Neorealism and Transmediality: A Migrating Narration

The lively debate on cinema, literature and the visual arts between the two wars fed into Italian Neorealism in an intertextual way, as emerges in Bazin’s, Zavattini’s and Deleuze’s writings on Neorealism. The French philosopher observed how Neorealism breaks the sensory motor connection typical of classical cinema, thus paving the way for a cinema of pure optical situations. W.J.T. Mitchell’s concept of ‘the image as agent’ exemplifies how neorealist movies possess a lasting iconic impact capable of affecting different medias, thus making new venues viable for innovative intertextual narrations. The present contribution analyses how this debate may be translated today in a multimedia theory that orients aesthetic choices and forms of reception in a globalized context.