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Article Excerpt
Hailed as the first neorealist film, inaugurating a new mode of cinematic narration, as well as a burgeoning political consciousness; criticized as a seedy melodrama, largely derivative of the American hardboiled genre and the French realist film of the Thirties; Ossessione projects the tension of an unfolding historical moment: the fall of Fascism and the birth of a new nation. Notwithstanding the lack of any overt political message or reference to the war and Fascism, history--personal and national--is the haunting obsession in Visconti's movie.
Ossessione is an ambiguous mixture of old and new. Within it coexist a formulaic crime story and an innovative way of looking at the world that defies the logic of the suspense genre and suggests the presence of worlds beyond the one represented. In his study Il paesaggio nel cinema italiano, Sandro Bernardi distinguishes two such moments within all visual experience: "vedere," an act that involves our existing knowledge--"L'uomo vede cio che sa" (18)--and "guardare," an openness to vision--"la possibilita di spingersi oltre il sapere." If Ossessione's tale of passion 'visibly' defies a Fascist idea of sanitized love and familial piety, the truly subversive element in the movie is the formal push, finding expression in the representation of the landscape, to "look at" the world. In Ossessione, landscape evades traditional integration into the narrative and instead unfolds as what Bernardi terms a "painterly landscape," one that draws the spectators' as well as the characters' glance beyond the narrated story, opening up "storie possibili che stanno dietro o accanto a quella" (37). If the landscape so understood represents "un momento di confine" that pushes the viewer beyond the "visible," Ossessione inhabits, through its use of landscape, a stylistic and historical threshold. (1)
It is still subject to debate to what extent Ossessione anticipated the poetics of neorealism. Rather than reading Ossessione as a more or less imperfect forerunner, I prefer to point out what did find expression in Visconti's first movie and was not to be found again in the neorealist film production to come: a cinematic representation of a Fascist society. While the neorealist movies often expressed, as Ruth Ben-Ghiat has argued, a "displacement of collective responsibility for Fascism by consistently shifting culpability away from ordinary Italians" (1999: 84), Ossessione represents the very containment of vision, spaces and desires enacted by Fascism within ordinary Italians. Visconti, and the group of young communist intellectuals around the journal Cinema, allegorically staged through the characters of the black-clad femme fatale and the indecisive tramp--swept away by a passion with murder at its heart, imprisoned in a house conquered through violence and obsessed with finding a way out to other stories, other realities--the predicament of the human subject under Fascism.
This essay will examine the haunting appearance of landscape in Ossessione as both a rupture of the conventionality of both filmic plot and Fascism and an opportunity to reenter the everyday. If, as Bernardi observed, the landscape is a philosophical object that expresses the relationship of the human subject with self and world, the landscape in Ossessione simultaneously expresses both hopelessness and the desire for another future. Moving away from the imperiousness and fatality of content, the cinematic image in Ossessione enjoys a freedom that intimates artistic and historical liberations yet to come. The characters, on the other hand, rather than looking at this world, turn their backs on it. After seeing the world for so many years, the problem for the characters of Gino and Giovanna, as well as for a whole generation of Italians, is to succeed in looking at the world once again. (2)
Landscape and Film Theory
In the fall of 1943, one year after shooting his first film Ossessione, Visconti publishes a minor artistic manifesto in Cinema announcing, to a country in the midst of momentous political change (July 25--fall of Mussolini; September 8--armistice), a new cinema to come. (3) There he writes:
Al cinema mi ha portato soprattutto l'impegno di raccontare storie di uomini vivi: di uomini vivi nelle cose, non le cose per se. Il cinema che mi interessa e un cinema antropomorfico. (italics mine)
Visconti overemphasizes the primacy of the human presence--his intent to "tell stories of living men"--to make a clear break with the staged Fascist cinematography of I telefoni bianchi (films set in sleek apartments crowded with fashionable artifacts). However, while focussing on the centrality of the human action, Visconti also points to the diffusion, so to speak, of the human presence in a reality that bears the eloquent imprint of human activity and desire, "fatta dagli uomini e da essi modificata continuamente" (34).
Visconti's search for a new relation between the human body and its surroundings was by no means an isolated one. "Come [...] sarebbe possibile intendere e interpretare l'uomo, se lo si isola dagli elementi nei quali ogni giorno egli vive, con i quali ogni giorno comunica?" asked Giuseppe De Santis already in 1941. (4) In a brief, yet poignant essay entitled "Per un paesaggio italiano," the future assistant director of Ossessione grants to landscape a centrality that has far-reaching consequences for Italian cinema. The central preoccupation of cinema, affirmed De Santis, should be to create an authenticity of both gesture and atmosphere. According to the young critic, the things that carry the marks of human hands, the walls of a house and the streets of a town, as well as nature "che lo circonda e che ha tanta forza su di lui da foggiarlo a sua immagine e somiglianza" (43), are the necessary points of departure for all cinematic narration. Landscape thus sets the stage for the telling of new stories. Bur this is not all. The visual emergence of a primordial landscape is identified with a radical rethinking of the very nature of the medium. By stressing the permanence of the image within the unfolding of the action, landscape invokes, as an element of the film aesthetic, different ways of seeing and telling that both reach back to the painting tradition and look forward to a new documentary form. It is through such hybridizations that De Santis heralds the birth of a new national cinema.
Michelangelo Antonioni, in his 1939 article entitled "Per un film sul fiume Po," perhaps went a step further than anyone in the articulation of a cinematography emerging from nature. "I need only say," he then wrote, "that I would like a film with the Po as the central character, in which the spirit of the river would provide the interest of the film." (5) Upsetting the conventional hierarchy between figure and background, the landscape becomes the subject of a story of passage and movement, and not simply a taken-for-granted and eternal reality. In Antonioni's preparatory notes, human history is seen as flowing side by side with natural history, as human society and the river change, destroy and dominate each other. The intertwining of natural and human temporalities resurfaces within cinema itself--thus, at the very heart of human technology--in the stylistic choice faced by Antonioni between 'story film' and documentary. The challenge, for Antonioni as for De Santis, is to find a new way of constructing a story where the action and the lyrical impulses which define the natural sequences ("the torment of poetic discovery") could merge. But how can nature translate into action? The camera will afford the necessary mediation. The movement of the camera will flow with the river, following its currents, eddies and floods, thus literally allowing the landscape to tell its own story. The river as landscape in action, an ongoing ribbon that metaphorically mirrors the unrolling of the film reel, lends itself both to fictional narrative and that of its seeming opposite, documentary, whose time, space and rhythm appear to be dictated by the environment. "Between you and me," Antonioni provisionally concludes, "I feel a good deal of sympathy for a filmed fiction/document without any label" (81). It is within that slash, the ongoing tension between the narrative and the image, that Antonioni and the whole generation that gave expression to the neorealist movement would decide to construct their stories.
In contemporary film studies, scholars have brought renewed attention to the role played by landscape within the double system of representation--visual and discursive--that organizes the cinematographic image (Bernardi 2002). In her L'Image-paysage: Iconologie et cinema, Maurizia Natali likens the cinematic screen to Freud's magic writing block: two superimposed surfaces, a first page constantly written and erased by the inflow of immediate perception and, under it, a deeper wax surface on which are engraved the infinite superimpositions of past writings. This double surface well describes the cinematic image "capture entre le mouvement present de la narration et le temps spectral des images" (72). Between these layers, the landscape acts...
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