ABSTRACT
When the subject of a film is not original but derived from a work of literary fiction, then, a problem of creative dependency of the former upon the latter may arise. For this reason, a director of the calibre of Federico Fellini used to remark that, whenever cinema resorts to a literary text, the result will always be, at best, a transposition of an illustrative kind, which coincides with the original in purely documentary details: the plot, the situations, the characters: in other words a whole series of data which our daily observation of reality or newspaper reading could supply with more stimulating richness and immediacy. Why, then, turn to literature in order to make a film? Fellini thought that even authoritative directors were prompted to make films based on literary works because of commercial reasons: ‘Casanova, come il Satyricon, il Decamerone, l’Orlando Furioso appartengono a quel tipo di film che si presume allettino i produttori e che quindi rappresentano una notevole moneta di scambio: io realizzo il Satyricon, ma tu, produttore, poi mi lasci fare Roma’. (‘Casanova, as much as Satyricon, Decameron, Orlando Furioso, are that sort of film that entice producers and therefore are precious currency: I make a Satyricon, but then, you producer, allow me to make Roma.’) 1 Yet, even Fellini, before dying in 1993 at the peak of his celebrity, when, in other words, he was able to impose his artistic choices on his producers, was planning to film his own version of Pinocchio, and we even know of an audition where Pinocchio was played by Roberto Benigni. 2
