Dickens transcodificato: metafiction, identità ed eredità culturale in 'The Personal History of David Copperfield' (2019) di Armando Iannucci

This essay investigates Armando Iannucci’s film The Personal History of David Copperfield (2019) through a semiotic and cultural lens. Considering the process of adaptation as a convergence of translation, transcoding, and rewriting, I intend to examine the relationship between the Dickensian hypotext and Iannucci’s work from an aesthetic, pluralist, materialist, and metafictional perspective. First, I will contextualise the film within adaptation taxonomies, relying on the director’s poetic declarations. Secondly, drawing on the concepts of ocularisation and auricularisation developed by Jost (1987), I will analyse how David Copperfield’s perspective is rendered throughout the film. Therefore, I will focus on camera work, framing, and audio narration. Thirdly, I will look into Iannucci’s attempt to render the scenic design as a ‘handmade’ ¬– and therefore ‘theatrical’ – physical entity. Lastly, drawing on Neo-Victorian Studies, I will highlight how the theme of self-discovery through the art of storytelling becomes central in the film, playing a pivotal role in the overlapping of Charles Dickens’ biographèmes (Barthes 1977) with David Copperfield’s ‘personal history’. From a cultural perspective, I will investigate how Iannucci redefines Victorian Englishness in literary terms, representing a multiethnic, creative, and outgoing society whose Dickensian humor is part of its cultural heritage.