Perra on Luzzi, 'A Cinema of Poetry: Aesthetics of the Italian Art Film'

Joseph Luzzi. A Cinema of Poetry: Aesthetics of the Italian Art Film. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014. xiv + 211 pp. $49.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-4214-1166-8.

Cinema, Poetry, and Italian History and National Identity

The study of the relationship between film and literature has a long and established history in Italian film studies. Less has been written about the connection between Italian auteur films and poetry. This is, in a nutshell, the subject of Joseph Luzzi’s latest book. The author’s stated intention is to analyze “Italian cinema in connection to such questions as the afterlife of the Greek tragic chorus, the literary prehistory of montage, and the cinematic application of the poetic apostrophe” (p. 11). In thus doing, Luzzi situates Italian cinema, in particular art film, from the immediate postwar to the 1970s, in the longue durée of Italian (and more in general Western) literary tradition. According to Luzzi, the pivotal role played by lyric poetry in shaping Italy’s literary history played an important role in shaping the poetics of many of the country’s foremost filmmakers. In Luzzi’s own words, “Italian directors have often looked to poetry to capture nonmimetic and nonnarrative forms of so-called reality and unveil the unconscious of their characters and the discontinuities of history” (p. 2). Classic filmmakers like Roberto Rossellini, Luchino Visconti, Michelangelo Antonioni, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Bernando Bertolucci, and Federico Fellini engaged in their works with aesthetic issues like “the relation between symbol and allegory [and] the nature of the chorus [in the Greek tragedy]” (p. 9).

Luzzi is not unaware of the fact that this choice of topic and theoretical framework is potentially fraught with controversy over what constitutes Italian cinema (or any other nation’s for that matter), the problematic nature of following the canon of Italian cinema and of art film, the definition of neorealismo,and the decision to think in terms of auteurs for the directors discussed here. He avoids using these categories unselfconsciously, engaging with them in a remarkably well-structured introduction. Whilst Luzzi adopts a pragmatic approach to the issue of defining neorealismo, ultimately dismissing the label as peripheral to his analysis, he problematizes Rosalind Galt and Karl Schoonover’s notion of global art film by stating that “the essence of the Italian art film lies in the local, not the global” (p. 5).[1] By the same token, he draws on recent and more established scholarship to engage with the notion ofauteur cinema, defining it as “those films that reflect a director’s personal creative vision” (p. 10), or even obsession.[2]

Having established its theoretical perimeter, Luzzi’s books develops in three parts, organized in broad chronological order. The first part, “Neorealist Rhetoric and National Identity,” engages with the link established by some neorealist films like Rosselini’s Roma città aperta (1945) and Visconti’s La terra trema (1948) between coralità and italianità. The children at the end of Roma città aperta share with the Greek tragedy the moral capacity of bearing witness, before moving back to the city that must be rebuilt. However, Luzzi notes how Rossellini as well as Vittorio De Sica were aware of the existence of a more negative and hostile side of the chorus, a role played by both nature and the villagers against Karin in Stromboli (1950), and the mob in Ladri di biciclette (1948). Ancient Greek literature also informs the second chapter, which engages with the relationship between symbol and allegory. Luzzi’s argument is that, whilst neorealism favored the use of allegories in order to issue political and moral instructions, auteurs like Fellini and Antonioni switched to symbolism as a more appropriate way of addressing the issue of national identity during and after the economic miracle.

While part 1 revolves around the philosophical and literary poles of Friedrich Nietzsche’s discussion of Greek tragedy and Giovanni Verga’s use of allegory, part 2 is built around Pasolini, in particular his essay on the cinema di poesia, which is the theoretical centrepiece of Luzzi’s work. Luzzi sees in Rossellini’s Viaggio in Italia (1954) an early example of cinema di poesia’s ability to capture “the unfiltered, prelinguistic unconscious of … characters through the free indirect point-of-view shot” (p. 54). Viewers experience the projection of the protagonist Katherine Joyce’s inner turmoil without having to resort to language, but mainly through the incongruous juxtaposition of sound and image. It is this power of the free indirect point-of-view shot that is theorized by Pasolini as the irrational, prelinguistic, pre-ideological, and therefore also antihistorical and antirealist world of the unconscious. Chapter 4 discusses Pasolini’s essay on cinema di poesia and its implementation in Il Decameron (1971), and situates it in the longer tradition of Italian culture, in particular with reference to Giambattista Vico’s concept of poesis.[3]

Vico also informs part 3, titled “Aesthetic corsi and ricorsi.” This section engages with the cinema that looks at the present and the recent past to investigate the individual living in the “materially though not morally rebuilt” Italy of the 1960s and 1970s (p. 90). It is the antihumanist cinema of Antonioni, in which subjectivity is effaced and traditional realist images hide as much as they reveal. It is also the chiasmic cinema of Visconti’s Il gattopardo (1963), in which in order to stay the same, things have to change; but also the cinema of Bertolucci’s Il conformista (1970), in which through a complete transmutation of values the unjust becomes just and betrayal becomes heroism.

After a further chapter on Fellini’s La voce della Luna (1990) and its relationship with the poetry of Andrea Zanzotto, the epilogue brings the discussion forward to the more recent years, and the films of Michelangelo Frammartino, Marco Tullio Giordana, and especially Emanuele Crialese. In the latter’sRespiro (2002) we see clearly the ideological sea change from the Marxist postwar optimism of La terra trema. In Visconti’s film, the poor fishermen in rural Sicily act as a positive chorus marked by class solidarity and lack of social and cultural antagonism. In Crialese’s work, the fishermen community of Lampedusa is a stifling chorus that ostracises any heterodox presence in the community, like that of the protagonist Grazia. Crialese’s is a brutal view of Italian society but also one much less aestheticized and epic than Visconti’s. In two words: more historical and realistic.

In the end, Luzzi’s book is a thought-provoking and well-written investigation of the role of history and realism in Italian cinema, and the role played by the centuries-long tradition of poetry (or more precisely, poesis) in this quest.

Notes

[1]. Rosalind Galt and Karl Schoonover, eds., Global Art Cinema: New Theories and Histories (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).

[2]. In particular John Caughie, ed., Theories of Authorship: A Reader (London: Routledge in association with the British Film Institute, 1981); see also Rosanna Maule, Beyond Auteurism: New Directions in Authorial Film Practices in France, Italy and Spain since the 1980s (Bristol: Intellect, 2008).

[3]. Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Il ‘cinema di poesia,’” in Saggi sulla letteratura e sull’arte, Tomo I, 2nd ed. (Milan: Mondadori, 2008), 1461-1488.

Subscribe to this Network to Reply

Source: networks.h-net.org