The essential aspects of what has been called cinematic neorealism find their ultimate definition in Luchino Visconti's Ossessione, more so than in La terra trema. In that archetype, the repertory oc characters,, shots, topographical choices, and visual cues is rooted in the soil of a vast figurative culture.... This, however, is an investigation that art criticism has yet to conduct: the story that has followed, which has beginnings with Visconti and with his perception of Italy in a cinematic light, is taking place before our eyes, with such richness and variety that one is forced to acknowledge film as today's leading art, just as operatic music was during the Romantic age or architecture during the early Renaissance.-Federico Zeri (1)
All the lines of Italian cinema, from the 1930s through the 1960s, pass through Ossessione. All the theory, the critical battles, the literary, visual, and cinematic models, the search for a common poetics and for a long-term film programmatics, converge in this film. Space and time seem to dilate steroscopically and to respond to a new rhythmics, a new metrics, and a new narrative and representational syntax. From this moment on, and in an even more decisive manner with Roberto Rossellini's Roma città aperta, the cinema will become the privileged metronome of the cultural and social processes of postwar Italian life.
On Visconti's set the labors of a group of young people mesh, the same young minds who, a few years earlier, had extensively debated the themes that would form the basis of neorealist poetics. Following the embryonic phase with its idea of cinema as a possible world, Ossessione (Obsession, 1942; released in English as Ossessione) opened a new phase for Italian cinema, one of real morphogenesis, the result of which would be the emergence of a series of distinguished filmmakers with strongly autonomous visions.
fig. 1 Massimo Girotti and Clara Calami in Luchino Visconti's Ossessione, 1942.
fig. 2. Roberto Rossellini's Roma città aperta
From its opening shots Ossessione displays, in explicit fashion, its cinematic, literary, and visual ancestry as well as its ideological and expressive charge (see fig. 1). Overcoming the mediation of literature without feeling any inferiority toward it (the plot was freely drawn from James M. Cain's novel The Postman Always Rings Twice, 1934), the scene seems to open up, for the first time, onto an Italy previously excluded from the glories of cinematic representation. "The film's story is a rather terrifying one, and situated in the sweetest, loveliest of Italian landscapes, a piece of Italy that had never before been seen," concludes Umberto Barbaro in a 1943 article, written right after the fall of Fascism's national regime.(2) With its landscape passages teeming with a life at times independent of the drama of Gino (Massimo Girotti) and Giovanna (Clara Calamai), at times symbiotically related to it, the film disconcerts its audience. The director's gaze is so powerful that, as if by synesthesia, it multiplies and dilates sounds emerging from the inert, silent backgrounds of the previous decades and transforms them into a scream of exceptional violence.
Contemporary critics realized they were witnessing an extraordinary event. Some of them, like Barbaro, theorist and spiritual father of many aspiring young directors, recognized in it the strains of a genetic patrimony with roots in Renaissance painting: "Doesn't the apparition of the ice-cream cart, so oddly fantastical, have heraldic precedents that perhaps go back to Ercole de' Roberti?" (3) As Guido Aristarco would write a few years later, Ossessione was to have, for many young critics, an importance every bit as great as that of Thomas Mann's Der Zauberberg (1924; published in English, in 1927, as The Magic Mountain).(4)
Thanks to Visconti and to the young people working with him, it was as though the spirit of the splendid painters of the quattrocento Ferrarese workshop-Cosmè Tura, Francesco del Cossa, and de' Roberti--had come back to life. A bond with a vast artistic heritage was thus recuperated through a process of fusion analogous to that achieved with matter a short while earlier by the young physicists gathered around Enrico Fermi on via Panisperna. Once activated, the chain reaction in the film universe released an uncontrollable energy and power of a sort never before seen. Now cinema-an art form considered secondary and lacking its own identity and expressive autonomy-would be granted a veritable leadership role within the international universe of the arts, from literature and theater to music and painting.
Though the great critical and historical mythologies of neorealist film have long asserted a cohesion and homogeneity, the landscape I am attempting to describe here is anything but cohesive. On the contrary, it is quite variegated, though marked by genetic characteristics that give rise to a narrative and visual universal language. Immediately after Ossessione, there was in any case a leap, an interval or pause in the evolutionary chain, followed in 1945 by the appearance of Roma cittd aperta (Rome open city, 1945; released in English as Open City, fig. 2), a work destined to have even more far-reaching effects on world cinema. The Visconti of Ossessione and the Rossellini of Roma clttà aperta can be included in the same list, yet they did not possess-it is wise to clarify this at once-the same cultural and ideological chromosomes and would go on to create rather dissimilar and distinct oeuvres.
