Söderbaum, Kristina

پنجشنبه 24 بهمن 1398
16:45
masoumi5631

Söderbaum ‹ ´ ödërbaum ›, Kristina . -German film actress (Stockholm 1912 - Hitzacker 2001 ); in Germany from 1928 , it was started at the cinema by her husband, the director Veit Harlan. Interpreted: Jugend ( 1938 ); Jud Süss ( 1940 ); Der grosse König ( 1942 ); Die goldene Stadt ( 1942 ); Opfergang ( 1943 ); Verrat an Deutschland (Berlin-Tokyo espionage operation, 1955 ).


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HARLAN, Veit

پنجشنبه 24 بهمن 1398
16:39
masoumi5631

Harlan, Veit

German screenwriter, director and theatrical and film actor, born in Berlin on September 22, 1899 and died in Capri on April 13, 1964. Taking advantage of a solid theatrical background and a long apprenticeship in cinema as an actor, H. became, as director, a of the key figures of the German cinema of the Third Reich: his are some of the most important works in support of Nazism, such as Jud Süss (1940; Süss the Jew), Der grosse König (1942; The great king), for which he won the Mussolini Cup for the best foreign film at the Venice Film Festival, and the colossal Kolberg (1945; The citadel of heroes). After the Second World War, tried and acquitted by the accusations of collaboration with the regime, he resumed his activity with works that, although without significant innovations, retain a certain narrative and photographic taste.

Son of the writer Walter Harlan, he studied acting with M. Reihnardt, making his theater debut in Berlin in 1915 as an actor and the following year as assistant director. After participating in the First World War, he also began working in the cinema, making his first appearance in Die Hose. Hans Behrendt's Skandal in einer kleinen Residenz (1927). He then participated in numerous films, proving himself a good character in works of historical reconstruction with a war theme such as Der Choral von Leuthen (1933) by Carl Froelich, Arzen von Czerépy and Walter Supper, or in detective films such as Taifun, also known as Polizeiakte 909 (1934) by Robert Wiene, and playing the part of the protagonist in Stradivari (1935) by Géza von Bolváry. It was the introduction of sound, and therefore the possibility of spoken dialogue, to favor his late debut in film direction which happened not accidentally with the adaptation of a comedy, Krach im Hinterhaus (1935), which had been directed by him at the theater. Thus began a prolific career as an author, and often also a screenwriter, of films based above all on great actor performances: the adaptation of LN Tolstoj by Kreutzersonate (1937; La sonata a Kreutzer), starring the diva Lil Dagover; Der Herrscher (1937; Ingratitude), in which the star of the silent Emil Jannings stands out; and the long series of films starring actress Kristina Söderbaum (often paired with Frits van Dongen): the historical-dramatic thriller Verwehte Spuren (1938; La peste di Parigi); the melodrama Die Reise nach Tilsit (1939; Towards love), based on Sunrise - A song of two humans (1926; Aurora) by Friedrich W. Murnau; Das unsterbliche Herz (1939; The accused of Nuremberg), taken from a text by his father, melodramatic costume story of the inventor Peter Henlein (played by a suggestive Paul Wegener). H. then directed the infamously famous Jud Süss, an explicit instrument of anti-Semitic propaganda that overturns the original meaning of the homonymous novel by the Jewish writer L. Feuchtwanger, and Der grosse König, a portrait celebrating Frederick II in the Seven Years' War with explicit allusions to the glory of the Hitler Reich. During the Second World War he alternated melodramatic production with that of supporting the regime with great staging skills, passing from the love triangle Opfergang (1944; The prisoner of fate) to a blockbuster of historical reconstruction like Kolberg: made in two years of shooting with tens of thousands of extras, the film tells the popular revolt of a Prussian port city on the Baltic in front of the invasion of the Napoleonic armies in 1806 , almost an appeal to resistance against Nazism surrounded by allied troops. H.'s activity resumed in the post-war period with Unsterbliche Geliebte (1954; The indomitable dynasty), eighteenth-century costume melodrama, and continued with works of various inspiration: from the adventure film Die Gefangene des Mahradscha (1954; The prisoner of the Maharajah) to the well-made espionage one Verrat an Deutschland. Der Fall Dr. Sorge (1955; Berlin-Tokyo - Espionage Operation), up to the scandalous drama of homosexual prostitution Anders als du und ich. § 175, also known as Das dritte Geschlecht (1957; closed-door trial). H. spent the last years of his life in Italy and wrote an autobiography, Im, Schatten meiner Filme, which appeared posthumously in 1966 (edited by HC Opfermann).BIBLIOGRAPHY

S. Zielinski, Veit Harlan: Analysis and Materials in the Auseinandersetzung mit einem Film-Regisseur des deutschen Faschismus , Frankfurt 1981; F. Noak, Veit Harlan: 'des Teufels Regisseur' , München 2000.


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Narrate with pictures

پنجشنبه 24 بهمن 1398
16:34
masoumi5631

Narrate with pictures

Ancient stories

In prehistory, when writing did not exist, images were a way of communicating. The artist affected his fears, his beliefs, but also the daily life of his tribe on the walls of the caves. To do this he used figures and symbols which, which have come down to us, have become precious documents and testimonies.

The 'rock art: the figures painted on the rock

The rock art that developed in the Upper Paleolithic (36.000 ÷ 10.500 BC) is the work of Homo sapiens . The first cave paintings (made, that is, on the rock) were discovered in 1879 in a cave in Altamira, in the north-west of Spain: they represent animals (especially bison, but also deer and horses) flanked by geometric signs such as triangles, ovals, rectangles. Paleontologists initially did not believe that such vivid and realistic depictions could have been made by men of the Ice Age. But, since other cave paintings attributable to the same period were discovered, they accepted the idea of ​​the existence of a real prehistoric art.

Shrines for religious rites and ceremonies

The caves used for the paintings were not inhabited. They were probably sacred places where propitiatory religious ceremonies were held (perhaps accompanied by dances and songs) to conquer the benevolence of the gods, so that they would help primitive man to survive and make hunting favorable to him.

The figures found on the walls of the caves are mostly related to the animal world: hunting scenes associated with female and male symbols, which represent the human couple and suggest the continuation of the species and its survival. For the Paleolithic hunter there was probably no contrast between reality and images: by painting reality he thought of taking possession of it and thus acquiring supernatural power.

Landscapes are not depicted in prehistoric paintings. The man is depicted in a stylized way or through the imprint of his hands, often alternating with signs. Signs, hands and animals are arranged in a precise order: almost like a form of writing .

An immense open-air museum

During the Neolithic period (7000 ÷ 2000 BC) the forms of painting and sculpture change. A new society was formed: man cultivates the land and raises animals. Hunting is no longer the only resource and in the rock depictions men, plants, animals but also everyday objects appear. In Valcamonica (Lombardy) a prehistoric civilization flourished, that of the Camuni, which produced numerous rock graffiti, signs engraved on the rock representing primitive architecture and maps of villages, (such as, for example, the Map of Bedolina ), hunting scenes, idols.

Prehistoric artists also knew how to create perspective effects, that is, drawing at the bottom what had to appear closer and at the top what was further away. They superimposed the images, created reliefs to give movement to the figure. More than 450,000 engravings have so far been brought to light: a large book engraved on stone walls that tells us of a historical period ranging from archaic hunters to the Roman age.

How was a cave painting done?

With charcoal, the contours of the figure to be represented were traced and, for coloring, ochres (yellow and red earth very common in nature), or clayey lands that previously had to be pulverized and mixed with water were used. The colors spread with the fingertips or with brushes made with horsehair or with bristles of other animals.

What did prehistoric artists draw?

The drawings on the walls of the caves tell stories of everyday life. In the Lascaux cave in France, a hunter with a bird mask is killed by the bison he is hunting. Just below is the funerary pole, that is the hunter's tomb, surmounted by a bird.

Traces of smoke and grease make us think that the artists worked in the depths of the caves, illuminating them with torches that burned animal fat.

Illustrate with words

Writing, images, sounds are born from the instinctive need to communicate. The drawing first told the story and gave visibility to the ideas. In the 20th century, in addition to images, artists used writing as well, breaking the barriers that separated the different forms of art and mixing the relationship between word and image

The art of writing

In human history, drawing preceded writing. Slowly, the designs used to communicate became stylized, transforming first into signs and symbols and then into alphabets . But the link between drawings and writing has remained very close in the art of calligraphy . In China, for example, the writing has always been a veritable art, made of designs and combinations of signs, called ideograms . Chinese writing represents objects, facts or concepts and uses the same tools as painting: soft brushes, ink stone, paper and silk.

Arabic writing is also an art, a calligraphy, which becomes the main decorative element of architecture or of metal and glass objects or even of beautiful ceramics.

Monks copy and create

In the Middle Ages it was the monks (see monasticism ) copyists of the great abbeys who created the art of miniature : these are letters drawn and embellished with decorations, characters, animals or flowers. The origin of the word miniature derives from the use of the minium, a red mineral with which the ink used by the monks was made.

The miniaturizing monk does not care that the illuminated letter is clearly legible: the first letter of the text is decorated and almost 'suffocated' by ornamental motifs and thus also assumes a magical and symbolic value.

In the Renaissance, with the invention of printing , letters lose their symbolic meanings to become only signs. The creation of typographic characters also becomes the object of study: the mathematician Luca Pacioli, a friend of Leonardo da Vinci, develops a system for calculating the proportions of the letters that will remain a point of reference for print production throughout the 16th century.

Writing in art

In late nineteenth-century France, some poets proposed a new relationship between writing and image: Mallarmé arranged the verses on the page so that the white spaces around the written words represented the silence surrounding the poet's voice. Apollinaire creates an expressive form, called a calligram , where the letters of the words, or the words themselves, are arranged in such a way as to illustrate the meaning of each poem.

Conversely, in the paintings of the artists of the early twentieth century, belonging to the currents of futurism, cubism and Dadaism (among them Raoul Hausmann), letters cut out of newspapers and pasted on the canvas begin to appear, typographic characters that have no other function than that of creating an image, a drawing: in this way the traditional patterns that saw a clear separation between the different forms of art (painting, poetry, graphics) are broken and words, texts, images and colors coexist in the picture.

The futurist revolution: the object books

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Italian painter and poet, founded futurism in 1909 . The Futurism is a literary and artistic movement, criticizing poetry and traditional painting, he wants to express in their works the new technology introduced into society by industrial progress, as the speed in transportation and electric light.

The transgressive charge and the creative energy of the futurists also transform the page and the book. Poets wander on the printed page, placing words and letters of the alphabet in an unusual way and emphasizing even empty spaces: "typographically pictorial pages" are born, which resemble paintings without being neither drawn nor colored. In 1927 the artist Fortunato Depero created the first Libromacchina bolted with two bolts taken from the workshop and applied on the hard cardboard cover.

From 1933 the first tin books, the first non-books, the object books were born.

Paint and tell

For human history, the end of the first millennium was a period of extreme importance. After a long period of stagnation, Europe experienced new economic, political, cultural and urban developments and progress. The arts also flourished thanks to the Church, which commissioned the artists of the time important cycles of frescoes to embellish its buildings.

Frescoes as stories: Giotto in Assisi

The main building of the medieval city was the cathedral. The Romanesque one, generally massive and imposing, proposed cycles of frescoes made on walls and pillars. These surfaces were perfect for welcoming the sacred stories of the Bible or the Gospels which, by telling the story of evil, sin, good, life and death, were intended to transmit to the faithful messages aimed at teaching Catholic doctrine and admonition of sinners.

One of the most important medieval fresco cycles is found in the Basilica of San Francesco in Assisi and was executed, around 1290, by Giotto di Bondone. The painter frescoed the stories of the saint bringing a breath of fresh air: St. Francis is represented as a simple man, he has the halo but is inserted in a dimension of everyday life. All the characters of the great Giotto cycle, made up of 28 scenes in chronological order, are rendered in a realistic way and this transpires from their gestures, which reveal emotions and feelings. The architectural structures in the frescoes create a sense of depth in landscapes that have never been so naturalistic until then.

Stories of the cross

The Stories of the cross , frescoed by Piero della Francesca between 1452 and 1466 in the choir of the Church of San Francesco in Arezzo, are taken from a legend that tells the story of the wood used to make the cross on which Jesus was crucified. The frescoes they represent one of the highest moments of fifteenth-century painting. In particular, the episode of Constantine 's Dream is remembered for being the first Italian painting set at night. As also emerges from the episode of Solomon 's encounter with the Queen of ShebaPiero della Francesca was fascinated by the study of light and optical games. This study was accompanied by the rigorous use of geometry and the application of mathematical rules that served to create figures with harmonious and balanced volumes.

The Sistine Chapel

One of the greatest challenges faced by Italian painting is represented by the frescoes of the Sistine Chapel, in the Vatican Palaces, in Rome. The enterprise, started by Pope Sixtus IV in 1481, was completed by Julius II in 1512. He entrusted the task to Michelangelo Buonarroti , who dedicated four years of his life to painting 500 square meters of the vault of the chapel. The main theme, the creation of man and the omnipotence of God, was designed to instruct the faithful on the Old Testament. The large figures are powerful, portrayed from the bottom up, with bright and strong colors, and can be compared to painted sculptures.

What was the artisan shop?

Inside the medieval city a new reality arises: the artisan workshop. It is the place where young aspiring artists live and work alongside the master painter (but the sculptors also had their workshops), with the aim of learning all the secrets of the trade. When they are beginners they shred the colors and prepare the wooden boards with chalk and canvas; then, having become more experienced, they draw, paint and exhibit their works at the entrance of the shop.

How do you paint a fresco?

To make a fresco, natural colors are needed which, once mixed with water, are spread on the wall to be frescoed, previously coated with a layer of lime: the lime, drying, retains the colors. Since the end of the fifteenth century, artists have not only drawn directly on the wall but have prepared the drawing on a cardboard. The contours of the drawing are perforated and the cardboard is placed against the wall. The perforated drawing (dusting technique) is dusted with charcoal dust, which leaves traces of the outline to be frescoed on the fresh plaster.

Pictures of the city

Le città portano in sé l'immagine del tempo che è trascorso. Dalle città emergono non solo le tracce della storia, ma anche idee sul modo di abitare. Per secoli, filosofi, architetti, pensatori religiosi o laici hanno immaginato, e a volte realizzato, luoghi e città dove l'uomo potesse vivere in armonia in un ambiente adeguato alle sue esigenze.

Idee per una città ideale

For millennia, men have dreamed of places to live: from the garden of Eden of Adam and Eve, described by the Bible as a place of absolute happiness, to the heavenly Jerusalem, which the Apocalypse of Saint John describes " bright with gold and adorned of sapphires . " In the 5th century BC Greece, the city was a topic on which much discussion was taking place: from the architect Hippodamo da Mileto, who wanted a harmonious and orderly city, to the philosopher Plato , who dreamed of a city where craftsmen, warriors and sages each had the right place, to Aristophanes, who in his comedy Gli Uccelli imagined a city of refuge for the wise, suspended between heaven and earth.

The good governance of Lorenzetti: the medieval city

Ambrogio Lorenzetti, between 1337 and 1339, painted, in the Sala dei Nove of the Palazzo Pubblico of Siena, a large fresco that represents an ideal vision of the territory and of the cities where people lived in the Middle Ages. With extraordinary precision and great skill the architectures, the landscape of the countryside, the people who act in those places and animate them are represented. Everything seems to flow in perfect harmony: and in fact the fresco bears the name of Good Government . Opposite to this fresco is that of Malgoverno where life situations are staged in a city governed without justice and without order.

Renaissance: city on a human scale

The ideal city of the Renaissance reflects the way in which life was conceived: man had to be the "measure of all things" and therefore all reality had to adapt to his needs. Drawings and paintings document how architects and artists imagined cities: wide streets with bright perspectives, harmony of proportions, perpendicularity of paths and use of the different orders of architecture. There are remains of ideal cities designed by Renaissance architects and never built, and we find traces of them also in some paintings of the period. For example, in The Delivery of the Keys of 1482 by Pietro Vannucci, called Perugino, the square in which the scene is set is clearly the result of an ideal study, not inspired by truly existing cities. The funeral of San Bernardino of 1490 by Bernardino Betti, called il Pinturicchio , are set in an absolutely imaginary city space, where squares, loggias and triumphal arches reign neatly: dreams of ideal spaces in which the buildings are arranged in order of importance from the center to the periphery.

