Wrapping Up “Through the Eyes of Those Who Are No Longer”: Paolo Taviani’s Leonora addio (2022)

Abstract

The first film signed by Paolo Taviani without his brother Vittorio (who died in 2018) in more than 60 years, Leonora addio (2022) recapitulates and condenses an entire career by recounting the grotesque (real-life) journey of the burial, cremation, exhumation, transfer (from Rome to Sicily) and re-burial of Luigi Pirandello’s corpse over more than ten years, as well as by showing in the last thirty minutes an adaptation for the screen of “The Nail” (“Il chiodo”, the last novella by the renowned Sicilian writer). A quintessential testament film refracting the writer’s death in Vittorio’s (one of the film’s many Pirandello-esque mirror games) and alluding to the intellectual legacies of either, Leonora addio daringly thematizes the exploitation of cultural value as well as its political implications—particularly in the specific Italian context and, implicitly yet unmistakably, in the present day too. My paper will analyse Leonora addio paying particular attention to how this subtext intersects the film’s “testamentary” surface, to Deleuze’s “crystal images” (pervasively informing the structure of Leonora addio), to the film’s many nods to Kaos (a 1984 Pirandello adaptation for the screen by the Taviani, analysed mainly through the lens of Lacanian gaze theory) and to the role of death in both films.