Tonino Guerra: Italian Cinema's National Treasure

encompassed dialect poetry, prose fiction, civic initiatives, the pictorial arts, and screenwriting. The preeminent Italian screenwriter of the latter half of the twentieth century, Guerra collaborated with most of the distinguished Italian film directors of his time, including Antonioni, Fellini, Rosi, the Taviani brothers, Petri, De Sica, and Monicelli; he also worked with the Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky, and the Greek director Theo Angelopoulos. The history of Italian cinema cannot be written without taking into account Guerra's exceptional contributions; he was not only a writer of screenplays but also, and more importantly, a close collaborator with most of the directors with whom he worked. His deeply poetic sensibility and his strong preference for the visual image over a plot-driven conception of filmmaking can be seen in such films as Fellini's Amarcord  or Antonioni's Blow-Up,  two of the numerous enduring classics of Italian cinema which were shaped in great part by the poet from Santarcangelo. Based in large part on personal interviews with Guerra, this presentation will focus on his own view of the screenwriter's role in the highly collaborative art of filmmaking. Great cinema is one of modern Italy's most glorious achievements, and Tonino Guerra is without a doubt one of its most distinguished protagonists. He is a genuine "national treasure."
Educated as an Italianist at Yale University, Rebecca West has focused her research and pedagogy on twentieth-century Italian literature, with a concentration on poetry and prose fiction, and more recently, on cinema. She published numerous articles on her areas of interest in American and Italian journals. She serves on several editorial boards for book series and journals, and has been a Visiting Professor at Northwestern University, Stanford, the University of Pennsylvania, and Yale. Her work overall in the area of cinema studies has focused on issues pertaining to gender, stardom, and adaptation, instead of exclusively on the Italian filmic tradition.