Velo ... city?

In the ideal city of the futurists, art puts itself at the service of technology and the machine. Boccioni, the greatest interpreter of the dynamism of the industrial city, paints The rising city (1910), a picture in which the modern metropolis becomes a whirlwind of lights, noises, colors and movement. Even in Simultaneous Visions and in La strada enters the house (both from 1911) the city turns into a sort of violent explosion in which the crowd, the trams, the cars, the buildings collide in a chaotic urban landscape.

Greek and Roman sculpture: stone tells

For centuries Greece has influenced the culture of ancient Rome through its myths, its literature, its philosophy. Even for the figurative arts it was like this: Roman sculpture, for example, was influenced by Greek influence. With the conquest of Greece, the Roman world acquired a sensitivity and aesthetic taste hitherto unknown.

Gods and men together

Art developed in Greece in the archaic era, between the 8th and 6th centuries BC. Examples of this style are the statues of the twins Kleobis and Biton, made in Delphi by Polymedes di Argo. Two different styles coexist in architecture: the Doric style , simple and austere, and the Ionic style , more flexible and soft. In the sculptures the figures follow geometric criteria and are characterized by scarce varieties: human forms have a very simplified body.

It is in the classical age, between the 5th and 4th century BC, that the anatomy of the figure becomes important. In this period Athens reigns without rivals: splendid and colorful buildings rise in the city. The most beautiful and imposing is the Parthenon , a temple built starting from 447 BC under the direction of the sculptor and architect Fidia, on the Acropolis ("upper city"). Dedicated to the goddess Athena, the Parthenon is the most splendid example of the classical era. The frieze, which runs for 160 meters, represents the Panathenaean Procession (the most important festival in the city) and wants to offer an ideal image of Athens: gods and men who mingle in the parades in the presence of all the heroes who made the city great, in an orderly whole that symbolizes the triumph of Athenian power about chaos.

Art and architecture on a human scale

Never as in Greek culture the arts are intertwined with philosophy: the Greeks place man at the center of all things and consider him the most important creature in the universe.

The statues of the Olympic athletes are striking for their naturalness, but with identical naturalness the statues of the gods were represented: not supernatural images full of mystery like those of the Egyptian temples, but representations of a simple and harmonious beauty.

Even in buildings, each architectural element is calculated and built on the basis of the proportions and measures of the human body: a space made on a human scale for man himself.

Stone books

Roman sculpture is less attentive to the representations of man in general and points above all to the celebration of the deeds of the emperor: it is therefore the means for a real political propaganda.

The Trajan Column , erected in Rome inside the Trajan's Forum in 113 AD, is not only the funeral monument of an emperor but also a kind of 'stone book', destined to last for centuries. In fact, from the base to the top of its about 40 meters high, a spiral bas-relief runs which describes the victories of the emperor Trajan on the Dacians, a population who lived north of the Danube. The sculptor, despite the imperial celebration, also pays attention to the dignity of the defeated and manages to grasp the most dramatic and intensely human aspects of the war.

The Column of Marcus Aurelius , which is located in Rome in Piazza Colonna, was built approximately between 182 and 190 AD It takes up the model of the Trajan's Column but proposes more schematic, simpler bas-relief figures with less realism: it tells the victorious deeds of the emperor over barbarian populations by exposing the ruthlessness and cruelty of war actions.

What is a mausoleum?

The Romans called sepulchres raised to the memory of illustrious deceased mausoleums. The word derives from the name of the governor of Caria, Mausolus, in memory of which the widow Artemisia had built a monumental tomb in the 4th century BC, considered one of the seven wonders of the world.

Among the most famous mausoleums we must mention those of Augustus and Hadrian in Rome and those of Galla Placidia and Theodoric in Ravenna.

The portrait

From the Egyptian, Greek and Roman civilizations came pictures and portraits painted, carved or engraved on the coins to celebrate the fame and perpetuate the memory of famous people. Over the centuries, new ways of representing the human figure were born and developed: there is the realistic portrait, the court portrait, the photographic portrait, the psychological portrait.

In the face a story

In the Middle Ages the portrait was reserved only for aristocratic characters: the emperor, the pope or the king are often painted in profile and the artist does not aim to create a realistic representation but rather wants to highlight some characters of the character's personality, thanks to which he is recognized as having an important role in society.

Between the 14th and the 15th century the portrait experienced a wide diffusion among the nobility of the courts and the nascent bourgeoisie of the city. In Italy, Piero della Francesca portrays Duke Federico da Montefeltro in 1465 proposing the image of a wise, cultured, sensitive to beauty Renaissance man, depicted in the style of that era, which respects the physiognomy of man and his class social.

Leonardo da Vinci , Botticelli , Raffaello and Tiziano are some of the great artists who portray man, enhancing their internal aspects, trying to catch them in the features of the face and in the depth of the gaze.

The portrait in pose and the portrait in the courts

The pictorial genre of the portrait reaches levels of maximum refinement between the 15th and 17th century in the area of ​​Flanders (Netherlands, Belgium and Northern France) where the Flemish painters operate a real revolution. The best known is Jan van Eyck, who paints three-quarter portraits (i.e. with the subject a little turned towards the viewer) of extreme precision. In Holland, Rembrandt , by adopting the same pose, expands the representation to the whole figure and gives the subjects an exceptional vitality.

The court portrait developed in the eighteenth century is different: the most representative, the work of Hyacinthe Rigaud, is that of Louis XIV, a ruler at the height of his power. Standing before his throne, the king embodies absolute power. With a sumptuous cape lined with ermine fur and a very swollen wig, the sovereign seems to dominate the world, an effect obtained by the artist by shooting the scene from below.

The photographic portrait

In 1839 the portrait changes: photography is invented and, thanks to a tripod and a mechanical device capable of capturing images, the black and white photographic portrait is born. In the beginning, the life of a portrait photographer is difficult: 50 kilos of equipment and a bad image rendering. But technological progress helps photography to improve the quality and speed of execution. A photographic portrait is infinitely reproducible, inexpensive and satisfies the vanity of being immortalized in poses that make one's social position stand out. In the 20th century, Arnolf Rainer tears, scratches and covers his photos with paintings and drawings to indicate the search for identity of men.

The portrait in contemporary art

For Vincent van Gogh , a great painter of the 19th century, portraying himself or another meant questioning the face to find the soul. The artist draws and redesigns portraits of humble people, peasants, other artists trying to highlight, rather than the physical and external appearance of the characters he portrays, their interiority, their dramas, their emotions.

During the 20th century the portrait was transformed again: the artist no longer offered realistic and similar traits. The common feature is the deformation to which the human figure is subjected so much that it becomes almost unrecognizable, as in Picasso's portraits. Furthermore, very often the portraits are made with unusual materials taken from everyday life: sheets of newspapers, pieces of wood, jute bags, straw, iron and others.

Telling impressions and ideas

Over the past two centuries we have witnessed important changes that have changed the face of the world and Europe: scientific and technological discoveries related to the development of industry, emigration from the countryside to the city, two world wars. Art, very sensitive to this alternation of historical events, testifies and suggests new ways of seeing and telling.

Impressionism: the light that changes forms

In 1872 the French artist Claude Monet painted Impression. Soleil levant, a painting that will give its name to the artistic movement called impressionism. The impressionist artist studies the thrill of reflections on the water, discovering how shapes change as the light that touches things and that seems to transform matter changes. The Impressionists renounce the outline, the chiaroscuro and many of the academic rules on which traditional painting was based. They combine colors directly on the canvas without mixing them first on the palette, with short strokes of brush that force the viewer to move away from the picture to obtain an 'optical mix' and be able to fully grasp the overall view, the subject of the picture. Color replaces forms and becomes an instrument for interpreting the environment represented: above all Parisian atmospheres,

Expressionism: emotion first of all

The expressionism movement, which originated in the countries of northern Europe in the late 19th century, influenced the rest of Europe, ranging from literature to theater and cinema. An expressionist artist, going beyond the conventions of the artistic tradition, wants to express his personal vision of the world, even if sad, painful or even cruel. For example, in the works of James Ensor and Edvard Munch , the tragedy of life and the dramatic events of the world are shown through the deformation of the features and the use of violent colors.

Surrealism: the magic of the imaginary

During the First World War, André Breton, a medical student, served in a psychiatry department where he was able to study the works of Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, from which he drew inspiration for the birth of one of the most important artistic movements of the 20th century: surrealism . Breton becomes the leader of a movement that aims at the production of artistic, poetic and literary works strongly connected to the world of dreams and that of the unconscious, that is to our most hidden thoughts. The main idea of ​​the surrealists is that art must also represent fantasy and imagination, and not only reality.

The surrealists were 'creators of images': Dalí, Miró, Magritte, but also the Italian De Chirico, with their inventiveness they widened the frontiers of art, inserting multicolored spots, figures into architectural structures and real landscapes mythological, magical, fantastic. Surrealism is an attempt to demonstrate that there is a magical universe where thought can change the state of reality.

How do you paint a picture in the surrealist way?

Let's take a glass and draw motifs with linseed or olive oil and colored water-based inks. Oil and water repel each other and form spots ... enigmatic. We superimpose a sheet of paper on the glass and gently dab with a rag, until the composition is dry.

Looking at the spots, we try to outline with a marker the subjects and landscapes that our brain 'sees' in this fantastic universe. By cutting them from the magazines, we add further images that will complete our composition where dream and reality mix.

The art of photographing

Photography tells, denounces, expresses, chronicles and stops time in an image. His birth has produced important changes in society. From early black and white attempts to color images, photography has become an art.

Artfully made images

When the first cameras came into circulation, it was amazing to understand that, with a simple click, the instant and reality could be blocked and reproduced. In the beginning, however, photography was considered a mechanical form of expression, painters had difficulty using it and photographers often retouched the photographs with the brush; but with the affirmation of the photographer P. Henry Emerson "photography must not show the truth but what the eye sees". Painters overcome initial perplexities and learn to manipulate photographic images; at the same time, photography is recognized by everyone as an expressive art.

A world in color

According to a slogan very popular in the thirties of the last century it was enough to be able to turn a key and to press a bell to be able to take pictures!

Other steps forward are made over the past century. Since 1935 photography is colored and cameras are built within the reach of the general public, who use them to stop personal memories. Professional photographers exploit the potential of color film, which in Franco Fontana's works become an opportunity to use simple shapes, few lines and few shades. Another artist, Luigi Ghirri, instead uses color to combine objects that have nothing in common in everyday life.

The photos tell the art

Sometimes the photographs told the art. It happened in Florence, around 1850, by the Alinari brothers. Leopoldo, Giuseppe and Romualdo Alinari open a small photographic studio, dedicating themselves to the reproduction of the masterpieces of art on large photographic plates. These photos, technically perfect and collected today in many catalogs, demonstrate the mastery of Alinari at the dawn of photography and constitute a historical archive of fundamental importance.

In the 20th century, photography also became a document of history and the social fabric: for example, in the 1930s, in the United States, the group gathered around the FSA ( Farm security administration ) tells the story of Roosevelt's America. In the same years, photography opens new scenarios on the interpretation of the reality that surrounds us. Mario Giacomelli in the research on the landscape investigates, using the first aerial shots, the theme of the passage of time. Some photographers experience a surrealist use of photography, where all images become a symbol of something else or are filtered by games of mirrors. Others go into even more daring solutions, experimenting with new techniques, such as that of the off camera, which provide for the artistic manipulation of the entire photographic development process.

War in a painting

Artists from all over the world and from all eras have shown the follies of wars in their works. Among them the Italian Paolo Uccello and the Spanish Pablo Picasso who, after five centuries, described in two famous paintings, equally dramatic and intense, two terrible war episodes.

The bombing of Guernica

The civil war is the most atrocious of wars. Spain has been the scene since 1936 of a terrible and bloody military conflict between the socialist forces of the Popular Front and the nationalist groups led by General Franco, allied with Nazi Germany and fascist Italy. On April 26, 1937, the German Air Force heavily bombed the small Basque town of Guernica. For four hours, bombs fell uninterruptedly, hitting the city for a radius of ten kilometers. It was Saturday, market day, many women and children were among the stalls and in the streets: there were almost 1,700 dead, thousands of injured and homeless, ruins on ruins!

A framework to narrate the unspeakable

Picasso , upset, holds the brush. For a whole month he works on a canvas about eight meters long, to narrate the martyrdom of the city of Guernica, horror, anger, fear, death; in a word, war. A woman, who screams in pain with a dead child in her arms, turns her pleading face to the bull, an image of brutality. All the other characters are turned towards him, with their heads turned, their arms raised, sinking into the ground or crawling, defeated, wounded. A dying horse, symbol of the whole people, neighs desperately. Everyone is torn in flesh, torn by a pain that has no name. At the center of the painting Picasso inserts a lamp, a glimmer of light; below, a broken flower is emerging from a broken sword. Hope is there. Picasso says:

"In Guernica I clearly express my horror at the military caste that submerged Spain in an ocean of pain and death."

A testimony

June 4, 1937 Guernicait is exhibited in the Spanish pavilion of the Universal Exposition in Paris and is immediately celebrated by the whole world. It has immense strength and power in it because it is not descriptive. It expresses, through the symbols of the bull and the horse, vital myths of Spain, the offended land, the freedom denied. Picasso builds a space for his characters, gray, black and white, where he lays bare his emotions and indignation. In the colorless painting even the space is broken and confused, there are no rules: a horror such as that of Guernica does not respect any human law. Picasso gives us in this work a testimony of barbarism, a trace that remains in the memory. The painting remains for 42 years at the Museum of Modern Art in New York; but since 1981, when a democratic government was elected in Spain,Guernica returns to Madrid.

Another story

Around the middle of the fifteenth century, Paolo Uccello painted The Battle of San Romano: the painting recounts the Florentines 'victory over the Sienese in 1432 and was commissioned by Cosimo de' Medici, the lord of Florence, the city where Paolo Uccello lives. Soldiers give way to horses; the spears cross, the militias collide. You can almost hear the gallop of the horses, the noise of the spears, the impact of the armor. The numerous knights who charge from the left of the painting seem to be one man painted in progression as he points his spear down. Paolo Uccello, who was first and foremost a Renaissance man, particularly interested in the figurative aspects, was admired by the Surrealists for his boundless imagination, but also by the Cubists, of whom some even consider him a precursor.

Cinema: seventh art

A factory of dreams and memories, cinema contains many languages. From his birth to today he has told, in black and white or in color, in silence or with his voice, the stories, fantasies, dreams of contemporary man. Cinema gives shape to the millennial desire to record movement, transforming an image reproduction technique into an art form and a spectacle.

IL umière to tell the story of life

"Come at 9 pm on December 28, 1895 to the Grand Café, Paris!" This is the invitation of the Lumière brothers to their first film screening (see cinema ). Spectators are just 35 but it is equally a triumph. The first screenings take place in shops, cafes, bazaars, during fairs and are accompanied by an organ, a piano or a gramophone.

Others had paved the way for the Lumières: Eadweard Muybridge in 1872 invented a device for photographing the gallop of a horse. In 1877 Émile Reynaud projects animated drawings in his optical theater in Paris. Thomas Edison invented the kinetoscope in 1890, a box in which an animated scene with images printed on film flows.

The seventh art is born

Louis and Auguste Lumière build a system that concentrates all the functions of the cinema: camera, development and printing laboratory, projection machine. The film dragging mechanism, the support on which the images (films) are fixed and the projection time (16 frames per second) make the projection possible on the screen: the Lumière Cinema is born.

In Italy the first screenings take place in Milan and Rome in 1896. In Hollywood studios in 1903 the first western was shot. In 1905 Filoteo Alberini made the first Italian non-documentary film, The taking of Rome . In 1911 the futurist Ricciotto Canudo coined the definition seventh art for cinema .

The first films are without sound and in black and white until the early 1920s, when direct shooting in natural colors is technically possible. In the same years the sound film was born. It's a revolution.

Charlot's silent cinema

During the period of silent cinema, comedians, short films (short or medium-length films) where actors, very good in mimicry and often reckless, were produced in funny actions with disastrous results: the most famous were Harold Lloyd, Buster Keaton , Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy (see Stanlio and Ollio ) and Charlie Chaplin . The latter soon became director and producer of the films that saw him starring. From the first short films he wears a bowler hat, wide shoes and wide trousers, holds a stick and has a small mustache. Charlot, his character, dominates the screens but rapidly evolves towards forms of comedy rich in social criticism.

