Pinocchio Commedia


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Pinocchio, the Tale of a Puppet


Book Description

Pinocchio, The Tale of a Puppet follows the adventures of a talking wooden puppet whose nose grew longer whenever he told a lie and who wanted more than anything else to become a real boy.As carpenter Master Antonio begins to carve a block of pinewood into a leg for his table the log shouts out, "Don't strike me too hard!" Frightened by the talking log, Master Cherry does not know what to do until his neighbor Geppetto drops by looking for a piece of wood to build a marionette. Antonio gives the block to Geppetto. And thus begins the life of Pinocchio, the puppet that turns into a boy.Pinocchio, The Tale of a Puppet is a novel for children by Carlo Collodi is about the mischievous adventures of Pinocchio, an animated marionette, and his poor father and woodcarver Geppetto. It is considered a classic of children's literature and has spawned many derivative works of art. But this is not the story we've seen in film but the original version full of harrowing adventures faced by Pinnocchio. It includes 40 illustrations.




Pinocchio, Puppets, and Modernity


Book Description

This study assesses the significance of Pinocchio in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in addition to his status as the creature of a nineteenth century traversed by a cultural enthusiasm for dummies, puppets, and marionettes. This collection identifies him as a figure characterized by a 'fluid identity,' informed with transition, difference, joie de vivre, otherness, displacement, and metamorphosis, making Pinocchio a truly modern, indeed postmodern and posthuman, cultural icon. Pinocchio, Puppets and Modernity explores this crucial and as yet little visited field, reassessing Pinocchio's genealogy and progeny, as well as illuminating both the wider context and more specific cultural manifestations of the mechanical-human interface in the domains of theatre, the fine arts, literature, radio, and even virtual reality coherently with the digital metamorphosis of our times. The wide-ranging scope of this exploration encompasses Italian, French, and English literature, dummies and marionettes in modernist and contemporary theatre, the fairytale tradition, and traditional and contemporary painting, as well as the older and newer media of radio, television, cinema, and the Internet. The diverse, comparative, and multimedia focus of this original discussion testifies to the enduring transcultural legacy of Pinocchio. Eminently sellable as a traditional cultural icon, Pinocchio is equally impactful and relevant for a globalized, multicultural, and virtual society, from Collodi to Disney and beyond. Katia Pizzi is Senior Lecturer in Italian at the Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London. She has published volumes on cultural identities, including A City in Search of an Author (2001) and The Cultural Identities of European Cities (2010), and on children's literature and illustration.




Walt Disney, from Reader to Storyteller


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Walt Disney, best known as a filmmaker, had perhaps a greater skill as a reader. While many would have regarded Felix Salten's Bambi and Carlo Collodi's Pinocchio as too somber for family-oriented films, he saw their possibilities. He appealed to his audience by selecting but then transforming familiar stories. Many of the tales he chose to adapt to film became some of the most read books in America. Although much published research has addressed his adaptation process--often criticizing his films for being too saccharine or not true to their literary sources--little has been written on him as a reader: what he read, what he liked, his reading experiences and the books that influenced him. This collection of 15 fresh essays and one classic addresses Disney as a reader and shows how his responses to literature fueled his success. Essays discuss the books he read, the ones he adapted to film and the ways in which he demonstrated his narrative ability. Exploring his literary connections to films, nature documentaries, theme park creations and overall creative vision, the contributors provide insight into Walt Disney's relationships with authors, his animation staff and his audience.




The Law and Comedy


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Despite their inherent seriousness, the law and those who practice it, be it lawyers, judges, politicians, or bureaucrats, are amongst the most popular objects of comedy and humour. Sometimes even the mention of the law, or the mere use of legal vocabulary, can trigger laughter. This is deeply counterintuitive, but true across cultures and historical eras: while the law is there to prevent and remedy injustice, it often ends up becoming the butt of comedy. But laughter and comedy, too, are also infused with seriousness: as universal social phenomena, they are extremely complex objects of study. This book maps out the many intersections of the law and laughter, from classical Greece to the present day. Taking on well-known classical and modern works of literature and visual culture, from Aristophanes to Laurel and Hardy and from Nietzsche to Totò and Fernandel, laughter and comedy bring law back to the complexity of human soul and the unpredictability of life.




Pinocchio Goes Postmodern


Book Description

In the first full-length study in English of Carlo Collodi's The Adventures of Pinocchio, the authors show how the checkered history of the puppet illuminates social change from the pre World War One era to the present. The authors argue that most Americans know a trivialized, diluted version of the tale, one such source is Disney's perennial classic. The authors also discover that when adults are introduced to the 'real' story, they often deem it as unsuitable for children. Placing the puppet in a variety of contexts, the authors chart the progression of this childhood tale that has frequently undergone dramatic revisions to suit America's idea of children's literature.




