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Fellini: Auteurism and Italian National Cinema(s)

The history of Italian national cinemas is highly informed by the conceptualisation of Italian Neo-realism as a post-war movement. It attempted to envision a coherent image of Italy that is grounded by the specificity of its ideological message as well as its particular modes of representation. However, shifts in the post-war climate with events such as the onset of the economic miracle in the 1960s threatened to disrupt the homogeneity of a certain national cinematic movement. This is the period in which Federico Fellini rose out of the ashes of Neo-realism to construct a brand of cinema that is informed by the specificity of individualism rather than a shared national consciousness. Fellini became a director that is championed globally as an auteur. Thus, the national identity of Italy is restructured from a national cinematic movement into the currency of the individual artist that is much in line with America’s liberal economy. In this essay, I shall conduct an auteurist study of Fellini and determine its applicability in the articulation of Italian national cinema. Firstly, I shall outline the various thematic concerns and stylistic strategies utilised by Fellini in relation to La Dolce Vita (1960) and 8 ½ (1963). Secondly, I shall explain how aspects of these themes reflect upon the economical and cultural climate it is situated within. It is my aim to demonstrate that formal and structured modes of articulating Italian cinema are necessary in the process of national building. But the homogeneity of such representations is not in line with the ever-shifting cultural landscape. As neorealism failed to attain hegemony as a mode of discourse, so will auteurism lose its currency in the study of Italian national cinemas. To conclude I shall assert that Fellini’s thematic concerns are to be conceptualised as a juncture of dissonance, a destruction of the persistence of the past towards the creative reshaping of the Italian cinema industry.

What is most apparent, upon viewing of a Fellini film, is a brazen spectacular display that bursts out of the colossal scope of its filmic settings. This visual style that is commonly associated with baroque, or what Stubbs refers to as “the style of excess,” assaults the spectator with “images of life that are highly charged with movements, contrasts, textures, colors, and, above all, surprises” (2006, p. 20). A compelling example in La Dolca Vita is the party sequence, a heavily utilised setting in Fellini’s films, that takes place in the roman dome as part of Sylvia’s promotional visit to Rome. The wideness of this semi-indoor space is emphasised through the composition of many layers of characters and objects within a vast depth of field. Once this is established, the camera zooms into Marcello’s narrative in his pursuit of Sylvia on the dancefloor. He showers her with flattering pickup lines, exalting her as a symbol that encompasses every aspect of humanity. With Sylvia being exactly that, Marcello is unable to catch her attention as her focus is on the sensational openness of the setting as signified through her absorption in the music. The surprise entrance of Frankie Stout, an actor with the likeness of a satyr, serves as a catalyst that further fragments Marcello’s narrative in favour of an excursion in Fellini’s spectacular style. As Hatab states, “The ‘negative’ posture, burlesque, and fringe realm of the satytrs can be said to have functioned as an inversion/deforming of human norms that brought both a comic and an exploratory effect” (2004, p. 214). Thus, the civilised slow-dance between Marcello and Sylvia breaks up and moves into a free-form dance that explores the space of the setting to the frantic beat of rock n’ roll.  In the process, many characters that were prior in the background join in the dance and receive attention from the camera. The sequence explodes into a kaleidoscope of individualistic human caricatures that beams with celebratory and comic energy. Stubbs likens this style to “the comic grotesque tradition” in which irregularity and contrast are the strategies utilised to draw attention to a vast array of characters (2006, p. 25-27). For example, in the scene above, there is Sylvia the blond bombshell, Stout the satyr, negros in the jazz band, rock n’ rollers, women in aristocratic attire, waiters in roman costumes, a chinese woman on the dancefloor. Even the drunk and immobile Robin is drawing a caricature of Sylvia’s manager, adding a mostauche as the finishing touch.

In contrast to the Roman dome, a signifier of Rome’s historical past that is stagnant and eroding in its fixity, is the spectacular and energetic representation of a global clutter of characters that are constantly in movement. As Degli-Esposti states, Fellini’s “distortions, alterations of forms, and lack of symmetry” are characteristics that opposes “the utopic perfection of Renaissance aesthetic production” in favour of “a sense of nonfixity and state of becoming” (p. 158). It also constructs a nihilistic portrait of Rome in which the older order of fixity such as Catholicism and Nationalism give way to a hedonistic pursuit of pleasure and a merging of cultures within a globalised Italy. La Dolce Vita opens with a statue of Christ literally uprooted by a helicopter that represents the transnational machinics of the industrial revolution. The sacred aura of Catholicism is demystified even further during the sequence in which two children simulate the sighting of Mother Mary in an overblown media spectacle.  Marcello’s narrative that revolves around the superficial and sensational tabloid culture set off during Italy’s economic miracle sees him moving from party after party in increasing hedonistic abandon. Bondanella states that Fellini emphasises on “a kind of animalistic and vital energy” that overrides the “corruption and decadence” in his representations of the changing cultural landscape of Italy (2002, p. 83). This goes in line with Rosenthal’s assertion that Fellini’s spectacle that consists of “the most peripheral bit player to the central character” communicates Fellini’s belief that “preserves the integrity of the individual and reasserts his own wonder at the diversity of human form and temperament” (1976, p. 67-68). Thus, with the death of God and the cultural confusion of Italy comes a humanistic spectacle of individuals that are, in Pasolini’s words, “so full of the joy of being” that it paradoxically represents the “most absolute product of Catholicism” (1993, p. 106-107).

