The ghost woman: Images of film petrarchism

Abstract

Although the strength and immensity of Petrarch's influences on cinema must sometimes be sought and found with the meticulous patience of the entomologist or metaphor scholar, Gino Frezza traces significant and inescapable presences of Petrarch's poetic figures in the cinematographic tradition of classical cinema and in modern and contemporary cinema. The relationship between Petrarca's work and cinema is revealed, albeit in filigree, in the crucial and enigmatic value of a cultural crossroads that is not secondary, recurrent and full of surprises. Prima Frezza reviews how Petrarca, in Canzoniere's rhymes, weaves the difficult and complex interface between rhyme and image, the dimension of writing and the visual configuration, and how, for this interface, the figure of the Woman imposes itself in terms of an image with a high ghostly coefficient. The author then illustrates the permanence of Petrarch's poetic themes in a context of cinematographic productions by authors and periods of the twentieth century which, with the work of the Italian poet, have no explicit relationship or affiliation or metaphorical proximity. Here, then, is Petrarch's "ghost woman" who transforms herself into the filmic physiognomies of the frame woman and the mirror woman, the statue woman, the memory woman and, finally, the ideal woman. The analysis of the Petrarchist influences in cinema concludes by attributing to the 14th-century Italian poet the most lucidly conscious origin of a theory of tears, which not by chance and very often suddenly cover the eyes of filmgoers. The tears of the spectator - an experience both physical and lyrical, manifest and intimate - correspond to Petrarch's tears, before the earthly vanity of mortals.