In this sense, among the most famous works of Chaplin we remember Modern Times (1936), The great dictator (1940) and Monsieur Verdoux (1947), in which the actor makes a profound criticism of the unbridled production rhythms of the industries, ideology of Nazism and society aimed only at enrichment.

Neorealism

In Italy, at the end of the Second World War, neorealism was born , a cinematographic movement that introduced important innovations in the language of the seventh art: often the actors are not professionals, but come from the villages or the countryside, the stories tell the newspaper and the scenes they are shot on the streets, in homes, in the city or in the suburbs. The aim of neorealist artists is to objectively render the country's political and social reality in a time of great change. In 1945 leaves Rome Open City by Roberto Rossellini. It is the manifesto of neorealism, testimony to the tragedies of the Resistance and the anti-fascist struggle, in which the actress Anna Magnani plays the role of woman of the people and mother overwhelmed by the tragedy of the war.

Objects, design and advertising

In the 20th century, great changes took place in the world of the production of objects for furniture and decoration, until then the fruit and work of skilled craftsmen.

The use of industrial machines and mass production make any relationship between the shape of the objects and the one who produces them lose. The object is designed according to criteria that meet the needs of the mass market.

The Bauhaus: art in daily life

Bauhaus, the German word meaning "house of construction", derives from the ancient Bauhütten , medieval guilds of builders, artists and craftsmen who worked in close collaboration. Founded in Germany in 1919 by the architect Walter Gropius , the Bauhaus is a school that was born with the specific objective of responding to the desire of architects, painters and sculptors to bring together art, craftsmanship and technology in a single work.

Gropius is concerned with making products that are functional and suitable for the purpose for which they were created, without sacrificing the aesthetics of the object. Products, therefore, mass-produced by the industry but also conceived and designed by artists. In fact, the Bauhaus welcomes not only technologists, architects and designers but also painters, musicians, sculptors, graphic designers, photographers. Among them Johannes Itten, expressionist painter, central figure of the Bauhaus school, Paul Klee and Vasilij Kandinskij.

The object of art and advertising

If we tried to imagine for a moment cities, towns, bars, theaters, cinemas without advertising, we would discover that colors, lights, posters would brutally disappear. In the 1960s of the 20th century, the world of consumption and the large quantity of objects that are produced and advertised daily become a matter of interest for artists. Thus, pop art was born in America , whose main exponents are Andy Warhol , Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg. The images and symbols of the consumer society distinguish their work, which draws inspiration from advertising and mass media: TV, radio, newspapers, cinema. The images of the stars of music, dance, fashion, art and architecture become an integral part of pop works.

Advertising, a characteristic expression of modernity, from that moment also entered the world of art. For example, the Italian painter Mimmo Rotella realizes his works of art starting from the advertising posters attached to the walls: he tears them, then glues them and assembles them on the canvas, staging the most evident 'products' of consumption.

The object becomes art: the ready made

It is in 1913 that an everyday object is elevated to the rank of an art object. Marcel Duchamp, a French artist, fixes a bicycle wheel on a white stool and invents the notion of ready made , that is "already done!". Duchamp takes an object already made by others, modifies it and makes it a real work of art. In a peremptory and humorous way Duchamp establishes that the industrial object, such as the wheel of a bicycle, if exposed and viewed in a different way, acquires a new meaning and can become a work of art. With Duchamp the creative act of the traditional artist loses importance, in favor of thought and idea. Duchamp's works initially caused a scandal among the public but were very important for the subsequent development of the

Bruno Munari

Munari, with his useless machines , travel sculptures , illegible books , puts found objects (paper, wood or metal) at the center of his works and places them in surprising, playful and lively situations. The originality of his works finds a fine example in the talking Forks , which appear as an extension of the hands. Munari thinks of them "without any practical purpose, only to let the imagination play".

Plasticine puppets: an animated world

The cartoons can be obtained through drawings or computer creations, or they can be three-dimensional puppets made with wood, papier-mâché, fabric or plasticine. The soft, modeling clay puppets have reached the general public thanks to characters such as Wallace and Gromit.

Cartoons and animated film characters

The cartoons produced by Walt Disney are among the most famous and important. In many of these, such as Snow White , The Little Mermaid , The Lion King , the traditional technique was used, that is, a sequence of colored drawings which, taken in succession, give the idea of ​​movement. The same technique has also been used by other cartoon designers, such as in the Hanna and Barbera series ( Yogi , The Ancestors ) or in the Warner Bros. series ( Bugs Bunny , Daffy Duck ).

This technique is just one of many possible ways to make animated films. In fact, the characters can also be cloth and metal puppets, as in Nightmare before Christmas , or they can be made directly on the computer, as in the two feature films Toy story and Finding Nemo . Finally, they can be built in plasticine, like the funny characters of the movie Wallace & Gromit and other stories and the funny protagonists of Escaping Hens.

Plasticine in animations

One of the first artists to use the technique of plasticine characters was Jean Painlevé, who in the thirties of the last century, together with the sculptor Bertrand, directed Barbe-Bleue . From that moment on, plasticine becomes a tool in the hands of artists to create two-dimensional animations (with the technique of cut figures), where the effect is the continuous transformation of forms: objects that become people, people who return things or change one in the other; instead, animated puppets are used in three-dimensional animations. One of the major artists who uses the two-dimensional technique is the Japanese Fusako Yusaki, while the three-dimensional animation was patented in 1985 in the United States, under the name of claymation. Thanks to it, many contemporary artists have made short films of great poetry: just think of the delicate Harvie Krumpet , of 2003, of the Australian Adam Elliot, who in 23 minutes tells the whole life of a plasticine puppet.

Wallace and Gromit

The best known plasticine characters are Wallace and Gromit. Wallace is an extravagant Englishman fond of cheese and inventions and Gromit his brilliant dog who reads Dog-stoevskij or La Repubblica di Pluto and lives in a room covered with wallpaper decorated with bones, crocheting. The wrong pants , one of the short films that sees them as protagonists, won the Oscar in 1994.

After a dog, a hundred hens are successful! Hens on the Run is a film entirely shot with plasticine puppets. For its realization, 450 plasticine hens supported by an iron skeleton were necessary to facilitate its movement and to avoid wear and tear on the joints. All of them have a scarf around their neck, to hide the junction of the head which can be easily replaced for changes of expression and beak movements that simulate speech. Who would have thought that Hollywood would also be conquered by plasticine?

How are animated films made?

While for the cartoons based on the drawings the illusion of movement is given drawing after drawing by the animators, for the animation of concrete and three-dimensional objects such as puppets it is necessary to move and modify the characters, shaping them shot after shot. In the plasticine animation real miniature sets are created: environments in three dimensions in which to place characters and on which to move the camera.

Fantastic library

"Lambicchi was given / a special saxophone, / and to offer himself, / a musical concert. / The player is missing, / but Lambicchi to himself says: / I will have one of value / with my archivernice. / Roll up your cuffs / lay it out on the portrait / of that certain Paganini / who still shines in fame / " .

Professor Pier Cloruro dei Lambicchi has invented a paint, or rather an arch-paint, portentous: just pass it on any figure, a photo, a painting, an advertisement and immediately the images become alive!

Think what a convenience! Do you have a stomach ache? Just take a magazine and here are pictures of pizzas or ice cream ready to become real and be eaten. Do you feel a little lonely? Just paint the photo of a friend and here's the company.

Not only! With the archivernice you can meet famous people: you can take the history book and have a chat with Caesar or Napoleon, or go to the cinema and smear the posters with paint. Indians and cowboys, spaceships and alien princesses will soon emerge. But be careful not to choose a horror film: you would fill the city with monsters ... Even in Lambicchi it often happens to lose control of the images that made it alive. Paganini, for example, was a violinist, what can one do with a saxophone?

" " This is a very rude act! "/ shouts the great violinist ." This joke is a joke , / that a musician doesn't need! " So he plays the big concert / handling that object , / as an expert master ... / on the poor man's groppon" .

If you want to avoid inconveniences, there is another way to make the figures seem alive: it is the skill of the artist. Sakumat is a painter famous for his skill. One day he receives the visit of a messenger who invites him to the palace of Burban Ganuan, lord of the land of Nactumal, in the mountains. This time his task is particular: with his colors he has to make the gentleman's son know the world who, due to a serious illness, can never leave the house and lives locked up in his rooms, without even looking out the window. He has never seen the mountains and plains, the village houses and the blue sky, the flight of birds or the ears of corn. The boy and the painter make friends and decide to paint the walls and ceilings of three entire rooms.

"So they explored the walls of the rooms as if they were the space of the skies. They began to imagine and distribute the subjects of the painting. " Here we will make the pasture full of fragrant flowers ... "" Yes, Sakumat! Like that of the story of Mutkul the shepherd! "." Then, we will put the hut of Mutkul the shepherd. Little baby, with the flock of red goats ... Were the goats of Mutkul red, weren't they? "." Yes. And will we also wear the lame dog, Sakumat? " " .

Gradually the walls fill with magic: flowery meadows, carts and horses, besieged castles, the sea with pirate ships. The child observes the artist's work in amazement: each new painting tells a story and it is truly magical to see the white walls that gradually transform in the whole world!

If you are not rich enough to call a painter home, there is another solution: you can go to the museum. Claudia has been thinking about it for weeks but does not want to be accompanied by her parents. She wants to go secretly after running away from home. Together with Jamie, his little brother, he organizes a perfect plan and one day, instead of going to school, he hides in the Metropolitan Museum in New York. But this is not a simple trip: the two will stay there for almost a week, day and night!

The museum is a whole world to explore, it's huge, with large rooms and vast corridors, stairways and a fountain full of coins. You can have a snack among the Egyptian mummies, wander among the masterpieces of American art or sleep in a luxury bed, even from the sixteenth century!

But the biggest surprise is a statue in the Italian Renaissance section, just purchased from the museum. It is an angel who has a great mystery: it was sold at auction for a few dollars but it could be worth a fortune if, as experts say, it was the work of Michelangelo. Claudia is fascinated by the angel and its secret. He must absolutely find out the truth. He knows that only in this way will he be able to go home.

"I, Claudia Kincaid, want to be different when I come back. For example, to be a heroine. Jamie, I want to know if it's Michelangelo's or not. I can't explain why, but I feel I need to know. For sure. Or yes or no. If we make a real discovery I will be another . " But can looking at a statue really change life? Maybe art really has this power ...

Certainly life has changed at Max's house since his dad brought a new picture home. In fact it is quite particular with that country landscape, the black crows in the sky and a gallows in the center with a lot of hanged. It is said that he was a terrible murderer who had sold his soul to the devil and had been betrayed by his son (who is seen painted on the side).

Max's dad bought it little because it is said to be a cursed picture. In fact, it's a bit dismal, but how can you believe in certain superstitions? The new purchase is hung in the corridor and nobody thinks about it anymore. Yet since then Max's dreams have become more turbulent, the atmosphere in the house becomes darker and the father weakens and gets sick.

Until, one evening: "Raucous, rough sounds. Yellow eyes of black birds. An indefinable feeling of impending catastrophe. In the darkness of the room, Max fidgeted restlessly under the covers, while the birds darted low over his head . A loop dangled empty in the wind. ... A rumbling thud. The door swung open. Max's eyes widened. He was awake . "

In front of him is the shadow of a man who grabs him by the neck, growls and screams revenge! Max kicks and punches but the man is too strong! Luckily the mother heard the uproar, took the damn picture and broke it in the assassin's head. The light comes on and Max sees his father on the ground, finally free from the curse. And don't tell me that the way the house is decorated doesn't matter!

Fear, joy, melancholy: great art always causes emotions. Bailey knows it well, who has just moved to a gray and desolate suburb where he has little to rejoice, at least until he happens in front of an amazing show:

"And then he saw it! There, on the concrete wall. He lost his breath, because the wall was covered with the brightest and most dazzling colors he had ever seen. So many colors to hide the concrete. Emerald green! Ruby red! Sapphire blue They whirled and swirled together! A kaleidoscope of stars, circles, crescents, swirling and spinning comets, twirling, twirling. "SCRIBBLE!", Exclaimed Bailey .

Bailey discovers that he has seen a 'scribbling', one of the few great graffiti in the neighborhood.

At one time, in fact, the mysterious Scribbolo wandered in the nights, trying to cheer up the grayness of the neighborhood with his graffiti. But it's been a long time now, and almost nobody remembers it anymore; indeed there are those who do not even believe in its existence. Bailey, however, does not resign himself and one night decides to explore the air duct that opens in his bedroom.

At the end of the tunnel he discovers the legendary Scribbolo jacket, puts it on and immediately feels full of magic: his fingers itch, they need spray cans and a coloring surface. Scribbolo is back! Little by little the neighborhood starts to shine with new colors and also the mood of the people changes: new loves bloom, we start to party again and hundreds of children recreate the Scribbolo Fan Club.

In comparison, little Jimmy has little to cheer about. His passion is to draw comics and he certainly does not lack talent. But at home he does not have many satisfactions: mom is always busy and the sisters always interrupt him on the best of inspiration. But the real problem is the dad: " It's not that he didn't like Jimmy, it's just that he didn't have the slightest idea what he was. He wanted a son to talk to about the pitchers and hitters averages. And instead he had Jimmy. Despite everything, he tried to do his best ... And he tried to find something to say to Jimmy, like: "Do you have to leave your comics scattered all over the floor?" ... Jimmy didn't think that Dad wanted to offend him. It was just that he didn't know how to behave with a child who drew comics ".

One day Charlie, the most admired boy in the whole school, offers to create a company: he as the author of the stories, Jimmy of the drawings. The new hero is called Bullet Head and has the mission of destroying everything he encounters: walls, heads, arms. Too bad that Jimmy, of all things, does not know how to draw hands. How can you not disfigure with all those cut arms? In short, the life of the artist is really hard: first you have to go hunting for inspiration, then you have to practice continuously to improve the style and you are never sure if the result will be liked by others. Is it worth it? Maybe you should ask whoever wrote the Jimmy story: he became a great cartoonist, famous all over the world, and now his hands are very good. ( Emilio Varrà )

Bibliography

Jules Feiffer, The superhero of the ceiling , Bompiani, Milan 1997 [Ill.]

Elaine Lobl Konigsburg, Escape to the museum , Salani, Florence 1997 [Ill.]

Giovanni Manca, Lambicchi, Paganini and the saxophone , in The heroes of the 'Corriere dei piccoli' , Eurostudio Editions, Bergamo. sd

Giovanni Manca, Pier Lambicchi and l'arcivernice , Genius, Milan 1952 [Ill.]

Roberto Piumini, Lo stralisco , Einaudi Ragazzi, Trieste 1993 [Ill.]

Philip Ridley, The fabulous Scribbolo , Mondadori, Milan 1998 [Ill.]

Paul van Loon , The thrill bus , Salani, Florence 1996 [Ill.]


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NAZISM

پنجشنبه 24 بهمن 1398
16:31
masoumi5631

Nazism

For relations between the Nazi regime and cinema, please refer to Germany : The National Socialist period: 1933-1945. See also the biographies dedicated to cinema figures particularly linked to the ideology of the n., As for example. directors Veit Harlan and Leni Riefenstahl.


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NEW AMERICAN CINEMA

پنجشنبه 24 بهمن 1398
16:27
masoumi5631

New American Cinema

If historically the experience of Jonas Mekas and the directors gathered in the New American Cinema Group (NACG) is identified on the NAC label, in a much broader sense numerous other American filmmakers can boast of having contributed to a new American cinema '. On the other hand, independent , experimental art cinemaand avant-garde is certainly not a recent phenomenon in the United States; indeed, one can find admirable vestiges of it at least since 1927, in a film directed by Robert Florey and Slavko Vorkapitch, The life and death of 9413 - A Hollywood extra. But it is true that never as in the late fifties, in the midst of the great crisis of the film industry caused by competition from the fledgling television, did the voices of those who, in the United States, theorize and practice an idea of ​​cinema completely far from the typical Hollywood product.

