Luchino Visconti and the Fabric of Cinema

Joe McElhaney

• Publisher: Wayne State University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780814343098
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Películas y vídeos

In Luchino Visconti and the Fabric of Cinema, Joe McElhaney situates Visconti's films as privileged and deeply expressive instances of a trope that McElhaney identifies as the "cinema of fabric": a reoccurrence in film in which textiles—clothing, curtains, tablecloths, bedsheets—determine the filming process. An Italian neorealist, Visconti emerges out of a movement immediately following WWII wherein fabric assumes crucial functions, yet Visconti's use of fabric surpasses his colleagues in many ways, including its fluid, multifaceted articulations of space and time. Visconti's homosexuality is central to this theory in that it assumes metaphoric potential in addressing "forbidden" sexual desires that are made visible in the films. Visconti's cinema of fabric gives voice to desires not simply for human bodies draped in fabric but also for entire environments, a world of the senses in which fabric becomes a crucial method for giving form to such desires. McElhaney examines Visconti's neorealist origins in Ossessione, La terra trema, and Rocco and His Brothers, particularly through fabric's function within literary realism and naturalism. Neorealist revisionism through the extravagant drapings of the diva film is examined in Bellissima and Senso whereas White Nights and The Stranger are examined for the theatricalizing through fabric of their literary sources. Visconti's interest in German culture vis-à-vis The Damned, Death in Venice, and Ludwig, is articulated through a complex intertwining of fabric, aesthetics, politics, and transgressive sexual desire. Finally, Visconti's final two films, Conversation Piece and The Innocent, assess through fabric both the origins of Italian fascism and the political tensions contemporaneous with the films' productions. Fabric in Visconti is often tied to the aesthetic impulse itself in a world of visionaries attempting to dominate their surrounding environments and where a single piece of fabric may come to represent the raw material for creation. This book will tantalize any reader with a keen eye and strong interest in film and queer studies.

1

Interwoven

Dirty Laundry

In the history of Italian cinema, 1960 is the year of three monumental films: Federico Fellini’s La dolce vita, Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’avventura, and Luchino Visconti’s Rocco and His Brothers. Their international success led to a significant Italian cinema revival, marking the first time the Italians were able to command this scale of attention since the emergence of neorealism roughly fifteen years earlier. And while Rocco has clear links with Visconti’s earlier work, the film is also, in important respects, unlike his preceding films. When La dolce vita, L’avventura, and Rocco opened, they were taken to indicate new directions for Italian cinema that extended and critiqued the film movement that galvanized audiences immediately after the Second World War. “Do you think neorealism is dead or alive?” a reporter asks Sylvia (Anita Ekberg), the Hollywood star visiting Rome in La dolce vita. The question, like so many posed in La dolce vita, is never answered. From the time of its release up through the present day, Rocco and His Brothers has always been understood as the least formally innovative of the three films. Its ostensible classicism, though, is of a very particular nature.

Arguments for Rocco’s classicism are largely traceable to the film’s novelistic dimension. Of particular relevance is how the film draws upon the forms of the nineteenth-century naturalist novel, where the realism is constructed through the accumulation of details and symbolic meanings, making use of extended descriptions of environments and the human figures within them, as in the work of Maupassant, Gustave Flaubert, Émile Zola, Giovanni Verga, Fyodor Dostoevsky. In 1946, Visconti staged a production of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1866), and the character of Rocco would, in its impossible “saintly” nature, have some of its basis in Prince Myshkin from The Idiot (1869). When Sam Rohdie writes that in Rocco “even the most banal detail seems overcharged,” it is a response to this type of nineteenth-century realism.1 Whether this literary heft disqualifies Visconti from fully belonging to neorealism is another matter. Guido Aristarco has argued that Visconti was “the first director in Italy to formulate a critical neorealism and the first to narrate films with the sweeping narrative scope of the novel.”2 What such an inclination on Visconti’s part entails is indicative of an ambivalence of wishing to belong to a significant film movement while choosing to remain somewhat outside of it, as though commenting on the nature of this movement as much as participating in it.

