Luigi Pirandello
Birth : 1867-06-29, Girgenti, Sicily, Italy [now Agrigento, Sicily, Italy]
Death : 1936-12-10
History
Luigi Pirandello (1867–1936) was an Italian dramatist, novelist, poet, and short story writer, best known for his many acclaimed stage plays and several successful novels such as The Late Mattia Pascal (1904) and One, No One and One Hundred Thousand (1926). He was awarded the 1934 Nobel Prize in Literature for "his almost magical power to turn psychological analysis into good theatre."
Pirandello's works include about 40 plays, some of which are written in Sicilian. Pirandello's tragic farces are often seen as forerunners of the Theatre of the Absurd. His first major play, Right You Are (if You Think You Are) (1917), explored the relativity of truth, a lifelong subject for Pirandello. Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921) contrasted art and life; it was followed by the tragedy Henry IV (1922). His other plays include Each in His Own Way (1924) and Tonight We Improvise (1930). He established the Teatro d’Arte in Rome and toured the world with his company (1925–27). Nearly all of Pirandello's plays were translated into English by the actor Robert Rietti.
Original Story
On a set filled with tension, a nervous director tries to shoot a horror movie. Meanwhile, six strangers suddenly appear who tell their story, explaining that they are the characters of the script left by a dead author.
Novel
A tale of three surreal Pirandello funerals intertwined with the murder of a young Sicilian immigrant boy in Brooklyn for what is described as a surreal, grotesque, complex narrative.
Novel
A train station in Sicily. There are two people in the waiting room: one is “the man with the flower in his mouth” in the film's title, who has confronted and threatened a mysterious woman outside the station. The other is “the peaceful customer,” who missed his train because of presents for the women in his family which hindered him as he ran and made him trip on the train tracks. The man with the flower in his mouth has helped the peaceful customer and immediately establishes a relationship of trust and empathy with him. The two recount their lives, but whereas the peaceful man talks about his frustrations, the man with the flower in his mouth keeps steering the conversation toward just one topic: death. Everything seems wrapped in mystery, starting with the identity of the woman outside the station...
Novel
Writer
Rome, early 20th century: a wealthy psychiatrist, who runs an asylum for women and lacks imagination in his practice, must find a wet nurse for his infant when his wife panics after childbirth. He brings a peasant, Annette, to Rome, forcing her to leave her own baby behind. To the consternation and increasing anger of the wife, the nanny immediately bonds with the couple's infant son - Annette's a natural. Against a backdrop of leftist demonstrations, Annette, who's lover is a teacher jailed for subversion, asks the doctor to teach her to read and write. Her nature and curiosity, the doctor's bland ideas, he and his wife's problems, and the two infants bring the story to a head.
Story
Two segments: In the first one Felice, a baritone who has had to give up his career because of a heart condition and now works as an accountant at the Opera, inexplicably spends his nights laughing in his sleep. When his best friend, a cripple, takes his life and his wife abandons him Felice decides to die himself. In the second segment two kidnappings in Sicily, the second of which took place a century before the present one, are compared.
Book
Short Story
Four nuns are raped by a group of lepers. Although they all turn out to be pregnant, their status is hidden from them in the convent.
Novel
Based on 'Il fu Mattia Pascal', one of Pirandello's many stories concerning the transitory nature of the intangibles "truth" and "identity". Mattia Pascal is a downtrodden average man, treated like trash by his fiancée, scorned by his associates, and cheated out of his inheritance by contemptuous relatives. The dispirited Pascal heads to Monte Carlo, accruing a fortune and also assuming the identity of a less fortunate gambler who killed himself. The "new" Pascal is treated with a dignity and respect that overwhelms him--and nearly kills him.
Novel
Five stories center on a werewolf, a feudal landlord, peasants, a ghost, and a mother and her sons.
Novel
Deranged after a fall from a horse, a man has lived for twenty years in a castle laboring under the delusion that he is Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV. His psychiatrist concocts an elaborate scheme to shock him out of his medieval reverie.
Writer
A rehearsal is disrupted when six figures mysteriously appear on the stage, claiming to be fictional characters from an unfinished play searching for an author to tell their tragic story. An adaptation of the classic Luigi Pirandello play, updated to take place in a 1970s television studio.
Writer
Dramatist Luigi Pirandello's mordant comedy of manners tells the tale of upper-crust Italians Silia Gala and her sneering spouse, Leone, who finds his impassivity tested when he has to duel his wife's frustrated paramour.
Story
The charming Adriana gets sick after her husband's death. Her brother-in-law takes her on a journey to meet a doctor, while love overwhelms them.
