Abstract
For a considerable period of time, literary Modernism has been mainly associated with the study of the novel and poetry rather than drama perhaps due to New Criticism’s emphasis on the text and disregard of performance. This profound anti-theatrical thrust of Modernism has to be, most certainly, re-examined and reassessed, particularly within the context of Australian literature and, more specifically, Australian theatre. That Australian modernist theatre has been inconspicuous on the world stage seems to be an obvious and undisputable statement of facts. Yet, with Patrick White, English-born but Australian-bred 1976 Nobel Prize winner for literature, Australian low-brow uneasy mix of British vaudevilles, farces and Shakespeare, mingled with the local stories of bushranging and convictism, got to a new start. Patrick White’s literary output is immense and impressive, particularly in regards to his widely acclaimed and renowned novels; yet, as it seems, his contribution to Australian – least the world – drama is virtually unknown, especially in Europe. The aim of this paper is, therefore, to disclose those modernist elements in Patrick White’s play, The Ham Funeral, that would argue for the playwright to be counted as one of the world avant-garde modernist dramatists alongside Beckett and Ionesco.
Highlights
Marta Eggerth, a star of German musical films in the 1930s; Austrian screenwriter Walter Reisch; Franz Planer, a master of cinematography, active in Berlin and Vienna; film composer Willy Schmidt-Gentner; and set designer Werner Schlichting: what do they have to do with the Italian film Casta Diva, directed in 1935 by Carmine Gallone and generally considered a high point in Italian cinema of the 1930s? The question may serve as an introduction to the following investigation of a number of Austrian and Italian films, among which Casta Diva, made in cooperation between Rome and Vienna around the mid-1930s
Linking to previous studies by the author on AustrianItalian cinematic cooperation during the 1930s (Bono, 2015) as well as the influence of German cinema on Italian musical films of the time (Bono, 1999), this essay will examine some of the major Austrian-Italian cooperation projects in the field of film developed in the mid-1930s
Beside Gallone’s film Casta Diva, further films which will be considered in this essay are Tagebuch der Geliebten (1935), Una donna tra due mondi (1936), Opernring (1936), and Blumen aus Nizza (1936)
Summary
Marta Eggerth, a star of German musical films in the 1930s; Austrian screenwriter Walter Reisch; Franz Planer, a master of cinematography, active in Berlin and Vienna; film composer Willy Schmidt-Gentner; and set designer Werner Schlichting: what do they have to do with the Italian film Casta Diva, directed in 1935 by Carmine Gallone. Beside Gallone’s film Casta Diva, further films which will be considered in this essay are Tagebuch der Geliebten (1935), Una donna tra due mondi (1936), Opernring (1936), and Blumen aus Nizza (1936). Their production involved some of the biggest names in Italian and German-speaking cinema of the time, including, besides Gallone, Italian directors Augusto Genina and Goffredo Alessandrini; the Germans Arthur Maria Rabenalt and Hermann Kosterlitz (who would later work in Hollywood as Henry Koster), as well as Italian novelist Corrado Alvaro and some of the greatest stars of Italian and German film in the 1930s, from the aforementioned Eggerth to Italian Isa Miranda and Polish tenor Jan Kiepura.
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