It is not uncommon in the critical literature on realism and naturalism to refer to how its forms and motifs are “woven” together. This, in itself, is tied to the most basic element of the storyteller “spinning” a tale for an enraptured listener, even as it is also tied to the formal constructions of art in general, in particular arts that are temporal in nature and in which the aesthetic expressivity is often a question of this dense interweaving. In The Brothers Karamazov (1880), Dostoevsky has the Devil (in reality, a hallucination of Ivan Karamazov’s) refer to “such artistic dreams, such complex and real actuality, such events, or even a world of events, woven into such a plot, with such unexpected details, beginning from your highest manifestations down to the last shirt button, as I swear even Leo Tolstoy couldn’t invent.”3 It is Zola, though, who will, in Au Bonheur des Dames, elevate fabric to the most heightened of naturalist visions. In this novel on the emergence of the Paris department store, Zola writes of how

lace shivered, fell back and hid the depths of the shop behind a disturbing veil of mystery; even the lengths of cloth, thick, square-cut, exhaled tempting breaths, while the coats on the dummies threw out their chests, endowing them with souls, and the great velvet overcoat swelled, warm and suppliant, as though across living shoulders with a beating breast and swaying hips.4

For the cinema, such anthropomorphic language has enormous possibilities, even though many Zola film adaptations fail to take full advantage. Eisenstein argues the “plastic side” to Zola’s writing is, in its linking of human beings with the details of their environment, and in its desire to plunge us into the totality of a setting, “very close in [its] nature to cinema.”5 In Visconti, such an impulse is clearest in Ossessione, an unauthorized adaptation of James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934). The debates as to whether Ossessione should be understood as an early neorealist film or a late example of thirties naturalism found in French cinema of that decade, such as Renoir’s modern-dress adaptation of Zola’s La Bête Humaine (1938), persist. For now, though, I would stress the importance of an early neorealist erotics, one with ties to nineteenth-century naturalism but articulated at a very different historical juncture. In its visual and dramatic density, Ossessione is as close to the world of Zola as it is to the world of American crime fiction to which Cain belongs. As in Zola, we find in Cain an attempt to document violent and sexual impulses with ties to the natural world. But Cain’s language is, in contrast to Zola’s, cryptic.

When we stopped it was in front of an undertaker shop in Hollywood, and they carried me in. Cora was there, pretty battered up. She had on a blouse that the police matron had lent her, and it puffed out around her belly like it was stuffed with hay. Her suit and her shoes were dusty, and her eye was all swelled up where I had hit it.6

Visconti retains the basic idea of a world covered in dust and grime, the filth extended to the clothing worn by his protagonists. But the film supplements and inflates Cain’s universe.

Cain’s novel is only 116 pages long. Visconti’s film lasts for 140 minutes. On the fourth page of the novel, Frank Chambers (Gino in Ossessione) has his first look at Cora Papadakis (Giovanna in Ossessione). She is tersely described as someone who “wasn’t any raving beauty, but she had a sulky look to her, and her lips stuck out in a way that made me want to mash them in for her.”7 What she is wearing as he spots her, the details of her home and work environment of Twin Oaks Tavern, none of this interests Cain as part of Frank’s initial impressions. It is enough to describe the tavern as “nothing but a roadside sandwich joint, like a million others in California.”8 In Visconti’s film, the trattoria where Gino (Massimo Girotti) meets Giovanna (Clara Calamai) is implicitly “like a million others” (consistent with the sociopolitical tradition of realism) even as the film plunges us into the details of this particular totality.

