Il pupo emigrato: dal teatro allo schermo (original) (raw)

The Image of the Puppet in Italian Theater, Literature and Film

Palgrave Mcmillan, 2022

With the advancement of cybernetics, avatars, animation, and virtual reality, a thorough understanding of how the puppet metaphor originates from specific theatrical practices and media is especially relevant today. This book identifies and interprets the aesthetic and cultural significance of the different traditions of the Italian puppet theater in the broader Italian culture and beyond. Grounded in the often-overlooked history of the evolution of several Italian puppetry traditions – the central and northern Italian stringed marionettes, the Sicilian pupi, the glove puppets of the Po Valley, and the Neapolitan Pulcinella – this study examines a broad spectrum of visual, cinematic, literary, and digital texts representative of the functions and themes of the puppet. A systematic analysis of the meanings ascribed to the idea and image of the puppet provides a unique vantage point to observe the perseverance and transformation of its deeper associations, linking premodern, modern, and contemporary contexts.

The Substance of Sicilian Puppet Theater: Past and Present

Athenaeum Review , 2020

The essay first outlines the principal chivalric narratives that found their way into traditional Sicilian puppet theater, and then turns to how today’s puppeteers are refashioning the stories for contemporary audiences. (Fall/Winter 2020: 139-153)

MALAGUERRA: THE ANTI-STATE SUPER-HERO OF SICILIAN PUPPET THEATER

AOQU (Achilles Orlando Quixote Ulysses). Rivista di epica, 2020

Although this literary figure is little known today, Morbello/Malaguerra was famous in Sicily and elsewhere in Italy from the mid-19th to mid-20th century. This essay focuses on his vicissitudes in print (Storia dei paladini di Francia) and on the puppet theater stage, with some attention to the spread of his name and adaptation of his adventures outside Sicily, both in the epic Maggio tradition of northern Italy and in the scripts of a Catanese puppeteer active in New York City. Because Malaguerra repeatedly contests the injustices perpetrated by those in power, his story reminds us that l’opera dei pupi was not simply a chivalric soap opera for the masses before television, but could be a vehicle to express a critical attitude toward the State under the cover of dramatizing medieval and Renaissance epics. Indeed, it may be that puppet theater’s political undercurrent was a factor in its massive popularity both in southern Italy and among Italian immigrants in urban centers of the New World. More generally, the essay aims to contribute to the discussion of political ideologies in the chivalric epic genre, especially in the context of Italian popular culture.

Sicilian Puppet Theater: Alterity or Diversity?

Representing Alterity through Puppetry and Performing Objects., 2023

From the perspective of alterity, the predominant figure of the Other in Sicilian puppet theater is undoubtedly the Saracen (Muslim). As antagonists, Saracens have been associated with different historical aggressors, from North Africans to Ottoman Turks to the House of Bourbon ruling Sicily in the 19th century. However, depictions of Saracens across the source texts, time periods, and puppet theater companies are exceptionally multifaceted. Many non-Christian protagonists were beloved by the traditional opera dei pupi public. A chivalrous Mongol khan, for instance, was affectionately depicted with the characteristic mustache of Vittorio Emanuele II, “il re galantuomo” (the honest gentleman king). And some puppeteers reversed the angle and fostered identification with the Saracen underdogs in the face of oppression coming from elsewhere. At the same time, the “Paladins of France” cycle, with its more than 300 nightly episodes, is replete with stories that eschew an opposition between an “us” and a “them” and instead underscore our common humanity across borders of all kinds. Camaraderie, friendship, and even romance can readily emerge between individuals from the most disparate corners of the globe—from China to Africa and from Syria to the islands above the Russian landmass—in extended narratives that encourage and promote understanding and peace. In recent decades, moreover, some Sicilian puppeteers have staged plays that thoughtfully challenge collective confrontations and question conventional societal attitudes. With such boundless material in both traditional and contemporary Sicilian puppet theater, scholars may shine the spotlight on features that either emphasize alterity or embrace diversity. The plays themselves sometimes stage a shift from one perspective to the other, as when an unknown foreign Other becomes a friend, benefactor, or lover. My essay focuses on a selection of examples under the guise of alterity before moving to three principal storylines that celebrate diversity through heterogamous marriages. https://digitalcommons.lib.uconn.edu/ballinst\_alterity/14

Italian Cinema in the Twenty- First Century: Representing the Precarious Subject

Italian Industrial Literature and Film, Edited by C. Baghetti, J. Carter and L. Marmo, Peter Lang, Oxford-New York, 2021

This book explores the representation of industrial labor in Italian literature and film from the 1950s through the 1970s. The first article of the postwar Italian Constitution states that the Republic is founded on labor. Forces across the political spectrum, from Catholic to communist, invested labor with the power to build a new national community after Fascism and war. The 1950s-1970s saw dramatic transformations, in economic, social and cultural terms, as labor moved from agriculture to industry and a whole generation of Italian writers and filmmakers used literature and cinema to interpretand influence-these changes and to capture the new experiences of industrial labor. The essays in this book offer a comprehensive panorama of this generation's work, examining key questions and texts, set against the context of history and theory, gender and class, geography and the environment, as well as their precursors and present-day successors. Carlo Baghetti is a postdoctoral fellow at the Casa Velázquez in Madrid (École des Hautes Études Hispaniques et Ibériques). He holds a PhD in Italian Studies from Aix-Marseille Université and l'Università degli Studi "La Sapienza" di Roma. He is the editor of Il lavoro raccontato. Studi su letteratura e cinema italiani dal postmodernismo all'ipermodernismo (2020) and a special issue of Costellazioni (2020) dedicated to representations of work in Europe. Jim Carter is Lecturer of Italian at Boston University. His articles on Italian industrial culture, especially at the Olivetti company, have appeared in journals like Modern Italy and Italian Culture. In 2018-2019, he won a Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome. Lorenzo Marmo is Associate Professor of Film Studies at Universitas Mercatorum and also teaches at the Università degli Studi di Napoli "L'Orientale." In 2017, he was Lauro de Bosis Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University. He is the author of Roma e il cinema del dopoguerra. Neorealismo melodramma noir (2018).

GIANNI RODARI The hidden socially interested puppetry underneath his stories

Artos, 2020

The article deals with Gianni Rodari’s stories, as containing their own transcription into puppet plays. Using historical references, from commedia dell’ arte’s puppetry tradition till the context in which Rodari created his stories, and combining the “fantastic binominal” of Rodari’s writing theories with the methodological tool of alienation in puppetry, as it has described especially by Henryk Jurkowski, the article argues on the Rodari’s tales transformation into puppet plays.