This essay considers religion in Pirandello’s oeuvre from a historical point of view, that is to say, as firmly anchored in a post-Copernican modernity in which, as philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche famously proclaimed, “God is dead,” and relativity came to be understood as scientific fact in the wake of Albert Einstein’s investigations. The essay asks whether a consistent meditation on religion can be found in Pirandello’s oeuvre and therefore considers several works, among them, The Late Mattia Pascal; Shoot!; Lazarus; and One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand. Particular focus is given to the ways in which these writings demonstrate Pirandello’s interest in mysticism, a non-dogmatic Catholic Modernism, and his rejection of any transcendent God, a belief which corresponded to his humoristic view of life more generally, tied as they both were to his uneasiness over life’s lack of certainty.

Introduced in the 1890s, cinema became a vital part of the culture to which Pirandello devoted his career. While he engaged to some extent with cinematic practice in promoting his works for adaptation or writing a screenplay from his Six Characters in Search of an Author, his relation to the medium lies predominantly in the conceptual affinities between cinema as a unique and pervasive means of expression and his philosophical outlook as theorized in the essay On Humor, the blueprint of his poetics. Describing an author’s disposition and its ensuing literary technique, “humor” is a conceptual model according to which the reliance on reason in attaining truth leads to an interpretation of experience in multiple, coexisting, and conflicting illusory constructs. This chapter examines Pirandello’s response to cinema’s aesthetic possibilities, which is evident in some of the short stories he recommended for adaptation and in the novel Shoot! and his screenplay from Six Characters, a metafictional inquiry into artistic creation whose protagonist and actor in that role would have been Pirandello himself.

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).