Maya Deren, who distinguished herself with her avant-garde visual essays in the 1940s, continued her work on the organizational side in the following decade by founding the Film Artists Society (1953) and the Creative Film Foundation (1955). Those were the years in which Morris Engel, Ruth Orkin and Ray Ashley filmed The little fugitive (1953; The little fugitive), causing a sensation at the Venice Film Festival, and Kenneth Anger made Eaux d'artifice (1953) and Inauguration of the pleasure dome (1954-1956), shaking the underground cinema itself. And it was also the years in which a counterculture weekly was founded, "The Village voice" (1955), which would soon dictate law in the national artistic and intellectual milieu. The times were therefore ripe for a general theoretical elaboration and for a sort of group manifesto (even if of a real group, aware of itself as such, at the time it was still not possible to speak). In 1955 the young Lithuanian Mekas founded the magazine "Film culture", which would become the maximum point of reference for anyone who refused the Hollywood conception of cinema as an industry in favor of an artistic conception that, as Mekas himself wrote in his editorial of 4 February 1959, allowed less perfect but freer films. On the field of "Film culture" was born in 1960, bringing together thirty young filmmakers, the NACG, an aegis that was to welcome the new, avant-garde and experimental forces expressed by the young American cinema. conscious of himself as such, at the time he could not yet speak). In 1955 the young Lithuanian Mekas founded the magazine "Film culture", which would become the maximum point of reference for anyone who refused the Hollywood conception of cinema as an industry in favor of an artistic conception that, as Mekas himself wrote in his editorial of 4 February 1959, allowed less perfect but freer films. On the field of "Film culture" was born in 1960, bringing together thirty young filmmakers, the NACG, an aegis that was to welcome the new, avant-garde and experimental forces expressed by the young American cinema. conscious of himself as such, at the time he could not yet speak). In 1955 the young Lithuanian Mekas founded the magazine "Film culture", which would become the maximum point of reference for anyone who refused the Hollywood conception of cinema as an industry in favor of an artistic conception that, as Mekas himself wrote in his editorial of 4 February 1959, allowed less perfect but freer films. On the field of "Film culture" was born in 1960, bringing together thirty young filmmakers, the NACG, an aegis that was to welcome the new, avant-garde and experimental forces expressed by the young American cinema. which would become the maximum point of reference for anyone who refused the Hollywood conception of cinema as an industry in favor of an artistic conception that, as Mekas himself wrote in his editorial of February 4, 1959, allowed less perfect but freer films. On the field of "Film culture" was born in 1960, bringing together thirty young filmmakers, the NACG, an aegis that was to welcome the new, avant-garde and experimental forces expressed by the young American cinema. which would become the maximum point of reference for anyone who refused the Hollywood conception of cinema as an industry in favor of an artistic conception that, as Mekas himself wrote in his editorial of February 4, 1959, allowed less perfect but freer films. On the field of "Film culture" was born in 1960, bringing together thirty young filmmakers, the NACG, an aegis that was to welcome the new, avant-garde and experimental forces expressed by the young American cinema.

It is difficult to say to what extent the work of "Film culture" encouraged and favored alternative film products of that period. Of course, the two phenomena arose from the same innovative humus, from the strong leafy air that had been breathing for some time against the tyranny of the Hollywood model. Furthermore, it should not be forgotten that the formation of the NACG also denounced a parochial nuance, as a New York response to the Californian domination. Moreover, the counter-cultural drive that animated Mekas and the entire production of the NACG went far beyond the narrow cinematographic sphere. In the same years he had distinguished himself, for example, a literary movement - which would soon be called Beat generation - which had as its primary objective the renewal of North American poetry and fiction in a direction of greater adherence to the needs of revolt that concerned not only the expressive forms but the sex, individual morality and politics. It was inevitable that the two areas would end up meeting, and indeed for a time they worked in concert, obtaining the greatest (or at least the best known) result in film with Pull my daisy (1959) directed by Robert Frank and Albert Leslie, based on a screenplay by Jack Kerouac and with Allen Ginsberg on stage.

The activity of J. Mekas, flanked by his brother Adolfas, also included the cinematographic direction: Jonas signed Guns of the trees (1961; The rifles of the trees) and Adolfas Hallelujah the hills (1963; The magnificent idiots). But in some ways even more important was the activity of distributor: in 1962 in fact his group founded the Film-Makers Cooperative, soon strong of 4000 titles, which included all the experimental films in 16 mm, and which followed in 1964 the opening of a film library in New York. In the same years works like Jack Smith's Flaming creatures (1963), Twice a man (1964) by Gregory J. Markopoulos, Scorpio rising (1963) by Anger were made, very different films, which for this reason testify not only to the different personalities of their authors, but also and above all how little precise and rigorous the NACG theory was. In reality Mekas had no film model to offer. It is no coincidence that, while admiring Jean-Luc Godard, he carefully avoided theorising a North American version of the contemporary French Nouvelle vague, which was also attempting in turn to renew national cinema on theoretical bases not dissimilar, in their generality, from those of the NACG ; and indeed, sometimes he had harsh words towards him ("It is not so new, and it is not so different from the rest of French commercial cinema, or any cinema. If they are so conventional at twenty, imagine what they will be at forty ! "; Movie journal. The rise of a New American Cinema 1959-1971, 1972). On the other hand, not infrequently Mekas found himself praising not only Orson Welles,

In short, the NACG was certain of what it did not want, but had not drawn up a clear alternative proposal. If an imperative had at the basis of its idea of ​​cinema, this was above all of an economic nature: the production of low and very low budget films was not only a way to allow anyone to approach film creation, but it was also the guarantee of a potential for experimentation that high Hollywood costs excluded a priori, since they had to guarantee a large turnout in the first place. Moreover, the low cost almost necessarily implied that the creator of the film covered various operational functions, not only the direction but also the script and sometimes even the production. In this way the NACG gave concrete form to an ideal of author that Hollywood had excluded,

It is impossible to reduce or bring the NACG back to a single theoretical-practical matrix: the various personalities who fought there produced and directed works with very different characteristics, so that a study of the phenomenon can only refer to the personality, culture, the same idea of cinema cultivated by individuals. Harry Smith and his colorful geometries have nothing to do with Peter Gessner, completely alien to any formal interest and tied to a documentary concept of cinema. It should be noted that the two most interesting filmmakers traditionally connected by critics with the NACG, John Cassavetes and Shirley Clarke, were not actually among the main proponents. Cassavetes' second version of Shadows (1960; Shadows) attracted some criticism from Mekas, who however understood its importance, even if it did not give Cassavetes the honor of unreserved recognition; while only after her first major film on the world of heroin addicts, The connection (1962), Clarke actively joined Mekas - whose group she was part of since 1960 - in supporting independent filmmakers, continuing in her directorial work with works such as The cool world (1963), on Harlem's youthful black gangs, and the long monologue Portrait of Jason (1967), which Ingmar Bergman called the most fascinating film he had ever seen, but also directing a commissioned documentary by JF Kennedy on the poet Robert Frost (Robert Frost: a lover's quarrel with the world, 1963), who won an Oscar in Hollywood.Not even a geographical location would be sufficient to analyze the NACG experience: if New York, in fact, it was its epicenter, San Francisco worthily played the role of branch. A city that has always been identified in bohemia, extravagance, freedom of thought and costume and also in excess, San Francisco was the home of Canyon Cinema, associated with the Mekas cooperative, in which some talents of the counterculture of the west coast gathered. But even here it is impossible to trace any homogeneity: Bruce Baillie's participatory attention to the life of the outcasts or his ability to heroize some icons of contemporary civilization (the motorcycle), but also moments and environments neglected by the consumer civilization (the manual activity of pupils), they do not find immediate points of contact with Robert Nelson's archival research and with his desecration of American chronicle rhetoric. Moreover, from San Francisco came Anger, whose extraordinary decadent fantasy, combined with a mystical sense of group rituals, found no comparison even within the experimental practice of other filmmakers (perhaps in a certain way Gregory J. Markopoulos). somehow the group's great adventure ended between 1966 and 1967, respectively the date of the cessation of the regular publication of "Film culture", and that of the enormous success of Andy Warhol's The Chelsea girls. The latter was known in the world of countercultural cinema at least since 1963, the year of Sleep and Eat, followed by Empire (1964) and My hustler (1965), all films that aroused - especially the first three - indignant reactions from the sophisticated audience of the Film-Makers' Cinematheque, completely unprepared to face hours and hours of projection in which a sleeping man or the Empire State Building is shown. The Chelsea girls was instead a triumph. Not much happened in this work either, but Warhol instilled in it a sense of movement provided more than by the gestures of the characters by the split screen technique, that is, the screen cut into two or smaller squares, each with a different image ( or equal). The Chelsea girls was certainly the film that came closest to the paintings that had made him famous and therefore could attract an audience now familiar with the methods and icons typical of his style. The success of the film had a somewhat epochal value, in the sense that, at least ideally, it brought the cinematographic avant-garde that orbited around the NACG in a decidedly less underground area, and therefore inserted the counterculture of the Mekas group in the various forms of the current and to some extent official culture. On the other hand, it was evident that something was now changing also in the group: there were those who abandoned the cinematographic practice deciding to move to other artistic fields, who, like Mekas and Stan Brakhage, thinned out the directing activity, and even who , like Anger, published a mortuary announcement in "The Village voice" alluding to his end as a film man. avant-garde film that orbited around the NACG in a decidedly less underground area, and therefore inserted the counterculture of the Mekas group in the various forms of current culture and to some extent official. On the other hand, it was evident that something was now changing also in the group: there were those who abandoned the cinematographic practice deciding to move to other artistic fields, who, like Mekas and Stan Brakhage, thinned out the directing activity, and even who , like Anger, published a mortuary announcement in "The Village voice" alluding to his end as a movie man. avant-garde film that orbited around the NACG in a decidedly less underground area, and therefore inserted the counterculture of the Mekas group in the various forms of current culture and to some extent official. On the other hand, it was evident that something was now changing also in the group: there were those who abandoned the cinematographic practice deciding to move to other artistic fields, who, like Mekas and Stan Brakhage, thinned out the directing activity, and even who , like Anger, published a mortuary announcement in "The Village voice" alluding to his end as a movie man.

As often happens, the experience of the NACG found heirs who radicalized it in a theoretical-practical sublimation, perhaps rigorous, but certainly less appealing. Just in that fateful 1966, which marked the sunset of the historical development of the group, another group, the Fluxus, proposed a renewal program through the voice of its leader, George Maciunas, who shortly thereafter would make the theories his own and the formulations of P. Adam Sitney on the 'structural film' (appeared precisely on a number of "Film culture" of 1969): a type of film, that is, whose shape is predetermined and simplified in order to immediately present itself to the spectator from the first impression. In reality, it was an extremely minimalist cinema, often played on small variations allowed by the alternation of dark and light. However, it is true that around the Fluxus revolved artists of considerable importance such as George Landow, Paul Sharits, Hollis Frampton, the same Michael Snow and even Yoko Ono.On a national scale other experiences, perhaps of different types, whose intent was however, to oppose the industrial and commercial concept of cinema imposed by Hollywood: not so much the semi-independent productions that since the 1920s have dotted Poverty Row, a central area of ​​Hollywood in which various companies flourished (some of which, such as Columbia Pictures Corporation, destined to rise in rank), and not even the experiments of African American cinema conducted by Oscar Micheaux in the 1940s, and all in all not even the small independent companies that somehow saved Hollywood during the great post-television crisis of the 1950s, such as the well-known American International Pictures; but rather some single and isolated figures who especially in the sixties developed a film in some ways amateurish, but full of omens and suggestions in relation to the developments of future Hollywood. Think of Herk Harvey, an improvised Kansas filmmaker, and his Carnival of souls (1962), a horrifying story made of nothing yet not ineffective precisely thanks to what it lacked in the rhetorical apparatus to which Hollywood - even the Hollywood of independents like Roger Corman - had accustomed the public of the time. Think of Herschell Gordon Lewis, the inventor of the gore (in which they dominate blood, lacerations, amputations and physical horrors of all kinds), whose Blood trilogy - Blood feast (1963), Two thousand maniacs! (1964) and Color me blood red (1965) - soon assumed mythical dimensions, later opening the way to the so-called slasher, or a type of cinema founded on a direct and insistent vision of the injured body and blood. Think of the king of sexploitation (cinema that exploits the sexual argument), Russ Meyer, a filmmaker who is anything but unwary and inventor of the roughie (film that combines sex and violence), whose Lorna (1964) opened new dimensions to soft core, and which often strengthened their works through a playful comic-satirical component. But above all, think of Frederick Wiseman, a former law professor, former producer of a film directed by Clarke, who in 1967 chose to shoot a documentary in the Cinéma verité style in the Bridgewater criminal asylum, Titicut follies, a work that was immediately banned at home because of its extreme crudeness in portraying the nudity of the condemned and in resuming the atrocious violence (murder including) perpetrated by the guards against them. Destined to undergo a long series of trials (mostly for infringements of the privacy law, since no other charges could be found) until 1972, she obtained only in 1991 the pass of the Supreme Court of Massachusetts.The sixties therefore they were particularly prolific and full of independent filmmakers and productions, including personalities who over time would have had a space within the Hollywood system, which, moreover, in that decade would have undergone important changes. Directors such as Samuel Fuller (who was already very active in the 1950s) or Monte Hellman or George A. Romero would have given - obviously together with many others - new directions to the capital of cinema.Others still cannot be inscribed in any group or historicized in any way. Not so much because they operate individually outside the system and even geographically far from it, as in the case of the aforementioned Harvey and Lewis, as because in their films we read well on the one hand a criticism of the Hollywood lesson and on the other a parody (perhaps involuntary) of avant-garde cinema. The probably clearest example is that of the brothers George and Mike Kuchar of San Francisco. In the celebrated Sins of the fleshapoids (1965) by M. Kuchar, for example, can be identified as a model that would have become classic in science fiction cinema starting from Ridley Scott's Blade runner (1982) (but which to a certain extent can also be found in Westworld, 1973, The world of robots, by Michael Crichton), that is, the humanity of the androids and the decaying corruption (or simply the stupidity) of humans. Naturally the productive, scenographic, technical and structural figure of the film is far from the Hollywood examples cited, given that the conception of the film is of an exemplary amateur brand; but the unusual taste for incongruous combinations makes it a sort of precious cinematic kitsch to which it is not possible to find antecedents. we can identify a model that would have become classic in science fiction cinema starting from Ridley Scott's Blade runner (1982) (but which to a certain extent can also be found in Westworld, 1973, The world of robots, by Michael Crichton), say the humanity of the androids and the decaying corruption (or simply the stupidity) of humans. Naturally the productive, scenographic, technical and structural figure of the film is far from the Hollywood examples cited, given that the conception of the film is of an exemplary amateur brand; but the unusual taste for incongruous combinations makes it a sort of precious cinematic kitsch to which it is not possible to find antecedents. we can identify a model that would have become classic in science fiction cinema starting from Ridley Scott's Blade runner (1982) (but which to a certain extent can also be found in Westworld, 1973, The world of robots, by Michael Crichton), say the humanity of the androids and the decaying corruption (or simply the stupidity) of humans. Naturally the productive, scenographic, technical and structural figure of the film is far from the Hollywood examples cited, given that the conception of the film is of an exemplary amateur brand; but the unusual taste for incongruous combinations makes it a sort of precious cinematic kitsch to which it is not possible to find antecedents. humanity of androids and decaying corruption (or simply stupidity) of humans. Naturally the productive, scenographic, technical and structural figure of the film is far from the Hollywood examples cited, given that the conception of the film is of an exemplary amateur brand; but the unusual taste for incongruous combinations makes it a sort of precious cinematic kitsch to which it is not possible to find antecedents. humanity of androids and decaying corruption (or simply stupidity) of humans. Naturally, the production, scenographic, technical and structural figure of the film is far from the Hollywood examples cited, given that the conception of the film is of an exemplary amateur brand; but the unusual taste for incongruous combinations makes it a sort of precious cinematic kitsch to which it is not possible to find antecedents.

