ABSTRACT
Pier Paolo Pasolini adapted and directed a short cinematic version of Shakespeare’s Othello in 1967. Che Cosa Sono Le Nuvole? (What Are Clouds Like? henceforth Nuvole) was initially conceived as one of the episodes of a feature film called Capriccio all’ Italiana (1968) but has since been shown as a short film in its own right and is often included in retrospectives on Pasolini’s career as a film-maker.1 Pasolini’s work is better known abroad than in Italy, where his sexuality, his uncompromising political views and the controversial circumstances of his death in 1975 still overshadow his artistic stature. However, Nuvole is still largely unknown even among Shakespearean scholars, partly because a long and unresolved copyright dispute has prevented it from being re-released, and partly because Pasolini himself may have regarded it as a fragment of a larger project, a sequence of short films which he never completed. And yet, even as a fragment, Nuvole represents a groundbreaking appropriation of Othello and deserves more visibility than it has been accorded so far. Like the other local Shakespeares discussed in this volume Nuvole represents a significant ‘new position’ within the field, which, as Bourdieu puts it, ‘by asserting itself … determines a displacement of [its] structure’ (1993: 58).