The attention to detail in the décor of the trattoria is of a kind in which Visconti’s cinema will never cease to revel, in this case a world of forlorn and decaying abundance even amidst economic and material scarcity. But it is the initial encounter between Gino and Giovanna that has attracted the greatest detail of attention, in particular for its strategy of playing within and against various expectations. The encounter was designed as a shock for Italian viewers contemporaneous with the film’s release, since both actors are “dirtied up” in a film intended to be a provocation to the Fascist cinema within which both actors had made significant appearances. Calamai’s hair, bleached blonde in her most notable roles prior to this, is darkened, her appearance closer to Corinne Luchair’s Cora in the French version of the Cain novel Le Dernier tournant (Pierre Chenal, 1939), although Luchair is otherwise filmed in a more conventionally glamorous way. Prior to Ossessione, Girotti and Calamai had major roles in films by Alessandro Blasetti, Girotti in the allegorical adventure The Iron Crown (1941) and Calamai in the tongue-in-cheek historical work The Jester’s Supper (1942). But the contrast between these two films and Ossessione is not simply a matter of the presentation of the actors. Blasetti literally envelops these films in curtains, in sheer or ornate fabrics and creates androgynous environments of sexual sadism and masochism. In The Iron Crown, Girotti is introduced wearing only a leopard-skin loincloth. His body is shaved, in contrast to the extremely hirsute body he presents in Ossessione. Early in The Jester’s Supper, a man rips Calamai’s chiffon gown as a threatened prelude to a sexual assault. The assault never transpires but the ripping briefly exposes Calamai’s breasts.9 The provocation of the eroticism in Ossessione, then, is one of context and form, attributable to the film’s ties to naturalism. What Visconti does with his two stars, but especially Giroitti, is a dual process of at once “degrading” them, making them literally dirty, and, at the same time, reinvigorating them, making them desirable in another way, with a desire no less tied to the properties of cinema than the idealization in their earlier films.

In the opening sequence, Gino is at first only filmed from the back and side as he moves through the front of the trattoria, his face hidden as the camera takes in what he is wearing: a suit covered in dust with large tears in the elbows of both arms of the jacket, and his feet in moccasins, as though only the lightest of fabrics separates Gino’s feet from the earth. There is nothing Chaplinesque about this image of a wandering, homeless male, but rather a sense of ruination. Nevertheless, it is also a typical star entrance, a slow buildup to the reveal of his face. Neither Gino nor the viewer sees Giovanna as she sings “Fiorin Fiorella” in what will turn out to be the kitchen. “Like Dante’s Circle with the wanderer Ulysses,” Geoffrey Nowell-Smith writes of Giovanna in this opening, “she entices Gino (significantly) by her singing.”10 But when the faces of both stars are finally revealed, there is an imbalance in their respective presentations. When Gino steps into the kitchen and discovers the source of the singing, Calamai’s Giovanna receives the first close-up, shot in high key, the light evenly spread across her face, flattering to her but otherwise unremarkable. Giovanna is first looking down, polishing her fingernails. She quickly looks up at Gino, then looks back down, and then (a delayed reaction) quickly looks back up, slightly tilting her head as she now scrutinizes him. The cut to Gino is a quick tracking shot toward him, the lighting on this face more detailed than that given to Calamai: a key light hits the left of his face, his nose casting a discreet shadow on the face’s right side; a small amount of fill light reaches this side as a flower-printed curtain hangs behind the left side of his face. We are seeing Gino through Giovanna’s eyes even as the camera is supplementing her look with its own. Once Gino steps into the kitchen, the slight suspension introduced through this presentation is broken as he brazenly walks around, helping himself to food, and insultingly refers to the grotesque obesity of Giovanna’s husband, Bragana (Juan De Landa), who is outside the trattoria. These exchanges are captured in wider mobile shots showing details of the large kitchen. Gino removes his jacket, revealing only a soiled, sleeveless T-shirt underneath. The sight of his exposed back causes Giovanna, as she suddenly turns around to look at him, to literally stop in her tracks. For a cinema of fabric, though, it is the rags and towels that droop on the walls that create an indelible sense of the environment surrounding Giovanna.

Such attention to forlorn detail is a naturalist transposition. For Eisenstein, Zola is typical of the naturalists “going out of themselves” in the pressure they put on details, thereby elevating pathos to “an event that is by no means obliged to be pathetic” even as Zola remains mindful of the structure of the condition he is describing.11 In Thérèse Raquin (1867) Zola describes the décor of the shop belonging to Madame Raquin: “On one side, there were a few articles of clothing: fluted tulle bonnets at two or three francs apiece; muslin sleeves and collars; and woolens, stockings, socks and braces. Each item, yellow with age, hung pitifully from a wire hook, so that the window, from top to bottom, was full of whitish rags that took on a mournful appearance in the transparent gloom.”12 In his 1953 modern-dress version of the novel, Marcel Carné reproduces none of this detail and the shop is simply a background, the fabrics looking clean, new, and immaculately ordered. Ossessione comes closer to Zola, with the rags and towels in Giovanna’s kitchen taking on a “mournful appearance in the transparent gloom.”

