Les métamorphoses intersémiotiques du mythe casanovien

Abstract

Giacomo Casanova is a real historical figure who traveled, wrote, loved during the Enlightenment, and whose posterity is linked to the myth he has gradually become. The substantivation of his surname, which reduces this multi-talented adventurer to the archetype of the unrepentant seducer, took place through the numerous intersemiotic rewriting of his consequent autobiography, Histoire de ma vie. Artists of all disciplines have played with the codes of his legend; they sometimes amplify the myth, they sometimes try, at the contrary, to suffocate it, in order to find the real man behind it, or they even sometimes create a new character, very different from the myth or the literary figure.These three rewriting choices are particularly interesting to observe during the intersemiotic metamorphosis of the original text in still or moving images, because from a medium to an other one, the casanovian myth grows or dies, lives and changes according the different codes which shape it... and be shaped by it.