A Cinema of Poetry: Aesthetics of the Italian Art Film

Introduction: Toward a Poetics of the Italian Art Film

Introduction: Toward a Poetics of the Italian Art Film The first thing I notice about a film is its light. There’s something about the light of Rossellini’s Voyage to Italy that announces Antonioni’s L’avventura. —Bernardo Bertolucci On 19 August 1916 Giovanni Verga wrote to his screenwriter that he was taking matters into his own hands: “Ho creduto meglio di stendere io stesso la trama delle scene . . . onde evitare uno dei soliti pasticci chilometrici che fanno assomigliare la cinematografia al romanzo di appendici per analfabeti” (“I thought it would be better if I myself wrote the plot for the film scenes [based on my play] . . . to avoid the usual reels of mess that make cinema seem like a serial novel for the illiterate”) (Raya 91). Verga’s words reveal the intense cinematic involvement of arguably Italy’s most important living author , whose work became a major point of reference for filmmakers during the Fascist and neorealist eras. They also show the cross-fertilization of the nascent film medium with other art forms and point to the aesthetic issues that would drive film’s relations with the sister arts: the legibility of the cinematic image as opposed to the more restricted realm of literary language, the potentially corrosive effect of cinema’s commercialism on artistic concerns, and the mix of uneasiness and excitement that artists like Verga felt about the new celluloid medium. In the spirit of Verga’s letter I consider how films made in the age of neorealism and its auteur aftermath shaped the history of aesthetics and abiding issues in cinema’s relations with other art forms, especially literature. In what ways do filmmakers think through long-standing aesthetic questions? What are the principles, or “poetics,” of cinema that connect it to the practices of its artistic counterparts? What qualities of film—its link with technological processes, capacity for mass distribution, synthetic virtues (or vices) as the so-called total art—have reshaped centuries-long aesthetic debates? And why did a critical mass of these sophisticated and critically acclaimed films appear 2 A Cinema of Poetry during Italy’s neorealist and auteur periods? This book answers these questions by examining them in a group of works that have long been acknowledged for their artistic and sociopolitical influence. My argument centers on the following three elements in the richly intermedial and formally complex nature of what I will call the nation’s “art-film” period. 1. Italian cinemas of poetry. The qualities of Italian literary history—its strong traditions in lyric poetry, its role in establishing a unifying Italian language, and the great political influence of some of its poets—made Italian cinema dependent on poetry’s institutions and cultural prestige as early as Giovanni Pastrone’s historical blockbuster Cabiria (1914), which featured intertitles by the self-proclaimed poet vate (poet-prophet) Gabriele D’Annunzio. I will argue on behalf of the ongoing impact of poetic modes of expression in Italian cinema and show how the emergence of a “poetic cinema” was central to the development of Italian film as it moved out of neorealism and into the more stylized auteur period. To that end my book focuses on the implications of arguably the most famous essay by an Italian filmmaker, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s “Il ‘cinema di poesia’” (“The ‘Cinema of Poetry ’” [1965]), which borrows semiotic theories from literary criticism to link cinematic and poetic expression. Overall, I seek to challenge the commonplace —advanced in the writings of Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer, among others—that film is bound to the novel above all other literary genres because each shares qualities capable of representing the elusive term reality. I contend instead that Italian directors have often looked to poetry to capture nonmimetic and nonnarrative forms of so-called reality that unveil the unconscious of their characters and the discontinuities of history—what Pasolini called “the world of memory and dreams.” 2. “Italianità” and the aesthetics of film. Although the term national cinema is highly controversial, especially when linked to the embattled drive for Italian political identity, this unstable issue of italianità led filmmakers with competing aesthetic agendas onto common paths of cinematic expression.1 As early as the influential articles by Giuseppe Prezzolini in La voce (1912–13), the film medium provided an irresistible forum for considering the issue of national identity. The intersection between the politicized component of rhetorical imagery and its aesthetic qualities coalesces in a defining quality of Italian cinematic history: the...