During Frank’s second encounter with Cora in The Postman Always Rings Twice, her outfit is described as “one of those white nurse uniforms, like they all wear, whether they work in a dentist’s office or a bakeshop. It had been clean in the morning, but it was a little bit rumpled now, and messy. I could smell her.”13 Tay Garnett’s Hollywood version of The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946) retains a whiteness linked with Cora (Lana Turner, whose hair is bleached) and sustains it for much of the film. But it is a white that never becomes soiled. Ossessione does not participate in this type of visual irony but appears to build upon a description of Cora from a passage late in Cain’s novel in which Frank observes her getting off a train wearing a black dress “that made her look tall, and a black hat, and black shoes and stockings . . .”14 Giovanna is largely associated with black, so that the sense of white declining into visible filth is eliminated. It is as though the grime is thoroughly embedded in her, a blackness that will also be linked with her own death. The image of a woman in black will recur in Visconti although its implications will shift from film to film. In Rocco and His Brothers, Rosaria (Katina Paxinou), the Parondi matriarch, is enshrouded in black, partly as an indication of her status as a widow but partly because in black she can extravagantly perform the role of grieving. When she is reunited with her oldest son, Vincenzo (Spiros Focás), at Vincenzo’s engagement party to Ginetta (Claudia Cardinale), she disapprovingly comments that he has stopped wearing mourning clothes. Moreover, Rosaria’s black clothing removes her from any bodily display. It is as though these shrouds become her body, desexualizing her. In much of the early part of Ossessione, Gino’s T-shirt is not only soiled but somewhat too small, unwittingly displaying chest muscle and with a nipple periodically exposed.15 Such an eroticizing of the male figure has naturalist precedents, particularly if applied to working-class figures equated with primal desires. In Thérèse Raquin, Zola describes the male protagonist, Laurent, as someone about whom “you could sense the swelling, well-developed muscles beneath his clothes, and the whole body, with its thick, firm flesh. Thérèse examined him curiously from his hands to his face, feeling a little shudder pass through her when she reached his bull’s neck.”16

The struggle in Ossessione is one that recurs in Visconti, in which the human subjects, in their intense need to look at an object of desire, are at once creators and spectators of images. The camera is ambiguously aligned with these human subjects while also giving itself the power to move through and articulate its own desires in relation to what it sees and creates. If Gino is much more strongly marked as an object of desire than Giovanna, it is less clear who has the greater force in controlling such states. Early in the film, after Bragana leaves Giovanna alone at the trattoria, Gino is working on the water pump outside when he hears Giovanna sing the same “siren song” that first lured him into the kitchen. Gino throws down the pump and walks toward the trattoria and stops. As he decides to move forward, there is a cut from a close-up of him framed from the waist up to a reverse angle, forward tracking shot, moving toward the trattoria’s entrance. When the mobile shot begins, it implies his point of view, but the implication is almost immediately challenged when Gino walks into the shot from the left, the movement now suggesting the camera’s autonomy. Whatever “natural” attractions are occurring between the protagonists, they are also drawn together by forces larger than themselves. But as Gino hears Giovanna’s voice and moves forward, he wipes his hands on his T-shirt, a gesture of further rubbing the sweat and dirt into the fabric. The gesture itself equally implies something autoerotic, the dirty, decaying shirt placed against Gino’s chest intensifying him as a naturalist image of desire, offered to the camera and to the (potentially desiring) spectator.

Bursting at the Seams

The title of Rocco most obviously evo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Cinema of Fabric, the Fabric of Cinema
• 1. Interwoven
• 2. The Diva, Draped
• 3. Tight Fits
• 4. Classical Forms
• 5. Decadent Threads
• 6. Fading
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author