Although neorealism may have had its day, it has endured as an overarching plane of expression, ethics, ideology, and aesthetics, offering a platform, points of view, and common references in various types of works and for diverse filmmakers, without ever strictly coinciding with any such work or filmmaker. When one looks more generally at the characteristics and dynamics of Italian cinema in the decades after 1945, the notion of a phylogeny-the evolutionary lines of specific groups of individuals and works-becomes quite clear, articulated into phases that follow the historic, economic, and ideological dynamics of the nation and the world at large.
For a few years between the end of World War 11 and the period of reconstruction and the Cold War, the sensibility dominating the poe tics- in -progress of Italian film was anthropocentric, coinciding in a common will to watch and tell the stories of people who have no story. Beyond the expressive quests and risk-taking of individual directors, a certain "middle language" was achieved thanks to neorealism, an idiomatic dialect-an accepted visual lexicon and anrrative syntax--that conferred a new, definitive identity upon Italian cinema.
"The films bearing the label neorealism," wrote jean Cocteau in his diary in the late 1940s, 11 were nothing more than Oriental tales. Like the Orient, Italy lives in the streets. The Caliph, instead of dressing up as a man of the people, dresses up as a movie camera and seeks out the mysterious intrigues that take place in the streets and in the homes. In Miracolo a Milano [1951; released in English as Miracle in Milan], [Vittorio] De Sica pushes the Oriental tale to the limit."(5) In an unusual move that went entirely against the neorealist current, Cocteau, faced with Rossellini's films Roma città aperta and Paisà (Compatriot, 1946; released in English as Paisan) and De Sica's films Sciuscià, (1946; released in English as Shoeshine) and Ladri di biciclette (Bicycle thieves, 1948; released in English as both The Bicycle Thief and Bicycle Thieves, fig. 3), invited the public not to content itself with the screen's ability to reflect, like a mirror, the living conditions of an entire nation. Cocteau was suggesting, rather, an equation between the great oral tradition and its clamorous reincarnation in the tales of Rossellini and De Sica. And he was hailing the possibility of entering the mirror to discover, like Alice or the Caliph in The Thousand and One Nights, the elusive and unpredictable dimensions of the thousand and one Italies in motion and in rapid transformation.
In Paisà Cocteau had seen occur, before his own eyes, the miracle of a man, the filmmaker, expressing himself through a people, and of a people that in turn expressed itself through the filmmaker. Things were starting over from scratch. The movie camera's eye seemed to have returned to the point from which the Luml~re brothers' cameramen had begun. Beginning anew also means rediscovering the world as if it were appearing before the director's eyes for the very first time. In reappropriating the powers of the gaze one realizes that the criteria, the units of measurement, and the systems of reference for the representation of reality have to be reestablished. The Rossellinian tale unfolds in distinct frames with a simplicity and dramatic power akin to that of the great medieval fresco cycles of Giotto.
The unit of measurement for this new, central phase in the history of Italian cinema-in a country destroyed economically and politically, morally and spiritually, physically and materially-was provided, on the one hand, by the war's ruins (the physical remains) and, on the other hand, by the need to translate at once that little bit of vital energy still in circulation (the nonphysical remains, as It were) into cultural energy. However briefly it may have lasted, the men who contributed to the resumption and reconstruction of cinematic activity had the exultant and unprecedented sense of having free access to all the surfaces of the visible and to all the surfaces of the utterable.
fig. 3. Lamberto Maggiorani and Enzo Staiola in Vittorio De Sica's Ladri di biciclette, 1948.
fig. 4. Roberto Rossellini's Paisà
Reconstruction also held open the possibility of once again breathing the air of international culture. Cinema became-without the need for any further diplomatic action-the most rapid means for a torn and vanquished Italy, impoverished and lacking credibility, to regain great international credit: "There is no doubt," wrote Georges Auriol in 1948, "that at the present time, in Europe, if not the world over, the cinema has its head in Rome."(6) And there is no doubt that, for a few years, the cinema born and raised in the ruins not only represented a wilt to rebirth, but also assumed absolute leadership in the territory of Italian and international art. Thanks above all to Rossellini and De Sica, for a few years the rhythms of world cinema sought to coincide with those of Rome rather than those of Hollywood.
