Shoot!

The Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio, Cinematograph Operator

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by Luigi Pirandello

Type: Stories
Subject: Technique > Cinematography
Keywords: operator, Italy, notebook
Publishing date: 2006
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Collection: Cinema and Modernity
Language: English

Relative size

Physical desc.

Paperback • 240 pages
5 ½ x 8 inches (14 x 20.5 cm)

ISBN-10 ISBN-13

0-226-66982-3
978-0-226-66982-3

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Book Presentation:
Originally published in Italian in 1915, Shoot! is one of the first novels to take as its subject the heady world of early motion pictures. Based on the absurdist journals of fictional Italian camera operator Serafino Gubbio, Shoot! documents the infancy of film in Europe—complete with proto-divas, laughable production schedules, and cost-cutting measures with priceless effects-—and offers a glimpse of the modern world through the camera’s lens.

Shoot!, presented here in its 1927 English translation, is a classic example of Nobel Prize-winning Sicilian playwright Luigi Pirandello’s (1867-1936) literary talent and genius for blurring the line between art and reality. From the film studio Kosmograph, Pirandello’s Gubbio steadily winds the crank of his camera by day and scribbles with his pen by night, revealing the world both mundane and melodramatic that unfolds in front of his camera. Through Gubbio’s narrative—saturated with fantasy and folly—Pirandello grapples with the philosophical implications of modernity. Like much of Pirandello’s work, Shoot! parodies human weaknesses, drawing attention to the themes of isolation and madness as emerging tendencies in the modern world.

Enhanced by new critical commentaries, Shoot! is an entertaining caricature, capturing early twentieth-century Italian filmmaking and revealing its truths as only a parody can.

Press Reviews:
"A behind-the-scenes look at the first years of filmmaking and a hilarious dark satire on Italian society."
Toronto Globe & Mail

See the publisher website: University of Chicago Press

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