A contemplative moment of disillusionment often follows from an immersion in spectacle in Fellini’s films. Stubbs notes that party sequences that “builds up to a frantic pitch” eventually “winds down to the separateness and loneliness of the participants” (1975, p. 99). The slowed down pace of such sequences sees the entrance of symbols that seem to provide some metaphorical rational to his films. Many critics approach such symbols with the binary of purity and decadence. For example, Burke sees Paola’s presence at the end of La Dolce Vita as a symbol of purity that “emphasize[s] the need for transformation from physical existence to spiritual life” (1966, p. 106). Marcello’s inability to hear her voice signifies that he has sunken so deep into hedonism that he is unable to transcend from the sweet life to the good life. However such readings are reductive because in practice, Fellini’s utilises symbols in a playful manner to create a mood of ambiguity, or as Bennett put it, as a “deliberate Fellini joke, designed to bait the humorless, jargon-chewing, symbol-seeking critics” (1964, p. 738). Paola can easily be seen as a devil in disguise, much like the angel that tempts Jesus away from the cross in Scorcesse’s Last Temptation of the Christ (1988). In this circumstance, Paola symbolises the false hope of transcendence that is ephemeral and death-like in contrast to an ever-shifting reality. Therefore, Fellini’s utilises symbols, not as a disillusionment of moral failings, but as a disillusionment of fixed signification, which is as dead as the monstrous fish lying on the beach. Fellini’s symbols point towards a dynamic “signifying process” in which “signs take on or change their significations” and “breaks the inertia of language-habits and offers the linguist a unique opportunity to study the becoming of the signification of signs” (Kristeva, 1988, p. 28). In Fellini’s own words, “Neo-realism does not express itself in what we show but in how we show it”  (cited in Pecori, 1978, p.5). Thus, an honest and truthful cinematic representation that draws from neo-realism points towards the process of signification of symbols that enables subjective significations to resonate in relation to the specificity of the individual.

Fellini’s films are often loosely constructed in relation to autobiographical anecdotes that are revisited in the present through excursions into his memories and dreams. This is explicitly and self-reflexively portrayed in 8 ½, as Guido, the director modelled after Fellini himself, revisits his memories in an attempt at gaining certainty of his life to be able to finish up his film in a truthful way. An apparent theme is the sense of childlike wonder in experiencing magical and sexual situations. Maurice, a Jungian archetype of the mage that “holds the keys to the initiatory gates at the thresholds of sacred space and time,” serves as a catalyst towards the recollection of a particular block in Guido’s memory (Moore & Gillette, 1993, p. 133). In revealing the words ‘Asa Nisi Masa’ as Guido’s unspoken thought, Guido moves into the memory of himself as a child under the care of his grandmother. This takes place in a dreamy interior with many white cloths and contrasting shadows. As the lights go out, a girl frantically tells an amused Guido about the enchanted painting on the bedroom wall and recites the spell ‘Asa Nisi Masa’. This evokes a sense of mystery and nostalgia. In another sequence, the movement and physique of a woman walking down a hill acts as a catalyst towards Guido’s remembrance of his first sexual encounter. In this memory, he visits the prostitute Saraghina. Her grotesque yet graceful features and her huge figure in contrast to a small Guido positions her as a potent figure of sexual excess that exposes Guido to the unknown territory of adult sexuality. This sense of childhood wonder is offset by memories of authoritative structures and figures. Following the Saraghina episode comes a recollection of his catholic institution in which he experiences a series of punishments and humiliations for his sinful excursion with a prostitute. Thus, part of Fellini’s memory is concerned with the moralistic order in a reflection of Italy’s Catholic origins. To a certain extent, it serves to preserve the spectacular aura of ‘sinful’ indulgence, as indicated by Guido’s return visit to Saraghina. In the filmic present, which takes place in the Economic Miracle, ‘sinful’ indulgence becomes second nature as Catholicism loses its hegemony. Though Marcello and Guido exists in such a hedonistic and energetic cultural landscape, the spectacular aura of childhood memories are rendered into indifference through adulthood and jadedness. However, access to child-like lenses is granted through the defamiliarising and dynamic energy of “the director’s camera, as Fellini transforms this fresco of decadence into a vibrant portrait that intrigues the spectator without necessarily drawing him or her into that evanescent world” (Bondnella, 2002, p. 90).

Another reoccurring autobiographical theme concerns Fellini’s estranged relationship with his father. In La Dolce Vita, Marcello approaches his father’s surprise visit with much enthusiasm. But it is not without certain awkwardness in their communication. Marcello’s intention in reuniting with his father is cut short as his father suffers a mild heart attack and insists on taking the last train home. In 8 ½. Guido meets his deceased father in a dream that takes place at his father’s burial site. Guido is unable to strike conversation as his father talks coldly about the condition of his grave and expressing some disappointment at his son’s lack of productivity. Thus, the father-son enigma in Fellini’s films comes in the form of “repeated presentations of derailed closure, of an attempt at reconciliation that always ends in a riddle of impossibility” (Papio, 1997, p. 404). The lack of communication, understanding and the inability to live up to the father’s expectations is, in a Freudian sense, a failed Oedipal order that is represented as a site of despair and contestation in Fellini’s films. However, in denying reconciliation, Fellini rejects the fantasy or totalising view of a phallic order under psychoanalysis that “subjects the unconscious to arborescent structures, hierarchical graphs, recapitulatory memories” and the image of the father (Deleuze & Guattari, 2008, p. 19). This explains his fascination with Jungian psychology in contrast to Freudian doctrine as he explains, “Freud wants to explain to us what we are; Jung accompanies us to the door of the unknowable and lets us see and understand by ourselves” (Fellini, 1988, p. 165). Thus, Fellini’s utilisation of memories and dreams are not exploited for utopian fantasies in certainty of structure. Rather, such sequences conjure at times, mystery and magic that brings back the wonderful and creative aura of a child’s sensibility, and at others, a sense of disorder and lack of fixity.