The poetics of neorealism did not arise from a common plan worked out over a cafè table but rather from its powerful voice, the lacrimae rerum (tears of the things). The movie camera discovered what Eugene Minkowski called "lived synchronism," that is, the penetration of screen time into the real time of the entire country.(7) The movie camera's eye assumed the role of retinal backdrop, a backdrop against which converged thousands of unforeseen images from which emanated a pathos and an ethos never before known. Such vastly different filmmakers as Alessandro Blasetti, Mario Camerini, Renato Castellani, Giuseppe De Santis, Pietro Germi, Alberto Lattuada, Rossellini, Mario Soldati, Visconti, Luigi Zampa, and Cesare Zavattini inhabited, for a few seasons, the same field of tension. "Neorealism," wrote Andr6 Bazin, "throws cat and dog into one bag."(8)
Even though Rossellini, unlike Visconti, was not immediately recognized as the Messiah incarnate, his Roma città aperta introduced a new way of looking at human beings and their relationship to things that was destined to become the common patrimony of world cinema and to orient, like a compass needle, the stylistic, thematic, and narrative choices of many filmmakers of subsequent generations. The director felt himself invested with the role of interpreter of the history of all people. Whereas in Visconti there is a convergence and metabolization of artistic and literary tradition, with Rossellin, the cinema suddenly fteed itself from this tradition, which had to some degree determined its prior direction. Indeed, at this point, the relationships were actually reversed: it was no longer cinema drawing sustenance from the major arts and translating literary language into images, or popularizing the products of the pictorial and figurative traditions; rather, it was cinematic writing that now transformed and influenced the various forms of artistic writing.
It is important to underscore this change, this assertion of autonomy. In certain sequences of Paisà, for example, the compassion incited in the viewer and the epic of observed reality combine in an absolutely natural manner. The result evokes great exemplars of Italian painting and sculpture from Giotto to Nicolo dell'Arca, passing through Michelangelo and the tradition of Caravaggian realism all the way up to the paintings, drawings, or sculptures of Renato Birolli, Renato Guttuso, Mario Mafai, and Giacomo Manzù that were created in the days of wartime struggle, resistance, and liberation. How can one fall to see a kind of ideal convergence and contiguity between Leoncillo's ceramic Madre romana uccisa dai tedeschi I (Roman Mother Killed by the Germans 1, 1944, cat. no. 16)-made in memory of and in homage to Teresa Gullacci, killed in Rome during a demonstration with other women in March 1944-and the sequence of the death of Signora Pina (Anna Magnani) in Roma città aperta? How can one fall to sense the same high tone of tragedy found in medieval and Renaissance sculpture groups in the recovery of the partisan's body in the sixth episode of Paisà (fig. 4)?
Filmmakers of the time had the heady sensation of being out to discover and able to conquer potentially all the possible loci of Italian reality. Above all they discovered a multiplicity of unprecedented forms of verbal and gestural communication, of perfect interaction between human beings and the environment: they made faces speak; they made silences, emptiness, objects, landscape speak; they rediscovered meanings and purposes in insignificant objects; they ennobled every little gesture. "Man," wrote Zavattini, "stands there before us, and we can watch him in slow motion to confirm the concreteness of every tiniest thought of his."(9)
Filmmakers of the time had the heady sensation of being out to discover and able to conquer potentially all the possible loci of Italian reality. Above all they discovered a multiplicity of unprecedented forms of verbal and gestural communication, of perfect interaction between human beings and the environment: they made faces speak; they made silences, emptiness, objects, landscape speak; they rediscovered meanings and purposes in insignificant objects; they ennobled every little gesture. "Man," wrote Zavattini, "stands there before us, and we can watch him in slow motion to confirm the concreteness of every tiniest thought of his. The neorealist gaze was an all-inclusive gaze that aimed to embrace the whole of the Italian territory. Faisa and Germi'S Il cammino della speranza (1950; released in English as The Path of Hope) feature journeys that wend from Sicily to northern Italy. The neorealists moved from Sicilian mines to the rice fields of the Vercelli region in the Piedmont, from the mouth of the Po to the towns of the Clociaria southeast of Rome, from the neighborhoods of Naples to the ramshackle suburbs of Rome, and entered people's homes to let the movie camera encounter reality naturally, without mediation or distortion. By spreading out the visual coordinates, the screen's virtual space was made to coincide with the space of an imagined Italian nation still to be reconstituted and from which it was understood as possible to build a new identity.
