The great black spider on its knock-kneed tripod: Reflections of cinema in early twentieth-century Italy

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Abstract

The emergence of cinema as a predominant form of mass entertainment in the 1910s inspired intellectuals to rethink their definitions of art. The Great Black Spider on Its Knock-Kneed Tripod traces the encounter of Italy's writers with cinema, and in doing so offers vibrant new perspectives on the country's early twentieth-century culture. This comparative study focuses on the immediate responses to this cultural phenomenon of three highly influential intellectuals, each with a competing aesthetic vision - Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, founder of Futurism; Gabriele D'Annunzio, leader of Italian Decadentism; and Luigi Pirandello, a father of modern European theatre and theorist of humour. Along with demonstrating how the popularization of the feature-length narrative influenced each author's outlook and theories, Michael Syrimis unravels the extent to which cinema enforced or neutralized the ideological and aesthetic differences between them.

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APA

Syrimis, M. (2012). The great black spider on its knock-kneed tripod: Reflections of cinema in early twentieth-century Italy. The Great Black Spider on its Knock-Kneed Tripod: Reflections of Cinema in Early Twentieth-Century Italy (pp. 1–357). University of Toronto Press. https://doi.org/10.33137/q.i..v35i1.22371

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