Bertinoro, 6/13 September 2009

Shadows

Shadows and Doubles.
Thematic Intersections between
Film and Literature


The duplication of identity is certainly a rich and complex thematic field, made of various intersections. In the fantastic literature of the 19° and 20° century shadows often play the role of doubles, offering an impressive variety of narrative situations and symbolic functions. In Chamisso’s Peter Schlemihl (which will have a long lasting success, from Hoffmann to Tabucchi), the loss of the shadow is linked to self-alienation and daemonic seduction of money. In Andersen’s The Shadow (1847) and in Wilde’s The Fisherman and His Soul (1891) we find a true and complete duplication, which expresses obscure and repressed parts of the self, while in 1963 novel by Lasilav Fuks Theodor Mundstrock the self-alienation and the dialogue with the shadow gives expression to the anxiety of a victim of the Shoah. Finally, two very different movies exploits the profound consonance between film and shadow in order to express duplication of identity and repressed feelings: the expressionist Schatten by Arthur Robison (1923) and the Italian comedy Luna e l’altra by Maurizio Nichetti (1996).
Lecture in English
Massimo Fusillo
University of L'Aquila

Massimo Fusillo is Professor of Literary Criticism and Comparative Literature at the University of L'Aquila; and Coordinator of the PhD Program in Literary Genres. His main Fields of Interest are Ancient Narrative, Modern Reception of Classical Literatures, Thematic Criticism, Cinema and Literature; he published Il romanzo greco: polifonia ed eros (Venice 1989; Paris 1991); La Grecia secondo Pasolini: Mito e cinema (Florence 1996; Rome 2007); L’altro e lo stesso. Teoria e storia del doppio (Florence 1998); and Il dio ibrido. Dioniso e le Baccanti nel Novecento (Bologna 2006).