Blow-Up: Sickness of (Z)eros

Shooting blanks

Obviously this deserves a lot more attention than what’s about to follow. It’s one of the quintessential art house films, it’s what made Antonioni even cooler with the English-speaking world, and it’s one of the most engrossing bits of cinematic existentialism ever composed. Like in L’Avventura, the mystery within the film is never solved; only the search is given attention, with a heavy emphasis on subjectivity. As the main character gets bored and wanders, so also does the camera. (At least in Blow-Up the main character at the beginning is still the main character at the end.) It’s not a stretch to think about the lyrics, “Strawberry Fields/ Nothing is real” while watching this film. Much of it takes place in a green park, a weird, enclosed and also public space that’s literally on a different plane than the rest of reality, whatever that is. It’s a postmodern Eden with a sort of stairway to Heaven one takes to get there.

Dislocated

Once there, happenings are a strange mix of poetry, reality, and myth. A serpentine woman tricks a man into his own murder, and a none-too-innocent bystander watches most of it transpire, developing an obsession over it precisely because the woman begs him to let it go. He never reports the murder, and ultimately he doesn’t care. He ascends into his loft where he develops and blows up photographs of the episode, clearly a reference to a similar character in Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom. If Laura Mulvey is right, the darkroom in that film stands for a kind of repressed id, a realm where the character can be himself in all of his shame and where he grants access to no one. (See also Norman Bates’ basement in Psycho.)

Tint-Id

It’s in this realm where he accesses the grainy, distorted, yet supposedly “real” photos of what took place are developed (an interesting, revealing word). As quickly and easily as the photos come into “being,” they also disappear without a trace. Just as L’Avventura was a double entendre, capturing notions of the “adventure” as well as the “fling,” so also is the title of Blow-Up. The photographer enlarges the photographs, but in so doing he annihilates them and, somehow, himself. We, like the nameless main character played by David Hemmings, only see the photos in his upstairs, private, windowless space. Their disappearance, along with their graininess, make him wonder what really happened, if anything. At the film’s conclusion, the character’s disappearance over the ultra-green (unreal?) grass call into question his existence and what the spectator has seen, or thinks s/he has seen. After all, preceding his dissolution, he gave up on reality. He takes part in a faux game of tennis with a group of hedonistic mimes. Outnumbered, when they depend on him to pick up the non-existent stray ball, he cooperates. So the question of what is real evaporates along with his very being.

Fetch & fade

If L’Avventura illustrated the sickness of eros, Blow-Up depicts the sickness of existence itself. What narrative there is in this film is at the mercy of the character’s whims. His point of being, and therefore his state of being, is in question from the beginning. He takes periodic breaks to become one of the fools that bookend the film. He acts unpredictably and egocentrically, knowing no other ethic. The lack of the real centrality of his ego, however, the problem of his self and identity, ruptures the heart of his ethic.

Goner

The photography that is central to the film contains a primal element, self-referentially alluding to cinema itself. Early shots in the film confirm this rather explicitly. The protagonist, before we know him to be the protagonist, departs a factory in the early morning in the midst of a mass exodus of workers. What is happening on screen, along with the placement of the camera, points back to the first-ever motion picture: Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory by the Lumière Brothers in 1895. Whereas that early film featured a static camera that did not stray from the group and did not discriminate from among the workers, the camera in Blow-Up does the opposite. It remains motionless only briefly, then wanders toward a particular individual who essentially sneaks into the film, where he doesn’t belong. This foreshadows his later sneaking into a murder where he doesn’t belong. In all of this, the acts of filmmaking and photographing are given a sinister edge. Any idea of the camera’s objectivity is obsolete, as it becomes clear that there are powers behind the operation of a camera. As in Peeping Tom, the operators are also powerless, however, wrestling with their own obsessions and fears.

Poser leaving a factory

Making out

Bored; how was it for you?

Russian dolls meet Nietzsche

Where is the "I"?

The Fall

Who's who?

Magnifying nothing

Obsessed with the copy

Spectre

Enveloped

Disappearing

Death = all that's real?

Self-confirmation

There's a lady who's sure...

 

 

Le Amiche: (Juxta)Posers

Having never seen a pre-L’Avventura Antonioni, wasn’t sure what to expect with this one. Was determined, entering into it, not to give it any kind of privileged “Antonioni” reading. Really wanted to look at it simply as a text, a film, a whatever, apart from favoring a distinctly auteur-ial bent. So much for that. Watching Le Amiche, one wonders if Antonioni’s so-called “new film grammar” heralded in L’Avventura was simply the first time someone else noticed it. There’s certainly a unique visual grammar afoot in Le Amiche, although maybe not as developed as in Antonioni’s 60s films. The foregrounding and backgrounding of characters is constant; so much so that it almost becomes odd when two or more characters aren’t separated by depth of field in a shot. This distance keeps characters disconnected by cinematography and body language. While on the same plane of existence they’re never quite on the same page. Often other mis-en-scene emphasize the distance, such as colors, postures, lighting, and states of being (living and dead).

Netted

Images of alienation are ubiquitos, though that’s an Antonioni buzzword. Too, the “sickness of eros” is everywhere. Like the quadrilogy in the early 60s, Le Amiche centers on female characters who are bored and/or sick with regard to love. And like those later films, there is no one at all in this film with a healthy love life. The whole world is diseased. Contemporary eyes are prone to see just rampant stereotyping: women who base their identity on their men and men who get bored with their women after a little sex. These films of Antonioni’s, however, have an unflinching frankness about the details of erotic boredom and its consequences.

