This chapter examines the legacy of Pirandello’s work in cinema. It outlines his own direct involvement in the medium, through novels (e.g., Shoot!), his work on adaptations and screenplays (for directors such as L’Herbier, Righelli, Ruttman), and essays expressing his ambivalent views on film as it evolved from the silent era to the “talkies.” This outline is followed by a survey of key film adaptations of his works (by Steno, de Sica, the Taviani brothers) and reflections on later film–theatre hybrids that mediate Pirandello’s transposition to the screen (e.g., by Rivette, Stoppard, Pinter). The chapter finally moves on to explore some broader, indirect forms of affinity that might be characterized as “Pirandellian.” It proposes four of these: films that play self-consciously and meta-cinematographically (e.g., by Nichetti, Allen); a cinema of “humorism” (e.g., in Fellini, Hitchcock); a cinema of selfhood that uses typical Pirandellian motifs such as doubling or insanity, among others (e.g., by Antonioni, Scorsese); and cinema as a medium of thought or philosophy (e.g., by Weir, Kaufman).

This chapter reassesses the relationship between the Gothic and the cinematic experience within the silent cinema era. At its birth in 1895, the very medium of cinema itself was perceived as inherently Gothic. Maxim Gorky’s famous allusion to a ‘kingdom of shadows’ full of grey, silent figures that filled him with ‘breathless horror’ evoked the spectre of the uncanny that underpins the Gothic experience. Yet, this chapter demonstrates that if one examines the history of the Gothic in the silent era, the Gothic changes from being an intrinsic part of the cinema experience to becoming a series of narrative and stylistic elements that ultimately form part of a kind of proto-horror, a mise-en-scène in search of a genre. By focusing not upon story elements but rather upon the ongoing association between the Gothic and the cinematographic through the use of cinematic techniques to convey subjective states of being, this chapter examines how the Gothic potential of the cinematic experience that was fundamental to the era of cinema’s birth did not disappear but rather remained, and continues to remain, embedded within cinema itself.