Fairy-Tale Films Beyond Disney


Book Description

The fairy tale has become one of the dominant cultural forms and genres internationally, thanks in large part to its many manifestations on screen. Yet the history and relevance of the fairy-tale film have largely been neglected. In this follow-up to Jack Zipes’s award-winning book The Enchanted Screen (2011), Fairy-Tale Films Beyond Disney offers the first book-length multinational, multidisciplinary exploration of fairy-tale cinema. Bringing together twenty-three of the world’s top fairy-tale scholars to analyze the enormous scope of these films, Zipes and colleagues Pauline Greenhill and Kendra Magnus-Johnston present perspectives on film from every part of the globe, from Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away, to Jan Švankmajer’s Alice, to the transnational adaptations of 1001 Nights and Hans Christian Andersen. Contributors explore filmic traditions in each area not only from their different cultural backgrounds, but from a range of academic fields, including criminal justice studies, education, film studies, folkloristics, gender studies, and literary studies. Fairy-Tale Films Beyond Disney offers readers an opportunity to explore the intersections, disparities, historical and national contexts of its subject, and to further appreciate what has become an undeniably global phenomenon.




Pinocchio's Progeny


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While Carlo Collodi's internationally revered Pinocchio may not have been the single source of the modernist fascination with puppets and marionettes, the book's appearance on the threshold of the modernist movement heralded a new artistic interest in the making of human likenesses. And the puppets, marionettes, and other forms that figure so vividly and provocatively in modernist and avant-garde drama can, according to Harold Segel, be regarded as Pinocchio's progeny. Segel argues that the philosophical, social, and artistic proclivities of the modernist movement converged in the discovery of an exciting new relevance in the puppet and marionette. Previously viewed as entertainment for children and fairground audiences, puppets emerged as an integral component of the modernist vision. They became metaphors for human helplessness in the face of powerful forces -- from Eros and the supernatural to history, industrial society, and national myth. Dramatists used them to satirize the tyranny of bourgeois custom and convention, to deflate the arrogance of the powerful, and to breathe new life into a theater that had become tradition-bound and commercialized. Pinocchio's Progeny offers a broad overview of the uses of these figures in European drama from 1890 to 1935. It considers developments in France, Spain, Italy, Austria, Germany, Sweden, Russia, Poland and Czechoslovakia. In his introduction, Segel reviews the premodernist literary and dramatic treatment of the puppet and marionette from Cervantes' Don Quixote to the turn-of-the- century European cabaret. His epilogue considers the appearance of puppets and marionettes in postmodern European and American drama by examining worksby such dramatists as Jean-Claude Van Itallie, Heiner MA1/4ller, and Tadeusz Kantor.




Puppet


Book Description

The puppet creates delight and fear. It may evoke the innocent play of childhood, or become a tool of ritual magic, able to negotiate with ghosts and gods. Puppets can be creepy things, secretive, inanimate while also full of spirit, alive with gesture and voice. In this eloquent book, Kenneth Gross contemplates the fascination of these unsettling objects—objects that are also actors and images of life. The poetry of the puppet is central here, whether in its blunt grotesquery or symbolic simplicity, and always in its talent for metamorphosis. On a meditative journey to seek the idiosyncratic shapes of puppets on stage, Gross looks at the anarchic Punch and Judy show, the sacred shadow theater of Bali, and experimental theaters in Europe and the United States, where puppets enact everything from Baroque opera and Shakespearean tragedy to Beckettian farce. Throughout, he interweaves accounts of the myriad faces of the puppet in literature—Collodi’s cruel, wooden Pinocchio, puppetlike characters in Kafka and Dickens, Rilke’s puppet-angels, the dark puppeteering of Philip Roth’s Micky Sabbath—as well as in the work of artists Joseph Cornell and Paul Klee. The puppet emerges here as a hungry creature, seducer and destroyer, demon and clown. It is a test of our experience of things, of the human and inhuman. A book about reseeing what we know, or what we think we know, Puppet evokes the startling power of puppets as mirrors of the uncanny in life and art.




Venetian Views, Venetian Blinds


Book Description

Half a millennium of English and American fantasies of Venice: this collection of essays by leading critics in the field explores the continued and continuing fascination of travellers, writers, artists, theatre workers and film makers with the amphibious and ambiguous city in the lagoon. There is hardly another place in Europe that has become so much of a palimpsest, inscribed with the fantasies, the dreams and nightmares of generations of foreigners, and this turns Venetian Views, Venetian Blinds into a particularly pertinent case study of the ways cultural difference within Europe is experienced, enacted and constructed. The essays range across five centuries - from the Renaissance to our postmodern present, from Shakespeare and his contemporary Coryate to recent novels, detective fiction and films - and, in contrast to previous studies focussing on the Grand Tour, they emphasise more recent developments and how they continue or disrupt traditional ways of perceiving - or being blind to! - Venice.