Landscape and Memory in Post-Fascist Italian Film

Cinema Year Zero

Giuliana Minghelli

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781135104801
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Media & Performing Arts
• Categoría: Film History & Criticism

This study argues that neorealism's visual genius is inseparable from its almost invisible relation to the Fascist past: a connection inscribed in cinematic landscapes. While largely a silent narrative, neorealism's complex visual processing of two decades of Fascism remains the greatest cultural production in the service of memorialization and comprehension for a nation that had neither a Nuremberg nor a formal process of reconciliation. Through her readings of canonical neorealist films, Minghelli unearths the memorial strata of the neorealist image and investigates the complex historical charge that invests this cinema. This book is both a formal analysis of the new conception of the cinematic image born from a crisis of memory, and a reflection on the relation between cinema and memory. Films discussed include Ossessione (1943) Paisà (1946), Ladri di biciclette (1948), and Cronaca di un amore (1950).

1 1943 Visconti

The Haunted Frames of Ossessione

Ossessione was hailed as the first neorealist film, inaugurating a new mode of cinematic narration, as well as a burgeoning political consciousness, but it was also criticized as a seedy melodrama, largely derivative of the U.S. hardboiled genre and the French realist cinema of the 1930s. The film projects the tension of an unfolding historical moment: the impending fall of the Fascist nation and the yearning for a new one. Notwithstanding the lack of any overt political message or reference to the war and Fascism, history—personal and national—is the haunting obsession in Visconti’s movie.

Ossessione is an ambiguous mixture of old and new. Within it coexist a formulaic crime story and an innovative way of looking at the world, one that defies the logic of the suspense genre by suggesting the presence of worlds beyond that represented. In his study II paesaggio nel cinema italiano, Sandro Bernardi distinguishes two such moments within all visual experience: “vedere” (to see), an act that involves our existing knowledge—“Man sees what he knows” (2002, 18)—and “guardare” (to look at), an openness to vision—“the possibility of going beyond what one knows.” If Ossessione’s tale of passion “visibly” defies a Fascist idea of sanitized love and familial piety, the truly subversive element in the movie is a powerful drive to “look at” the world that finds expression in the representation of the landscape. This representation evades traditional integration into the narrative and instead unfolds as what Bernardi terms a “painterly landscape,” one that draws the spectators’ as well as the characters’ glances beyond the narrated story, opening up “possible stories that stand behind or next to that one” (37). If the landscape so understood represents “a frontier moment” that pushes the viewer beyond the “visible,” Ossessione inhabits, through its use of landscape, a stylistic and historical threshold.¹

It is still subject to debate to what extent Ossessione anticipated the poetics of neorealism. Rather than reading Visconti’s first movie as a more or less imperfect stylistic forerunner, I prefer to focus on what found unique expression in this prologue to neorealist film production: a cinematic representation of a Fascist society. While the neorealist movies often expressed, as Ruth Ben-Ghiat has argued, a “displacement of collective responsibility for Fascism by consistently shifting culpability away from ordinary Italians” (1999, 84), Ossessione represents precisely Fascism’s containment of vision, spaces and desires structuring the inner world of such “ordinary” Italians. Visconti, and the group of young communist intellectuals around the journal Cinema, allegorically staged through the characters of the black-clad femme fatale and the indecisive tramp—swept away by a passion with murder at its heart, imprisoned in a house conquered through violence, obsessed with finding a way out to other stories, other realities—the predicament of the human subject under Fascism.

The haunting appearances of landscape in Ossessione rupture the conventionality of both filmic plot and the Fascist social order by suggesting a critique of the everyday and the possibility of an alternative space of experience. If, as Bernardi observed, the landscape is a philosophical object that expresses the relationship of the human subject with self and world, the landscape in Ossessione simultaneously expresses both hopelessness and the desire for another future. Moving away from the imperiousness and fatality of plot, the cinematic image in Ossessione enjoys a freedom that intimates artistic and historical liberations yet to come. The characters, on the other hand, rather than looking at this world, often turn their backs on it. After seeing the world for so many years, the problem for the protagonists, Gino and Giovanna, as well as for a whole generation of Italians, is to succeed in looking at the world once again.²

Landscape and Film Theory

In the fall of 1943, one year after shooting Ossessione and shortly after the declaration of the armistice between Italy and the Allies, Visconti published a manifesto in Cinema announcing a new cinema to a country in the midst of momentous political change:

Al cinema mi ha portato soprattutto l’impegno di raccontare storie di uomini vivi: di uomini vivi nelle cose, non le cose per sé. Il cinema che mi interessa è un cinema antropomorfico.

