Epitaph for Those Departing into Darkness: On the Lyrical Quality of Valerio Zurlini’s film The Camp Followers (Le soldatesse)

Abstract

Based on Ugo Pirro’s novel Le soldatesse (1956), Valerio Zurlini’s 1965 film of the same title, translated as The Camp Followers, is a story using the director’s characteristic lyrical modus, which radically distinguishes it from its prose literary source. This is evidenced, in addition to the choice of theme and main problem, by the narrative solutions used in the work: in composition, plot development, character modeling, the handling of off-camera commentary, original music and, finally, imagery, including intertextual references to masterpieces of poetry (Eugenio Montale, La bufera, 1943) and painting (Jacopo Pontormo, Il Trasporto di Cristo, 1525/26–1528). The dramaturgical analysis of the work, firstly, leads to reflections on the possibilities of film in general to transpose lyricism, understood – following Andrzej Stoff – primarily as “a phenomenon in the field of man’s relation to the world”. Secondly, it leads to the question of the significance of the lyrical reworking of the plot, which acquaints us with the story of a group of young women during the Italian occupation of Greece in 1942.