Reviewed by: Pirandello and Film by Nina da Vinci Nichols and Jana O'Keefe Bazzoni Piero Garofalo Pirandello and Film. By Nina da Vinci Nichols and Jana O’Keefe Bazzoni. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1995; pp. xxviii + 248. $49.50 cloth. Luigi Pirandello has been considered a playwright, a writer of fiction, and even a lackluster poet, but recently his entire persona has been reconfigured to grant him a position within the nascent Italian film industry. Partly due to the expiration of the heirs’ exclusive proprietary rights at the end of December 1992, the last few years have witnessed a plethora of publications of edited and unedited materials. In addition to this book, two recent works are of particular interest for theatre specialists: a collection of theatre-related documents edited by Susan Bassnett and Jennifer Lorch, Luigi Pirandello in the Theatre: A Documentary Record (Switzerland: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1993) and Pirandello’s letters to the actress Marta Abba, translated and edited by Benito Ortolani (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). Nina da Vinci Nichols and Jana O’Keefe Bazzoni take full advantage of this new-found wealth of material to produce an engaging and fascinating portrayal of Pirandello’s unsuccessful efforts to transform the revolutionary Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921) into a film. The text is divided into two parts. Part one, “Commentary,” is comprised of six chapters analyzing Pirandello’s relation to cinema. The first chapter examines the 1915 novel Si gira! (Shoot!), which details Pirandello’s familiarity with the film industry. This avant-garde narrative addresses the possibility of a reconciliation between the mechanical reproduction of reality and the instability of reality in flux. Framed by an opposition between mechanical objectivity and artistic subjectivity, the text retains an ambivalent, yet tragic perspective. Pirandello’s novel resonates with concerns similar to that of his plays: form and flux, art and life, reason and madness. Chapter 2 examines the development of certain themes (in particular absence and self-creation) that would coalesce in Six Characters. This rapid overview of Pirandello’s pre-1921 theatre and fiction, centered primarily on the 1904 [End Page 526] modernist novel Il fu Mattia Pascal (The Late Mattia Pascal), attests both to the continuity and to the increasing complexity of Pirandello’s poetics. Even in these early works there emerges the portrait of an author aware of the technical, dramatic, and metaphysical possibilities of film. The final four chapters of this first section analyze the various film scripts that Pirandello developed. Chapter 3 examines the Prologo (Prologue), a précis, first published in 1926, for a film version of Six Characters. This curious piece, written in the first person and signed by the author, remained virtually unknown until its republication in 1941. The Prologue suggests that perhaps the symbolic interpretations of George Pitoëff, staged in Paris (1923), and of Max Reinhardt, staged in Berlin (1924), provided the imaginative impetus to transform the drama into a film. The fourth chapter focuses on the Film-Novelle (Scenario), a more elaborate and detailed outline for a silent film based on Six Characters. Pirandello had taken up residence in Berlin in 1928, and collaborated on this work with Adolph Lantz in 1928 and 1929. The Scenario attests to his realization that any cinematic production would have to come from German or American financing. Chapter 5 emphasizes Pirandello’s emotional investment in the tortuous attempts to see his project come to fruition. What emerges is a portrait of a quasi-obsessive artist committed to the integrity of art, but also to financial remuneration from art. Throughout this chapter and indeed throughout the entire “Commentary,” the spectre of Marta Abba haunts the playwright. So many of his decisions are based on an excessive devotion to her that it appears legitimate to question the soundness of his judgment. The illusions that emerge from his letters, fundamental in reconstructing this period in his life, suggest that his own intransigence played a determining role in the project’s failure. Chapter 6 analyzes the Treatment for Six Characters, a prose-sketch written in English in 1935 with the collaboration of Saul Colin, Pirandello’s secretary. The Treatment was presented...