What brought me to cinema above all was the commitment to tell stories of living human beings: human beings living among things, not about the things themselves. The cinema that interests me is an anthropomorphic cinema.³

Visconti overemphasizes here the primacy of the human presence—his intent to “tell stories of living men”—to make a clear break with the staged quality of the Fascist cinematography of i telefoni bianchi (films set in fashionable interiors). However, while focusing on the centrality of the human action, Visconti also points to the diffusion, so to speak, of the human presence in a reality that bears the eloquent imprint of human activity and desire, “made by human beings and continuously modified by them” (quoted in Milanini 1980, 34).

Visconti’s search for a new relation between the human body and its surroundings was by no means an isolated one. In 1941, Giuseppe De Santis, the future assistant director of Ossessione, had asked, “How … could it be possible to understand and interpret the human figure, if we isolate it from the elements in which it lives, with which it communicates every day?”⁴ In a brief yet poignant essay, entitled “Per un paesaggio italiano” (For an Italian Landscape), De Santis grants to landscape a centrality that has far-reaching consequences for Italian cinema. The central preoccupation of cinema, argued De Santis, should be to create an authenticity of both gesture and atmosphere. According to the young critic, the things that carry the marks of human hands, the walls of a house and the streets of a town, as well as nature, “which surrounds him and that has such a power on him to shape him in its own image and semblance” (1982, 43), are the necessary points of departure for all cinematic narration. Landscape thus sets the stage for the telling of new stories. But this is not all. The foregrounding of a primordial landscape is identified with a radical rethinking of the medium itself. By stressing the permanence of the image within the unfolding of the action, as an element of the film aesthetic, landscape invokes different ways of seeing and telling that reach back to the traditions of painting as well as look forward to a new documentary form. It is through such hybrids that De Santis heralds the birth of a new national cinema.

Michelangelo Antonioni, in his 1939 article entitled “Per un film sul fiume Po,” perhaps went a step further than anyone in the articulation of a cinematography emerging from nature. “I need only say,” he wrote, “that I would like a film with the Po as the central character, in which the spirit of the river would provide the interest of the film.”⁵ Upsetting the conventional hierarchy between figure and background, the landscape is proposed as protagonist of a story of passage and movement and not simply a taken-for- granted and eternal reality. In Antonioni’s preparatory notes, human history is seen as flowing side by side with natural history, as human society and the river change, destroy and dominate each other. The challenge, for Antonioni as for De Santis, is to find a new way of constructing a story where the action and the lyrical impulses that define the natural sequences (“the torment of poetic discovery”) could merge. But how can nature translate into action? The camera will afford the necessary mediation. The movement of the camera will flow with the river, following its currents, eddies, and floods, literally allowing the landscape to tell its own story. The river as landscape in action, an ongoing ribbon that metaphorically mirrors the unrolling of the film reel, lends itself both to fictional narrative and that of its seeming opposite, documentary, whose time, space, and rhythm appear to be dictated by the environment. The intertwining of natural and human temporalities resurfaces within cinema itself—thus, at the very heart of human technology—in this stylistic choice Antonioni faced between fictional film and documentary. “Between you and me,” Antonioni provisionally concludes, “I feel a good deal of sympathy for a filmed fiction/document without any label” (quoted in Overbey 1978, 81). It is within that slash, the ongoing tension between the narrative and the image, that Antonioni and the whole generation that gave expression to the neorealist movement would decide to construct their stories.

