From Nestoroff to Garbo: Pirandellian Humour in Its Cinematic Vernacular. 29

Abstract

A discussion of the 1932 Hollywood adaptation of Pirandello's 1930 play, Come tu mi vuoi, in the context of Miriam Hansen's analysis of Hollywood cinema as "vernacular modernism" allows us to explore the relationship between Pirandello's umorismo and mass culture. The coexistence of multiple identity constructs in the absence of one stable identity is at the core of umorismo and is vividly dramatized in the play's presumably amnesiac female protagonist. The film's humoristic dimension is found not so much in its explicit discourse on identity, which the film's happy ending largely tends to resolve, as in its peculiar reconstruction of the Greta Garbo star-image, lying in excess of the film's story and diegesis, which shares with Pirandello's humour the constellation of diverse and competing images as projected onto the figure of the female protagonist.