The decentred subject is a major theme in Fellini’s films. Fellini states that his motive in making 8 ½ is to create a portrait of a man “in which all the possibilities of his being happened—their levels, story after story, like in a building whose façade is crumbling” (cited in Burke, 1966, p. 156). Richardson draws a reference to TS Elliot in relation to this thematic, emphasising that both artists utilise an “aesthetic of disparity” that “does not emphasize narrative smoothness or continuity” (1978, p. 111). In 8 ½, narrative and subject, which comment on Italy’s national identity in the past, are decentred as memories and dreams intertwine with reality. Drawing from Deluze’s conception of the time-image, Martin-Jones asserts that Guido’s excursions into the many layers of his memory does not serve to inform the present, but “provides a number of not necessarily true pasts that enter into virtual circuits with the present, to create a memory of the future” (2006, p. 63). In contrast to the movement-image that recollects the past in order to inform the subject’s action in the present, is the time-image that opens up “the labyrinthine whole of time that is created when” the linearity of memory is ungrounded, “and the subject’s sensory-motor continuum suspended” (ibid, p. 62). It his hard to tell what is reality and what is memory in 8 ½ as Guido moves through the many layers of his memory. There is not a single recollection sequence in which he returns back to the apparent present as it always cuts straight to another episode.  Furthermore, there is a collapse between the distinction between actual and virtual memory. For example, the cardinal sequence that takes place in the steam bath is an assemblage of characters from his ‘present’, a doubling of the confession sequence that Guido experiences as a young boy and the other meeting with the Cardinal earlier in the narrative. In the concluding carousel sequence, characters from the many layers of his memory, including young Guido, appear within the same space with the adult Guido who directs them to move around a circle endlessly. This corresponds to Deleuze’s utilisation of Nietzsche’s eternal occurrence to illustrate the pureness of time in which “the straight line of time, as though drawn by its own length, re-forms a strange loop” that “leads into the formless” (1997, p. 91). Thus, the decentreing of subject and narrative in Fellini’s film is also the decentreing of the actuality of the past and present that points towards the openness of the future.

So far, in discussing Fellini’s spectacular display, playful symbolism and the decentreing of narrative and subject through excursions in dreams and memories, I have positioned his key and formal concerns within an auteurist perspective. Neo-realism is concerned with articulating the negative effects of war rooted in Fascist history and critiquing bourgeois ideology towards an enlightenment of class-consciousness. Fellini’s cinema marks a departure from the unity and hegemony of neo-realism as a purist form of cinematic discourse in Italy through a personalised vision that stresses the complexity of the human condition. However, it is more conducive to position’s Fellini’s thematic differences as a creative rearticulation of neo-realism rather than as an opposition. As Burke states, the older generation of neo-realists and Fellini share a passionate and humanistic dedication to human solidarity (1966, p. 4). Rosenthal also links Fellini to neo-realism through his “direct style of observation” (1976, p. 12). Thus, Fellini’s greatest contribution to this trajectory of Italian national cinemas is his honest intentions in expanding the boundaries of reality into the psychological and spiritual depths of the human condition that “redeem[s] the world of appearances through a poetic or oneiric rendering of that world” (Restivo, 2002, p. 37). This brings to mind Badiou’s ethical framework:

Every absolutization of the power of a truth organizes an Evil. The Good is Good only to the extent that it does not aspire to render the world good. Its sole being lies in the situated advent of a singular truth (2002, p. 85).

It is farfetched to claim that the hegemonic currency of neo-realism is evil in its intentions as it primarily has its aims in political emancipation. However, its instrumental nature bears its head with the critical insistence of its values as the dominant mode of cinematic discourse in Italy. Fellini playfully acknowledges this in La Dolce Vita when a journalist asks Sylvia the audacious question of whether she thinks neo-realism is dead, in which an assistant automatically signals her to say no. Similarly, the numbing and overly rational criticisms by the cinematic ‘intellectual’ in 8 ½ delimit Guido’s creative potential. As the currency of neo-realism solidifies into stagnancy within a changing cultural climate, Fellini ethically moves into the complex channels of the individual’s psyche to communicate a subjective but truer reality. His motive in portraying a truthful subjective reality also enables him to achieve a strong sense of historical specificity. La Dolce Vita and 8 ½ reflect on the cultural and moral confusion of Italy within the economic miracle. He does this “without rigorous moralistic judgments,” enabling the spectator to experience the vibrancy of life in the absence of any absolute ideologies (Bondanella, 2002, p. 70).

