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Multimedia Archaeologies
Gabriele DâAnnunzio, Belle Ãpoque Paris, and the Total Artwork
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Paris, 1910-1915. Artists, intellectuals, and international celebrities crowd the city as never before. Decadent dreams and avant-garde manifestos celebrate the marriage between art and life. Creative experiments and vital joy dance hand in handâon the edge of the abyss of WWI. Gabriele DâAnnunzio is one of the highly influential yet semi-forgotten protagonists of this season and an emblem of its contradictions. A child of the Decadence, but also a forerunner of Modernism, the Italian poet defies the barriers between art forms, languages, and aesthetic practices. Tellingly, some of the periodâs major figures across the arts are involved in DâAnnunzioâs projects, including Canudo, Bakst, Brooks, Debussy, Montesquiou, and Rubinstein. In particular, in his sacred drama Le Martyre de Saint Sébastien, the poet combines French, Italian, literature, theater, mime, dance, music, painting, and cinema in a way that fuses old and new. DâAnnunzioâs hybrid experiments challenge Wagnerâs âtotal artworkâ theories, search for a synthesis between pictorial stillness and filmic movement, and anticipate contemporary multimedia experiences. These artistic collaborations end suddenly at the outbreak of the Great War, when Dannunzian total artworks migrate from the stage to the battlefield, generating a controversial legacy that calls for renewed critical investigations.
âMirabileâs study produces a compelling claim that DâAnnunzioâs French plays are âtotal artworksâ or Gesamtkunstwerke following the aesthetic ideals of Wagner, and that they âtest the distinction between the literary, the musical, and the visualâ (25). The book offers a rigorous comparatist framework from which to reexamine DâAnnunzioâs works from his period in France, a prolific set of writings that have been overshadowed by the salacious elements of his life and political affiliations, which included an awkward alliance with Mussolini. [â¦] Multimedia Archaeologies invites us to not only consider DâAnnunzioâs verse-plays as exemplary of an entire current in modernism, but also to weigh the complex legacy of the long nineteenth century and its total artwork, whose shadow continues to cast itself in the field of aesthetics.â - Ronjaunee Chatterjee, University of California, in: Comparative Literature Studies 53.1 (2016), pp. 12-14
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Decadence of Decadence
The Verbal: Saint Sebastian, Adonis, and Christ
The Visual: Aesthetic/Ecstatic
The Musical: Music for the Eyes
Multimedia Archaeologies: Gabriele DâAnnunzio, Belle Ãpoque Paris, and the Total Artwork
Works Cited
Introduction: The Decadence of Decadence
The Verbal: Saint Sebastian, Adonis, and Christ
The Visual: Aesthetic/Ecstatic
The Musical: Music for the Eyes
Multimedia Archaeologies: Gabriele DâAnnunzio, Belle Ãpoque Paris, and the Total Artwork
Works Cited