Literature in the Silent and Sound Cinema

This educational project in the Interdisciplinary use of Cinema at school started in 2016 with the students of the Cinema and Visual Arts course at the Education Science Bachelor Degree of Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca. During every academic year, the students participated in this interdisciplinary didactics project titled Literature in the Silent and Sound Cinema. Literature in the Cinema consists of studying film adaptations and some literary works. The educational objective is to highlight the value of the arts in education, promoting the interdisciplinary approach of literature starting from cinematographic art and vice versa. The study of the relationship between Literature and Cinema is accompanied by the projection of the relevant film sequences, to introduce the participants to an understanding of cinematographic language. Each lesson involves the analysis of many elements and comments on literary texts related to the topic chosen and other reference texts and the analysis of film sequences drawn from or inspired by the selection of literary texts (Costa, 1993). The first cinematographic opera proposed to the students was Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland inspired by the fantastic novel, published in 1865 by Lewis Carroll (alias Charles Lutwidge English reverend writer and mathematician) and known in many countries around the world. This contribution describes the ability of the student to observe film images with an interdisciplinary approach to re-elaborate content creatively and how they have read and analysed literary script in the light of its potential transformation into images.