Juxtaposed

What may separate Le Amiche most from later Antonioni is its harshness. The film begins with a woman attempting suicide and failing. It ends with the same woman completing the act after an inability to move past the circumstances that caused the initial attempt. The film refuses a cheap solution, rather focusing on the darker, perhaps more real half of existence that many films would rather suppress. The ultimately successful suicide may be darker than necessary for Antonioni to get his point across. This narrative element is rendered darker still with many characters in the film joking about the woman’s ineptness even to kill herself. Further, the film does not end with the suicide, but continues just long enough to emphasize the rest of “le amiche” and their men. Just because one life has ended doesn’t mean that the story, and its very real-world correlations Antonioni draws, are over.

Universal opening

Doubled foreground

Demoted action

Spaced out

Stoned countenance

Light & darkness

Backwards

Un'avventura

Don't take no credit card to ride this train

The Dreamers: 3-Way Cinephilia

Les cousins dangereux

Previous advisor had this one on the syllabus of an undergrad film theory course, and for good reason (although many of us would never put it on any syllabus). It doesn’t take a critic or a scholar to see that Bertolucci’s obsessions with politics, sex, and cinema all collide here. This film is worthy of consideration from numerous vantage points. A study of its spaces would be worthwhile, for example. The apartment functions in a new way from that of the apartment in Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris. Here, it’s loaded with Freudian imagery and phenomenological implications. This apartment is a nest, as Gaston Bachelard would probably have it. It’s a safe haven for idealists who pretend to be political while being ignorant of real politics. They are on a backwards journey, returning to a womb-like state at the phase in life when they should be growing up. The two French siblings, Theo and Isabelle, are twins, so their need to be together in a shared fetal state makes some sense. Only an outsider like Matthew could offer an alternate point of view and insist that they need to “grow.” Isabelle’s fractured psyche, split into multiple selves, comes out most overtly when we see her for the first time in her bedroom. She first appears as Venus di Milo, presenting herself as a sex object with no arms (i.e., no agency). This hearkens back to a subtle early scene in which her father displays frank affection to Isabelle with his hands. Once Isabelle approaches Matthew in her bedroom, she is captured by three mirrors, illustrating her different selves precisely at the moment when one Isabelle (the carefree hedonist) is interrupted by another (the little child incapable of maturing), as she hears music from the room next door where she knows her brother is being intimate with another woman.

Fake chains; poser

It’s also a study in France during the late, politically revolutionary days of the 60s. Unlike other, more mythological 60s films, The Dreamers doesn’t take a simple, nostalgic route. Something tragic is present from the beginning, largely due to the obvious idealism of the young characters and the background political dissension. The characters love cinema, so the film uses cinematic tricks to connect those issues in the 60s with the film before us. The twins’ failure to recognize their own political idealism (read: ineptitude) is part of the film’s tragedy, and Matthew’s failure to recognize his unique brand of American idealism is another part. Bertolucci examines modern film theory with a reverse lens. Rather than a study of spectators in a theater imbued with life experiences and sometimes mistakenly seeing reality in the screen, these youths see the screen everywhere in the real world. They talk and move as if they are in films, and Bertolucci intercuts the film with other, older films. They inhabit a fantasy world inside an apartment and escaping mostly just to visit the cinematheque. They get just as riled up over whether Keaton or Chaplin is greater as they do regarding the Vietnam War. It’s not that they don’t care about the war to some extent, it’s that they care about movies just as much.

Darkroom, or, the id-side

Then there’s the poetry vs. politics element. Theo and Isabelle decry their father’s political ambivalence on account of his status as a poet. He prefers to write what he writes and let his poems do the rest of the work. His children, on the other hand, love filmmakers like Godard who infuses all of his films with political ideals (incidentally, political ideals of the sort that did not ultimately cling to the cultural fabric in a lasting way). The film seems to present the youngsters as something like naive hypocrites discovering their own way in life and failing; it is called The Dreamers, after all. Their existence is an affluent one in an apartment removed from the political goings-on of the real world. Their own misguided voyage of self-discovery brings them into a little tent, a fascinating picture of three adolescents desperately trying to rebuild a womb to reenter. Once they’re back in, who else discovers them but their parents, confused and saddened. Once Isabelle realizes they were caught, she attempts a murder-suicide, one of the more dramatic attempts at creating an identity and legacy that history has known. Even a gesture such as this, however, fails. A part of the political demonstration outside the apartment literally invades their intimate and doomed space via a broken window. They wake up and Isabelle quickly covers up her attempt to kill herself, her brother, and Matthew. Now that the political realm is right outside their window, Theo and Isabelle take up arms in the futile cause. Matthew is at least consistent enough to know he shouldn’t take part in a violent demonstration. The twins, however torn from the womb they are, participate in an outside cause based on convenience and ease. Their attachment to each other becomes a mobile womb, since the womb in the apartment has been compromised, violated. Matthew’s previous inclusion is perhaps to blame, so when they’re given the chance to part ways with him, they seize it.

Art or politics

The originals...

...the copycats

...and Freaks.

Injecting cinema into life

 

Culinary idealism

Cracked & broken

Screen goes fuzzy

Politics stuck in the background

Repression depression

Death in the womb

Rebirth?

For A Few Dollars More: Form, at all costs

Don't blink

Like any other trilogy, the Dollars trilogy shouldn’t have to be viewed chronologically if it’s worth its salt. So, after A Fistful of Dollars and then The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, finally sat down to the oft-neglected middle one. Everything active in the other two is happening here, without a doubt. The absence of women as anything but flashback-driving-force material from the narrative seems stronger than ever in this one, even while skimming through other Spaghetti Western fare such as Django. The Italians love their women (perhaps more shamelessly than ever in the 60s), but Leone created a man’s man’s world in these films, and unlike Peckinpah he didn’t even bother to objectify or exploit women to any considerable extent.

