La muta del serpente bianco

Abstract

The legend of white snake is one of the four Chinese legends about love, spreading out among folks in ancient China. Through oral and various conventional literature, this tale became a classical theme of different artistic forms (ballads, precious scrolls, novels, scripts for story-telling, dramas, Beijing opera), and from the 20th century it became a theme of films, TV dramas, cartoon, and comic strips. The analysis of five movies on the legend, filmed between 1927 and 2011, confirmed the important role that repetition plays in commercial movies and identified a link between the narrative techniques of oral literature and the ones of cinema entertainment, thanks to the comparison with the old literary versions. This is a confirmation of how consuming literature and films are performing functions once typical of oral literature