Adaptation Vol. 4, No. 2, pp. 137–166 doi: 10.1093/adaptation/apq016 Advance Access publication 15 November 2010 © The Author 2010. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com 137 From Literature to Film Through Figurative Arts: Italian Imagistic Substitutions ILARIA SERRA* Abstract This article is based on several recent critical stances that invite adaptation studies to be more comprehensive (avoiding a ‘piecemeal nature’ of research) and to focus not on cinema’s losses but on cinema’s gains in the process of adapting from text to screen. The subject matter of this article is an overview of creative choices or ‘imagistic substitutions’ by Italian directors. Italian cinema—perhaps more than any other national cinema—heavily relies on literature and strongly emphasizes the creative possibilities in the hands of directors. This article analyses several film examples according to a specifically cinematographic, artistic, and even painterly point of view. Keywords Italian cinema, Italian adaptation, painting, poetry. Let us leave behind any pretence of judging what tastes better, the movie or the book—as the two goats munching on a roll of film inspired by a best-seller comment, ‘I preferred the book’. 1 The superiority of literature and the accusation of ‘infidelity’— which ‘carries overtones of Victorian prudishness’, according to Robert Stam (3)—are clearly out of date in critical studies of adaptation, or perhaps they never existed, as Simone Murray affirmed in her 2008 discussion in Literature Film Quarterly: ‘most strik- ing’ is ‘how few academic critics make any claim for fidelity criticism at all’ (7). 2 In the same year, in Britain, Thomas Leitch once again shook the terrain of adaptation stud- ies with his article in Adaptation, which raised several issues, but most of all posited ‘the most urgent item on the agenda’: ‘to shift evaluative problems the field has inherited from literary studies—fidelity, hierarchy, canonicity’ (76). This article seeks to be a re- flection on recent developments of adaptation in Italian cinema, with these critical stances in mind. 3 The aim is to provide an overview based not on single case studies— the ‘piecemeal nature of current research’ that Murray condemns (6)—but on a broad theme that touches two generations of Italian directors: their use of ‘imagistic substitu- tions’, or images replacing words, according to an Italian cinematographic taste. 4 In this article, I will not speak of adaptations (or ‘reductions’, as the Italian word riduzione cinematografica negatively implies) but of creative choices. I will emphasize ‘what has been gained rather than what has been lost’ 5 through inventions based on cinema’s technical possibilities and often inspired by Italian figurative arts. *Department of Languages, Linguistics, and Comparative Literature, Florida Atlantic University. E-mail: ilaria.serra@fau.edu. at University of Utah on November 10, 2011 http://adaptation.oxfordjournals.org/ Downloaded from