Resurrezioni del pre-cinema. Edogawa Ranpo e la reinvenzione del panorama

Pierluca Nardoni

doi:10.60923/issn.2531-9876/22044

Authors

Pierluca Nardoni "Gabriele d'Annunzio" University of Chieti-Pescara

Pierluca Nardoni is a PhD student at the ‘G. D'Annunzio’ University of Chieti-Pescara, with a thesis on the artistic reactivations of cinema archaeology, and adjunct professor at the University of the Republic of San Marino. He has mostly focused on historical avant-garde movements, the relationship between the visual arts and cinema, and the theme of ornamentation in the arts, on which he has published essays and curated conferences and exhibitions at national and international institutions. On these topics, he has curated exhibitions such as Ejzenštejn. La rivoluzione delle immagini, together with Marzia Faietti and Eike D. Schmidt, at Gallerie degli Uffizi in Florence, and What a wonderful world. La lunga storia dell'ornamento tra arte e natura, together with Claudio Franzoni, at Fondazione Palazzo Magnani in Reggio Emilia.

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.60923/issn.2531-9876/22044

Keywords:

Ranpo, panorama, pre-cinema, reactivation, illusionism

Abstract

This article analyzes the novel by Japanese writer Edogawa Ranpo, The Strange Story of Panorama Island (1926-1927), focusing on the refined ekphrastic technique with which the author revives an obsolete media device, the Panorama. After a brief historical and critical investigation of the panoramic device in the West and Japan, the article reads Ranpo's novel as a visionary and unreal (but made true by ekphrasis) example of the revival of Panoramas, in parallel with the experiences of European painting and in particular Claude Monet's Water Lilies cycle, which, in the years when The Strange Story of Panorama Island was published, opened to the public as a renewed Panorama. The peculiar metanarrative devices with which Ranpo ‘immerses’ the reader in his story find precise correspondences with the strategies of sensory immersion of the nineteenth-century panoramic experience, updating them in an imaginative direction.

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Resurrections of pre-cinema. Edogawa Ranpo and the reinvention of the Panorama

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