What strange object impossible to define univocally was in reality the independent film of those years also proves its potential versatility in the most diverse directions. If in fact, for example, the Kuchar never came to have relations with regular Hollywood production, equally young authors operating in the same period, as, for example, Brian De Palma, although making his debut with films certainly not belonging to the mainstream , then ended up working in the area of ​​regular production, bringing, however, to varying degrees the breath of their extra moenia experience, so that it is not difficult to see in one of his first films, Greetings (1968; Hello America), his personal obsessions about pornography, the politics and nature of the film show that would later return to his more regular production films. Moreover, it is not at all risky to say that the relaunch of theNew Hollywood and more generally of American cinema after the crisis of the Fifties and Sixties is mainly due to the work of young authors who started making films with independently produced films: from Martin Scorsese to Peter Bogdanovich, the list would be very long.

Sometimes, especially in the following decade, there were works that would have well figured in an ideal selection proposed by "Film culture": for example. Wanda (1971) by Barbara Loden, wife of director Elia Kazan, while giving space to the models of narrative cinema exuded an interiority, a thoughtfulness, a penchant for abjection and failure which is not difficult to find in the films praised by Mekas and partners ten years earlier. Furthermore, the independent cinema of the seventies brought to light a thematic component that had been perceived only superficially in the NACG (and which obviously had always been banned from Hollywood cinema): homosexuality. By the dawn of the homosexual liberation movement, Hollywood herself had fired The boys in the band (1970; Party for the birthday of dear friend Harold), one of William Friedkin's early films; but it was obviously in the field of independent cinema that the most sincere works on the subject were produced, from Some of my best friends are ... (1971) by Mervyn Nelson to A very natural thing (1974) by Christopher Larkin, paving the way for small masterpieces that, like John Sayles' Lianna (1983), would come, always in an independent area, in the following decade.

The independent cinema that followed the NACG experience developed in many directions and with an impressive number of filmmakers, so it is impossible to give detailed account of it: from the cartoons of Ralph Bakshi to the comedies of John Korty (who will then move on to work for television); the extraordinary documentary activity of the brothers Albert and David Maysles and Richard Leacock - collaborators, among other things of Donn A. Pennebaker on the set of his Monterey pop (1969), which paved the way for a real genre, the concert movie , in vogue in the seventies - to directors who, like Romero, Wes Craven and Tobe Hooper, would have baptized what together with the science fiction film would soon have been the major turning point in American cinema of the last quarter of a century, the revival and 'horror movie . Moreover, the official Underground would have continued its way, sometimes with memorable works such as Jim McBride's David Holzman's diary (1968) or even some titles by Warhol and his pupil Paul Morrissey.

È necessario citare infine un nome che non permette addentellati di alcun tipo: quello di John Waters, un giovane di Baltimora che portò a picchi mai raggiunti una sua personale estetica del cattivo gusto con film come Multiple maniacs (1971), Pink flamingos (1973), Female trouble (1975), parte dei quali interpretati da un'icona come il travestito Divine. Waters, un vero esploratore del limite, lesse nel cinema la possibilità di dare ordine (disordinato, naturalmente) all'abiezione attraverso una commedia grottesca che non esclude alcun colpo di scena nella direzione dell'insopportabilità e del disgusto. Se il cinema hollywoodiano è pensato e realizzato esattamente come opposto a quello di Waters, è logico che fra i due poli si situino le esperienze del cinema underground e di quello più largamente indipendente. E dunque, il cinema di Waters è quel che il cinema indipendente sarebbe stato senza un'idea di arte che, per quanto lontanissima dalle pratiche hollywoodiane, andava comunque nella direzione di parametri e valori non così antiborghesi come la stessa avanguardia aveva creduto. John Waters, insomma, prima di essere la cattiva coscienza del perbenismo hollywoodiano, è anche e soprattutto quella della presunzione e dell'orgoglio delle avanguardie, indipendenti come lui.BIBLIOGRAPHY

R. Tomasino, New American Cinema 1960-1969. Ten years of underground US cinema , Naples 1970.

A. Leonardi, Eye my god. New American Cinema , Milan 1971.

P. Adam Sitney, Visionary film: The American avant-garde , New York 1974.

DA James, Allegories of cinema: American film in the Sixties , Princeton 1989.

G. Merritt, Celluloid mavericks. A history of American independent film , New York 2000.


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CINEMA THEORIES

پنجشنبه 24 بهمن 1398
16:24
masoumi5631

Since its first appearance, between March and December 1895, the cinema asked for numerous interventions. There were presentations of the new invention, predictions about its possible future, chronicles, opinions. Del c. therefore we began to speak immediately: we will continue to talk about it throughout its existence. The speeches that accompanied its development serve to establish hierarchies of values, to establish comparisons with other phenomena, to understand what is produced and consumed. On the other hand, the contents of theoretical discourse can vary widely: however a recurring trait, even if not always clear, is the vocation of theory to take charge of c. in its generality, as a device for the production and consumption of films, or as a specific language, or as a peculiar form d, as a medium among the mediaor finally as a set of films, made and to be done. Instead, the function of theory has two fundamental objectives. On the one hand the ability to fix a definitive knowledge about the c., That is a set of knowledge that find their expression in a more or less coherent and convincing design; on the other, that of making this knowledge a common heritage, that is, something shared by a more or less large group of scholars, who find in a given 'image of cinema' a precise model of interpretation of a given phenomenon. The history of the theories of the c., On the other hand, does not present a linear and progressive path: to give a picture it is necessary to follow paths that stop and re-emerge, blurred borders, overlapping areas, in order to offer an orientation, but also a possibility of reading.

The submerged theories

Already during the first fifteen years of life of the c., There were numerous interventions concerning him. There was no lack of reflections that sought to investigate the phenomenon, mostly mixed with news, announcements, still and animated photography manuals, advertising posters, catalogs of films available, etc. In this sense we can speak of submerged theories: with the sole exception of B. Matuszewski ( 1856-1944, operator and author of pioneering texts on c.), the theory did not yet have its own recognizable and autonomous space. Examining the interventions, it clearly emerges that the greatest effort was aimed at trying to understand the meaning of c., The reasons for its success, and the possible uses towards which it could be oriented. In this sense, Matuszewski's position is emblematic, and in 1898, three years after the birth of the cinema, he wrote two brochures in which he asked himself about the nature of the new form of expression, considering the extraordinary films "historical sources" to which the same dignity as traditional documents had to be recognized, and identifying the great technical possibilities of cinema. . The interest in its abilities and functions and the hypotheses on its development are also found in other interventions. To such ideas we must add the important theme of modernity, of which c. was identified by many as the clearest emblem. This theme was dealt with in various interventions and later acquired a notable importance, in particular in the pages of the novel by L. Pirandello Si gira ... , published in installments in 1915 and then published in1925 in a new edition with the title Quaderni di Serafino Gubbio operator . In this regard, the position taken by M. Gor´kij in an article from 1896 is significant: albeit with a strong negative connotation, the new medium is not placed on the same level as traditional arts but on that of all the mechanisms typical of the modern age which have profoundly altered man's perceptive habits.

It therefore seems clear that in the submerged theories of the early years the will to familiarize yourself with the new invention and the need to analyze the individual and social experience to which it gave rise were fundamentally at stake.

The exploration of the field

The 1907 was a breakthrough year for the c theory. (Grignaffini 1989 ). A group of interventions suggests that the new medium then began to have stable citizenship in 'cultured' speeches. There is in fact a reference to c. in L'évolution créatrice by H. Bergson, released in 1907 , while E. De Amicis published, again in that year, a story entitled Cerebral cinema , built as a free montage of images. A writing by the director G. Méliès ( 1861-1938 ), Les vues cinématographiques , also from 1907, traces a portrait of the filmmaking profession, proposes a first typology of cinematographic products and sketches the features of a fantastic poetics. The philosophy of the cinema , an article by G. Papini published on May 18 of that year in the newspaper La Stampa , highlights some possible lines of reflection and contains an appeal to intellectuals to deal seriously with the new invention. Through these and other interventions, c. began to gain its cultural legitimacy. The merit of having opened the way to a complete and thick reflection is generally attributed to R. Canudo ( 1877-1923), who began to take an early interest in C., with a series of reflections that set the lines of the debate: the comparison between C. and the other arts, the idea of ​​a synthesis of the different expressive areas, the modern character of the new medium and the need to transcend the simple reproduction of reality. These themes return, both together and individually, in many contributions from the 1920s and 1920s. The modernity of the c., For example, was a trait strongly emphasized by the artistic avant-gardes, first of all the Italian Futurism. On the theme of the relationship between the arts of great interest was the contribution offered by SA Luciani ( 1884-1950) who developed a series of comparisons between the new medium and traditional areas of expression, first of all the theater, and underlined the distance of c. from any form of realistic representation of reality.

To all this must be added the enhancement of the figure of the director as a source of poetic intentionality, and an interest in the concrete procedures used by the film and for the concrete forms of film language. Also the poet and writer V. Lindsay ( 1879-1931 ), whose The art of the moving picture ( 1915) had a large influence on the debate around c. held in those years in the United States, he wanted to start from the comparison between c. and the other arts. Lindsay, however, does not just draw comparisons and types: especially in the second part of his work, he goes in search of the peculiar features of the new medium (which he identifies in an ability to transform the rhythm of time and the extension of traditional space ), to identify its contribution to the aesthetic field. Other contributions also go in this direction. Suffice it to mention that of the psychologist H. Münsterberg ( 1863-1916 ), The photoplay. A psychological study ( 1916). Just as fundamental were the positions of some of the protagonists of the artistic avant-garde of the 1920s, including F. Léger ( 1881-1955 ) or L. Moholy-Nagy ( 1895-1946 ). These interventions highlight how at the end of the 1920s there was a progressive recognition of the field by the emerging theories of C.: starting from an especially aesthetic interest, an attempt was made to focus on the expressive potential, the cultural reflections and the specific contributions of the new medium. Thus the eight volumes entitled L'art cinématographique , published in Paris between 1926 and 1931, include analyzes of various authors who invest the social or psychological implications of c., its relationships with other forms of expression, and offer an effective image of the breadth of the paths that characterized the debate.

The great theorists

Just starting in the 1920s and then in the following decades, however, there were numerous attempts to develop a more organic approach to the topic. In many cases they were made by directors who, starting from their experience, tried to develop a systematic reflection on the new medium, also because they are engaged either in an activity to promote their films or in a teaching activity. Not infrequently the arrival point is a 'formula' ("the visible man", "the primacy of editing" etc.): what matters, however, is that this formula was born from an attention paid to what characterizes more deeply the c. and makes it a significant presence. The theoretical elaboration was concentrated in some geographical poles: France, where it assumed a great cultural weight. experience of 'pure cinema'; the Soviet Union, where filmmakers and scholars posed the political and cultural problem of contributing to the revolution; Italy, where the dominant aesthetic, the Crocian one, posed itself as a challenge to the recognition of the artistic value of the c .; Great Britain, a country in which, close to some governmental bodies, an important documentary production developed.

France . In France, alongside and after Canudo, an important presence was that of the director and theorist L. Delluc ( 1890-1924 ). In his best known contribution, Photogénie ( 1920 ), Delluc tackles a knot of great importance by designating with the term photogenicthe ability of photography and then of c. to bring out the absolute naturalness of the world through technical and expressive means, that is, tools that act without imposing themselves on attention. The photogenic debate continued intensely throughout the 1920s. Although the term gradually acquired new meanings, Delluc's intuition, that of an absolute naturalness which is reached through an intensive use of the technique, was still taken up, for example, already by the director G. Dulac ( 1882-1942 ) , whose observations should be placed within the framework of 'pure cinema', that is, of an experience that pursues the autonomy of c. from any other narrative form in favor of a purely visual dimension. Claiming naturalness beyond technique, one of the recurring themes in

Soviet Union

At the same time, in the Soviet Union, the film debate revolved around the central problem of editing, behind which, however, wider reflections emerged. In fact, the desire to discover the laws of cinematographic language was pressing, but the desire to use the film as an instrument of intervention was just as strong, like political action and social mobilization. Among the most significant personalities who participated, in the first place there was Dz. Vertov ( 1896-1954). For Vertov, editing represented the main road through which to proceed with an "organization of the visible world". Thanks to the assembly, the c. re-reads and rewrites reality. In this way a real "cine-eye" is established, an "armed eye of a camera", which can at least visually appropriate reality. Also SM Ejzenštejn ( 1898-1948) wondered about the political-ideological functionality of c. through a long theoretical work that continued uninterruptedly from the 1920s until his death, to support his work as a filmmaker and to compose a framework of reflection that appears to be one of the highest points of twentieth-century aesthetics. Ejzenštejn wondered what the real possibility was of formulating an ideological message, or better yet how c. could act as an instrument of knowledge of reality and as a moment of participation by the spectator. In this perspective, it is not enough to replace a 'bourgeois' gaze with a 'revolutionary' gaze, as Vertov hoped. For Ejzenštejn form is not a simple 'ornament' of expression, on the contrary it constitutes the 'logic' underlying a work. At the center of his theoretical concerns from the early 1920s until the late 1930s there was thus the fundamental concept of montage which he first conceived as a tool for giving birth to a complex emotional orientation (montage of attractions), or an abstract general idea ( intellectual montage): in both cases, he brought it back to the principles of dialectical materialism, and therefore understood it as a specific procedure (applied to language) of a general mechanism (which informs reality and human activity). This concept experienced an evolution in the subsequent ideas of supratonal and vertical assembly. At this stage Ejzenštejn wanted to insist on the editing's ability to reunite the different elements of the work into a complex unit, traveled by multiple lines of strength and equipped with multiple points of connection; at the same time, the editing also made it possible to pass from the simple reproduction of things to an ideal synthesis (of an emotional-conceptual type) which returns, rather than the outlines of things, their overall sense. After the celebration but also the emptying of the assembly concept, the second stage of Ejzenštejn's reflection took place under the aegis of the combination of organicity-pathos. The basic idea is that the equilibrium point of a work coincides with its breaking point: the more it appears structured, coordinated, compact, the more it hides vanishing points. From this point of view, the perfect composition is the one in which everything is held, and yet instead of closing in on itself, it brings representation towards new horizons. Hence the enhancement of the principle of ecstasy; introduced in its most literal sense, as "leaving oneself and leaving the usual state", ecstasy signals, both on the level of expressive registers and on the level of fruition, a continuous movement of representation towards new horizons, up to the margins of the unrepresentable.

To the Vertov-Ejzenštejn line of reflection, the theoretical approach which was headed by VI Pudovkin ( 1893 - 1953 ), and before him by LV Kulešov ( 1899 - 1970 ) was flanked, and somehow contrasted.). Editing in this approach became a mere linguistic procedure, and therefore a way of organizing the film's discourse. This did not prevent its assumption as the aesthetic basis of c. in the context of which, however, he held an eminently compositional function, as a means of layout of the story. Finally, the attention shown by Russian formalism towards c. Was rich in ideas of considerable interest and fundamental solicitations. as a new and complex form of artistic expression and communication, with the concrete establishment of a network of relationships between the representatives of the formal school and the most important directors of the first period of c. Soviet. Just as undeniable is an affinity on the level of theoretical and poetic elaboration between the writings of VB1984 ) and Ju.N. Tynjanov ( 1894 - 1943 ) and Ejzenštejn's reflections. Reasons such as the essential semantic function of editing, the anti-naturalism of the c., The denounced and unmasked procedure, the estrangement as a means of highlighting the perception of the object are found in the elaborations of Ššklovskij, Tynjanov and in those of BM Ejchenbaum ( 1886 - 1959 ), while decidedly close to Vertov's cine-truth is the position of OM Brik ( 1888 - 1945 ), who in claiming the objectivity of the facts rejects at the same time his artistic reworking.

The Soviet debate found a turning point in the second half of the 1930s (and also its moment of exhaustion) with the appearance of socialist realism. A set of practical indications rather than a real theory, socialist realism considered c., And more generally art, as a reflection of reality and as an ideological-political promotion tool without its own autonomy. Hence a different conception of the cinematographic language: the fundamental component became his ability to build typical characters, rather than editing with his ability to deconstruct reality.

Balázs and Benjamin

Of great value was the reflection conducted by the Hungarian B. Balázs ( 1884-1949 ) on the social function of cinema. Balázs, who worked closely with the Soviets, clarified their function as a fundamental means of processing and making known information, which in turn affects the way of thinking and acting of those who acquire them. At the same time he wanted to underline how c. it brings back into play that visual culture, founded on the expressive power of the human body, which conceptual culture risks atrophying. Attention to c. understood as a medium, it characterized the approach of other theorists, in particular that of W. Benjamin ( 1892-1940 ) who with Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit (1936 ; trad. en. 1966 ) offered a lucid diagnosis of the destinies of art in a society dominated by mass communication. The c. it is the phenomenon that best demonstrates the effects related to the fall of the "aura" (the fruition of the work loses all sacred dimension and therefore becomes a pure act of consumption), and the one that best highlights the possibilities that follow (the generalized availability of the means capable of establishing a real "communicative democracy").