Auteurism is a means of articulating national identity within the international art-film circuit. As Martin-Jones states, despite the deliberate destabalision of national identity through the utilisation of the time-image in 8 ½’s narrative, “the film is ultimately reterritorialised through the agency that it provide Fellini the auteur” (2006, p. 76). Fellini’s auteurist status corresponds to the influx of the American brand of individualism within the economic miracle that is also referred to as ‘Hollywood on the Tiber”. Within this climate is Italy’s alliance with the global phenomenon of American ideology that “enlisted high art and, equally important, the cult of the artist, as symbols of American individualism” (Burke, 1966, p. 8). Fellini is propagated as a modernist artist that communicates a rich and visual appealing paradigm of the complexity of the human condition. This complexity is explicit in its deterritorialision of the Italian national narrative within the specific trajectory of Italian cinema. However, within a global level, it becomes a means of transcending cultural specificity towards a universal product that is marketable to the global market as a marker of enlightened individualism. Thus, in the championing of Fellini as auteur, the articulation of Italian national identity moves away from an emphasis on cultural specificity to the global sentiments of the enlightened artist that paradoxically becomes an icon of Italian nationality.

Auteurism is a useful framework in understanding the articulation of Italian national cinemas within the specificity of the economic miracle. However, it is more productive to view Fellini’s thematic in relation to its destabalisation of national narratives, its destructive but creative potential in signalling towards the possibility of an open field of constructions in the future. Within a postmodern cultural climate, the currency of the auteur is destabalised by post-auteurism, in which “the auteur was killed off as creative artist and resurrected as merely one system of codes among many or as the radically dispersed effect of ideological gaps and contradictions” (Burke, 1989, p. 37). This movement serves to deterritorialise the reterritorialisations of auterism in the study of Italian national cinemas, bringing back Fellini’s thematic of dislocation back into the foreground. As such, Auteurism suffers a similar fate as neo-realism. All frameworks that conceptualises Italian national cinemas within the rigidity of a structure will eventually lose its currency due to the ever-shifting cultural field. Fellini is important in the sense that he self-reflexively highlights this inherent dissonance in the construction of national identity. However, as Brunetta says, “the progressive loss of that projectuality and tension” of national identity is “a common denominator that had accompanied for a long time the Italian authors of the postwar years” (cited in Gieri, 1995, p. 199). The need of articulating national identity is inherent to the construction of a nation. Fellini’s films are no exception. But he differs in the sense that his spectacular and celebratory display of cultural confusion points towards an active and affirmative articulation that meanders in multiple directions within the process.

References

Badiou, A. (2002). Ethics. An Essay on the Understanding of Evil. London: Verso.

Bennett, Joseph. (Autumn, 1964). Italian Film: Failure and Emergence. The Kenyon Review, 26(4), 738-747.

Bondanella, P. (2002). “La Dolce Vita: The Art Film Spectacular”. in The Films of Federico Fellini. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 65-92.

Burke, Frank. (1966). Fellini’s Films: From Postwar to Postmodern. New York: Twayne Publishers.

Burke, Frank. (Autumn, 1989). Fellini: Changing the Subject. Film Quarterly, 43(1), 36-48.

Degli-Esposti, C. (Summer, 1996). Federico Fellini’s Intervista or the Neo-Baroque Creativity of the Analysand. Italica, 73(2), 157-172.

Deleuze, G. (1997). Difference and Repetition. London: The Athlone Press.

Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (2008). A Thousand Plateaus. London: Continuum.

Fellini, F. (1988). Federico Fellini: Comments on Film. Grazzini, G. (ed.). Fresno: California University Press.

Gieri, M. (1995). Contemporary Italian Filmmaking: Strategies of Subversion. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Hatab, L. J. (2004). Satyr: Human-Animality in Nietzsche. in Acampora, C. D. & Acampora, R. R. (eds.). A Nietzschean Bestiary: Becoming Animal Beyond Docile and Brutal. Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. 211-219.

Kristeva, J. (1988). “Towards a Semiology of Paradigms”. in Ffrench & Lack. (eds.). The Tel Quel Reader. New York: Routledge. 25-49.

Martin-Jones, David. (2006). Deleuze, Cinema and National Identity. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Moore, R. & Gillette, D. (1993). The Magician Within. New York: William Morrow.

Papio, Michael. (Autumn, 1997). Derailment of Closure: The Father-Son Enigma in Fellini. Italica, 74(3), 392-402.

Pasolini, P. P. (1993). “The Catholic Irrationalism of Fellini”. in Bondanella, P. & Degli-Esposti, C. (eds.). Perspectives on Federico Fellini. New York: G. K. Hall. 101-109.

Pecori, Franci. (1978). Federico Fellini. Florence: La Nuova Italia Editrice.

Restivo, Angelo. (2002). The Cinema of Economic Miracles. Durham: Duke University Press.

Richardson, R. (1978). “La Dolce Vita: Fellini and T.S. Eliot”. in Bondanella, P. (ed.). Federico Fellini: Essays in Criticism. New York: Oxford University Press.

Rosenthal, Stuart. (1976). The Cinema of Federico Fellini. London: The Tantivy Press.

Stubbs, J. C. (April, 1975). 8 ½. Journal of Aesthetic Education, 9(2), 96-108.

