Works of Tonino Guerra

The Works of Tonino Guerra explores the extraordinary screenwriting career of Tonino Guerra, the Italian poet, visual artist, and concentration camp survivor who collaborated with many of Europe’s great auteur filmmakers, among them Michelangelo Antonioni, Federico Fellini, Andrei Tarkovsky, Vittorio De Sica, Francesco Rosi, and Theo Angelopoulos.Guerra’s oeuvre, which includes the masterpieces L’avventura (1960), Red Desert (1964), Blow-Up (1966), Amarcord (1973), and Nostalghia (1983), is incomparable in the history of screenwriting. And although Guerra’s unique voice and lyricism helped define the vanguard of arthouse cinema for decades, this book is the first to be dedicated to his matchless contribution to European filmmaking. Among Guerra’s enduring preoccupations were questions concerning dialect, language, and the subaltern; landscapes, nonhuman life, and the environment; modernity and alienation; as well as contemporary political violence and the spectre of Europe’s fascist past, present, and future.While the book is primarily focused on Guerra’s work as a screenwriter, many of the chapters situate Guerra’s films within his practice across artistic disciplines, drawing upon his acclaimed poetry, novels, landscapes, and visual art. His screenplays—and the resulting films—are also contextualized and analyzed in terms of ecology, colonialism, gender and sexuality, classical form and genre, visuality, style, sound, performance, and space. The volume also presents previously unpublished archival materials that reveal Guerra’s process as a screenwriter and filmmaker. As such, The Works of Tonino Guerra is a major contribution to the study and histories of European cinema, screenwriting, and postwar Italian culture.