Filmmaking by the Book: Italian Cinema and Literary Adaptation.

Professor Marcus's survey of Italian film adaptations is an important and original book that breaks new ground and provides compelling interpretations of Italy's most important directors and their experiences with adaptations of literary works. The author focuses upon major Italian auteurs (Visconti, De Sica, Fellini, Pasolini, the Taviani brothers) and ten different problems of literary adaptation arising within the unique bodies of work produced by these directors. She wisely avoids attempting to resolve abstract problems of adaptation in her opening chapter and concentrates, instead, upon a far more intriguing question--how self-consciously cinematic imaginations intent upon originality nevertheless employ literary texts to resolve artistic problems specific to their individual styles and their historical milieux. Rather than provide a theory of Italian literary adaptation, then, Professor Marcus departs from extremely sophisticated, frequently brilliant analyses of the …