Italy

In a panorama such as the Italian one of the thirties, deeply influenced by the thought of B. Croce, a more traditional aesthetic concern was dominant, linked to the recognition of the film as a possible work of art. The historian and critic CL Ragghianti ( 1910-1987 ), perhaps the most interesting thinker of the period between the wars, was also the backdrop for anti-naturalism and anti-technicalism , who strongly emphasized the nature of figurative art in cinema. The contribution of R. Arnheim (b. 1904 ), a German scholar who moved to Italy and is active here between 1933 and 1938, must be read against this cultural background.. In his texts he observes how the film image is separated from reality by a series of "differentiating factors": it lacks the depth of field, the ability to continuously follow an action, the possibility of mobilizing the sense of smell or touch , color etc. And the c. it offers itself as art precisely in so far as it is an imperfect reproduction of the world: creativity can manifest itself thanks to the difference with reality. The radicality of this assumption pleased the Crociani (even though Arnheim was not a Crociano); however, faced with the incessant search by c. of a greater reproductive efficacy and of the scholar's resistance to new technologies, such as color and sound, the weak aspect of his approach appeared.

Great Britain

Also at the center of the debate on c. that took place in those same years in Great Britain was its social function. In particular, J. Grierson ( 1898-1972 ), promoter of a documentary school (see documentary), as well as being a documentary maker himself, was deeply convinced that c. should be an instrument of knowledge and information. In this position we find some key ideas on which the comparison was focused in those years and which will be central even in the years to come. In particular, the need to deal with the realistic basis of c., To accept or overcome it, and the will to explore the social function of the new medium. But a very specific theme, of great relevance and linked to a great technical revolution had meanwhile passionate theorists between the 1920s and the 1930s: that of c. sound.

Theories of sound

The sound cracked many assumptions on which the discussion was based, and c. he was forced to start thinking about himself again. There were numerous interventions aimed at defining rules of conduct and rules of use on an aesthetic level; but also at the technological level there was a very rich and contrasted debate, promoted in particular by the representatives of the industry. A first and recurring position was that based on indifference: c. it continued to be treated as visual art, in which sound took on a decorative role. Specular to it, a conception of sound developed as a parallel and concurrent element to the image. An example of this position is the so-called Asynchronous Manifesto , signed in 1928 by Ejzenštejn, GV1903-1983 ) and Pudovkin which gave rise to the hope of a counterpoint use of the sound with respect to the image, at the origin of numerous theories of asynchronicity. The last significant position is that which saw in the sound an element, so to speak 'natural'. It is in this context that the reflection of M. Pagnol ( 1895 - 1974), director and actor for whom c. sonorous was to function as a 'mirror' of real world wealth. All these positions were slow to settle in an overall assessment, with the only exception being Balázs' reflection. The theorization of the latter was based on two assumptions: the filmic sound, coming from a fixed emission source, is independent of the image; however the viewer is driven to research the origin of the sounds and therefore to motivate their presence on the basis of the image. Hence the idea that c. is a "ventriloquist" art: the sound does not belong to the image and at the same time it is made to belong to it. The consequence is to highlight the presence of manipulative strategies both in the most realistic and in the most anti-naturalistic films.

Ontological theories

The resumption of the debate, starting from 1945 , presented some novelties. In the first place with the post-war period it was taken for granted that c. it constituted a privileged form of expression for understanding the cultural processes underway, and therefore an obligatory observation point. Secondly, there was an accentuation of the specialist characteristics of theoretical reflection. While between the two wars the protagonists of the debate (directors, writers, critics etc.) were involved in the practical realization of the cinematographic works, starting from 1945the theoretical reflection acquired its own independent status with respect to the contingency of concrete action and was enriched by broader contributions to new cultural areas and the appearance of particular lexicons. In fact, at c. categories of researchers specialized in particular disciplines (e.g. psychologists, sociologists, beauticians, etc.) began to be systematically interested in the impact of the medium on the processes underway. At the same time, the institutions in which theory was made (e.g. specialist journals, or, from the 1960s onwards, the university) changed. There was also a greater internationalization of the debate: a division based on the places and groups in which the theory was born and developed was replaced by a distinction by virtue of the themes and ways in which it was elaborated.

In the post-war period it is possible to identify three great 'theoretical paradigms' around which fundamental elaborations gathered: ontological theories; semiotics and methodological theories; the new trends identifiable in the so-called field theories. As far as what can be called ontological theories are concerned, the expression refers to A. Bazin ( 1918-1958 ), and in particular to the title of his perhaps most famous essay, Ontologie de immagage photographique ( 1945 ), and to the subtitle of the first volume of his work Qu'est-ce que le cinéma? ( 1958-1962; trad. It. Par. 1973 ), or Ontologie et langage: both indicate the desire to focus on the intrinsic characteristics of C., its 'deep nature'. The ontological theories aim in fact to define the essence of the c., Identified now in its realistic dimension (Bazin, S. Kracauer, and before that the Italian theorists of Neorealism); now in his ability to deal with the imaginary (E. Morin); now in its nature of language (G. Della Volpe, J. Mitry): to frame the phenomenon in its peculiarities and in its field of action.

The realistic hypothesis

Among the most relevant positions stands out precisely that of Bazin who underlines how c. is able to add the reproduction of time to photographic objectivity: in fact, in the cinematographic medium, the existing is no longer present only in its appearances and through an automatic process, but also in its becoming. Hence a very close link between c. and reality: the former literally overlaps the latter; it becomes, rather than a copy, a "fingerprint". In the same way it enters into communion with reality to reveal its profound truth. To confirm this idea Bazin deals with the cinematographic phenomenon in all its extension: analyzes famous works and marginal films, recognized authors and directors of documentaries or short films, procedures in use (such as, for example, the sequence plan or the depth of field), lesser known periods in the history of cinema. In particular, Italian Neorealism was at the center of the debate that involved Bazin and numerous other scholars and allowed to develop critical positions of great interest in which from the analysis of the works we moved on to a broader cultural, aesthetic, but also political reflection. Among the various positions, fundamental was that of C. Zavattini (1902-1989 ). Writer and director, he on the one hand claimed in c. a great tool of knowledge, capable of grasping things in their daily lives. On the other hand, he wanted to highlight how war and resistance had taught us to appreciate the richness of reality and the value of current affairs and how filmmakers should also treasure this lesson. Zavattini modulated his proposals summarized in the so-called poetics of stalking, dreaming that life would appear directly on the screen, thanks to the choice of 'true' stories, interpreted by their own protagonists, perhaps filmed as they unfold. The idea defended by G. Aristarco ( 1918-1996) was in some way opposite to that expressed by Zavattini: true realism, claimed the critic and scholar of c., does not arise from a surrender by c. towards life, but by an ability of the former to understand and rewrite the latter. We must therefore go beyond the simple mirroring of reality: by treasuring the great literary tradition, it must be rediscovered that the truth of things is not separated from the stylistic and expressive commitment. Between the two poles represented by Zavattini and Aristarco there is a wide range of critical and theoretical positions of great interest which animated and substantiated the debate. Among the most significant are those of L. Chiarini ( 1900-1975 ) and U. Barbaro ( 1902-1959). The first contested the reduction of the film to a 'cinematic show', recognizing however the need for the director to creatively rework the data that reality offers him. The second recognized in assembly a fundamental principle of aesthetic construction.

Cinema as a device of the imaginary

This approach to c. he found ample and convincing testimony in Morin's Le cinéma ou l'homme imaginaire ( 1956 ) ( b.1921), in which the scholar, sociologist of international importance, wanted to put himself in relationship with the research and conclusions of theorists like Bazin, and intervene in the debate. Morin also starts from an analysis of photography, however seeing instead of a device to grasp the real directly without the mediation of man, a means that involves the observer until he becomes an essential pawn in the game. Photography overlaps on a world superimposes a desire and a fantasy, over an objectivity overlaps a subjectivity. In Cinématographe dei Lumière subjectivity is even more superimposed on the objectivity of the reproduced data. The consequence is that the film can offer its 'discourse' on reality, reorganizing its components and highlighting new aspects. But it's a 'speech' which continues to ask (and obtain) the spectator's participation and it is at this point, Morin underlines, that the 'cinema' finally becomes 'cinema': what is created is a real place of symbiosis, that is, a system that it tends to integrate the viewer into the flow of the film and at the same time the flow of the film into the psychic flow of the viewer. The conclusion is that c. it is the place par excellence of the imaginary. This study, although among the most important of the 1950s, remained rather isolated and the notable ideas it contained were developed only later in contexts of cultural debates marked by a different type of approach. Just think of the reflections on the psychological device at the basis of cinematographic fruition, with the works of Ch. Metz ( cinema 'finally becomes' cinema': what is created is a real place of symbiosis, that is, a system that tends to integrate the viewer into the flow of the film and at the same time the flow of the film into the psychic flow of the viewer. The conclusion is that c. it is the place par excellence of the imaginary. This study, although among the most important of the 1950s, remained rather isolated and the notable ideas it contained were developed only later in contexts of cultural debates marked by a different type of approach. Just think of the reflections on the psychological device at the basis of cinematographic fruition, with the works of Ch. Metz ( cinema 'finally becomes' cinema': what is created is a real place of symbiosis, that is, a system that tends to integrate the viewer into the flow of the film and at the same time the flow of the film into the psychic flow of the viewer. The conclusion is that c. it is the place par excellence of the imaginary. This study, although among the most important of the 1950s, remained rather isolated and the notable ideas it contained were developed only later in contexts of cultural debates marked by a different type of approach. Just think of the reflections on the psychological device at the basis of cinematographic fruition, with the works of Ch. Metz ( that is, a system that tends to integrate the viewer into the flow of the film and at the same time the flow of the film into the psychic flow of the viewer. The conclusion is that c. it is the place par excellence of the imaginary. This study, although among the most important of the 1950s, remained rather isolated and the notable ideas it contained were developed only later in contexts of cultural debates marked by a different type of approach. Just think of the reflections on the psychological device at the basis of cinematographic fruition, with the works of Ch. Metz ( that is, a system that tends to integrate the viewer into the flow of the film and at the same time the flow of the film into the psychic flow of the viewer. The conclusion is that c. it is the place par excellence of the imaginary. This study, although among the most important of the 1950s, remained rather isolated and the notable ideas it contained were developed only later in contexts of cultural debates marked by a different type of approach. Just think of the reflections on the psychological device at the basis of cinema use, with the works of Ch. Metz ( it remained rather isolated and the notable ideas it contained were developed only later in contexts of cultural debates marked by a different type of approach. Just think of the reflections on the psychological device at the basis of cinematographic fruition, with the works of Ch. Metz ( it remained rather isolated and the notable ideas it contained were developed only later in contexts of cultural debates marked by a different type of approach. Just think of the reflections on the psychological device at the basis of cinematographic fruition, with the works of Ch. Metz (1931 to 1993 ), J.-L. Baudry (n. 1930 ), R. Bellour (n. 1939 ).

Cinema as a language

This orientation has given rise to numerous lines of investigation: the comparison between verbal language and audiovisual language; the study of film grammar; analysis of films based on literary works etc. Its development occurred in a period, the mid-sixties, in which a new approach was given to the problem thanks to the semiology that in language was able to identify not the main character of the c., But one of its numerous aspects to be clarified in a renewed optics. Previously Della Volpe ( 1895 - 1968) had aimed to demonstrate the rational foundation of c. and, consequently, he had investigated the very nature of cinematographic language. By highlighting the dialectic existing between the form (ie the structure capable of expressing meanings) and the forms "ie empirical or 'full' ideas and concepts" which allow the "effective communicativeness of the image" and refer to the content, Della Volpe had also enhanced the importance of the techniques of the c., as well as elaborated the notion of plausible film, understood as internal consistency of the speech carried out by the director.

A summa of the research capable of summarizing and reabsorbing in itself the complexity of the whole debate is represented by the monumental work of Mitry ( 1907-1988 ), Esthétique et psychologie du cinéma. Les structures ( 1963 ). Mitry also starts from a polemic against the realist conceptions of c., But to achieve a different goal from that of Morin. If it is true at first sight that the film 'shows' and does not 'mean', it is also true that a more in-depth analysis makes it possible to understand that the film image is fully sign. In fact, the film image does not only show. It means, both because it takes on new values ​​through its combination with other images ( symbol), both because it triggers a process of generalization and abstraction starting from its very presence on the screen ( analogon). In fact, one can look at the image both in relation to what is represented and as a representation of something. The world on the screen may be similar to what surrounds us, but it is still a world in itself. At the same time, the presence of a represented person, or the presence of a show, make c., In detaching himself from reality, continue to maintain a link with the latter. Hence the possibility for the film image to be an entity in itself and at the same time to make a reference to what it ideally started from. The heart of Mitry's position lies in the affirmation of the film's intrinsic 'linguisticity' on the basis of the image's ability to both mean starting from showing, and becoming representation from the represented. But the central node of his work remains the one highlighted here: the idea that the image is a sign and representation, and therefore that c. it is language. This belief will also animate the semiotics of c., But in very different ways than those which constitute the substance of the discourse carried out by Mitry.

Semiology and methodological theories

The fundamental problem of semiology was not to define the nature or the essence of the c., But it materialized in the search for adequate tools to analyze it. This already emerges from the analysis of the inaugural text of the semiology of c., The famous Cinéma: langue ou langage? Metz, which appeared in 1964 in the fourth issue of the French magazine Communications. The title of the essay refers to a controversy on which the semiology of the period insisted: can we study 'flexible' systems of signs, languages, or should we limit ourselves to 'rigid' systems, languages? It is only semiology that makes this distinction; and places it to understand what its object should be. For Metz, the first thing that matters is the research framework, with its questions and its investigation tools: the consequence is the abandonment of any investigation that claims to investigate a phenomenon in its intrinsic characteristics, in favor of a research that studies the phenomenon 'from the point of view of' a given discipline. It is therefore the true discriminating method. In this sense Metz ceases to think that c., If it is a field of signs, is in itself: it is only in so far as it is taken for such. At the study of c. as an intrinsically linguistic reality, a study of the linguistic aspects of the c. is replaced, or better still, a linguistic study of cinema.

The paradigm shift favored the application of other forms of investigation (sociology, psychology, psychoanalysis, etc.) to cinema. The first period of development of the semiology studies of c. it can be placed between the mid-sixties and early seventies, and was characterized by various attempts to answer Metz's question: c. does it have a 'language' analogous to natural languages ​​and therefore can it be the object of semiology? The answers were varied and numerous were the Italian scholars who intervened in the debate, also on the spur of two international conferences dedicated to the language of the film which were held in the context of the International Exhibition of the new cinema in Pesaro, respectively in 1966 and 1967. U. Eco identified in film language a greater complexity of planes but also the presence of "codes" which are found in verbal language; E. Garroni ( 1923-2005 ) wanted to emphasize that it is not the "language" but the "codability" of languages ​​that is at the center of semiology, and therefore c. it is the object of semiology insofar as it also proves "codifiable"; PP Pasolini ( 1922-1975 ) elaborated an apparently paradoxical but very interesting answer, namely that c. it has its own language, and this coincides with the 'language' of the natural world. The release in 1971 of Langage et cinémaMetz represented in many respects the culmination and at the same time the overcoming of this period. The work in fact tries to define under what conditions c. it can become the object of semiology. In particular, it suggests that different realities must be taken into account: the text (i.e. something concrete and singular: this given film), the message (something concrete but not singular: for example, a play of lights in a film, which it is part of that text but it is not exclusive of it), the code (something built by the analyst and not singular: for example, the 'grammar' of lighting), and the singular system (something constructed and precisely singular: the organization of a text, the building of the film that is focused on in the analysis).

