- published: 03 Mar 2016
- views: 100
Luigi Pirandello (Italian pronunciation: [luˈiːdʒi piranˈdɛllo]; 28 June 1867 – 10 December 1936) was an Italian dramatist, novelist, and short story writer awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1934, for his "bold and brilliant renovation of the drama and the stage". Pirandello's works include novels, hundreds of short stories, and about 40 plays, some of which are written in Sicilian. Pirandello's tragic farces are often seen as forerunners for Theatre of the Absurd.
Pirandello was born into an upper-class family in a village with the curious name of Kaos (Chaos), a poor suburb of Girgenti (Agrigento, a town in southern Sicily). His father, Stefano, belonged to a wealthy family involved in the sulphur industry and his mother, Caterina Ricci Gramitto, was also of a well-to-do background, descending from a family of the bourgeois professional class of Agrigento. Both families, the Pirandellos and the Ricci Gramittos, were ferociously anti-Bourbon and actively participated in the struggle for unification and democracy ("Il Risorgimento"). Stefano participated in the famous Expedition of the Thousand, later following Garibaldi all the way to the battle of Aspromonte and Caterina, who had hardly reached the age of thirteen, was forced to accompany her father to Malta, where he had been sent into exile by the Bourbon monarchy. But the open participation in the Garibaldian cause and the strong sense of idealism of those early years were quickly transformed, above all in Caterina, into an angry and bitter disappointment with the new reality created by the unification. Pirandello would eventually assimilate this sense of betrayal and resentment and express it in several of his poems and in his novel The Old and the Young. It is also probable that this climate of disillusion inculcated in the young Luigi the sense of disproportion between ideals and reality which is recognizable in his essay on humorism (L'Umorismo).
Actors: Nicola Piovani (composer), Vittorio Taviani (writer), Margarita Lozano (actress), Paolo Taviani (writer), Luigi Pirandello (writer), Tonino Guerra (writer), Ciccio Ingrassia (actor), Tony Sperandeo (actor), Franco Franchi (actor), Claudio Bigagli (actor), Omero Antonutti (actor), Regina Bianchi (actress), Massimo Bonetti (actor), Paolo Taviani (director), Lina Nerli Taviani (costume designer),
Plot: The film consists of four stories plus epilogue, set in 19th-century Sicily. THE OTHER SON - A mother spends her life waiting for news from her two sons (emigrated to America) while ignoring her third, because he is the reincarnation of the bandit who raped her. MOON SICKNESS - a newly-wed peasant girl discovers that her husband goes mad every full moon. She arranges for a male friend to protect her, but they end up in bed together just as the moon emerges from behind a cloud. THE JAR - a rich landowner hires a master craftsman to repair a giant olive jar, but the craftsman gets trapped inside. REQUIEM - villagers band together in an attempt to force their landlord to let them bury their dead. CONVERSATIONS WITH MOTHER - the writer Luigi Pirandello talks with his aged mother about a story he always wanted to write, but which he never managed to capture in words.
Keywords: amphitheater, animal-abuse, anthology, based-on-novel, beach, bell, bird-nest-full-of-eggs, bocci-ball, burial, cactus