The story of Martin Eden could be told as a fairy tale like this: A sailor meets a princess.
You fall in love, but the differences in class are not so easy to overcome.
The seaman does everything to prove himself worthy of his beloved.
He becomes rich and famous, but loses the princess and ends up in the sea.
There are many stories with a comparable course; one can see them as a naive form of a conflict that many today want to see between identity and class.
In love you recognize yourself, but in the social class of the princess you recognize yourself as who you are (socially) not.
In Pietro Marcello's film adaptation of Jack London's novel "Martin Eden", it is a grammatical form in which the difference between the sailor and the princess first becomes apparent: He uses a verb in a subordinate clause in the indicative.
But he would have to say “indicasse”, use a subjunctive, in order to prove himself to be a polished speaker of Italian.
Sailor meets princess
Martin Eden's great ability to learn is shown by the fact that he conjugates flawlessly at the table with the Orsini family, a few minutes later. But he still doesn't get rid of the sailor, the Neapolitan in himself, so quickly, no matter how unconditionally Elena Orsini can love him.
For Pietro Marcello, one of the main works by the American writer Jack London became a key to Italian history in the 20th century. And not in the narrower sense of a sequence of events, but with a view to constellations that were recognizable before the First or Second World War and have only changed insignificantly up to the present: the alleged liberalism of a possessing class corresponds to the simple life of the petty bourgeoisie and at the “periferia” opposite, Italy proper is ruled by a refined or decadent class. Marcello changes the scene, in London it was Oakland on the American west coast, in the film it is a strongly typified Naples, the city in which profound Italy could recognize itself.
An Italy that muddles up the sounds in its everyday language rather than expressing itself in a clear and transparent idiom.
Marcello also changes scene in another respect.
From London to Naples
He translates a novel into the language of cinema in a way that goes far beyond what is commonly called an adaptation.
Because in his “Martin Eden” the cinema itself becomes a setting in its historicity: with numerous recordings from archives and with allusions to the aesthetics of silent films, Marcello lets his hero, who absolutely wants to become a writer (“scrittore”), become a genuinely cinematographic one Become a figure.
In 2019 “Martin Eden” premiered in Venice.
After that, the film was put on hold, which was forced by the pandemic.
But by then it was already clear that a real event was being dealt with.
National cinemas are often viewed in terms of inheritance.
Germany, for example, is still seen internationally as the film country that has found its most important expression in the work of Rainer Werner Fassbinder.
And since then the world cinema has been looking for a new Fassbinder.
An intellectual of the cinema
In Italy, Pier Paolo Pasolini is the analogue figure: an intellectual of the cinema who has tried many syntheses between popular and radical form, but who also allowed the bourgeoisie and the sub-proletariat, myth and reason to collide. Pietro Marcello proved to be someone who was able to translate Pasolini's concerns into genuinely new forms, especially with his film “Bella e perduta - A journey through Italy” (2015).