Stubbs, J. C. (2006). Federico Fellini as Auteur: Seven Aspects of His Films. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

Filmography

8 ½, Federico Fellini, 1963

La Dolce Vita, Federico Fellini, 1960

Last Temptation of the Christ, The, Martin Scorsese, 1988

Transformative + Materialistic Bodybuilding

“Her muscled back splays her spine- a zen archer’s bow, shooting off arrows of power into the springtime hills. Her thighs and calves launch her up cliffs over oceans, into herds of impalas in African deserts, or into outer space among rockets and comets. .. her heart is no longer cowering behind rib walls, and her pectoral muscles, not simply holding firm her breast, reach out to embrace and hold children, lovers, small animals, and savage beasts against the warmth of her heart. She no longer folds her hands protectively about the cave of her abdomen and womb. Her fingers are no longer antennae of insects and tendrils of vines; they close in fists that open breaches in the walls of the gym, the house, and the city, and extend talons to carry off us with her” – Alphonso Lingis

Chen Kaige’s Yellow Earth

 Situating Yellow Earth within Chinese National Cinema

Prior to the emergence of the 5^th generation of Chinese cinema in the 1980s, the movement that Yellow Earth (Chen Kaige, 1984) is positioned in, Chinese national cinema was heavily influenced by state ideology. Various film styles and aesthetics, such as melodrama, realism and Chinese opera were incorporated in its history, resulting in a hybrid and intertextual film culture. The 1980s saw a diffusion of Communist ideology and political restructuring. This marks the emergence of the 5^th generation who “depart[ed] from films in the melodramatic tradition” and “the revolutionary models of socialist production” to experiment with visual and narrative delivery as a form of cultural reassessment and ideological critique (Cui, 2003, p. 101). Through an analysis of Yellow Earth, I will be supporting the claim that an indigenous aesthetic developed within the movement. Rather than preferring a reading that sees its aesthetics as entirely original, I will situate the film within its rearticulation of the various Western aesthetics as adopted by China’s film heritage. Firstly, I shall discuss Yellow Earth’s departure from realism through its obscure articulation of history. Secondly, I will explain how the film dismantles melodramatic constructions with its engagement with a primitive form of landscape painting that conjures up the Taoist/Buddhist ontology of being as vast emptiness. Thirdly, I shall explore its intersection with transcendental film style. To conclude, I will map out Yellow Earth’s unique fusion and rearticulation of various film aesthetics explored in the essay.

Historical Void:  Yellow Earth’s Departure from Realism

            Realism, a signifier of modernism that moves along the progressive trajectory of Chinese cultural history, is considered the dominant aesthetic mood for Chinese national cinema. Being critical towards the ideological implications of realism, Chen Kaige self-consciously engages with its deployment, restructuring its aesthetical signification in the process. It is undeniable that on the surface, the film utilises a realist representation through its departure from expressionism, enabling a stark and anti-spectacular acting style. Landscapes are also shot in extremely naturalistic settings with little mediation. However, I believe that Yellow Earth departs from realism through its unspecific representation of history. Berry and Farquhar argue that the film’s only departure from realism is through its disengagement from national ideology (2006, p. 107).  For them, the film is still inherently realist because its “narrative is anchored in real historical events” (ibid, p. 103). I shall discuss how this statement is problematic.

Chinese film prior to the 5^th generation fixated its narrative on the present, a realist visuality that explores notions of modernity and articulates the possibilities of change. For example, the social-realist model adopted during the Maoist regime depicted the current conditions of the proletariat, interpellating its spectators to identify with the utopian project of the Communist party that moves towards the future. However, Yellow Earth engages with a great disparity between the present and past. It conjures up primitive landscapes and rituals, filmic representations that are uncanny to spectators accustomed to realist depictions of modernity. The scene in which Gu Qing returns to the Communist camp in Yan’an could be constructed to represent a stable and real point in history. However, Gu Qing is bombarded with a ritualistic drumming procession. He watches on without any expression, signifying an unstable access to the historical signifiers of the Communist era. The scene also utilises hyperkinetic movements that meander within the procession, a displacement from the still and naturalistic digesis, disabling the spectator’s contemplation of history in that particular moment. Furthermore, the last scene, in which the villagers attempt to conjure up the metaphysical presence of the rain god, works as a parallel to the Communist drum ritual, reworking any possible historical signification of the first scene into a form of primitivism. Far from depicting a particular event in history, it engages in ethnographical “dream time, of the time of renewed myths,” displacing historical accuracy and specificity into contemplative timelessness (Chow, 1995, p. 42).

Yellow Earth’s historical ambiguity is further enforced through the framing of landscapes that utilises deep focus. Within the vast naturalistic stillness of the landscape, dwarfed characters move directly along the depth of field, enabling a vastness that extends within the film image. Deleuze states, “depth of field creates a certain type of direct time-image that can be defined by memory, virtual regions of past,” being “less a function of reality than a function of remembering, of temporalization: not exactly a recollection but an invitation to recollect” (1989, p. 105). Thus, historical narrative in Yellow Earth is based on subjective memory that is not linear and anchored in real moments. Rather, it is perceived through the spectator’s own engagement, making it dreamy, unspecific and multiple.

Despite this, it does not abandon history with what Jameson refers to as the “nostalgia mood,” in which the past is articulated “through stylistic connotation,” serving as “a symptom of the waning of our historicity” (1984, p. 66-68). I argue that despite its ahistorical constructions, Yellow Earth is still engaged in a discourse of history. It rejects nostalgic and surface representations of history, displacing the specificity of history into a vast depth of field that functions as a contemplative framework. This rearticulates history, separates it from ideological implantations and self-referentially engages with its spectators’ intuition through a recollection of subjective perceptions of history. Thus, history is absent in the foreground, but is accessible critical rearticulation by the spectators via depth cues.