Metz elaborates a map of the codes that characterize more or less exclusively the c. and, at the same time, it shows how these codes combine in a peculiar way in each film. In this regard, he insists that in a film, rather than living together, codes fit together and collide. The typical structuralist structure of the first period opens up to a more moved vision: not only does the underlying architecture count, but also the dynamics that formed it and that continue to shake it. Here come the concepts that will guide the 'second semiology', which was characterized by a new orientation. First of all, the double road of Metz became one: he stopped studying the language of cinema, to study above all the film. Then the attention to the thrusts and counter-thrusts that move the different elements; rather than on structures, interest began to focus on processes. The 'second semiology' can in fact be defined as textual and dynamic capable of ranging from the 'production processes' of a film to its 'communication processes', and therefore from the play of codes to the interaction between recipient and recipient. Among the most interesting topics: research on c. of modernity (carried out by A. Gardies, D. Chateau and F. Jost); on the point of view (J. Aumont, again Jost, E. Branigan); on the act of narrating (S. Chatman, A. Gaudreault); on anomalous configurations such as off-screen, the look in the car, the superimposition etc. (M. Vernet). Towards the end of the seventies, attention was fixed on two fields of research: on the one hand on the processes of cinematographic enunciation, that is, on the way in which a filmic text is constituted as such and exhibits its status through self-references; on the other, on the processes that connect a text to its context, that is, on the way in which a film binds and together is indebted to the social, cultural and institutional sphere in which it appears. Theory of enunciation and pragmatic approach were therefore the two horizons (often linked together) towards which the second semiotic has moved. During the seventies, however, this discipline had crossed psychoanalysis and criticism of ideology, giving rise to a different study trend. that is, on the way in which a filmic text is constituted as such and exhibits its status through self-references; on the other, on the processes that connect a text to its context, that is, on the way in which a film binds and together is indebted to the social, cultural and institutional sphere in which it appears. Theory of enunciation and pragmatic approach were therefore the two horizons (often linked together) towards which the second semiotic has moved. During the seventies, however, this discipline had crossed psychoanalysis and criticism of ideology, giving rise to a different study trend. that is, on the way in which a filmic text is constituted as such and exhibits its status through self-references; on the other, on the processes that connect a text to its context, that is, on the way in which a film binds and together is indebted to the social, cultural and institutional sphere in which it appears. Theory of enunciation and pragmatic approach were therefore the two horizons (often linked together) towards which the second semiotic has moved. During the seventies, however, this discipline had crossed psychoanalysis and criticism of ideology, giving rise to a different study trend. social, cultural, institutional, within which it appears. Theory of enunciation and pragmatic approach were therefore the two horizons (often linked together) towards which the second semiotic has moved. During the seventies, however, this discipline had crossed psychoanalysis and criticism of ideology, giving rise to a different study trend. social, cultural, institutional, within which it appears. Theory of enunciation and pragmatic approach were therefore the two horizons (often linked together) towards which the second semiotic has moved. During the seventies, however, this discipline had crossed psychoanalysis and criticism of ideology, giving rise to a different study trend.

New trends in cinema theory

The meeting of semiology, psychoanalysis and criticism of ideology, during the seventies, had a double effect: the methodical approach gave way to a multidisciplinary approach, and the desire for analysis to a desire for interpretation. What could be called field theories developed. This meeting took place around a specific area of ​​interest: we wanted to understand how the machine of c. (the beam of light from the projector, the dark room, etc.) determines a peculiar viewing experience, but also how the gaze (of the camera, of the director) forces the viewer to take on a specific perspective. The first aspect was at the center of a broad reflection that had the cinematographic device as its theme. Baudry and then Metz again dedicated various interventions to this topic, linked to a wide use of especially Lacanian psychoanalysis. The second aspect is linked to the theme of the gaze. Camera look at the world, first of all. Beyond the contents filmed, the action of the camera is always ideological: it offers a falsely neutral and natural vision; homogenizes reality; strengthens the viewer's sense of self. Magazines likeCinéthique , Cahiers du cinéma and Screenin the early seventies they intertwined a dense debate around this thematic issue. But the look is also what the characters exchange with each other and which the spectator is called to share. These looks on the screen and beyond the screen form a dense network that establishes the paths of knowledge, desire and power. The theme was developed in depth by the Feminist Film Theory which, between the seventies and the eighties, played an important role in relaunching and renewing certain elements of the debate on c., Engaging the problematic nature of a perspective enriched by the reflection activity of the feminist movement, from diffusion in the context of c. independent of the presence of directors, from1941 ), P. Cook ( b.1943 ), C. Johnston ( 1940-1987). The perspective within which these studies must be placed is that of Cultural Studies, oriented to identify and study the most interesting subcultures within societies or the manifestations of cultures far from traditional ones. Feminist Film Theory has made its contribution to this type of study by combining gender identity within the various possibilities of articulating the concept of identity (racial, national, etc.). According to these settings, the spectator is therefore seen not only as a linguistic subject, 'created by' and 'inscribed' in the filmic text, but also as a social subject, shaped by the interaction with other individuals and by the activity of the institutions; at the same time the cinematographic representation is examined not only in itself, but in relation to the set of social representations, in its circulation within a culture, and with regard to the effects it produces. Parallel to Cultural Studies, other approaches emerged in the late 1980s, during the 1990s and then in the early21st century. In the first place there was a return of aesthetic interest in the c., Of which a significant sign were the two volumes of G. Deleuze ( 1925-1995 ), The image-mouvement ( 1983 ) and The image- temps ( 1985), but also the in-depth works of Aumont. An interest has also developed for the cognitive processes activated by c., That is, for the ways in which images and sounds are perceived, or a story is followed, or the diegetic world depicted on the screen is reconstructed. In the background, finally, there was the great flourishing of historical and philological studies on the c., In particular the works dedicated to the period of origins, based on the recovery of materials and on the reconsideration of sources. What is undoubted is the consideration that at the beginning of 21° sec. the debate is still very lively, full of surprises and, above all, of promises. And it appears to extend in different directions, fragmenting and chasing its object, which increasingly intertwines the results with aesthetics and communication intended in all the complexity of its different forms of expression.BIBLIOGRAPHY

G. Aristarco , History of the theory of the film , Turin 1951 , 1960 new ed. revised and expanded.

D. Andrew , Concepts in film theory , New York-Oxford 1976.

D. Andrew , The major film theories , New York-Oxford 1976.

G. Grignaffini , Knowledge and theories of cinema. The silent period , Bologna 1989.

F. Casetti , Theories of cinema. 1945-1990, Milan 1993.

A. Boschi , Theories of cinema. The classical period : 1915-1945, Rome 1998.

E. Garroni , film aesthetics , and F. Casetti, film theories , in Encyclopedia of cinema , Institute of Italian Encyclopedia, 2 ° vol. and 5th vol., Rome 2003 and Rome 2004 , ad voces.

Film production of the early 21st century

by Simone Emiliani

The 21st century marked the further diversification of the methods and places of use of the cinematographic product: and this both by virtue of the widening of the television exploitation of films, and because of the development of new electronic media (from home video to pay-TV, from DVD to the Internet, up to the controversial possibility of watching films on videophones). Therefore, if the room is no longer the privileged place for viewing (think of the offer of television schedules or projections during air travel), the DVD has definitively imposed itself thanks to the high quality of the image and sound and the presence of extra content, in the best editions of high documentary value. The vision of the backstageprocessing, the ability to recover the c. of the past and to see the full editions of great classics (as in the case of Viaggio in Italia , 1953 , by R. Rossellini or Le mépris , 1963 , Il contempt , by J.-L. Godard) are some of the opportunities offered from this medium. Finally, the problems related to the different forms of duplication of the works destined for the cinema or television circuit should be underlined, a phenomenon that, especially recently, has increased considerably also due to the ever faster speed of the network that allows you to download films on your computer, with clear evidence copyright infringement.

The hall is therefore no longer the only place for cinema viewing. And the same television with pay-TV has diversified the offer by offering a preview not only of the most representative films released in theaters but also contributing, in certain cases, to making known works that, although awarded at important international festivals, have had little circulation or they have not been distributed in Italy. This allowed the discovery of little known or emerging cinemas, as in the case of African production or that of countries such as Irān. But above all it was c. Asian to impose itself on Western audiences first with films from Hong Kong, Japan, China and Taiwan and then from Korea and Thailand.

Even from a technical point of view, the diffusion of digital has produced significant changes. In fact, it is now possible to modify stage spaces on the computer, both from a graphic point of view and by creating significant changes in the chromatic effects, in the contrasts between light and shadow and in the perspectives. For The Polar Express ( 2004 ; Polar Express ) R. Zemeckis was adopted a revolutionary system called performance capturethrough which the movements and all the expressions of the interpreters are captured and transformed into digital images by a series of infrared cameras. Subsequently the images are inserted into scenographies reconstructed on the computer and every nuance of the actors' acting constitutes a repertoire for virtual characters. Digital (see digital , cinema ) has therefore made it possible to lower the costs not only of the works of independent filmmakers , but also of sumptuous blockbusters such as Gladiator ( 2000 ; Il gladiatore) by R. Scott where, in mass scenes, many extras have been recreated on the computer. Among the various possible theoretical readings on the future of c., The beautiful film by A. Niccol Simone ( 2002 ) hypothesizes the possible disappearance of the human actor.

The c. the United States continued to impose itself, on a distributive level, on the world market. And this has happened both with successful blockbusters , and with films by independent authors who have reached a wide range of audiences, and thanks to the large amount of genres addressed (from fantastic to horror, from melodrama to comedy, from musical to detective, from political-civil to western), while, on the other hand, the favor reserved for authors and actors active for some time has been confirmed. C. Eastwood has managed more and more to mix the lesson of his two teachers, D. Siegel and S. Leone, creating a c. of absolute formal rigor but also deeply intimate as in the case of Mystic river ( 2003 ) and Million dollar baby( 2004 ) written by P. Haggis whose debut film Crash ( 2004 ; Crash - Physical contact ) won the Oscar for best film in 2006 . M. Scorsese continued to demonstrate his visual talent, while verging on a smug mannerism in Gangs of New York ( 2002 ) and especially in The aviator ( 2004 ). Also the choral dimension of c. by R. Altman ( 2006 Academy Award ) showed signs of fatigue in The company ( 2004 ). The work of S. Spielberg, except for the case ofCatch me if you can ( 2002 ; Try to catch me ), and The terminal ( 2004 ), has appeared increasingly gloomy, as in the science fiction films AI - Artificial intelligence ( 2001 ; AI - Artificial Intelligence ) and Minority report ( 2002 ), and spectacular like War of the worlds ( 2005 ; War of the worlds ). W. Allen's latest works have instead shown an opening towards an unprecedented visual experimentalism evident in Anything else ( 2003 ) and Match point (2005 ). M. Mann with Ali ( 2001 ) and Collateral ( 2004 ) reiterated that he is one of the best American directors, capable of combining a personal visionary style with disruptive action scenes. Scott also continued to make a c. spectacular with a strong visual impact, as in Kingdom of heaven ( 2005 ; The Crusades ). In turn, the work of D. Lynch has maintained its hypnotic power, always suspended between reality and dream, in Mulholland Dr. ( 2001 ; Mulholland drive ).

Lynch is part of that group of American filmmakers who have encountered increasing difficulties in working in their own country, while directors such as M. Cimino and FF Coppola have no longer made films after directing respectively The sunchaser ( 1996 ; Towards the sun ) and The rainmaker ( 1997 ; The Rain Man ). Even J. Cameron has not yet returned behind the camera after the success of Titanic ( 1997), but for reasons probably attributable to the need to take a break after such a commercial triumph. In the crowded group of those who encountered obstacles in completing their projects there are some great directors who established themselves in the seventies and eighties such as W. Hill ( Undisputed , 2002 ), GA Romero ( Land of the dead , 2005 , La terra of the living dead ), B. De Palma ( Femme fatale , 2002 ), J. Carpenter ( John Carpenter's ghost of Mars , 2001 , Ghosts of Mars ), J. McTiernan ( Basic , 2003 ), L. Kasdan (Dreamcatcher , 2002 , The Dreamcatcher ), K. Bigelow ( K- 19 : the widowmaker , 2002 , K- 19), J. Landis ( Susan's plan , 1998 , Imperfect Crime ), J. McNaughton ( Wild things , 1998 , Sex crimes - Dangerous games ), A. Ferrara ( Mary , 2005 ), J. Demme ( The Manchurian candidate , 2004 ), J. Milius ( Rough riders , 1997 ), P. Verhoeven ( Hollow man ,2000 , The man without a shadow ). M. Nichols returned with Closer ( 2004 ) to make a provocative comedy about sexual habits, while T. Gilliam, after a tormented production, managed to finish his The brothers Grimm ( 2005; The Grimm brothers and the enchanting witch ) .

In the context of c. In the United States, a group of authors capable of combining the needs of a c. aimed at the general public with a style defined from both a visual and narrative point of view, as evidenced by the fantastic universe of Zemeckis ( Cast away , 2001 ; The Polar Express ), the decadent and Gothic one by T. Burton ( Charlie and the chocolate factory , The Chocolate Factory , and Corpse Bride , The Corpse Bride , both from 2005 ), the colorful and dramatic dramatic one by S. Lee (25 th hour , 2002 , La 25 aNow; Inside man , 2006 ), the minimalist and melancholic one aimed at a personal review of the genres of J. Jarmusch ( Broken flowers , 2005 ), the cinephile of J. and E. Coen ( The ladykillers , 2004 ), the nostalgic one of W. Wang ( Maid in Manhattan , 2002 , A 5- star love ), that of action by J. Woo ( Paycheck , 2003 ), that inspired by the forms of c. Hollywood classic by R. Howard ( Cinderella man , 2005). Furthermore, with increasing frequency, US production has revived the biopic . In addition to The Aviator by Scorsese, Alexander ( 2004 ) by O. Stone and Ray ( 2004 ) by T. Hackford. Q. Tarantino deserves a separate discussion with the Kill Bill saga divided into two episodes ( Kill Bill: Vol. 1, 2003 , Kill Bill: volume 1, and Kill Bill: Vol. 2, 2004 , Kill Bill: volume 2) has recovered and reinterpreted forms of c. Oriental and Italian genre of the seventies.

Note the c. of civil commitment by J. Sayles ( Sunshine State , 2002 , The Coast of the Sun ), as well as the choral comedies of JL Brooks ( Spanglish , 2004 ). Also noteworthy is the production of G. Araki ( Mysterious skin , 2004 ), R. Rodriguez ( Once upon a time in Mexico , 2003 , Once upon a time in Mexico ; Sin city , 2005 , co-directed with the cartoonist F. Miller), S. Soderbergh ( Ocean's eleven , 2001 ; Ocean's twelve , 2004). The superb ability to stage the tragedy and death of G. Van Sant with Elephant ( 2003 ) and Last days ( 2005 ), that of P. Weir to film extreme challenges ( Master and commander - The far side of the world , 2003 , Master & commander - Challenge at the edge of the sea ), the bursting talent of S. Coppola ( Lost in translation , 2003 ), the rehearsals of B. Silberling ( Moonlight mile , 2001 ; Lemony snicket , 2004 ) and P Weitz ( In good company , 2004), the adhesion to the classical genre structure of G. Fleder ( Runaway jury , 2003 , The jury ) or the narrative robustness of C. Hanson ( In her shoes , 2005 , In her shoes - If I were her ).

Numerous spectacular films such as the mediocre Hulk ( 2002 ) by A. Lee or the two Spider-Man ( 2002 , 2004 ) by S. Raimi who confirmed the latter among the best directors of his generation; or hit series such as the Harry Potter series inspired by JK Rowling's novels (the first two directed in 2001 and 2002 by Ch. Columbus, the third of 2004 by A. Cuarón, the fourth of 2005 by M. Newell); the one based on the trilogy of The lord of the rings by JRR Tolkien and directed by the New Zealand director P. Jackson ( 2001-2003 ), which in 2005he made his particular reinterpretation of a classic like King Kong ; the futuristic one on Matrix ( The matrix , 1999 ; The matrix reloaded and The matrix revolutions , both from 2003 ) by brothers A. and L. Wachowski; and finally the filming of the Star wars saga ( Star wars: episode I - The phantom menace , 1999 , Star wars: episode I - The phantom menace ; Star wars: episode II - Attack of the clones , 2002 , Star wars: episode II - Attack of the clones ;Star wars: episode III - Revenge of the Sith , 2005 , Star wars: episode III - Revenge of the Sith ) which marked the return after more than twenty years behind the camera of G. Lucas. Equally important was the new direction by T. Malick after a long silence: The new world ( 2005 ).

