Abstract

The essay presents a critical analysis of Pirandello’s reading of the world-machine and of the philosophical implications of the dehumanisation brought about by the modern world in Pirandello’s The Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio, Cinematograph Operator. An underlying thesis concerns the contribution that the success of cinematic art has also made to this dehumanisation. Cinematic art is thus analysed as a condition of a fundamentally alienated experience. On the one hand we find the world of life, which is an infinite process with its complexity and also its contradictions; on the other hand we find the world of machines, with its rigid simplifications that end up ignoring the infinite richness of nature