Giving to see with words: Cinema and Literature in Italo Calvino

Abstract

Discussions about the relations between Image and Word are recurring in the work of Italo Calvino, who had always searched to project in his books images that might rebuild his imaginary worlds, in order to think the blank page such as a movie screen. So, we’ll demonstrate how the Calvino’s literary produce combines the imaging to the verbal,   searching to build images from the word, or aiming to translate mental images into words. Starting, so, the intersections between image and word, we’ll get the considerations made by Calvino about cinema and literature, presenting a context in which the cinema was the world to the Italian writer and revealing the effects of World War II such Calvino’s vision of the cinematography production, as the insertion of a politically engaged young writer in the literature’s world. In this paper, we aim to reflect about the relations between literature and cinema in Calvino’s work, remarking how the whole calvinian writing can be considered as a cinematography of words.