Writer
Writer
Sei personaggi in cerca d'autore is an Italian staged filmmaking of the play of the same name, written by Luigi Pirandello about the relationship between authors, their characters and theater practitioners. The story follows six characters: Il Padre (Romolo Valli), la Figliastra (Rossella Falk), la Madre (Elsa Albani), Il Figlio (Piero Sammataro), la bambina (Patrizia Ponzelli) and Il giovinello(Paolo Figna) that invading a essay by a theater company looking for an author.
Writer
Dutch tv registration of Luigi Pirandello's classic play Enrico IV, or Hendrik IV.
Story
In late 19th century Sicily, handsome free-spirit Liolà wanders into town, where he encounters an old flame now married to a wealthy landowner.
Author
A widowed man who has lived adoring the memory of his wife, discovers 15 years later that she was his best friend's lover.
Theatre Play
In present-day U.S., Dr. Michael Parker, a prominent surgeon, unexpectedly runs into his German-born wife whom he thought was dead. Victor, an artist and his "dead" wife's now boyfriend, berates Dr. Parker for "killing" her. The bulk of the story flashes back to Austria during World War II as we learn how Dr. Parker met and married his wife, and the one mistake that may have cost him his family.
Novel
A film made up of four episodes: a jar repairer gets trapped in a vat because of his hunch; a young unmarried mother is forced to beg to buy herself a fan; Rosario Chiarchiaro appears before a law court for casting spells; the discomfort of an overtight jacket gives a wedding witness the strength to persuade the bridegroom's reluctant parents to bless his union.
Author
Paolino, a teacher at an elementary school near Naples, appears nervous for a few days and his friends do not know why. The man is the lover of Assunta, the mother of one of his pupils, and he discovers that she has become pregnant.
Theatre Play
Paolino, a teacher at an elementary school near Naples, appears nervous for a few days and his friends do not know why. The man is the lover of Assunta, the mother of one of his pupils, and he discovers that she has become pregnant.
Theatre Play
A number of different segments taken from 19th century Italian stories.
Screenplay
A woman takes the place of a wife who had died seven years earlier.
Novel
Mathias Pascal, saddled with a stupid wife and a nagging mother-in-law, leaves home and is extremely lucky at several gambling resorts. He returns home and discovers that a drowned man, fished out of the river, bears an uncanny likeness to him and is being buried by his family as him. This, to him, is a pleasant turn of events and he goes to Rome, where he falls in love with Louise Paleari. Count Papiano, a jealous suitor of Louise's, threatens him with arrest unless he produces credentials to prove his identity.
Story
Novel
In the huge steel factories in Terni (Umbria, Italy), two friends: Mario and Pietro, fight for the love of the same girl, Gina. Pietro dies because of a work accident at the factory. The other workers think Mario is responsible for the death of his friend. Mario, who is innocent, is forced to quit, but his love for Gina and his dedication to his job help him out of his crisis.
Theatre Play
Bar entertainer Zara is a discontented alcoholic who is pursued by many men but lives with novelist Carl Salter. One day, Tony shows up on Salter's estate claiming that Zara is actually Maria, the wife of his close friend Bruno, claiming that her memory was destroyed during World War I. Zara doesn't remember but leaves with Tony to Salter's dismay. Bruno, now an officer in the Italian Army, tries to coax Maria's memory back on his large estate. No one is really sure if Zara is Maria, and when Salter shows up with a mental case from Trieste that he claims is the real Maria, everyone on Bruno's estate is desperately searching for the truth.
Novel
A young woman takes care of the just-born child of her late mother. Sacrificing her engagement and studies along the way.
Theatre Play
A dying man meets a stranger at a bar.
Original Story
Based on the play Henry IV by Luigi Pirandello. Conrad Veidt plays Count di Nolli, a nobleman who, after a head injury, imagines he is the medieval emperor. His friends and relatives choose to play along, dressing up as medieval courtiers, but is di Nolli truly mad, or just pretending? The art direction was by Hermann Warm. It was shot on location in Italy. 6 acts, 1856 meters.
Novel
Mathias Pascal, only son of a once-rich family, marries beautiful Romalinda, who has a terrible mother-in-law. She controls her daughter, and soon his home life becomes a nightmare. His only moments of lights are his mother and baby, but both die on the same day. Shocked, he leaves his hometown and goes to Monte Carlo, where he wins a fortune at the casino. Returning home, he reads his own obituary in a paper. They have found a corpse in a creek and connected it with his disappearance. Mathias, noticing that he is now free from all ties to his old life, decides to start a new one.
Story
In a sleazy cigar and newspaper store in Rome, an old newsagent nicknamed "Papa Re" sells his wares, warmed only by an earthenware heater that his granddaughter brings him each evening. One day, the stove falls from his hand and breaks into a thousand pieces. The same evening, when he opens the kiosk, he finds inside a woman, huddled up, with her little daughter in her arms: it is Rosalba Vignas, a singer-songwriter who has been chased away by her lover, Cesare le Milanese, who fell in love with his younger colleague.