 

Taoist Primitivism: Emptying out Melodramatic Formulations

            The naturalism and depth described above can be attributed to how Yellow Earth’s rejects “the aesthetics of socialist realism by critiquing them through traditional aesthetic codes” (Berry & Farquhar, 1994, p. 95). Its cinematography that “works with a limited range of colours, natural lighting, and non-perspectival use of filmic space” resembles ancient “Chinese scroll-painting,” in which “centrifugal spatial configurations open up to a consciousness that is not moved by desire but rather by the lack of it” (Yau, 1991, p. 64-65). This corresponds to a primitive mode of address in film, the Taoist philosophy of vast emptiness. The Tao Te Ching states, “there was something formless yet complete, that existed before heaven and earth” (cited in Waley, 1934, p. 174). The first few scenes of Yellow Earth are exemplary of its primitive aesthetic. The film opens with a stark shot of barren earth. Gu Qing, who signifies the desire and movement of Communist ideology, emerges at the top of the frame, dwarfed by the vast landscape but slowly emerging towards clearer view. Before his figure is significantly constructed in view, the film crosscuts into another still image of barren earth. Then the camera pans up to the sky, engulfing the screen with an empty bluish tint. Thus, from the start, the spectator is bombarded by a strange decentralising effect that is uncommon to both Chinese cinema and Hollywood narrative. Rather than serving as establishing shots, the naturalistic setting is constructed in the forefront and appears as the essence of the film. This “signifies a deliberate emptying” that when viewed in relation to the ideology of Maoism, “wrests apparatuses of representation from the kind of rhetorical coercion that typifies communist state discourse” (Chow, 1995, p. 40).

            Pickowicz states, “the melodramatic imagination is deeply rooted in Chinese life” (1993, p. 325). The figuration of the family (Jia), a signifier to modernity and a micro parallel to the nation state (Guo Jia) is the archetype of China’s melodramatic tradition. Yellow Earth is conscious about the signifying implications of the family, bringing in the emptying effect of its aesthetic into the structure of the family. While the outdoor shots of stark naturalism are strong indicators to such an aesthetic, the mood it evokes also pervades into the material stronghold of familial relations, the home. Firstly, the home in Yellow Earth is situated within the naturalistic setting of a cave. This emphasises the intrusiveness of the home towards an empty and original state. Yellow earth is constructed into a dwelling. Secondly, the primitive family is not stable and complete with the absence of a motherly figure. Thirdly, in the scene when Gu Qing first enters the cave, the absence of a strong melodramatic narrative and is apparent within the communication dynamics of the family. Besides the inhibited movements of Cui Jiao, the family members are all statically positioned at specific points. The father sits in a meditative and unresponsive state. As soon as Hanhan enters the narrative space, he stops all movement and stands emotionlessly by the door. The only dynamic that fuels any narrative development is Gu Qing’s enquiries about folk songs that he is attempting to document and restructure for ideological purposes.  The editing achieves a repetitive pace in relation to the desire for response from the three family members. The same shots that are marked with silence move in a cycle, highlighting the lack of communication and expanding symbolic space between the characters. Thus, the family and melodramatic dynamics are emptied out. Gu Qing’s one-sided dialogue, as a catalyst to the reaffirmation of the family through the parallel with the interests of the nation as a macro-family, is met with silence, echoing the blank deepness of the exterior landscape.

 

Transcendental Style

            Berry and Farquhar draws a parallel between Yellow Earth’s aesthetic and French poetic realism, highlighting “political ambivalence, personal disappointment, melodious sadness, and a sense of degeneration and death” (2006, p. 103). This situates Yellow Earth within a more symbolic deployment of realism in which the subjectivities of its protagonists result in the anxieties explored in the narrative. However, with its primitivism, emptying out of filmic perspectives, irrationalism and heavy symbolism, I believe that Yellow Earth has more similarities with the uncommon, yet trans-national aesthetic of cinematic transcendentalism. Schrader formulates two aspects of transcendental style as, “an actual or potential disunity between man and his environment which culminates in a decisive action” and “a frozen view of life which does not resolve the disparity but transcends it” (1972, p. 42, 49). In Yellow Earth, Cui Qiao, as the signifier of modernity, senses disunity between the primitive customs that entrap her and the utopian promise of liberation implanted on her by Gu Qing. She makes the decisive action of crossing the turbulent river. The disparity is not resolved as she drowns in the river. However, at that moment, the river, as a naturalistic element, becomes a vehicle of transcendence. The river that nourished her, symbolised through the drawing of water, ends up consuming her motivation and action. Disparity is absorbed into the river, emptying out ideological formations and its decisive actions in favour of a pure form. Thus, the film offers a glimpse and feeling of a meta-view that transcends a fixation of particular moments in history and their ideological effects. It strives towards transcendence through the primitivism of its traditional aesthetics.

In this paper, I argued that Chen Kaige deconstructs realist representations of history through his use of  cinematic depth to offer a self-reflexive address based on subjective recollection of history. Secondly, I discussed how the film conjures a mood that resembles the Taoist notion of emptiness by drawing the style of its cinematography from the primitive and culturally specific art form of landscape painting. This aesthetic that is used to destabilise history it its exterior shots also permeates into the home, in which it empties out melodramatic notions of the family. Lastly, I explored the film’s similarities to Schrader’s conceptualisation of transcendental style. With all these factors, it become necessary to view Yellow Earth as a critical fusion of various film aesthetics. It is a ‘becoming’ that draws and rearticulates multiple reference points to the effect of generating a unique localised style. As a turning point, it opened up the possibilities for a revolutionary exploration of film style within the field of Chinese film.