Light my fire

The Man With No Name takes a back seat here, noticeably more than in the first and third installments. He’s content to be the ronin, the man with no real loyalties or passions, who seems to take part in the quest for the bounty out of boredom and a desire to entertain himself rather than for any meaningful reason. Colonel Mortimer even carries some human baggage in this one, leading The Man to withdraw from the final gunfight. His passivity here is contrasted with that from A Fistful of Dollars, in that he actively staged, or at least encouraged, a war between two clans. Here, he recognizes that a fight is happening whether he participates or not.

Why can't we be friends?

Nearly to a greater degree than in The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, the film For A Few Dollars More seems to elevate form above content and channel all of its discourse through its exaggerated style. After doing a lengthy study on a so-called “amplified” style, Leone’s becomes qualitatively different by consistently drawing attention to itself from beginning to end. An amplified style, on the other hand, breaks through the film’s standard discourse to highlight important themes, moments, and the like. Leone is creating a new grammar for the Western, one that is highly self-referential; referencing its own genre without ceasing. The sheer number of shots in any given scene, and the deliberately repetitive and loud manner of editing those shots, is designed to raise this world and all who dwell in it to something mythical. This kind of form may be the logical end of the Western genre, a kind of style that was always destined to be and one that signified the imminent death of the genre. Taken to such extremes, some kind of rebirth or reboot is now necessary to rethink this cinematic category. Leone doesn’t seem to rethink it but rather to wallow in it, to amplify it 100% of the time and thereby exaggerate it to force its inclusion into the canon. It may be that such films are, ironically, the best introduction to the genre than anything John Ford ever made.

Worst enemy

Déjà vu

The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly: Genre Over Text

When in doubt as to where to begin, defer to your local online academic database; in this case, William McClain’s essay, “Western, Go Home! Sergio Leone and the ‘Death of the Western’ in American Film Criticism” (Journal of Film and Video, 62:1, Spring 2010). It’s an interesting look at Leone’s Dollars Trilogy through the lens of genre criticism – meta-genre criticism, really. Briefly exposing the Foucault power element behind it all, McClain points out that when critics rejected Leone’s westerns as being bona fide “Westerns,” they were appealing to a standard put in place by powerful forces like studios and their producers. These figures, more than audiences or the film texts themselves, are a priori responsible for the creation of distinct genres for capitalistic purposes. Up until new forms of deconstructed/reconstructed cinema, critics got to define what constituted a “genre,” a process referred to as “genrification.” This contrasts with the “de-genrification” that took place when American critics rejected an Italian director with a production team made up of Italians, Germans, and Spaniards creating a trilogy of films that were to be explicitly “Western” and featuring an American star. The Western, previously thought to be a quintessentially American genre, was at a low point, as many have noted, and was in need of a reboot. One of the great ironies about the “Spaghetti Western” subgenre, of course, is that it was largely inspired by the Far East, most notably Kurosawa’s Yojimbo, which formed the narrative backdrop and overall source material for A Fistful of Dollars. At least one critic has noted the further irony that Kurosawa’s film was very well-received by Western (geographically speaking) audiences whereas Leone’s was not. Both were heavy on violence considering the period, but the theory goes that Kurosawa’s film has a subtler and arguably more perfected technique than Leone’s.

As part and parcel of the (de)genrification taking place in the critical reception of these films, the films’ marketing highlighted the similarities between the Dollars Trilogy with the James Bond films that were quite popular at the time through the same studio. In each of these series, you have a very manly (according to popular cinematic stereotypes) male protagonist who’s light on dialogue but heavy on clever physicality. Music figures prominently, with narrative twists built on the ingenuity of the main character. Etc., etc. The critical rejection of Leone’s films, however, becomes odd when considered in light of its conservative prejudices. While one might think of cinema as a necessarily progressive medium, born as it was out of technological novelties, some of its biggest fans seem to hate change. Even the “professionals” in the field seem to lament changes within genre even more than they simply observe them; usually the laments feel arbitrary, based simply on a preference for the way things have always been. On the other hand, while it was popular in the 60s to love so-called art films like those from Antonioni, Bergman, and Kurosawa, anything that pierced into an established genre (like the American western) was often deemed revisionist and therefore inauthentic.

Looking more specifically at the films themselves, there’s yet another irony present in this conservative degenrification. Kurosawa’s Yojimbo, which brought about Leone’s Fistful, features a universe devoid of the strict black-and-white morality of earlier, textbook Westerns. Your John Wayne-hero doesn’t inhabit this universe. Instead, it’s a figure whose namelessness reflects the impossibility of labeling him with simple goodness or badness, notwithstanding the tongue-in-cheek title of The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. In Kurosawa’s case, Mifune’s character in Yojimbo arguably represents precisely the filmmaker in all of his questionable yet unquestioned authoritativeness. He has absolute power, much like the way Sanjuro sits high atop to two warring clans after pitting them against one another for his own entertainment. This slightly sadistic power-wielding without much purpose aside from selfish introspection is in some ways exactly what filmmakers are doing when they, from a broader perspective, mess with a genre. (It’s certainly what they’re doing when they make a film.) So perhaps what lies behind this attempt at critical degenrification is really critical jealousy; it’s the job of filmmakers to make films and let the critics identify genres, not for filmmakers to take the initiative by doing both. In other words, critics may resent it when those in construction enter into the realm of demolition, previously a field they held in monopoly. While Leone attempts to regenrify, critics respond by degenrifying; Leone tries to move the genre forward and critics turn the tables by rejecting his product.

