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PIRANDELLO 150: Screening of MA NON È UNA COSA SERIA (But it’s Nothing Serious)

In commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the birth of Italian writer, Nobel Prize laureate Luigi Pirandello, the Department of Italian Studies at the University of Toronto and the Italian Cultural Institute in collaboration with the Cinema Studies Institute at the University of Toronto, present Pirandello 150, a Film and Lecture Series.

Innis College Town Hall – 2 Sussex Ave, Toronto, ON M5S 1J5
21 November, 6:00PM

Click here to RSVP

Michael Syrimis (Tulane University) presents MA NON È UNA COSA SERIA, directed by Mario Camerini, starring Vittorio De Sica, Elisa Cegani, Assia Noris (1937 – Italian with English Subtitles, Black and White, 79 min.)

Michael Syrimis is associate professor or Italian at Tulane University. His research focuses on Italian cinema and literature as well as the interaction between these two media at moments marked by radical shifts in twentieth-century Italian culture, such as the 1910s, ’30s, ’40s, and ’60s. He is particularly interested in the role played by film technology in the emergence of different strands of modernism at such key historical moments. His book, The Great Black Spider on Its Knock-Kneed Tripod: Reflections of Cinema in Early Twentieth-Century Italy, published in 2012 by the University of Toronto Press, studies the responses to the rise of cinema as mass entertainment in the 1910s by such influential literary figures as Gabriele D’Annunzio, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, and Luigi Pirandello.

Ma non è una cosa seria (But it’s Nothing Serious) is based on the eponymous Pirandello play. Vittorio De Sica plays a wealthy socialite who has to constantly fight off a horde of women who are eager to marry him because of his position and money. He weds a servant, who turns out to be a better partner that he had anticipated.

  • Organized by: The Department of Italian Studies at the University of Toronto and the Italian Cultural Institute
  • In collaboration with: Cinema Studies Institute at the University of Toronto