ABSTRACT

The theme of an erotic infatuation seems to have been channelled both via the literary source and its filmic adaptation, the latter, where the writer Gustav Aschenbach (himself modelled on Gustav Mahler) is turned into a musician, undoubtedly having inspired the musical theme in Quartetto Basileus. Fabio Carpi's films have had a limited distribution and he remains a little-known figure in contemporary cinema, the 'outsider of his generation', as Michel Boujut calls him. Whilst the relations between Guglielmo and Morelli are thus explicitly based on the Charlus-Morel constellation from the Recherche, Quartetto Basileus makes numerous other direct allusions to Marcel Proust. The 'intermittenze del cuore', as experiences of involuntary memory are called in the film, can resuscitate the past without, however, reconciling past and present. The director makes no secret of his peripheral status in Italian cinema. A successful writer of fiction himself, literature and the cinema form an inseparable symbiosis in his creative life.