Of course, as McClain observes, Leone’s films are so chock full of Western cliches that they may be just as much reversionist as revisionist. But by referring so constantly to all that is textbook Western, films like The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly become so self-consciously Western that they revise the genre by referring back to it so heavily. (It’s hard not to think of someone like Tarantino when considering this.) Here is where the critical argument and degenrification of the Leone Western gains some validity. Leone’s brand of the Western appears – at first at least – to be more concerned with form than with content. By featuring a cynical protagonist and positioning the viewing on his side, and not only elevating but apparently glorifying new depictions of violence, the themes that were previously deemed essential to the Western are subjugated to its form. Even still, the argument goes, the new violence masks the traditional Western aesthetic behind a screen of blood. It’s at least possible that Leone belongs to a breed of filmmakers that are grown-up, boyish cinephiles. Many of the great filmmakers cared more about ideas than they did about cinema, so they used the latter to portray the former. This may or may not be true of Leone, but his films and others in his vein at least suggest the possibility.

Or, another possibility: Leone’s films are the logical outcome of the traditional American Western. By always elevating the importance of the individual (usually, more specifically, individual responsibility) and inhabiting a world in which capital (gold, money, what-have-you) is prime, it could be argued that Leone’s nameless, wandering protagonist is the eventual destiny of the gun-wielding Western hero. After saving enough towns from bandits and Indians, he becomes chapped and leathered, finally giving into the pressure and following his own desires instead of giving them up for others. McClain observes that the narratives within the Dollars Trilogy are essentially meaningless; it’s all about the character. In earlier Westerns, the main character existed for the narrative, in order to be a figure of salvation and sometimes redemption. The Man With No Name probably had a name at one point; he was probably known for something heroic. Now he disassociates himself from his past (and the Western from cinema’s past) and uses his skill and prowess to save his own hide and get himself the gold. McClain identifies this (although not as explicitly, perhaps) as the unraveling of the Western myth. Rooted as the Western is in American mythology, Leone dares to follow a moral mythology to its nihilistic ends.

It should be noted here that this is distinctly not what Kurosawa was doing with Yojimbo. Functioning not only as a metaphor for cinema, Yojimbo was directed toward a modernized (1961) Japan. The American occupation was fully over at this point and the Japanese economy’s upward progress now demanded the (re)formation of a national identity, one that struggled to find a moral foundation, just like Kurosawa’s character Sanjuro. Sanjuro’s disdain for his past and playful, amoral exploration of new territories is condemned by Kurosawa as ultimately immature and childish. Whether Leone’s adaptation of Kurosawa’s source material and reappropriation of it to the American Old West similarly condemns such childish violence is questionable. True, Kurosawa’s film also emphasized violence in new ways – Kurosawa himself deeply regretted the effects Yojimbo‘s violence had on subsequent films. Audiences may have largely missed Kurosawa’s point, however, which exposed violence as ineffective and gratuitous, especially when it exists merely for entertainment. One does get the impression watching Leone’s films that the violence is more celebrated than carefully used to undermine itself.

Images from here and here.

Quickies, Vol. VI

Waterloo Bridge (dir. James Whale, 1931): A refreshingly different pre-code film from the afore-discussed Red-Headed Woman and Baby Face, this one sticks to your basic melodrama motifs, very D.W. Griffith style but minus the epic scope. WWI bombs dropping on London form the catalyst for the melodrama, ending up with feel reminiscent of A Farewell to Arms (which came a year later) and the like.

The Dangerous Thread of Things (dir. Michelangelo Antonioni, 2004): Typical but atypical Antonioni. Great to see some of those big shots of alienation and juxtaposition again, along with perfectly square and perfectly diagonal angles like only a Neorealist who loves Eisenstein can pull off. Dialogue is atrocious. This probably would have worked better not as a silent film, but without any talking. Hard to see what the big guy is getting at, but apparently he sees his “sickness of eros” as having some kind of hedonistic cure.

Broken Blossoms (dir. D.W. Griffith, 1919): A case study of any issue within a hundred miles of gender, this one is a tight, cohesive, and theoretically pornographic (in its etymological sense) excuse to watch a bunch of people die: the macho male “ideal,” the helpless damsel, and the aww-aren’t-you-sweet foreigner who attempts to rescue said damsel before coming to his own pathetic end. So much for proselytizing Buddhism and spreading world peace; the poor devil goes from missionary to creep, in the end making life even worse for poor Lucy and her pure-evil father/husband figure Battling Burroughs. We have Griffith to thank or to blame for so many of these now-common features of narrative cinema. Check it out here.

