lectures widely on art, film, and literature.