The reaffirmation of an anthropocentric and anthropomorphic cinerrV found its highest expression, after the masterpieces of Rossellini and De Sica, in Visconti's La terra trema 0948; released in English as The Earth Trembles), loosely inspired by Giovanni Verga's novel, I Malavoglia 1881; published in English, in 1890, as The House by the Medlar Tree). Visconti went to the South in 1948, to Aci Trezza in Sicily, to shoot his film among real fishermen and in the same settings as those in the novel. He had been thinking for many years of transcribing the Verga work to the screen; in a 1941 article illustrated with drawings by Guttuso, he told of how, through direct contact with the land of Sicily, he had seen Verga's language incarnate in the landscape, had seen it transformed into body, soul, blood: "To a Lombard reader such as I ... the primitive, gigantic world of the fishermen of Aci Trezza and the shepherds of Marineo had always seemed upraised by the imaginative, violent tone of epic: to my Lombard eyes, though contented with the sky of my own land ... Verga's Sicily had always truly seemed the island of Ulysses"(10). This strong statement, in which reality is directly perceived in its mythic and symbolic aspects (perhaps he had been influenced by a reading of Elio Vittorini's Conversazione in Sicilia [Conversation in Sicily, 1941; published in English, in 1949, as In Sicily]), would also help to determine the formal choices of La terra trema: "The power and suggestiveness of Verga~s novel seem to rest entirely on its intimate, musical rhythm ... a rhythm that gives a religious, fateful tone of ancient tragedy to this humble tale of everyday life, this story seemingly made up of discards and rejects, of things of no importance."(11)
Such a poetics clearly prefigures Visconti's dominant directorial practices and choices.
Approaching this Sicily meant, for Visconti, approaching a reality in which any gesture, any
drama, had the power to burst forth at the height of its primitive energy and acquire something of
the sacred value of Greek tragedy. Conceived as the opening segment of a great trilogy, and
realized visually in part under the influence of the documentaries of directors Robert Flaherty
and Joris Ivens and the painting of Guttuso, La terra trema is, a great voyage of catabasis-a
return to the source, a descent to the roots of the national folk culture. The visual score
successfully conveys the sense of both the violence of class exploitation as well as the
fishermen's titanic struggle against the forces of nature. In this film the director achieved a
figurative tension, an ability to see and charge the object of his vision with meaning, that was
never repeated. Neither the sumptuous nineteenth-century picture gallery that is Il Gattopardo
(1963; released in English as The Leopard) nor the exploration of chromatic possibilities and
splendor of Senso (Sense, 1954; released in English as The Wanton Countess) nor the infinite
gamut of black-and-white half-tones of Le notti bianche (1957; released in English as White
Nights, fig. 5) possesses the innovative power of La terra trema, which, nevertheless, in terms of
public response, was one of the most clamorous failures in the history of Italian film.
fig. 5. Jean Marais, Maria Schell, and Marcello Mastoianni (background) in Luchino Visconti's
Le notti bianche, 1957.
In the early 1950s Visconti and a few other filmmakers Mario Camerini with Ulisse (1954; released in English as Ulysses), Renato Castellano with Giulietta e Romeo 1954; released in English as Romeo and Juliet), Guglielmo Giannini with Carosello napoletano (Neapolitan carousel, 1952; released in English as Neapolitan Fantasy), and Visconti with Senso- confronted the problems of color as an expressive medium, achieving results that were in many ways original and memorable, but the advent of color did not automatically revolutionize cinematic ways of seeing. For there was, in Italy, a distrust of color as a form of expression that simplified and therefore reduced the possibilities of signification; it is notable that Federico Fellini would not make his first color feature, Giulietta degli spiriti (released in English as Juliet of the Spirits), until 1965.
In their early color films the directors, cameramen, and screenwriters recuperated their pictorial heritage by drawing liberally from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Mannerist and Baroque painting, from the eighteenthcentury townscapes of Francesco Guardi and Antonio Canaletto, and from the paintings of the nineteenthcentury Italian Impressionists, the Macchiaioli. The time machine of Italian film, which had seemed to be in constant acceleration, experienced a slowdown in these films, modulating itself in relation to cultural, not social, temporality. Painting found its way onto the screen mostly through quotation (as in Senso and Giulietta e Romeo), though in many cases the quotation found an added value on the screen, as in Carosello napoletano, a cinematic transcription of a musical show that, in 1950, Giannini had taken around Europe with great success. Of all those musicals produced in Italy during the 1950s, this film alone can compete, as an equal, with the great American musicals. Taking off from very old song Michelemmà, and working his way up to the nineteenth- and twentiethcentury songs Funiculi juniculà, Santa Lucia lontana (Santa Lucia far away), Partono i bastimenti (The ships are leaving), 0 vita, 0 vita mia (Oh life, my life), Quando spunta la luna a Marechiaro (When the moon rises at Marechiaro), in a kind of grandiose "songbook" of unparalleled emotional, visual,! and cultural intensity, the director succeeded in using a phantasmagorical play of lights and colors, gestures and sounds, scents and odors to illuminate and accompany the glorious and sorrowful epic of the population, culture, andi folk civilization of the great city of Naples. And Giannini managed to capture on screen, through a color that kinesthetically becomes sound-and, vice versa, through sound that bursts into a continuous symphony of colorthe city's solar spirit. It was not until the 1960s, with the emergence of Michelangelo Antonioni's and Federico Fellini's color films, that we would again see movies in which color is given so dominant an expressive role.