The Leopard

Veiled from the outset

The same year as the previous post’s film was released (8½, in 1963) Luchino Visconti adapted to the screen The Leopard (Il Gattopardo), the novel by Giuseppe di Lampedusa. Was looking forward to the film, having just finished reading the novel. Di Lampedusa’s book is epic in small scope, a personal account of a man growing old and outdated. The story gives the reader the impression of being in the mind of Prince Fabrizio, with access to all his thoughts and feelings and that kind of immediately-forgiving perspective that comes from being witness to one’s own weaknesses and failures. It must be admitted that a novel is slightly more conducive than film to this kind of intimacy, although master filmmakers have succeeded in making very personal films, even without first-person narration. It’s hard not to think of a character such as Michael Corleone in the film sculptor’s hands of Francis Ford Coppola. For all of Luchino Visconti’s reputation as one of the great neorealist directors of Italy, The Leopard feels very much like a genre imitation of the American epic/Western, replete with a very Technicolor color palate, extreme wide angle shots, panoramic scenery, and that sense of overal gaudiness that probably existed in 1860s Sicily but detracts from a film focused around an individual. Only in the film’s final act does Visconti go to pains to get into the psyche of Fabrizio, the Leopard. By then it seems too late, or it seems as if he’s tired not so much from the life that has preceded the film but by the short segment of his life that the film depicts. Di Lampedusa’s novel begins with a tired prince whose days of glory are drawing nigh. One realizes that the film is under no obligation to imitate the novel. And it is interesting to consider a film like this next to contemporaries such as Fellini’s aforemtioned 8½ and Antonioni’s L’Eclisse. These films, which happen to be in black and white, personally and impersonally focus on alienation and the world’s failure to deliver what it promises to the successful and affluent. Fabrizio has succeeded at least as well as Fellini’s and Antonioni’s characters, but the film has him walking away pitifully, tail between his legs, as if the audience should feel sorry for him. It’s an unappealing thought to protrude one’s lower lip for the sake of someone who has everything in the world. In the novel, the Leopard is allowed to grow old with a sense of gracefulness, even as he knows the dead end that will meet him at the end of his life. He rejects pity from those closest to him and maintains respect, not bitterness, for those whose futures are bright. This isn’t a case of another film that didn’t measure up to the book, but one character presented in a much more compelling way than another. Finally, Burt Lancaster, this one wasn’t for you.

8½

Woman-herding

The argument is out there that 8½ (Otto e mezzo) is not an autobiographical film and should not be interpreted thus. Cited as evidence is the thematic dialogue within the film about the fictional director’s intention to make a film with no relation to reality. Obviously, the fictional director, Guido, is conflicted about this. He contradicts himself both in words and actions by casting characters who correlate nearly perfectly to the reality of his own life. 8½ is such a self-reflexive film that the argument shouldn’t have to be made that Fellini is clearly grounding Guido in himself and the narrative in his own life. This is obvious from the small example to the big picture common sense. The film, as Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli observes, doesn’t offer a close-up shot of Guido until following the opening dream sequence, and when there is a close-up, we only see Guido through a mirrored reflection. If this isn’t an early sign that we are watching Fellini watch – or better yet, recreate – himself, then what else could it be?

Then there is Fellini’s infamous admission that he is a liar, or as a later, truly autobiographical film has it, Fellini: I am a Born Liar. The classical paradox holds up well here: what do you believe when someone tells you he is a liar? Do you take him at his word and allow him to contradict himself (lie) or do you disbelieve him, tell him he’s actually honest and thereby make his statement a lie? Tropes throughout Fellini’s oeuvre offer consistent evidence that Fellini wanted to redefine himself. He himself has said how bored he get with the same old stories. Films like 8½ serve the double purpose of allowing Fellini to rebuild his identity while simultaneously defending his right to live out his lie. The film’s title directly refers to the number of films Fellini had made at that point. Guido’s age is exactly Fellini’s age while making the film. Guido is a famous Italian director without an idea for his next film other than to film his own director’s block. He loves his wife, in a sense, while cheating on her constantly. Examples continue. But thankfully, this isn’t the most interesting aspect of 8½.

Fellini’s break from neo-realism began before this, with La Dolce Vita, but here Fellini allows his famous fingerprints to take over not only the style but the form of the film. His affinity for clowns and the circus has been noted often, with La Dolce Vita structured as a sort of circus spectacle for the spectator. With 8½, the ringmaster is within the film, even as the circus sometimes takes over him and he becomes the spectator. Ravetto-Biagioli notes the ritornello, both within the musical soundtract as well as the camera positioning, moving back and forth from Guido’s point of view to our point of view of him. Fellini’s disdain for truth and non-fiction is on display as he shrugs off reference to reality whenever it suits his fancy, presenting a narrative devoid of any ground for objective reality. Not only do the film and the film within it blur together, but reality and ream become more and more difficult to discern.

Father, I have sinned. Is that cool with you?

Notes. Fellini’s struggle with the church not only as institution of authority but as embedded moral standard continues, though he now shows more signs of putting it past him than he did in La Dolce Vita. Misogyny is just shameless enough (and Italian enough) to be viewed satirically, though Fellini and Mastroianni lived it out before, during, and after the film. For all his talent, and for all the praise that should be lavished upon 8½, Fellini is not a subtle director by any means. A psychoanalytic reading is hardly necessary, since he spells it out so explicitly, connecting Guido’s obsession as a man with his frustration as a boy. Circuses, however, are not intended to be subtle, but spectacular, overwhelming, musical, and tingling to the senses. That Fellini infuses such beautiful chaos with intellectual coherence and premeditated style justifies, to say the least, 8½. Also, no man in cinema has ever looked as flawlessly stylish as Marcello Mastroianni here.

