Overview

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.

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"""One cannot deny that Pirandello's plays and novels reveal a surprising individuality - ironic, inventive, and sometimes fantastical.... He serves up old wine in new bottles, carrying the thoughts and emotions of men into striking and unusual situations, replenishing their force by shifting their orbit from the commonplace to the extraordinary."" - New York Times (1927)"""

One cannot deny that Pirandello's plays and novels reveal a surprising individuality - ironic, inventive, and sometimes fantastical.... He serves up old wine in new bottles, carrying the thoughts and emotions of men into striking and unusual situations, replenishing their force by shifting their orbit from the commonplace to the extraordinary. - New York Times (1927)

Author Information

Sicilian writer Luigi Pirandello (1867-1936) is the author of several novels, short stories, and plays, including Six Characters in Search of an Author. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1934. C. K. Scott Moncrieff (1889-1930) translated many of Marcel Proust's writings, among other important works. P. Adams Sitney is professor of the Council of the Humanities and Visual Arts at Princeton University and the author of Visionary Film: An American Avant-Garde in the 20th Century.

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