For both Antonioni and Fellini, whether working in black and white or in color, there was an imperative beyond objective reality-which in any case is difficult to define-to define the elusive dimensions of subjectivity. They were beginning to understand the importance of the invisible that lies beyond the visible. The faith in the cognitive power of reason-the certitudes provided by ideologies, on the one hand, and by the "facts" of reality, on the other hand-was being replaced by epistemological doubts, by new questions, by perceptions of the problematics of the real. Accordingly, in their films, objects and forms in space begin, little by little, to lose their identities, often appearing to be signals pointing to another dimension. The visible, thanks to the gazes of these two directors, begins to be presented as a multidimensional reality; the empirical data of the everyday begin to fall apart, providing no certitudes and mutating in accordance with the mutations of the inner conditions of the Subject.
More than anyone else, Antonioni, the creator of Il grido (1957; released in English as The Outcry), L'avventura (The adventure, 196o; released in English as L'Avventura), and Deserto rosso (1964; released in English as Red Desert), breathed the spirit of Modern and contemporary painting-from Gianni Morandi to Alberto Burri, from Giorgio de Chirico all the way to Francis Bacon. From his first documentaries and feature films he managed to communicate-often with a single image-the feeling of malaise, the growing power of emptiness enveloping and separating people and things (see fig. 6). In his work of the 1950s and 1960s, Antonioni sought to replace real spaces with topologies that would help to measure the distances separating individuals from others or dividing them from themselves. In Antonioni's films the perception of space is overturned: not only are sight and point of view determined by objects, but objects themselves become manifest, seeming to incarnate an unprecedented meaning. Emptiness prevails over fullness; absence has a greater consistency, a greater narrative and dramatic weight, than presence. On several occasions the director seemed to want to capture on film even the inner radiations of the imaginations of his characters as they attempt to flee the everyday.
fig. 6. Monica Vitti in Michelangelo Antonioni's Deserto Rosso
fig. 7. David Hemmings in Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-Up, 1966.
During a visit to New York in the early 1960s Antonioni asked if he could visit the studio of Mark Rothko, a painter for whom he felt a great affinity. After admiring the paintings a long time, he observed that those canvases, like his own films, speak of "nothingness." The art critic Richard Gilman, who was present at the studio visit, later pointed out that though not abstract, L'avventura and La notte (1961; released in English as The Night), like much painting of the time, are self-representational-absolute works that do not describe any action, inasmuch as they create an action in themselves."(12)
With L'avventura there coalesces in Antonioni's development, though not only for him, a new phase in which a closer relationship with the characters was sought, and an attempt was made to correlate their movements through space-a space suddenly become enigmatic, elusive, unknowable-with the movements of the mind. In the films of the 1960s the perception of space and of its inner coordinates became at once sharper and more uncertain. In the opening sequences of L'avventura, but especially in L'eclisse (1962; released in English as Eclipse) space, as in the paintings of Piet Mondrian, is reduced to its elementary structures, only later to open up onto other dimensions, as in Metaphysical painting.
The turn to color in the 1964 Deserto rosso extended Antonioni's formal and expressive ranges. Now the figures in the landscape dissolve, tending to become spots of color. As Carlo DiCarlo wrote of the film:
All is color. The green and silver of the cisterns; the black of the smokestacks, the junction lines,
the trestles; the yellow and minium red of the structures; the milky white, the golden yellow, the
gray and black of the gas blow-pipes; the violet-green rust of the grass; the ftw plants that twist
about themselves almost weeping onto the burned, bluish-ocher, gray-sepia, lead-colored earth;
everywhere a melting pot of incredible, unreal, irreducible tints, almost resembling the
meteorological impasti of Dubuffet.(13)
Antonioni went so far as to force these colors, making them, even more than the objects, a mirror of the emotional and existential state of his characters. The cinema seemed to become for him a means of synthesizing and reformulating contemporary developments in painting, music, and aesthetics. In Blow-Up (1966) he transferred these elements to center stage, making them the object of the story (see fig. 7). Once the dissolution of the subject within the space of the Italian reality had been established and presented anew in various forms, Antonioni began to feet the need-as would also happen to Pier Paolo Pasolini-to verify the facts on a broader scale and to force himself into a sort of expatriation, which was followed by a literal cultural and iconographical repatriation in the latter half of the 1960s, with Blow-Up, made in England, and then Zabriskie Point (1970), made in the United States.
