Sciascia a man of cinema

The relationship between Leonardo Sciascia and cinema is multifaceted and intrinsically contradictory. This short contribution intends to mention two paths. One is that of Sciascia as a spectator, reviewer and writer of cinema, and the other concerns the adaptation of Sciascia's novels. Sciascia's writings on cinema, together with the testimonies of his contemporaries, help to account for the beginning of the relationship between the writer and the new art, and of cinema as a viaticum of phenomenal cultural discoveries (for example, that of Luigi Pirandello, a which Sciascia first approached through cinema). Over the years, Sciascia's youthful and frenetic cinephilia had gradually diminished. The writer no longer frequented cinemas, having preferred to make cinema a place of memory and reflection. After this account, the essay offers an excursus through the many Italian cinemas that have appropriated Sciascia's letter. Sciascia, that is, as a source of stories for an entire generation of filmmakers and for a large part of Italian engaged cinema. Lastly, reference is made both to the cinematographic elements present in Sciascia's writing and to the uniqueness of Sciascia's crime fiction which breaks with the canons of the genre and, in doing so, goes to the heart of a purely cinematic question, that of the relationship between what you see it and what it is.