La mafia siciliana tra parola e immagine: da Leonardo Sciascia al cinema-documento.

This thesis studies the ways in which the Sicilian mafia has been represented in Italy between the 1960’s and 1970’s. Starting from an intermedial perspective the thesis takes into consideration how the subject has developed in Italian literature focusing in particular on Leonardo Sciascia’s writings. More specifically the study compares the literary parameters in his novels to different films which present the criminal phenomenon. In this sense one of the main objectives of the thesis is to demonstrate how the mutual convergence of two languages (word and image) marks the specific representation of Sicilian mafia in a relevant way. The thesis is structured as follows. Chapter one reconstructs the way in which the topic has been dealt with Italian/Sicilian literature from the nineteenth century until nowadays. Moreover the same chapter focuses on the detective story and the evolution of this particular genre in Italy. This section takes into account the influences of the English and American detective stories with particular attention to specific social changes at the end of the first half of the 20th century. Furthermore the representation of the mafia theme is related to the fundamental debate between fiction and non-fiction. The last part of chapter one takes into consideration the documental aspect in mafia fiction on the one hand and mafia as a literary genre on the other hand. Chapter two outlines the methodological approach on which this research is based. After considering specific intermedial theories (and their applications), the focus moves gradually to the convergences between writing and filming. This part tackles in particular the dimensions of time and space which are fundamental in the comparison of both languages. Moreover this section introduces the concept of chronotope, a theoretical device on which the analysis and the comparison of novels and films will be based. Chapter three considers Sciascia’s relation with film from different perspectives: his specific idea of ‘seeing’ through images, his collaboration with film productions and his comments on several filmic adaptations of his novels. The second part of this chapter analyses different primary texts (articles, prefaces, short essays) where he describes the mafia phenomenon. The aim of this section is to define a specific vision of the Sicilian mafia and to outline a dominant chronotope in its representation. Therefore we take also into account historical and social theories which Sciascia mentions in his writings. In this sense the ‘mafia as an association’ is the main motive that will be taken into consideration to analyse Sciascia’s two novels in chapter four. In chapters four and five the concept of chronotope has been applied to two kinds of texts. The fourth chapter analyses two of Sciascia's novels Il giorno della civetta (1961) and Il contesto (1971). Chapter five focuses on the filmic language, analysing two film adaptations of Sciascia’s novels Il giorno della civetta (1968) of Damiano Damiani and Cadaveri eccellenti (1976) of Francesco Rosi. In the examination of the configuration of time and space this section compares the specific narration of the films to the narration of the novels relating them to the dominant chronotope ‘mafia as an association’. Chapter six analyses Gianfranco Mingozzi’s documentary Con il cuore fermo, Sicilia (1965). A close dialogue between filmic/photographic images and Sciascia’s written text configures in this case the specific representation of mafia defined by the Sicilian writer. Sciascia’s work represents a fundamental step towards the representation of a complex phenomenon such as the Sicilian mafia in particular due to the ability to document through fiction. This study underlines how this specificity finds his expression through relevant and significant intermedial elements dealing with fundamental aspects related to a representation of mafia that is not only oriented towards the correspondent genre.nrpages: 402status: publishe