If Antonioni's vision encompassed one of the most advanced and far-flung frontiers of visual experimentation in postwar cinema, Fellini's was more limited and compressed in a geographical sense, seeming, by contrast, to fall almost entirely along the Rimini-Rome axis in the twenty-year period of interest to us. In fact, however, Fellini, too, aimed at exploring and suggesting dimensions beyond the details of the visible and at making autobiographical memory coincide with collective memory. Fellini was one of the few directors in the entire history of film who were able to build, in film after film-in a vast body of work extending from Luci del varietà, (1951; released in English as Variety Lights) to La voce della luna (1990; released in English as Voice of the Moon)-a true cosmology based on discrete experiences that expand in space and time, indefinitely and limitlessly."(14) He could move with great simplicity from the spaces of reality to those of dream; capable of making several different moments coexist in the same sequence, he seemed, like a magician, able to control time.
From La dolce vita (The sweet life, 1960; released in English as La Dolce Vita.) on, Fellini's first-person involvement in the production process was quite similar to that of many American Action Painters. His is an exceptional case of "action filming": without destroying the object of his narrative, the director almost phys ically penetrated his own film, letting his own vital energies imbue the images and creating a kind of stream of consciousness through the cinematic medium. In fact Carl Jung and James Joyce are the most recognizeable tutelary deities of Fellini's cinema after La dolce vita.
After 1960 Fellini abandoned any real interest in the mimetic representation of everyday life, deciding to enter his own inner world in a more definite manner through the insertion of oneiric elements into the metacinernatic structure. One of the foundations of neorealist poeticsthe attempt to make the real coincide with the visible was left behind, and the movie camera began to stray ever more constantly toward the realms of dream and the imagination. The dream acquired a material consistency and reality seemed but an illusory game of mirrors and masks.
The key work of the Fellinian cosmogony is Otto e mezzo (1963; released in English as 8-1/2). In
this film, the director defined a structure, achieved a rhythm, and organized the shots in a
perfect, mutual, intern ' .,i,ilibruirn achieved through a simultaneous movement toward chaos
and the height of entropy and the sudden and almost magical ability to reorder components and
rejoin the scattered and incomprehensible strands of life experience (see figs. 8, 9). In this film,
which occupies a position with respect to the rest of Italian postwar cinema like that of the
Sistine Chapel with respect to the rest of Renaissance painting, the boundaries of realism are
crossed but not entirely lost sight of. Through the destructuring of the coordinates of space and
time, a whole imaginative world is brought into the picture and fitted into a grandiose
framework. Several different threads of time overlap and interweave, while inner time dictates
the real narrative.
fig. 8. Federico Fellini on the set of Otto e mezzo. 1963.
fig. 9. Marcello Mastroianni in Federico Fellini's Otto e mezzo. 1963.
Otto e mezzo placed Fellini at the highest level of visionary filmmaking, alongside the likes of Ingmar Bergman, Luis Bufiuel, Akira Kurosawa, and Orson Welles. In Fellini's subsequent works of the 1960s-films as different as Giuletta degli spiriti and Fellini Satyricon (1969)-in a state of creative grace, he continued to pull out of his hat a vast quantity of images and emotions integrating his own experience and personal memories with the collective experiences and memories of a world, playing with a palette of vastly changing, iridescent colors, now dense, rich, bright, and velvety, now cold and ghostly. Fellini's journeys were the initiatory journeys into the discovery of oneself. Deep down he loved static realities and indelible emotions, understanding the imaginative power to be found when the mechanism of time was oriented against the clock or toward the spaces of the mind and the imagination rather than those of reality.
Although he had once worked with Fellini, collaborating on the script of Fellini's Le notte di Cabiria (1956; released in English as The Nights of Cabiria and later as Cabiria), Pier Paolo Pasolini was to take a very different approach to filmmaking. Pasolini was an exceptional man, an orchestra unto himself, a King Midas capable of exercising direct control over his materials and transforming them even by the most elementary contact. He moved quite naturally from being a painter to being a screenwriter of films set in the run-down suburbs of Rome; little by little, in a process that lasted almost ten years, his eyes drew closer and closer to the movie camera. In his first two films as director, Accattone! (Beggar!, 1961; released in English as Accatone!)(15) and Mamma Roma (Mama Rome, 1962; released in English as Mama Roma), Pasolini discovered the image and its coordinates with equal excitement and set out on a visual quest in which he proved himself capable of creating perfect cinematic equivalents to the painting of Piero della Francesca, Masaccio, and Masolino.
