Some puppets come to life in a theater with no windows. This time the puppets interpret William Shakespeare’s Othello.
EN
“In the film, Othello is performed by semi-human puppets in a marionette theatre, shifting within a web of visual and verbal intertexts. More than a simple adaptation or appropriation, the film can be seen as an act of incorporation: the source text is ‘killed’, torn into pieces, and then it is given new life as a personal, intertextual compound.”
Serena Parisi1
“Is Che cosa sono le nuvole? the film we are watching, or the play the puppets are about to perform? But we soon find out that the show the puppets will perform is Othello, as we immediately recognize characters and plot. Is Pasolini telling us that his film is nothing else but a puppet performance? But the puppets are actually real actors acting the roles of puppets that act the characters of Shakespeare’s Othello. This conscious confusion between reality and theater, between theater and cinema, and puppet-man, puppet-character and puppet movie director underlines the self-reflexivity of Pasolini’s cinematic discourse, which is also underscored by the images on the playbills.”
Daniela Bini2
- 1Serena Parisi, “Che Cosa Sono le Nuvole?: Filmic Appropriation and the Rediscovery of Material Reality,” Textus, English Studies in Italy 3 (2018): 33-50.
- 2Daniela Bini, “High and Low Art, Inadequacy of Words, and Self-Referentiality in Pasolini’s Che Cosa Sono Le Nuvole?,” Italica 90, no. 2 (2013): 227–244.