 

References

Berry, C. & Farquhar, M. (1994). “Post-Socialist Strategies: An Analysis of Yellow Earth and Black Cannon Incident”. in Ehrlich, L. C. & Desser, D. (ed.). Cinematic Landscapes. Austin: University of Texas Press. 81-116

Berry, C. & Farquhar, M. (2006). “Realist Modes: Melodrama, Modernity, and Home”. in Berry, C. & Farquhar, M. (eds.). China on Screen: Cinema and Nation. New York: Columbia University Press. 75-107.

Chow, Rey. (1995). Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography, and Contemporary Chinese Cinema. New York: Columbia University Press.

Cui, Shuqin. (2003). Women Through the Lens: Gender and Nation in a Century of Chinese Cinema. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.

Deleuze, Gilles. (1989). Cinema 2: The Time Image. London: Continuum Press.

Jameson, Fredric. (1984). Postmodernism, Or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. New Left Review, 146, July-August, 53-92.

Hansen, M. B. (2000). Fallen Women, Rising Stars, New Horizons: Shanghai Silent Cinema as Vernacular Modernism. Film Quarterly, 54(1), 10-22.

Pickowicz, P. G. (1993). “Melodramatic Representation and the May Fourth Tradition of Chinese Cinema”. in Widmer, E. & Wang, D. (eds.). From May Fourth to June Fourth: Fiction and Film in the Twentieth Century. Harvard: Harvard University Press. 295-326.

Schrader, Paul. (1972). Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Waley, Arthur. (1934). The Way and its Power: A Study of the Tao Te Ching and Its Place in Chinese Thought. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd.

Yau, Esther, C. M. (1991). “Yellow Earth: Western Analysis and a Non-Western Text”. in Berry, Chris (ed.). Perspectives on Chinese Cinema. London: BFI Publishing. 62-79.

Necro-utopianism and Heterogeneous Action

The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (De Sica, 1970) is a cinematic representation of Italian Jewish experience within Fascist oppression. It deviates from factual historical accounts of the documentary format and the autobiographical narratives of writers akin to Levi who “bear witness only to the things” that he has “endured and saw” (1976, p. 195). The lyrical atmosphere evoked by its garden motif has been criticised as an escapist tendency that caters for the art house market. In this essay, I shall argue that the garden motif is constructed not simply for cinematic pleasure, but more importantly as an analysis of a psychological form of escapism. Firstly, I shall discuss De Sica’s dialectical construction of utopian private space and the historical public domain. Secondly, I shall discuss the implications of Giorgio’s sexual ‘awakening’. It is my motive to demonstrate that De Sica’s film critically offers transcendence through death and an uncertainty through action as two possible avenues in dealing with the Holocaust.

The Garden as Utopian Impulse

The garden sequences are filmed in a washed out tone. Characters are illuminated in a dreamy glow. Marcus describes this utopian space as “a locus of pleasure and beauty” that “acknowledges neither time, nor change, nor the encroachments that history may make on its privileged domain” (2000, p. 260). Thus, the garden mentality is positioned as an enticing yet neurotic disavowal of the heterogeneous elements that threaten its status. Through its clearly marked boundaries, the garden is segregated  from the historically specific public domain that bears the weight of Fascism. The narrative that progresses within this outdoor space, which is shot starkly with a sharp focus, is concerned with an increasing presence of fascist violence. For example, Giorgio discusses Fascist laws with his family, gets kicked out of the library and watches documentary footage of Nazi rallies in the cinema. A further distancing is facilitated as Giorgio is lectured on the realities of concentration camps when he visits his brother in France. Thus, neorealism’s historical accountability, evoked in the public spaces of De Sica’s film, enables a distancing that evaluates the garden mentality as reductive escapism (Marcus, 2000, p. 270).

Such a reading positions De Sica’s film as an anti-escapist call to action or, more contingent for the spectator, a form of critical awareness towards Fascism. However, its garden/outdoor binary does not address how utopianism and action/awareness are inherently intertwined within one’s psychological state. Giorgio’s indulgence in the garden mentality is not fixed within his visits to the garden, but lingers on even when he is facing the realities of Fascism. His decision to return to Italy despite being ‘educated’ on the horrors of Fascist rule is not simply a heroic act but an indication of a complex psychological state that insists on a certain form of utopianism.

Jameson states that in addition to its “demystifying vocation,” a unified critique of culture must also  “project its simultaneously Utopian power as the symbolic affirmation of a specific historical and class form of collective unity” (1981, p. 291). With this, Jameson recognises the desire for a state of completion that drives our unconscious desire. The distancing provided by De Sica’s neorealistic construction of historically specific public space is a negative hermeneutic that serves to demystify the subject’s complicity with Fascist ideology. However, as Levi has explained, the political consciousness in terms of resistance “was particularly weak in Italy” (2001, p. 192). Therefore a specific utopian impulse rooted in a collective struggle against Fascism seems out of reach for the characters in De Sica’s film. The garden is the only ‘wholesome’ reference to a utopian impulse that can propagate a unified action. However, the garden’s aristocratic fixation, timelessness and constant circulation of childhood memories offer only death as a form of utopianism. In this sense, action leads to the perfect resolution in death. De Sica’s film demonstrates that when the oppressed does not have access to a political consciousness, the notion of a historically and collectively fixed utopian ideal can easily regress into a regressive utopian ideal, such as death or even fascism itself.