If, as we have seen, Barbaro succeeded in grasping the connections between the painting tradition and Italian cinema, it was the lectures of the great art historian Roberto Longhi that, in the long run, seem to have acted most profoundly and directly on the work and vision of Pasolini. For Pasolini, Longhi's work constituted a fundamental reference point, and his charismatic teaching at the University of Bologna became the vital lymph, the flesh and blood of his poetics and expression. To Longhi, Pasolini owed illuminations that became first poetry, then prose, then cinematic images.(16)
Pasolini's films continually give the impression of a director mesmerized by every face and body he filmed, separating them from the story and violating all the preexisting rules of cinematic grammar and syntax. Film brought out the best in his painterly education, which for over a decade had remained in a latent state, ready to explode in many different directions. At the same time, his writing had been ready to transform itself into images and to do so in such a way that the transition was almost unnoticeable. By the end of the 1950 writing could no longer afford him the sense of total identification with its object, compared to the often stunning power of images randomly discovered by moving one's gaze in a circle and stopping suddenly on a face that directly expresses the material reality of an idea.
With the use of color the possibilities grew considerably, and the Longhi. influence, after a long distillation, yielded the stupendous images of "La ricotta" (an episode in the anthology film Rogopag, 1962,; released in English as Rogopag): the play of dissonance and chromatic and aural counterpoints, of quotations, of sacredness and the desacralizing of the figurative and the possibility of giving it new form and life on the screen. Film, compared to fiction, had a tremendous regenerative effect on Pasolini, acting almost as an intravenous infusion, a complete renewal of his poetic circulatory system. Yet the traditions of painting and of literature would, throughout his career, remain the favored territories of his creative inspiration.
Compared to the filmmakers of the French New Wave, who saw reality only through the lens of cinematic experience, Pasolini observed the world of the Roman periphery through the filter of his artistic education.
Painting, for him, was a means of access, a magical assistant enabling him to enter effortlessly into the space of film. And in his early films he created a time that is not the time of cinematic narration, nor that which found its way into French film through the tcole du Regard. Rather, it is the time of the spectator's sight when viewing a painting. His idea of space and time is comparable to that of a medieval painter: Pasolini seemed to know only twodimensional space and to be entirely ignorant of perspective. And yet even when making an obvious quotation from one painting or another, he always sought to give cinematic life to the iconography of reference.
Pasolini truly wanted to use the movie camera as a paintbrush and went so far as to appear in Il
Decamerone (1970; released in English as The Decameron), his film based on Boccaccio's
fourteenth-century classic, as a Giottolike painter who moves about and observes the world with
a precinematic eye (fig. 10). The classics-in such films as Il vangelo secondo Matteo (1964;
released in English as The Gospel According to St. Matthew), Edipo re (1967; released in
English as Oedipus Rex), and I racconti di Canterbury (1972-; released in English as The
Canterbury Tales), among others-served him as a kind of natural environment in which to
camouflage, project, recognize, and reveal himself according to the needs and the stages of a
journey that seemed already entirely written out and anticipated in the pages of the great
literature of the past.
fig. 10. Pier Paolo Pasolini in his Il decamerone. 1971.
Yet even when he used literary space to tell of himself, Pasolini acted in the spirit of a nomad. He used the classics to move between history and myth-between "the vain movement of present time"(17) and the sense of repetition, of return, of original stasis, between the linear narrative path with its sense of closure and the notion of infinite circularity. For Pasolini the primary concern was the deep meaning of the parable of individual and collective existence, the exemplary significance of every parable or tale. Literature and painting were for him a means of an obsessive search for paradise lost and an observation point from which to gaze on the present and the future.
Even if Bernardo Bertolucci's first film, La commare secca (1962; released in English as The Grim Reaper), seems to have been born of one of Pasolini's ribs, in it his gaze gradually reveals itself as a perfect blend of the geniuses of artistic tradition and cinematic tradition. In Bertolucci, more than in any other filmmaker of his generation, there is also a c ross-contam i nation and constant fusion between elements specifically 1inked to Italian cinema and culture (Verdian opera especially) and motifs that immediately give his films an international scope and frame of reference. Though Bertoluccl was driven from his very first films to go on a kind of journey in search of his father and his own family roots, these films are informed by a stereoscopic gaze through which every space is a place of places, an intersection of autobiographical emotions and memories and international artistic, literary, and cinematic influences.
La strategia del ragno (1970; released in English as The Spider's Stratagem) can be considered the young director's moment of arrival, and a decisive turning point in his work. Among many other things the film is also an exceptional repertory of painterly images-from the Surrealist painting of Rene Magritte to the Metaphysical painting of Giorgio de Chirico to the realism of Edward Hopper and the visions of various naffs scattered about the Po River valley-that the director has reordered and revived. And with this film he began his association with the cinematographer Vittorio Storaro: thanks to Storaro, and to their combined meditation on the transformative role of light, its connotative function would start to become clear, assigned the task of orchestrating-playing an even more important role than music-the meaning of the film.
