The Great Black Spider on Its Knock-Kneed Tripod : Reflections of Cinema in Early Twentieth-Century Italy

__The Great Black Spider on Its Knock-Kneed Tripod__ traces the encounter of Italy’s writers with cinema, and in doing so offers vibrant new perspectives on the country’s early twentieth-century culture.

The emergence of cinema as a predominant form of mass entertainment in the 1910s inspired intellectuals to rethink their definitions of art. The Great Black Spider on Its Knock-Kneed Tripod traces the encounter of Italy’s writers with cinema, and in doing so offers vibrant new perspectives on the country’s early twentieth-century culture.

This comparative study focuses on the immediate responses to this cultural phenomenon of three highly influential intellectuals, each with a competing aesthetic vision – Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, founder of Futurism; Gabriele D’Annunzio, leader of Italian Decadentism; and Luigi Pirandello, a father of modern European theatre and theorist of humour. Along with demonstrating how the popularization of the feature-length narrative influenced each author’s outlook and theories, Michael Syrimis unravels the extent to which cinema enforced or neutralized the ideological and aesthetic differences between them.

Contents 7 Acknowledgments 9 Illustrations 13 Abbreviations 15 Introduction. Reflections of Cinema and Technology in Marinetti, D’Annunzio, and Pirandello 17 1. Film Aesthetics of a ‘Heroic’ Futurism 43 2. An Aesthetics of War: The (Un)Problematic Screening of Vita futurista 78 3. Velocità: Between Avant-Garde and Narrativity 122 4. Forse che sì forse che no: Technological Inflections of a Decadent Text 153 5. Through a ‘Futuristic’ Lens: D’Annunzio’s Cinematic Re-Visions 180 6. The Humoristic Image in Pirandello’s Si gira ... 213 7. Cinema as Humour: The Oltre and the Superfluo 241 Conclusion 287 Notes 295 Bibliography 347 Index 359