The invisibile Wells in the European cinema

A filmography including all works directly or indirectly referring to Wells’s scientific romances usually includes mostly American productions with a ratio of 90%. Nevertheless Wells’s penetration and absorption in European cinema has been much heavier than it could be thought at first sight. On the other hand, the documentary evidence of this influence are somehow difficult to spot, partly because of the repeated failure to draw an effective filmic rewriting of the wellsian literary source texts and partly on account of the tendency of the American model to dominate the market. In the long, fragmented history of several European experiences with the technology of cinema, Wells keeps cropping up, providing some universal archetypes of imagination which are then assimilated and remodelled according to the specific national cultures and backgrounds. In most cases, Wells is no more than a ghost, an “invisible man” authorizing the tale, an underground presence, a subtext. My purpose in this work is to draw a map of these occurrences – regardless of their objective value in terms of filmic results - with an eye to the way in which the wellsian model, often openly stated in the title and plot of the film, has been at the same time resisted and assimilated, and always filtered and hybridised through its gradual inclusion in a new cultural field.