"Casta Diva" di Carmine Gallone e i film biografico-musicali italiani, 1935-1954: Pastiche, Emozioni e Memoria storico-culturale


Seminar by Giuliano Danieli (Università di Roma “La Sapienza”)

26/09/2023, ore 10, Facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia, Aula Pirrotta

My lecture will comparatively analyze Carmine Gallone's Casta diva (1935) and the biographical-musical films produced in Italy between the 1940s and 1950s by highlighting the different dramaturgical, narrative, temporal and visual strategies adopted in these films, and the role played by music (pre-existing or original) in their soundtracks. I wonder if these characteristics took on a specific configuration in Casta diva, such as to justify the particular success and importance that this film had in the Italian cultural and cinematic landscape. Useful for the purposes of my analysis is the aesthetic category of "pastiche," around which an intense debate has developed in recent years. In particular, I take up the theory advanced by Richard Dyer, who identifies film pastiche as a means of building links between emotions and cultural-historical memory. Applying this idea to my analysis of Casta diva, I discuss the hypothesis that the aesthetics and dramaturgy of Gallone's biopic (particularly the '54 remake) - which in taking up dramatic-musical topoi derived from the world of opera is effectively configured as a pastiche between opera and film - may have encouraged in viewers of the time a particularly strong and fruitful affective bond with Italy's (especially nineteenth-century) cultural past, at a time of crisis and reconstruction of national identity as was the immediate postwar period.

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