Roma, città aperta

With every beginning to every movement, exaggerations of description abound. For all the importance of Roberto Rossellini’s Roma, città aperta (Rome, Open City) in setting a precedent for Italian Neorealism, the account given by Millicent Marcus in Italian Film in the Light of Neorealism seems to glorify a little the birth of this cinematic baby. To push the illustration, it’s not unlike a description of the beauty of childbirth that neglects the very real (note, not “neo”-real) and painful mess that delivery also tends to be. Roma, città aperta was not a documentary and had to intention of being one. Marcus claims that the film is “antirhetorical,” intended to display the real situation of wartime Rome. Not only, Marcus points out, are all the events based on true accounts, but scenes such as Manfredi spitting in the face of an overly talkative and torture-happy Nazi officer offer support for the thesis that Rossellini’s location shooting, natural lighting, and documentary-like style were intended to cut through cinema’s overly rhetorical nature. Why would Rossellini particularly want to undercut rhetoric? Because of Mussolini and all of his empty talk. However, it can be just as easily argued that a more life-like depiction of the wartime dilemmas of Roman citizens is itself the most efficacious kind of rhetoric, a kind that may dispose of verbal arguments in favor of cinematic ones. Cinema gives priority to the image over the word, anyway, so perhaps it was deft of Rossellini to utilize the kind of rhetoric he did. Aside from this, however, Marcus offers a helpful interpretation of the film. He points to the juxtapositioning of humor with tragedy, the shift that occurs halfway through the film at the death of Pina, Rossellini’s anti-pietistic but decidedly Christian sympathies, the identification of Don Pietro with the symbol of Christianity in St. Peter’s (“San Pietro”), and the film’s conclusion with a boy carrying the namesake of the (re-)birth of Rome: Romoletto. Rossellini holds his characters responsible for their failures and dreams of better days to come for the Open City, when actual Don Pietros will guide the people without need for filmic examples. As Marcus observes, that day has yet to arrive.

The Last Emperor

According to Yosefa Loshitzky’s chapter “The Quest for the Other: Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor and The Sheltering Sky” in her book The Radical Faces of Godard and Bertolucci, Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor is best understood politically and psychoanalytically. The idea is that sex and politics are intimately intertwined, both having to do with power and relationship with the Other. The author makes a good point, or rather many good points, but her argument is suspect because it makes Bertolucci’s film a remarkable failure. This is possible, but improbable.

"...wherever he may go!"

For one thing, she makes the case that the Forbidden City is reified, or in her words, made into a spectacle, by Bertolucci. This point invites debate, because it raises multiple questions before it can be answered. It would seem, though, that the Forbidden City was built with the idea of spectacle in mind as a major priority. It legend, aesthetic, and history make this point. Second, film itself is a medium of spectacle by definition. Therefore, whether Bertolucci intended for the Forbidden City to appear as a “spectacle” in The Last Emperor is nearly beside the point. Spectacle plus spectacle equals spectacle. Bertolucci would have had to go to enormous pains to avoid the Forbidden City looking spectacular. Since it did look spectacular in the film, we can safely assume that he was quite comfortable presenting the palace as it is.

Watching the perversion

Still nursing at 12

The idea of the palace as the womb, the embodiment of the woman, holds potential but is taken too far. Taken to its logical conclusions, the Forbidden City then signifies a level of feminine identification that encourages excessive deuterohermeneutics. That is to say, this position causes one to read into the film too much. Perhaps when the 3-year-old emperor emerges for the first time from the palace and pushes through the golden translucent sheet we are to take it as a metaphor for the birth canal. And perhaps, before that scene, when the young boy is transported into the Forbidden City for the first time, this is to be understood as penetration/impregnation. Perhaps. Problem is, when one sees a motif such as this, it’s all too easy to construct a relatively coherent justification for it. If it seems a stretch, it might be worth sticking to the more overt meanings of the film.

Industrialization outside the Forbidden City

The author’s main argument, however, is interesting and provocative. The argument observes that the emperor’s memories (1) occur during a time of crisis, (2) are brought on by free associations, and (3) fundamentally distinguish the politics of China before and after the Cultural Revolution.

1.    The film’s diegetic “presence” is found during the deposed emperor’s period of interrogation and reeducation in the labor-camp-slash-detention-center. Times of crisis tend to “color” one’s past recollections, as is literally done in the emperor’s memories. Were one to view the film solely on an aesthetic basis, it would seem that Bertolucci was glorifying pre-Cultural Revolution China as the utopia that the West should emulate. That period contains richer, deeper, and simply more colors than the film’s depiction of Maoist China. The camera shots, too, are grander and more varied (from both above and below).

2.     Seemingly random occurrences spark the emperor’s memories. The first flashback (which is of dubious recollective value) takes place when knocking on a door in the detention center psychically connects the emperor to his first entrance into the Forbidden City at the age of three.

Mr. O'Toole: what would colonial films be without him?

3.    Most importantly of the three, the film is divided into a few pieces, but most importantly into two stages: the remembered and the present. The remembered past is connected with the feminine, the unconscious, and the imagined. China at the time was powerless, seen in the fact that the Forbidden City had on its throne a clueless child. At the child’s coronation, we glimpse the only woman in the film to hold any kind of power: the dying empress. And this is the point; she is dying. She delivers a few lines before a large, black pearl is inserted into her mouth, signifying her death. Before dying, however, she tells the boy that men are not permitted in the palace past dusk. The “men” that surround them are not really men, for they are eunuchs. Only the emperor himself may live in the Forbidden City. Thus, the city is emasculated, as its one male is still a child.

Once the boy enters adolescence, it turns out that he has poor eyesight and needs glasses. Peter O’Toole’s very Western character puts up a fight to ensure that the boy receives the spectacles. The article makes the point that his lack of site corresponds with his overall (Freudian) Lack. In classic Oedipal form, the boy’s castration matches his lack of sight. It has also been argued, however, that the boy’s glasses illustrate enlightenment, which can be easily connected with Western enlightenment/knowledge, since it was Johnston, his tutor, who got him the glasses. In this way, the past portion of the film illustrates lack of knowledge and consciousness.

Coronation of a puppet

Actually, how it illustrates unconsciousness isn’t totally clear. Presumably, the emperor’s lack of awareness of what is taking place beyond the walls of the Forbidden City is an instance of this. Once he finds out that he has been deposed and imprisoned, it’s much too late to do anything about it. As for the imagined, this refers to the earlier point that the emperor’s crisis-driven memories are tinted by his lack of knowledge at that time and need for imagination to fill in the gaps of knowledge.

