Cinematic structures in Italo Calvino’s fictions

Abstract

The article explores the influence of cinema on Italo Calvino’s writing. Critics and even Calvino himself have tended to construe visibility in his works as purely abstract, pictorial and geometric. However, the article shows that the writer’s style includes references to film form and culture. Precise transmediations of cinematic temporality, techniques and characterization are found in his literary production from Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno (The Path to the Spiders’ Nests) (1947) to Palomar (Mr Palomar) (1983). Drawing on narratology and semiotics, the analysis retraces various para-cinematic techniques in Calvino’s literary corpus, pointing to the 1958 short story La signora Paulatim (Mrs Paulatim) as a prime example of full cinematization. Moreover, it points out that the characterization in Marcovaldo (1963) draws on classical slapstick comedies and anticipates some of the features found in the Fantozzi series. Finally, the article frames the contribution of film culture through the concept of ‘cinematic mode in fiction’.