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A Grammar of Cinepoiesis

Poetic Cameras of Italian Cinema

Silvia Carlorosi

Cinepoiesis, or cinema of poetry, strikes us as a strange combination, a phrase we initially read as an oxymoron. Poetry is often associated with the abstract and the evocative, while cinema suggests the concrete and the visible. Yet, various visual media use strong and often contradictory images, whose symbolic force and visual impact stimulate the public’s attention. Abstract and emblematic images surround us, and the poetic nature of these images lies in the way they speak beyond their apparent limits and stimulate connections on a subjective level. A prosaic world like the contemporary one, though, no longer seems to hold a place for poetry. We are inundated by the need to tell and to be told, the need to build our lives through narratives. But it is precisely here, in this contemporary landscape, that the cinema of poetry attempts to establish a space for itself, exchanging the productive and industrial apparatus for the poetic stimulus of a sensory experience. A Grammar of Cinepoiesis is a theoretical and practical guide to the cinema of poetry, to its tools and forms. It examines how the language of a “cinema of poetry” works both in its theoretical foundations and in its modes of representation, and how it takes shape in the exemplary practice of Italian authors such as Pier Paolo Pasolini, Michelangelo Antonioni, Federico Fellini, and the more recent Franco Piavoli and Matteo Garrone.

Lexington Books

Pages: 222 • Trim: 6⅜ x 9¼

978-1-4985-0984-8 • Hardback • September 2015 • $121.00 • (£93.00)

978-1-4985-0986-2 • Paperback • April 2019 • $50.99 • (£39.00)

978-1-4985-0985-5 • eBook • September 2015 • $48.00 • (£37.00)

Series: Cine-Aesthetics: New Directions in Film and Philosophy

Subjects: Social Science / Media Studies, History / Europe / Italy, Performing Arts / Film / General

A Grammar of Cinepoiesis

Poetic Cameras of Italian Cinema

Hardback

Paperback

eBook

Summary

Cinepoiesis, or cinema of poetry, strikes us as a strange combination, a phrase we initially read as an oxymoron. Poetry is often associated with the abstract and the evocative, while cinema suggests the concrete and the visible. Yet, various visual media use strong and often contradictory images, whose symbolic force and visual impact stimulate the public’s attention. Abstract and emblematic images surround us, and the poetic nature of these images lies in the way they speak beyond their apparent limits and stimulate connections on a subjective level. A prosaic world like the contemporary one, though, no longer seems to hold a place for poetry. We are inundated by the need to tell and to be told, the need to build our lives through narratives. But it is precisely here, in this contemporary landscape, that the cinema of poetry attempts to establish a space for itself, exchanging the productive and industrial apparatus for the poetic stimulus of a sensory experience. A Grammar of Cinepoiesis is a theoretical and practical guide to the cinema of poetry, to its tools and forms. It examines how the language of a “cinema of poetry” works both in its theoretical foundations and in its modes of representation, and how it takes shape in the exemplary practice of Italian authors such as Pier Paolo Pasolini, Michelangelo Antonioni, Federico Fellini, and the more recent Franco Piavoli and Matteo Garrone.

Details

Lexington Books

Pages: 222 • Trim: 6⅜ x 9¼

978-1-4985-0984-8 • Hardback • September 2015 • $121.00 • (£93.00)

978-1-4985-0986-2 • Paperback • April 2019 • $50.99 • (£39.00)

978-1-4985-0985-5 • eBook • September 2015 • $48.00 • (£37.00)

Series: Cine-Aesthetics: New Directions in Film and Philosophy

Subjects: Social Science / Media Studies, History / Europe / Italy, Performing Arts / Film / General

Author

Silvia Carlorosi is adjunct professor at the City College of New York.

Table of Contents

Chapter IMeter and Rhetoric: Leopardi’s Poetry in Federico Fellini’s La voce
della luna
Chapter II“Im-Signs” and Free Indirect Subjective
Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Cinema of Poetry: Accattone and Mamma Roma

Chapter III Color and Focus: Michelangelo Antonioni’s Il Deserto Rosso and Blow Up

Chapter IVSound and Silence: Franco Piavoli’s Il pianeta azzurro and Nostos

Chapter VMovement and Form: Matteo Garrone’s Primo amore and Gomorra

EpilogueThe Visual Power of Images

Appendix IAn Interview with Franco Piavoli

Appendix IIAn Interview with Matteo Garrone

Reviews

Leopardi's “Silvia” leads us to find poetry in life and life in poetry. Silvia Carlorosi, adapting Leopardi's poetics, leads us to look for poetry in cinema and to engage in the process of poiesis or creation that poetic cinema requires of the viewer, not only to understand the reality represented on the screen, but to appreciate and enrich our own lives as well.
— Sante Matteo, Miami University

Presented in a clear and engaging style and supported by detailed analysis of selected films by both canonical auteurs and newer filmmakers, Carlorosi’s book offers important and original insights for the understanding of the ‘cinema of poetry.’ The meanings of a ‘poetic camera’ will be less obscure after reading this study.
— Roberta Tabanelli, University of Missouri-Columbia

In this rigorous and impassioned study, Silvia Carlorosi develops a critical methodology based on Pier Paolo Pasolini’s seminal “Cinema of Poetry” essay, amplified by extensive research in the field of image theory. The result is a series of case studies which investigate the irrational, disruptive, and multidimensional workings of the image in examples from the filmographies of Pasolini, Fellini, Antonioni, Garrone, and Piavoli. This is a powerful new tool for the analysis of films which defy the codified norms of cinematic convention and instead propose a liberated, open-ended, and visionary approach to the world of lived experience.
— Millicent Marcus, Yale

A Grammar of Cinepoiesis

Poetic Cameras of Italian Cinema

Silvia Carlorosi

A Grammar of Cinepoiesis

Poetic Cameras of Italian Cinema

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