Bruce Springsteen e lo storytelling cinematografico

Abstract

In any artistic adaptation, the source text hybridizes with the different textual, audiovisual, and performing forms with which it comes into contact, and becomes something different at the end. However, there is also a kind of adaptation that does not occur through a dynamic transition process, as it is already inherent in the work itself. By focusing on Bruce Springsteen’s statement according to which he writes his songs to be movies, I try to identify the cinematographic mechanisms that turn a record into the soundtrack of its visual track. In a system of transmedia storytelling, the process could be defined as ‘trans-authorship’: the object that undergoes the transmedial transition is not the work of art—which preserves its original audiovisual characterization—but the artist’s consideration of that specific work as a medium which does not coincide with the initial model. Taking into account Ennio Morricone’s remarks on Springsteen’s cinematographic qualities, the analysis aims to demonstrate how music and cinema interact in many of Springsteen’s songs to widen and deepen their original narrative structure.