Jason Collins Abstract

Tessa’s Europa: The Surreal Language of a Film Made for Print

Throughout Italy’s cinematic history, films employed dialect to lend a sense of realism to setting, thus dialect has been used to an effect. Outside of imbuing a film with dialect for reasons of suspension of disbelief, it has rarely been used beyond realism with exceptions being Fellini’s Roma and Amarcord, even then using dialect to lend a sense of reality to an otherwise surreal world.  Tessa’s screenplay for an unmade film intitled Europa, predates the common use of dialect as a cinematic tool having been written by the avowed anti-fascist during the ventennio.  It suffered from Mussolini’s linguistic, artistic, and academic policies, ensuring that is would not be taken up by any director.

Tessa’s film, described as “Simbolismo tenebroso, alimentato da vocaboli e immagini disseminati nel testo[1], remained an unmakeable project for political reasons.  Europa bares a surreal quality akin to Marguerite Duras’s Hiroshima Mon Amour, and follows the events of one day’s time.  The work is separated into operatic acts (five) with an introduction, three acts, and a finale that reveals events that occur inside a church, a brothel, and a garden – with surrealistic automatism.  The bizarre juxtapositions, the linguistic subversion, and anti-fascist sentiment ensured this work would become a literary artifact of Surrealism and dialect literature. Only reaching publication in 1986, more than fifty years after its composition, the screenplay remains unmade in spite of the author’s distinction as one of the greatest Italian poets of the 20^th century.

[1]“ Dark Symbolism, fueled by words and images scattered in (throughout) the text.”