Once the Cultural Revolution occurs and the film takes us to the “present” full-time, the emperor’s reeducation show that this is now a stage of knowledge. His imagination is not useful, because it is objectivity that now matters. When he attempts to exercise any kind of imagination, he is chastised and punished. Perhaps most significantly, women slowly disappear as the film moves into the stage of communist China. The ex-emperor loses both of his wives. The pilot woman fades away. The only display of femininity is masked in masculinity, as the woman dance on the street during the “parade” wearing men’s clothes. As has been observed, this was probably less influenced by Bertolucci than by the social reality in China, where women must wear men’s clothes in order to lessen the sexual distinction.

The author’s main contention is that Bertolucci’s attempt to glorify the Chinese utopia of communism failed. It failed because, for all his innovation, Bertolucci falls back into very normative sexual politics by reducing the past to femininity and the idealized present to masculinity. The point is actually not nuanced at all, even despite Bertolucci’s strong adherence to Communist principles. It can be added that Bertolucci also failed for idealizing his ideals and not being conscious enough of his own psyche. The drabness that covers China after the Cultural Revolution is not inspiring at all. Could it be inspiring to someone like Bertolucci, who is at his best when he gives free reign to colors and opens his lens full-throttle? As a member of the Italian Communist Party, it is shocking that Bertolucci sees post-Cultural Revolution China as the utopia when it was the pre-revolution that looked so much more appealing. In this way it is Bertolucci’s honesty that did him in. To depict Imperial China as drab and Communist China as beautiful would have been disingenuous. The film would have been seen as a propaganda film rather than an epic. So in the end, perhaps it is better to have before us a flawed epic than a glorious exploitation film.

The Conformist

This is a remarkable film. I suppose that’s the point of almost all the films I’m posting on here these days, but this one is unique for its accessible complexity. It’s highly psychological, ingeniously edited, beautifully shot, philosophically oriented, and powerfully didactic. Before this, had only seen from Bertolucci: The Sheltering Sky and Besieged. Have somewhat avoided his other stuff on moral grounds, but this one was on the list. Reading the chapter on it in Italian Film in the Light of Neorealism (Marcus, 1986, Princeton) was quite enlightening. So if anything below seems particularly intelligent, that’s where it’s from.

Marcello Clerici, the title character, only holds the title of “the conformist” ambiguously and, more than that, ironically. The idea is that he conforms to Fascist idealism during World War II in order to suppress tendencies (both psychological and sexual) that resulted from a traumatic experience as a child. He marries a simple, unintelligent woman, joins the Fascist secret police, and drowns his “other” desires in heterosexuality, all to meet the status quo.

Early in the film, Marcello meets his blind friend Italo in a radio studio. Clearly, “Italo” personifies the nation at the time, blindly adhering to Fascist ideology under Mussolini. Through a glass, the two men see three women performing. They are dressed identically, singing in unison, and dancing together. They seem to illustrate the nation of Italy at that period in all its conforming. Following their performance, Italo goes on the air to spread Fascist propaganda, which seems to be linked not only to his blindness, but to the previous performers.

The shots of the office of the minister (where Marcello receives his orders) are curiously similar in style to the walls of the asylum where Marcello’s insane father is housed in a straight jacket. I’m not sure if this is deliberate, but it seems consistent with the rest of Bertolucci’s style.

The film’s editing is amazing. It’s rather violent, just as the flashbacks that we witness are intrusions on Marcello’s psyche while trying to fulfill his orders. An early shot of the Eiffel Tower seems out of place until later, when Marcello and his wife find themselves there during Marcello’s psychological crisis. There are also lots of split screens – split by walls and room divisions, often while the characters are still conversing through the dividers. This pictures not only Marcello’s solitude, but his fragmented and conflicted state of mind. The crooked, diagonal shots (almost surreal in nature) also seem to indicate Marcello’s skewed view and non-conformism. Despite his efforts, he does not fit into the mold in which he has placed himself.

The flashback of Marcello’s childhood trauma is orchestrated with supreme competence. (Though Bertolucci is lauded for the editing, in interviews, he gives all of the credit to his editor, without whose input Bertolucci would have never considered doing it the way he did.) Marcello’s present movement flagging down the car are paralleled to perfection with those of his while he was a child. When he was a child, his flagging down a car led to his first pseudo-murder, just as he knows that flagging down his personal thug Manganiello will also result in murder at his hand. The continuation and conclusion of the flashback while in the confessional solidifies that Marcello is in a moral dilemma with very moral ramifications. His sense of guilt from his past requires him to confess his sins. But more than that, he is pre-guilty over the murder he will commit in the near future. Knowing that it must be done, however, he visits the priest for absolution before he commits the sin. The priest tells Marcello that his sexual liaisons thus far in his life are not “normal,” as he believes. The priest urges Marcello to normalcy by having a wife and family. Now the church, symbolic both of Italy at the time and of the moral status quo, tells Marcello to conform further. At a party shortly thereafter, Italo, surrounded by other blind friends, speaks to Marcello more about being “normal.”