Giorgio’s Absence: Undetermined Action

A trajectory within De Sica’s film that moves away from the finality of death is Giorgio’s awareness of his sexual desire towards Micol. Throughout the first ¾ of the narrative, his attraction towards Micol draws him back to the garden despite her constant rejections. However, in a desperate attempt, Giorgio returns to the garden at night to catch a glimpse of Micol. What follows is a dreamy enactment of the primal scene. Micol reveals her body and stares blankly at Girogio as he gazes at her through the window. Marcus asserts, “By shattering his illusion of invisibility and reversing the subject-object relationship, Micol breaks the spell of narcissistic projection on which Giorgio’s erotic fantasy is built” (2000, p. 269). As Žižek states, it is only through the unconscious or “dream that we approached the fantasy-framework which determines our activity, our mode of acting in reality itself” (1989, p. 47) Thus, in a reversal of the dominant patriarchal mode of cinematic representation, the spectator, along with Giorgio, is able to self-reflexively view the prior hidden dynamics of sexual desire that fuels the perpetuation of his garden mentality.  Giorgio becomes aware that desire is the relation of being to lack, and gives up his unproductive pursuit of Micol. This represents a call for spectatorial awareness and a resistance on Giorgio’s subsequent actions much in line with the “historical-moral accountability” De Sica evokes in the scenes situated within public space (Marcus, 2000, p. 272).

This is the ‘healthiest’ trajectory in dealing with the Holocaust that De Sica offers. Nonetheless, it perpetuates an aura of dread through its elusive representation. In light of Giorgio’s sexual awakening, his father consoles him by saying, “If one wants to seriously understand how the world works, he must die, at least once.” This reaffirms Micol as a signifier of an unattainable obscure object of desire. By highlighting that death is an inevitability in Giorgio’s existence, his father indicates that whatever one chooses to pursue in relation to a primal lack would simply be a repetition that leads to a similar death. In this sense, Giorgio’s father seemingly prepares Giorgio for multiple deaths or failures in his future endeavours. In light of this, Micol’s gaze is to be communicated, not as a catalyst to historical accountability, but as a signifier of a death-like void that transcends worldly actions. This brings to mind D.H. Lawrence’s suggestion in Lady Chatterley’s Lover:

Being a girl, one’s whole dignity and meaning in life consisted in the achievement of an absolute, a perfect, a pure and royal freedom. What else did a girl’s life mean? To shake off the old and sordid connections and subjections” (2006, p. 7)

By rejecting the visceral in a preference for unspoilt memories, Micol becomes the pure figuration of the garden mentality. She offers an ethereal escapism from politics and history that is intertwined with death. After this episode, Giorgio disappears from the narrative. To follow up and attach an element of hope to his possible resistance would be a plunge into uncertainty, constant strife and chaos. The man of action is devoid of any true utopian impulse. On the other hand, Giorgio’s absence can easily be interpreted as a resignation from the intangibility of his existence.

I have demonstrated that De Sica’s film does not simply offer a lyrical portrayal of Jewish experience as an escapist avenue in line with the art house market. Firstly, I discussed how the contrast between private utopian space and public historical space enables a distancing that critiques the garden mentality as a form of destructive and neurotic denial. However, I argued that the dialectical relationship between these two poles presents a complex psychology in which action and resistance are bound to an inherent need for a utopian reference. The general lack of Jewish political conscious in light of the Fascist regime disavows a historical and collective form of utopianism. Death becomes a prominent utopian solution, as the timeless garden is the only reference point clearly illustrated in De Sica’s film. Secondly, I positioned Giorgio’s sexual awakening, not as a simple political maturation, but as a plunge into a void. While his possible actions are undetermined, his absence does provide a fleeting sense of hope. In light of these arguments, De Sica’s film becomes a dreadful portrait of Jewish experience within Fascist rule. There is a prevailing sense of death and existential crisis within its lyrical representation. Perhaps, the greatest lesson it offers us is it’s articulation of the inevitable, beautiful and deathlike utopianism that is inherent in our unconscious. This could lead to unproductive escapism and even Fascism itself. A healthy attitude would consist of a critical relationship with one’s utopianism, an active fluctuation of homogenous and heterogeneous elements.

 

References

Jameson, Fredric. (1981). The Political Unconscious. Ithaca and New York: Cornell University Press.

Lawrence, D. H. (2006). Lady Chatterley’s Lover. New York: Penguin Books.

Levi, P. (2001). “A Self-Interview: Afterword to If This is a Man”. in Belponti. & Gordon. (eds.). The Voice of memory: Primo Levi. Oxford: Polity Press. 187-207.

Marcus. M. (2000). “De Sica’s Garden of the Finzi-Continis: An Escapist Paradise Lost”. in Curle. & Snyder. (eds.). Vittorio De Sica: Contemporary Perspectives. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 258-279.

Žižek, Slavoj. (1989). The Sublime Object of Ideology. London and New York: Verso.

Your chaos days are numbered

Fucking good.