In contemporary film studies, scholars have brought renewed attention to the role played by landscape within the double system of representation—visual and discursive—that organizes the cinematic image (Bernardi 2002). In her L’Image-paysage: Iconologie etcinéma, Maurizia Natali likens the cinematic screen to Freud’s mystic writing pad—a screen on which to write and erase immediate perceptions, while a wax surface underneath retains the innumerable impressions of past writings. This double surface well describes the cinematic image “captured between the present movement of narration and the spectral time of the images” (1996, 72). Between these layers, Natali sees the landscape acting as Walter Benjamin’s “optical unconscious,” a space “which conjures itself back behind the human actions represented, the deep space which persists behind the body of cinema” (74). Since the inception of cinematography, the landscape shot, a framed piece of nature, “opens an esthetic contradiction within cinema, the art of the city and crowds, of speed and mechanical movement” (61)—hence its marginal- ization in classical cinema. Within the narrative flow of action-images that construct the story, nature is distanced, excluded, fragmented, or contained by quotational devices (windows, backgrounds, vistas). Nonetheless, Natali maintains, the landscape introduces a rift within the apparently seamless flow of the cinematic story. Nature, thus “mise au fond,” reemerges with the enigmatic force of the repressed, Bazin’s “révolution de la forme vers le fond.”

In the late 1930s and early 1940s, the Cinema group started this revolution by choosing landscape, what had been a fundamentally invisible background (“fond”) in classical and mainstream cinema, as the experimental site for the development of a new cinematography. Visconti, De San- tis, and Antonioni imagine stories emerging from the mutual molding of human figure and natural landscape, stories born at the intersection of the world of conscious actions, of movement and history, and that of nature, the space of the everyday and timeless habitation.⁶ The camera eye of neo- realism will inhabit this space of heightened perception, a space where, to borrow Bakhtin’s description of the chronotope, “time … thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible, likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history” (1986, 84). Here is born and tentatively theorized what André Bazin defines a few years later as the “image-fact” of neorealist cinematography, which he sees endowing “the entire surface of the scene … [with] an equally concrete density,” whereby “man himself is just one fact among others, to whom no pride of place should be given a priori”(1971, 37–38). Landscape becomes the site on which to represent a dispersed, profoundly modernist, and yet “realist” idea of subjectivity. At the same time, history, “mise au fond” in the official discourse of Fascism, reemerges through landscape as a natural history. Nowhere does this concept find its realization more clearly than the closing episode of Paisà. There, the story of Italy’s liberation as the obscure struggle of nameless partisans is narrated directly by the flowing of the Po River, whose “muddy waters, … reeds stretching away to the horizon, … occupy a place of equal importance with the men” (37).

This neorealist attention to the environment should not be simply equated with heightened realism.⁷ Described as a “communication” between the human and the surrounding elements, the representation of the landscape marks an opening toward the metaphysical, that is, toward what is silent and yearns for expression. Following the lesson of Jean Renoir, De Santis argues that landscape should be used to point out the existence of feelings that men cannot express. Thus, filmed landscape becomes the site where visible reality and the unconscious meet, a place where the human subject both asserts its mastery and is mastered, a known everyday space and, at the same time, a foreign territory. By bringing landscape to the foreground, the critics of the Cinema group recognize it as a kind of ultimate frontier of the story, where human actions begin to merge with the horizon of their unfolding. Here, the unspoken that haunts every story—and is constitutive of every story, the source from which every story emerges and to which it returns—becomes visible. Landscape represents for this young generation of Italian critics and for future filmmakers an unclaimed, primitive, politically virgin ground from which to discover new stories and storytelling techniques and a new human subject—a space that can accommodate a truly new Italian cinema.

Antonioni’s d...

Índice

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Copyrighted Images
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 1943 Visconti: The Haunted Frames of Ossessione
• 2 1946 Rossellini: Landscape as Burial Ground
• 3 1948 De Sica and Zavattini: Memory in Shadow and Stone
• 4 1950 Antonioni: Cronaca di un Amore's Landscapes of Remorse
• 5 Epilogue as Prologue-Zavattini/Celati: Documentaristic Visions from Un paese to Mondonuovo
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index