30142 - Cinema and Literature (LM)

Learning outcomes

The student has an in-depth knowledge about the relationships between literary and cinematographic texts. He's able to use instruments and critical methodologies to analyze the connections between the two languages.

Course contents

The landscape invention between literature and cinema

Since Fifteenth century the painting knows very well the importance of landscape and of its interpretation. Only a century after the literature begins to think over the landscape (Piero Camporesi, Le belle contrade, Garzanti 1992). From this moment the landscape become an essential element of poetry, travel report or whatever form of writing, until the flourishing of nineteenth century novel. The cinema inherits from the literature the awareness and the thought, sometimes by adaptation of novels where landscape and nature are real characters as the humans, sometimes by the translation in images of the same literary sensations and functions, particularly for the Romantic empathic vision of nature. The Lumière brothers present in their movies daily or exotic landscapes, but the fiction cinema will celebrate the landscape and make it became a protagonist: the large extensions of the western film (J. Ford); the Italian countryside, location of the war in the neorealist movies, the Sicilian islands or the London lawns of M. Antonioni, the German views emblematic background of the loneliness and the crisis of identity narrated by W: Wenders, the wild nature of Sean Penn's Into the Wild, the futuristic and ecologic foreshortenings of the science fiction (J. Cameron). The course includes the collaboration of professors of the Faculty of Agriculture.

Readings/Bibliography

Texts for the students of "Cinema e letteratura" (LM):

Giorgio Tinazzi, La scrittura e lo sguardo. Cinema e letteratura, Venezia, Marsilio, 2010.

Vincenzo Buccheri, Lo stile cinematografico, Roma, Carocci, 2010.

Sergio Arecco, Il paesaggio del cinema, Dieci studi da Ford ad Almodóvar, Genova, Le Mani, 2002

Paesaggi (ed. by Luca Pasquale), n. 4 of the review "Film/Letterature" (Edizioni Gedit, 2008), only the part concerning the landscape. The students can buy the review on the web or find it in the Journal Catalogue of the Bologna libraries.

Added text for those students who don't attend the course:

Paolo Brandi, Parole in movimento. L'influenza del cinema sulla letteratura, Fiesole, Cadmo, 2006.

The students who don't attend the course have to watch 5 movies (at least 2 related to landscape) among those deeply analyzed in the texts.

At the exam the students have to bring the list of the chosen movies

The attendance (also for the past courses) is valid only for a year from the first examination session after the end of the course.

Texts for the students of History of Cinema (LM):

Fernaldo Di Giammatteo, Storia del cinema, Venezia, Marsilio, 2005.

Sergio Arecco, Il paesaggio del cinema, Dieci studi da Ford ad Almodóvar, Genova, Le Mani, 2002

Paesaggi (a cura di Luca Pasquale), numero 4 della rivista "Film/Letterature" (edizioni Gedit, 2008). The students can buy the review on the web or find it in Journal Catalogue of the Bologna libraries.

Added text for those students (LM) who don't attend the course:

Paolo Brandi, Parole in movimento. L'influenza del cinema sulla letteratura, Fiesole, Cadmo, 2006.

The students who don't attend the course have to watch 5 movies (at least 2 related to landscape) from the following list:

Nosferatu, Eine Symphonie des Grauens (1922) by Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau

Bronenosec Potëmkin (1925) by Sergej M. Ejzenštejn

Metropolis (1927) by Fritz Lang

Modern Times (1936) by Charlie Chaplin

Bringing Up Baby (1938) by Howard Hawks

Le quai des brumes (1938) by Marcel Carné

Gone With the Wind (1939) by Victor Fleming

Citizen Kane (1941) by Orson Welles

Paisà (1946) by Roberto Rossellini

Ladri di biciclette (1948) by Vittorio De Sica

Rear Window (1954) by Alfred Hitchcock

A bout de souffle (1960) by Jean-Luc Godard

La dolce vita (1960) by Federico Fellini

El angel exterminador (1962) by Luis Buñuel

Andrej Rublev (1966) by Andrej Tarkovskij

Blow up (1968) by Michelangelo Antonioni

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) by Stanley Kubrick

Nashville (1975) by Robert Altman

Taxi Driver (1976) by Martin Scorsese

Apocalipse Now (1979) by Francis Ford Coppola

Pulp Fiction (1994) by Quentin Tarantino

Exotica (1994) by Atom Egoyan

Ta'm e guilass (1997) by Abbas Kiarostami

Todo sobre mi madre (1999) by Pedro Almodovar

Code inconnu - Récit incomplet de divers voyages (2000) by Michael Haneke

Dogville (2003) by Lars von Trier

Um filme falado (2004) by Manoel de Oliveira

At the exam the students have to bring the list of the chosen movies.

The attendance (also for the past courses) is valid only for a year from the first examination session after the end of the course.

Assessment methods

Oral examination

Teaching tools

Video projector, PC

DVD and VHS are available at: Videoteca del Dipartimento di Musica e Spettacolo(via Barberia, 4); Sala Borsa; Biblioteca di Discipline Umanistiche (via Zamboni, 36).

Office hours

See the website of Cristina Bragaglia