0000000000353631
AUTHOR
Maurizio Calbi
showing 12 related works from this author
States of Exception: Auto-immunity and the Body Politic in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus
2010
The essay starts by referring to a central moment in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, when the Roman hero reacts to his banishment by banishing: “I banish you!" (3.3.123). These lines, the essay argues, provide, in a condensed form, a radical shift of perspective on the question of the boundaries of Rome: how far does Rome extend? Can Rome banish herself ? Does Rome move with Coriolanus as he moves “elsewhere” (3. 3. 135)? They also force the audience to reconsider the "nature" of the political decision that leads to the ban. Taking its cue from this line, the essay shows that the question of boundaries in Coriolanus is intimately connected with the uncanny logic of "auto-immunity" which affects R…
Shakespeare in the Extreme: Addiction, Ghosts and (Re)Mediation in Alexander Fodor’s Hamlet
2011
This article is an analysis of Fodor's filmic version of Hamlet as simultaneously reverent and irreverent toward the canonical status of the Bard. It shows how Hamlet is being recycled by being brought into contact with contemporary citational environments, from pop music to drug culture.
Chasing Shakespeare: The Impurity of the “Not Quite” in Norry Niven’s From Above and Abbas Kiarostami’s Where Is My Romeo
2017
The essay situates the “not Shakespeare” of this volume within the theoretical problematics of the “post-textual.” It re-elaborates the “post-textual” as the uncanny re-appearance of Shakespeare in the form of heterogeneous fragments that are made to cohabit with various textual and media environments. These media products include a “Shakespeare” that is not quite Shakespeare, an “entity” that becomes the site of unceasing transactions (for instance, between an “outside” and an “inside,” between visibility and invisibility, between the “original” and its iteration) and multiple contaminations (through media, characters, and plays).
“This England”: Re-Visiting Shakespearean Landscapes and Mediascapes in John Akomfrah’s The Nine Muses (2010)
2017
The paper will offer a reading of John Akomfrah’s The Nine Muses (2010), a 90-minute experimental feature film that has been defined as “one of the most vital and original artistic responses to the subject of immigration that British cinema has ever produced” (Mitchell). It will focus on the multifarious ways in which the film makes the “canonical” literary material that it incorporates, including Shakespeare, interact with rarely seen archival material from the BBC regarding the experience of Caribbean and South Asian immigrants in 1950s and 1960s Britain. It will argue that through this interaction the familiarity of Western “canonical” literature re-presents itself as an uncanny landscap…
Spectral Shakespeares. Media Adaptations in the Twenty-First Century.
2013
The book is an exploration of recent, experimental adaptations of Shakespeare on film, TV, and the web. Drawing on adaptation studies and media theory as well as Jacques Derrida’s work, this book argues that these adaptations foreground a cluster of self-reflexive "themes" - from incorporation to reiteration, from migration to addiction, from silence to survival - that contribute to the redefinition of adaptation, and Shakespearean adaptation in particular, as an unfinished and interminable process. The "Shakespeare" that emerges from these adaptations is a fragmentary, mediatized, and heterogeneous presence, a spectral Shakespeare that leaves its mark on our contemporary mediascape.
Shakespeare a part: Scenes of Translation in Jean-Luc Godard's Bande a part and the Nouvelle Vague
2018
The article explores the "otherness" of Shakespeare in some films of the nouvelle vague of the early sixties, and argues that this otherness is bound up with processes of cultural translation involving different kinds of movements (i.e., across cultures, languages as well as media boundaries
‘‘This is my home, too’’: Migration, spectrality and hospitality inRoberta Torre’s Sud Side Stori (2000)
2011
The article explores Roberta Torre’s film Sud Side Stori (2000), an extravagant Italian re-vision of Romeo and Juliet set in the Sicilian city of Palermo which displays awareness of the global circulation of the story of the two ‘‘star-crossed lovers’’. In the film, which combines neo-realist cinematographic techniques with the artificial style of the musical, Shakespeare’s young lovers become Toni Giulietto, a lousy local rock singer, and Romea Wacoubo, a beautiful Nigerian prostitute who falls in love with him when she sees him standing on his balcony. Not unlike West Side Story, the inter-racial passion between Toni and Romea exacerbates pre-existing ethnic conflicts. It is opposed not o…
“In States Unborn and Accents Yet Unknown”: Spectral Shakespeare in Paolo and Vittorio Taviani’s Cesare deve morire (Caesar Must Die).
2014
The paper focuses on Paolo and Vittorio Taviani’s Cesare deve morire (Caesar Must Die) (2012), an Italian adaptation of Julius Caesar set in a high security prison in Rome with a cast entirely made of convicts or former convicts. It explores how this adaptation "deconstructs" and "rewrites" Shakespeare (from an "Interview" with the film directors), especially by setting Julius Caesar in the "unborn state" of a prison, and through the use of a number of "accents yet unknown"–the inclusion of "dialects" from the South of Italy that not only displace the English "original" but also "standard" Italian translations of the play. The paper argues that the "Shakespeare" that emerges from this film …
Exilic/Idyllic Shakespeare: Reiterating Pericles in Jacques Rivette’s Paris nous appartient
2015
Jacques Rivette’s Paris nous appartient (1961) is about a literature student, Anne Goupil, who becomes involved with a group of bohemians centering around the absent figure of Spanish musician, Juan. The film incorporates the attempt by theatre director Gérard Lenz – in many ways a simulacrum of Rivette himself – to stage Pericles, even though this is a play that he himself defines as “incoherent” and “unplayable.” This essay explores the significance of this incorporation, and shows how the reiterated, fragmentary rehearsals of this “unplayable” play are essential to an understanding of the (disjointed) logic of the film as well as the atmosphere of conspiracy it continually evokes. It als…
The boundaries of citation and allusion: Shakespeare in Davide ferrario's Tutta colpa di giuda (2008), Alfredo Peyretti's Moana (2009), and Connie Ma…
2018
The paper focuses on the following samples of media material: Davide Ferrario’s Tutta colpa di Giuda (2008), a film set in an Italian prison that references Hamlet; Alfredo Peyretti’s Moana (2009), which is about the life of Italian porn star Moana Pozzi, and incorporates lines from A Midsummer Night’s Dream; a 2001 episode of Crime Scene Investigation entitled “Caged” that makes citations from Othello interact with an investigation into what looks like a murder; and Connie Macatuno’s Rome and Juliet (2006), a Filipino experimental film that turns Shakespeare’s tragic love story into a lesbian romance. The paper argues that “Shakespeare” is a fragmentary but significant presence in each of …
Approximate Bodies. Gender and Power in Early Modern Drama and Anatomy
2005
The early modern period was an age of anatomical exploration and revelation, with new discoveries capturing the imagination not only of scientists but also of playwrights and poets. Approximate Bodies examines the changing representation of the body in early modern drama and in the period’s anatomical and gynaecological treatises. The book traces a number of emblematic figurations of the body, which it sees as dramatized and rearticulated in the period’s texts: the eroticized, deformed body of the outsider, for example, or the effeminate body of the desiring male and the disfigured body parts of the desiring female. Drawing on the theories of Foucault, Derrida and Lacan and working through …
“Speaking in Terror: Femininity, Monstrosity and ‘Race’ in Early Modern Culture”
2002
The chapter examines how the intersecting vectors of gender and race contribute to the configuration of monstrosity in early modern drama and anatomy, and how this construction is simultaneously powerful and haunted by the fear of the 'other'.