An implacable light immobilizes the characters under the sun of the first afternoon or under the rays of the moon, a light that communicates tactile sensations and sound vibrations and lends magic and mystery to the figures in the landscape. In Il conformista, 1970; released in English as The Conformist) "the separation of light and shade in Rome and the fusion of light and shade in Paris, the utilization of effects of blue and orange, of gray and white and violet, both indoors and outdoors, the plays of backlighting, up to the visionary immersions in darkness in the last part of the film, build up a visual fabric so suggestive that it becomes the very focal point of the linguistic system."(18) The results of Bertolucci and Storaro's collaboration -which with the passage of time became a true creative intermarriagewould effect, in the decades to follow, a profound change in the consciousness of the role of light for filmmakers all over the world.
The visual quest of post-neorealist Italian cinema does not, however, reside only in Antonioni, Fellini, Pasolini, and Bertolucci. We cannot forget such other important names as Mauro Bolognini, Franco Brusati, Marco Ferreri, Ermanno Olmi, Elio Petri, Gillo Pontecorvo, Francesco Rosi, Ettore Scola, Florestano Vancini, and Valerio Zurlini, all of whom participated in this cinematic deconstruction. of the visible world.
In the 1970s, because of shifts in the economic, ideological, and cultural landscape, Italian film began to lose its creative and vital energy and, with it, its cultural hegemony. In a rather short space of time, despite the fact that certain directors -Antonioni, Bertolucci, Fellini, Olmi, Rosi, and Scola-continued to create important works, there was a general withdrawal from artistic experimentation and linguistic creativity. In this climate of doubt neither literature nor art, which had served Italian filmmakers so well in the postwar years, could continue to serve as an authentic source of creative support or reference. Rather, the artistic patrimony seems to have become excess baggage, ballast that the new generation of directors, whose dominant models and visual and narrative syntax owe more to television and MTV, have attempted to jettison.
Translated, from the Italian, by Stephen Sartarelli.
Notes
1. Federico Zeri, La percezione visiva dell'Italia e degli italiani (The visual perception of Italy and the Italians. Turin: Einaudi, 1989), p. 63.
2. Umberto Barbaro, "Realismo e moralità," Film 6, no- 31 (July 31, 1943), P. 3.
3. Umberto Barbaro, "Neo-reatismo," Film 6, no. 23 (June 5, 1943), P. 4
4. Guido Aristarco, "Il neorealismo cinematografico," L'europeo 34 (June 4, 1976), P. 34.
5. Jean Cocteau, Le passé défini (The past defined. Paris: Gallimard, 1983), P. 351.
6. Georges Auriol, "Entretiens romains," La revue du cinéma, no. 13, (May 1948), p. 54.
7. Eugène Minkowski, Il tempo vissuto (Time lived. Einaudi: Turin, 1983), 13-20.
8. André Bazin, Qu'est-ce que le cinéma, IV Une esthétique de la réalité dans le néo-réalisme (What is cinema, IV: an aesthetics of reality in neorealism. Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1962.), p. 16.
9. Cesare Zavattini, speech given at the Perugia conference on "Il cinema e l'uomo moderno" (The cinema and the modern man), 1949. Reprinted in Mino Argentieri, ed., Neorealismo (Neorealism. Milan: Bomplant, 1979), p. 63
10. Luchino Visconti, "Tradizione e invenzione," in Stile italiano nel cinema (Italian style in cinema. Milan: Daria Guarnati, 1941), P. 78.
11. Ibid., P. 79.
12. Seymour Chatman, "All the Adventures," in Seymour Chatman and Guido Fink, eds., L'avventura (The adventure. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers Film in Print, 1989), P. 3
13. Carlo DiCarlo, 11 colore del sentimenti," in MichelangeloAntonioni, Deserto rosso (Red desert. Bologna: Cappelli, 1964), P. 17.
14. The most recent, complete, and coherent analysis of Fellini's universe can be found in Peter Bondanella, The Cinema of Federico Fellini (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992).
15. Accatone! was based on Pasolini's novel Una vita violenta (1959; published in English, in 1968, as A Violent Life).
16. Gian Piero Brunetta "Longhi e l'officina cinematografica," in Giovanni Previtali, ed., L'arte di scrivere sull'arte (The art of writing about art. Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1982), PP- 47-56.
I7. Pier Paolo Pasolini, Edipo re (Oedipus rex), ed. Giacomo Gambetti (Milan: Garzanti, 1967), P. 130.
18. Paolo Bertetto, "Filosofia della visione," in Paolo Bertetto, ed., Vittorio Storaro, Un percorso di luce (Vittorio Storaro, a path of light. Turin: Allemandi, 1989), p. 9.