Cinematograph and Cinematic Narration in Giuseppe Genna’s Novel “Italia De Profundis”

Abstract

Modern writers actively use the film looking in a literary text. In the author’s article the focus is on cinematographic techniques used by Giuseppe Genna, an Italian writer, in his novel “Italia De Profundis” (2008), such as film editing, switching the perspective, combining close-ups with distant views, etc.
Aside of cinematic techniques, the topic of cinema as such is considered: the image of the screen, the motive of the acting, ways of representing the person as a character. The screen in the novel appears in a negative way, as something sinister, changing the nature of the person.
The hero’s beloved is an actress and her habit of “playing” destroys love relationships. The screen generates a twin of the protagonist and is a door to another reality, where it is not the person that acts, but the character. Genna develops his novel as an Unknown Narrative Object guided by Pier Paolo Pasolini’s literary heritage and actively uses the extraliterary resources accompanying the text with the videos booktrailers, including a review of Lynch’s film “Inland Empire” in the texture of the narration, and so on. By creating a multitext novel with the use of different visual means that literature can access, the author tries to reflect the modern age and show «a hero of our time».