One of the most significant parts of the film occurs when Marcello finally meets with Professor Quadri in his study. Marcello brings up Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. Bertolucci cinematographizes the myth by allowing light from only one window to enter the room, with Marcello’s shadow cast up on the wall until he opens another window, causing his shadow to vanish immediately. It is Quadri who makes the explicit connection between the allegory and Fascism in Italy. By linking The Conformist with Plato’s allegory, Bertolucci again indicates that this film is about morality. What is not mentioned in the film, but further reading of Plato teaches, is that the lesson of the allegory is not chiefly epistemological but rather ethical. The man who discovers the truth by coming out into the light of day is constrained to revisit the cave and tell his companions there of the illusion versus the truth. Quadri’s escape to Paris to form an anti-Fascist movement (that does nothing but distribute pamphlets) is a cop-out. Rather than returning to the belly of the beast (Italy), he flees and does not fulfill his moral obligation to root out Fascism where it exists.

Also, Bertolucci has made clear that cinema is an example of Plato’s allegory. It has light cast into a theater by means of a rear projector while an audience watching the images on the screen, often taking them to be real. Bertolucci’s film is making a moral statement: that its viewers leave the theater to spread truth, the sort of truth portrayed in the film about psychological honesty and political obligation.

The dance scene is another famous example of Marcello’s inability to conform. After sitting while the others dance, he eventually gets up, but remains by himself in the middle of the floor, moving in the opposite direction from the rest of the dancers, who are joined by hands. Five years later, he teaches his daughter the Ave Maria. His daughter is blond-haired and blue-eyed, unlike her parents but just like one of Marcello’s victims, Professor Quadri’s wife, whom Marcello desired. The walls in his daughter’s room are painted to look like blue, cloudy skies. Not only does the image connect with an earlier one when Marcello walked past a similar painting, only to have its background be nearly identical, but it again pictures Marcello living in an artificial and contrived world in which he does not belong.

The film’s final scene almost perfectly correlates to Plato’s allegory. But significantly, though Marcello is facing the truth about himself psychologically and sexually, the fire is neither in front of nor behind him, but rather beside him. The ending is ambiguous, leaving the decision in the hands of the viewers. Bertolucci acknowledges Marcello’s dilemma but transfers the moral responsibility from the character to the viewer.

Umberto D.

Italian neorealism was seen as coming to an end when Vittorio de Sica made Umberto D. De Sica’s The Bicycle Thief and Rosselini’s Rome, Open City triggered the film movement, but by the time Umberto D. was released, de Sica’s statement of the end of neorealism went unappreciated. The movement characteristically included an objective camera, true-to-life storylines, social critique, and future prospects beyond the narrative parameters of the film. Umberto D. departs from these criteria in a few ways.

First, the camera moves into subjective mode in a number of places. While observing Umberto in the confines of his apartment, in the temps morts of his quotidian dwelling, the shots are medium and the scenes uneventful. When, late in the film, Umberto looks out the window after hearing the trolley pass, the camera’s quick-zoom at the tracks and cobblestones intimates the thought of suicide. This subjective camera technique ends as quickly as it begins. But as Umberto leaves his neighborhood by bus to find a place for Flike, the shots at the buildings from within the bus again are from Umberto’s point of view, rather than the more dispassionate shots of him and his surroundings.

The realistic nature of the film is in line with neorealism. As others have pointed out, the film never veers into territory that would rob it of its innocence of genre. It could have easily become romance, melodrama, or tragedy, but de Sica avoids those tendencies. The character is neither completely lovable nor completely deplorable. While we sympathize with his plight, often we note that he might improve his situation ever-so-slightly were he to think a little differently. His attempts to pawn off his timepiece to those just as poor as he, his using others at the soup kitchen to feed his dog, and his broken promises and ignored possibilities to be a father figure to Maria all frustrate the audience, who feel he should know better. Particularly uncomfortable is his all-too-healthy posture and movement while buying time at the hospital.

What social critique the film contains is subtle and underdeveloped. The opening scene has Umberto as just one of many elderly faces protesting their measly pensions after years of faithful social work. Olga, Umberto’s landlady, seems to symbolize the state of Italy at the time of the film. Umberto tells Maria (the young maid) that during the war, he gave some of his rations to Olga, who used to call him “Grandpa.” After the war, Umberto tells Maria, Olga “went crazy,” and now harasses him endlessly about his unpaid backrent. Her ascent up the social ladder – marrying the local theater-owner, operatic singing lessons, and remodeling of the apartment, including the destruction of Umberto’s room – has caused her willingly to forget her country’s recent history and discard sensitivity toward Umberto. De Sica was surely illustrating the end of neorealism in Olga: the people had quit acknowledging the sorrows that Italy endured under war and fascism. Better to wallow in the affluence of better times than remember past horrors.

Finally, the film does not end with a clear path for Umberto’s future. Whereas de Sica’s The Bicycle Thief‘s finale was clear and certain, Umberto walks away with Flike down a sidewalk before a group of playing children hide them from view. All that Umberto has decided is that his crisis is not worth suicide. Having regained the trust of Flike, he will continue forward, not knowing what that might entail. In this way, the film is more of an aesthetic parable than a fixed narrative. One could not read a script and grasp Umberto D. It is another example of the fact that modern cinema (post-neorealism) is equal to more than the sum of its parts. It has been said that, in this film particularly, de Sica paved the way for the style of Fellini and Antonioni. Arguably, those directors never ended on a note of certainty, and no story or shot said anything in itself. Shot after shot after shot, however, composes a complete artwork that cannot be broken down and retain its meaning and power.

Notes: Similar opening to Bicycle Thief, first a crowd, then zeros in on one man. Maria sprays/burns ants on wall. From Maria’s cot – shot of cat walking on grating above; identification with stray cat. UD – afraid of living in shelter, afraid of sending Flike to shelter. Tries to beg but can’t; teaches Flike to beg. UD’s distorted reflection in bus below Commendatore, who has skewed image of UD.