ABSTRACT
It was Gérard Genette who emphasised the fundamental importance of all those elements to be found on the 'threshold' of a work, whether literary or cinematic. For instance, when the title and credits begin to roll in Ettore Scola's Riusciranno i nostri Eroi a ritrovare I'Amico misteriosamente scomparso in Africa? (1968), they are accompanied by tribal-sounding chants and a succession of slides, showing explorers' travels around Africa. They range from rugged and barren landscapes to scenes of big-game hunting, and from slave trading to Stanley's encounter with Livingstone. Coherently reverberating the sense of a sesquipedalian title, these nondiegetic shots carry out the second of the epigraphic functions as suggested by Genette in Seuils, which consists of 'un commentaire du texte, dont elle précise ou souligne indirectement la signification'.1 Maybe even too 'indirectly', however, because when I sent a video cassette of Scola's first film to Gene Moore a few years ago, while he was working on a collection of essays published by Cambridge University Press in 1997 as Conrad on Film, he could not fully appreciate the brilliant parodie disguise this film represented of Conrad's story, though, in private correspondence, he found the film striking for its exuberance and joie de vivre.
