La terra trema as Palimpsest: Tracing Intertextualities between Literature, Theater, and Film in Pirandello and Visconti

Abstract

At an advanced stage of the preparation of La terra trema (1948), Luchino Visconti incorporated elements of Giovanni Verga’s I Malavoglia into his film to change the original documentary nature of his masterpiece. But Verga’s novel was not the only stimulus of Visconti’s grandiose imagination. In fact, the social utopia that feeds Visconti’s dream is an element that cannot be inferred from I Malavoglia , a work that intentionally avoids conveying any message of social change. Instead, Visconti’s film can be read as a product of literary mediations that establish a hermeneutical process which examines the incessant bidirectional dialogue between literature and film. This process brings into play Luigi Pirandello’s La nuova colonia , born as an incomplete filmic subject. In my reading of it, Visconti’s La terra trema embodies the ideal completion of this unfinished filmic project.