The success of M. Moore Bowling for Columbine ( 2002 , Bowling for Columbine ) and Fahrenheit 9 / 11 ( 2004 ), with whom he won the Golden Palm at the Cannes Film Festival, has stimulated the production of documentaries. Finally, among the actors behind the camera to underline the results achieved above all by R. Redford ( The legend of Bagger Vance , 2000 , The legend of Bagger Vance ), D. De Vito ( Duplex , 2003 , Duplex - An apartment for three ), K. Costner ( Open range , 2003, Borderland ), S. Penn ( The pledge , 2001 , The promise ), M. Gibson ( The passion of the Christ , 2004 , The passion of Christ ), G. Clooney ( Confessions of a dangerous mind , 2003 , Confessions of a dangerous mind ; Good night and good luck , 2005 ), TL Jones ( The three burials of Melquiades Estrada , 2005, The three burials ).

Compared to the United States, Europe has confirmed how much the lesson of historical movements such as Italian Neorealism, the French Nouvelle vague and English Free Cinema is still alive in the various countries.

In Italy N. Moretti has once again demonstrated his rigor and his consistency in combining Rossello's lesson in a room in La stanza del Figlio ( 2001 ). intimate with the forms of melodrama, while with Il caimano ( 2006 ) he created one of his most complex and courageous works, not only an important reflection on Italy in recent years and on the figure of S. Berlusconi, but above all a film on intimate and experimental, visionary and sentimental cinema. G. Amelio, instead, with Le keys di casa ( 2004 ), from the novel by G. Pontiggia, renewed that 'c. of the stalking 'on the characters of neorealistic derivation, while MT Giordana joined the c. of civil plant (I cento passi , 2000 ) with that of memory ( The best youth , 2003 ). In turn B. Bertolucci with The dreamers ( 2003 ) evoked the Sessantotto with sincere nostalgia, while the work of M. Bellocchio appeared even more extreme, free and pervaded by explosive dreamlike glimpses ( L'ora di Religion , 2002 ; Good morning, night , 2003 ). After the success of Pane e tulipani ( 2000 ), the evidence offered by S. Soldini with Brucio nel vento ( 2002 ) andAgate and the storm ( 2004 ). Directors such as C. Mazzacurati ( L'amore trovato , 2004 ) and F. Archibugi ( Domani , 2001 ) confronted the Italian reality, both recent and past, while others brought on the screen a c. sometimes even imperfect but authentically lived, as in the case of M. Calopresti ( Happiness costs nothing , 2002 ) and F. Comencini ( Mobbing - I like to work , 2004 ), or a group of Neapolitan filmmakers among whom A. Capuano ( Luna rossa , 2001; Mario's war ,2005 ), M. Martone ( The smell of blood , 2003 ), A. De Lillo ( The rest of nothing , 2004 ) and P. Sorrentino ( The man in more , 2001 ; The consequences of love , 2004 ). The nostalgic element has been confirmed in the films by P. Avati as a recurring trait ( The second wedding night , 2005 ). G. Salvatores, instead offered with the psychological thriller I am not afraid ( 2003 ) one of his best works while he faced the noir with Quo vadis, baby? ( 2005). In turn, M. Placido has made films aimed at rediscovering the past both at a historical-political level ( Romanzo criminale , 2005 ) and at a literary inspiration level ( A journey called love , 2002 ). And it is the memory and the comparison between different cultures that characterize the work of F. Ozpetek ( La finestra di fronte , 2003 ; Sacred heart , 2005 ). The literary origin continued to characterize the work of R. Faenza ( I giorni dell'abbandono , 2005 ), while G. Muccino ( L'ultimo bacio , 2001 ; Remember me, 2003 ) and C. Comencini ( The beast in the heart , 2005 ) brought choral events to the screen from which the evil of contemporary living shines through.

As for the comedy, R. Benigni ( Pinocchio , 2002 ; The tiger and the snow , 2005 ) has always explored new fabulous and fantastic dimensions, while C. Verdone ( Love is eternal as long as it lasts , 2004; My best enemy , 2006 ) focused on sentimental crises and the existential unease of his characters. And if L. Pieraccioni tiredly repeated the formula of previous successes (except in the case of I love you in all the languages ​​of the world , 2005 ), P. Virzì ( Caterina goes to town , 2003 ) and C. Vanzina (Horse fever - La mandrakata , 2002 ; The return of Monnezza , 2005 ) have re-proposed the model of the 'Italian comedy'. Ciprì and Maresco, on the other hand, have kept their stylistic code in The return of Cagliostro ( 2003 ) and Come inguaiammo il cinema italiano ( 2004 ), while R. Torre continued to narrate Sicily with the dramatic Angela ( 2002 ).

The c. French has shown how in the past a very rich vitality. Godard pushed to the extreme his very personal experimentalism in which c., Politics and history are combined ( Notre musique , 2004 ), C. Chabrol has again shattered bourgeois society using the structure of the detective ( Merci pour le chocolat , 2000 , Thanks for chocolate ; La demoiselle d'honneur , 2004 , The bridesmaid ), E. Rohmer merged his c. speech with a theatrical use of the stage space ( L'anglaise et le duc , 2001 , The noblewoman and the duke ;Triple agent , 2004 , Special agent ). They confirmed their rigor J. Rivette ( Va savoir , 2001 , who knows? ; Histoire de Marie et Julien , in 2003 , of Marie and Julien History ), A. Varda ( The Gleaners and I , 2000 Life is a harvest ), A. Resnais ( Pas sur la bouche , 2003 ), B. Tavernier ( Laissez-passer , 2002 ; Holy Lola , 2004 , La piccola Lola ).

The choice to follow the events of their fellow citizens in other countries has characterized the last two feature films made by A. Téchiné ( Loin , 2001 , Lontano ; Les temps qui changent , 2004 , The changing times , both set in Tangier) and Vers le Sud ( 2005 ; Towards the South , set in Haiti) by L. Cantet, already made known with two works on the world of work, Ressources humaines ( 1999 ; Human resources ) and the excellent L'emploi du temps ( 2001 ; A tempo full). In addition to A. Cavalier ( Le filmeur , 2005 ), P. Vecchiali ( À vot 'bon coeur , 2004 ), C. Miller ( La petite Lili , 2003 ), the director-documentary filmmaker R. Depardon (10 e chambre - Instants d 'audience , 2004 ), to J. Doillon ( Raja , 2003 ), P. Chéreau ( Son frère , 2003 ; Gabrielle , 2005 ), P. Leconte ( L'homme du train , 2002 , The man on the train ), yes Ph. Garrel (Les amants réguliers , 2005 ) and C. Denis ( L'intrus , 2004 ) for the powerful formal freedom in showing extreme feelings. R. Guédiguian has in turn changed register with the painful and intimate Le promeneur du Champs de Mars ( 2005 ; The walks to the Campo di Marte ). Among the results of the younger directors, c. personal and restless of O. Assayas ( Clean , 2004 ); the one focused on the blockbuster-spectacular forms of L. Besson, who after The messenger: the story of Joan of Arc ( 1999 ; Joan of Arc) worked mainly as a producer and screenwriter; the thrillers by M. Kassovitz ( Les rivières pourpres , 2000 , The rivers of purple ); the intense and disenchanted detective stories by O. Marchal (36 Quai des orfèvres , 2004 ), X. Beauvois ( Le petit lieutenant , 2005 ), and C. Kahn ( Feux rouges , 2003 , Lights in the night ).

Attention to the political and social reality of the country has continued to characterize the production of Great Britain and Ireland, as in the work of K. Loach ( Sweet sixteen , 2002 ; Ae fond kiss… , 2004 , A passionate kiss ), M. Leigh ( Vera Drake , 2004 , Vera Drake's secret ) and P. Greengrass ( Bloody Sunday , 2002 ). Also worth mentioning are the proofs of M. Winterbottom ( In this world , 2002 , Things of this world ), N. Jordan ( The good thief , 2002 ,Triple game ) and D. Boyle (28 days later… , 2002 , 28 days later ). In turn, S. Frears continued to direct films in both England and the United States, sometimes achieving high results such as High fidelity ( 2000 ; High fidelity ) and Dirty pretty things ( 2002 ; Small dirty business ), while always J. Sheridan compared with American production with In America ( 2002 ) and I. Softley with intense K-Pax ( 2001 ; K-Pax - From another world ) andThe skeleton key ( 2005 ). W. Shakespeare's works continued to inspire the films of K. Branagh ( Love's labor's lost , 2000 , Pene d'amor perdute ), while P. Greenaway ended in an increasingly hermetic visual experimentalism as in the case of the trilogy The Tulse Luper suitcases ( 2003-04 ).

In Germany, the road movie and the model of c. American classics (especially the myth of the frontier) continued to inspire W. Wenders ( Land of plenty , 2004 , The land of abundance ; Don't come knocking , 2005, Don't knock on my door - Don't come knocking ). Other more representative directors include W. Herzog ( The wild blue yonder , 2005, The unknown deep space ), and E. Reitz, who directed the third part of the Heimat saga ( Heimat 3 - Chronik einer Zeitenwende , 2004 , Heimat 3- Chronicle of an epochal turning point ) set in the period from the fall of the Berlin Wall ( 1989 ) to the present day. Among the younger directors, T. Tykwer ( Lola rennt , 1998 , Lola runs ) and the Turkish-born filmmaker F. Akin ( Gegen die Wand , 2004 , The Turkish Bride ) made themselves known. Austrian cinema has found international success with M. Haneke thanks to films such as La pianiste ( 2001 ; La pianista ) and Caché ( 2005 ; Nothing to hide ).

As for the c. Polish signs of vitality came only from the works of the great R. Polanski ( The pianist , 2002 , The pianist ; Oliver Twist , 2005 ), now stateless director, and by A. Wajda ( Pan Tadeusz , 1999 ). Some European cinemas appear inextricably linked to the fame of authors whose international value has long been recognized, as in the case of Sweden with I. Bergman, who has come back behind the camera with the television film Saraband ( 2003 ; Sarabanda ) ; of Greece with Th. Anghelopulos (Trilogy I - To livadi pu dakryzei , 2004 , The source of the river ); Bosnia with E. Kusturica ( Ž ivot je č udo , 2004 , Life is a miracle ); Finland with A. Kaurismäki ( Mies vailla menneisyyttä , 2002 , The man without a past ); of Romania with L. Pintilie ( L'après-midi d'un tortionnaire , 2001, The afternoon of a torturer ); of Belgium with the brothers L. and J.-P. Dardenne ( L'enfant , 2005 ); of Denmark with L. von Trier ( Dancer in the dark, 2000 ; Dogville , 2003 ). The name of the latter is linked to the birth, dating back to the late nineties, of the Dogme 95 movement , which within a few years has exhausted its role, more controversial than subversive, and whose end was sanctioned by a document signed in March 2005 by the directors who had created it.

The situation is different in the Iberian countries. In Spain, in addition to the vibrant melodramas of P. Almodóvar ( Todo sobre mi madre , 1999 , All about my mother ; Hable with her , 2002 , Speak with her ; La mala educación , 2004 ), the figure of A. Amenábar has gained prominence ( The others , 2001 ; Mar adentro , 2004 , Mare dentro ) and above all a genre like horror has been successful, with which directors such as J. Balaguerò have made themselves known internationally ( Los sin nombre , 1999, Nameless - Hidden entity ). In Portugal, however, in addition to the very important figures of the producer P. Branco and the great director M. de Oliveira, whose work has continued to maintain surprising energy ( Je rentre à la maison , 2001 , Return home ), it should be remembered the brilliant folly of JC Monteiro ( Vai e vem , 2003 ), who passed away in 2003 , as well as the figures of J. Botelho, T. Villaverde and P. Costa.

In Russia, finally, in addition to N. Michalkov, inactive since the time of Sibirskij cirjul´nik ( 1999 ; The Barber of Siberia ), and his brother A. Končalovskij ( Dom durakov , 2002 , La casa dei matti ), one of the most appreciated internationally is A. Sokurov, whose precious work on the image has emerged in documentaries and films of 'fiction'. His most extreme work is Russian ark ( 2002 ; Russian ark ), consisting of a single sequence-plan of 96minutes shot with digital technique inside the Hermitage Museum where the ghosts of Russian history take shape again. Among the younger directors, A. Zvjagincev ( Vozvra š č enie , 2003 , The Return , Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival) and A. German Jr ( Garpastum , 2005 ) made themselves known.

As for the other cinemas, if in Canada by D. Cronenberg ( Spider , 2002 ; A history of violence , 2005 ), A. Egoyan ( Ararat , 2002 ) and D. Arcand ( Les invasions barbares , 2003 , The barbarian invasions ) and in New Zealand important confirmations have arrived from J. Campion ( In the cut , 2003 ), elsewhere new names have imposed themselves. Among the most significant, that of the Brazilian W. Salles ( Diarios de motoceta , 2004 , The motorcycle diaries), by Argentinean L. Martel ( La ciénaga , 2001 ) and P. Trapero ( Mundo grúa , 1999 ), by Mexican AG Iñárritu ( Amores perros , 2000 ), without forgetting the important figure of R. Ruiz, Chilean director but now used to shooting in Europe.

In African countries the vitality of the works of the director Burkinabé I. Ouedraogo ( La colère des dieux , 2003 ) and of the Egyptian Y. Chahine ( Skoot hansawwar , 2001 , nc Silence ... on tourne ) is intact , while only recently it has been possible appreciate the talent of Senegalese DD Mambéty ( Le franc , 1994 ), who died prematurely in 1998 , and discover that of Mauritanian A. Sissako ( Heremakono , 2002 , Waiting for happiness ). Also noteworthy is the South African G. Hood winner of the 2006 Oscarfor best foreign film with Tsotsi ( 2005 ; His name is Tsotsi ).

In Irān, despite the political regime and the censorship difficulties, c. characterized by a powerful realism, which shines through not only in the films of well-known authors such as A. Kiarostami ( Ten , 2002 , Dieci ) and M. Makhmalbaf ( Safar-e Ghandeh ā r , 2001 , Journey to Kandahar ), even in some outcomes of the works of more discontinuous directors such as Makhmalbaf's daughter, Samira, and J. Panahi ( Dayereh , 2000 , The Circle ). The hardness that leaves no room for B. Payami's hope is striking ( Sokoote beine do fekr , 2003 ,Silence between two thoughts ) or the geometric style of A. Naderi who has been making his films in the United States for years, such as Marathon ( 2002 ).

The greatest signs of novelty, however, came from the Far East. In Japan, in addition to the films of directors already active since the sixties such as Oshima Nagisa ( Gohatto , 1999 , Tabù - Gohatto ), Suzuki Seijun ( Pisutoru opera , 2001 , Pistol opera ) and the late Imamura Shōei ( Akai hashi no shita no nurui mizu , 2001 , Lukewarm water under a red bridge ), a prominent place continues to occupy the work of Kitano Takeshi ( Zatoichi , 2003 ). Furthermore, the visionary authenticity of Tsukamoto Shinya ( Rokugatsu no hebi ,2002 , A snake of June ), and the work of Miike Takashi, who has directed over 60 films in about 15 years of activity including Ōdishon ( 1999 ; Audition ) and Izo ( 2004 ). The success of the horror genre is also great in Japan thanks above all to directors such as Nakata Hideo, whose Ringu ( 1998-99 ) have been subject to remakes in the United States ( The ring two , 2005 , directed by Nakata himself). A special place deserves the master of c. animation Miyazaki Hayao, known in Italy since the success ofMononoke-hime ( 1997 ; Princess Mononoke ), whose figurative and evocative power was confirmed by the subsequent Sen to Chihiro no kamikakushi ( 2001 ; The enchanted city ) and Hauru no ugoku shiro ( 2004 ; Howl's Moving Castle ).

On the one hand, confirmations have come from China from authors now widely appreciated internationally such as Chen Kaige ( He ni zai yi qi , 2002 , Together with you ) and Zhang Yimou, who has obtained wide acclaim, also from the public, with the Wuxiapians ( sword and cape film) Ying xiong ( 2002 ; Hero ) and Shi mian mai fu ( 2004 ; The forest of flying daggers ); on the other the directors of the so-called Sixth generation such as Zhang Yuan ( Guo nian hui jia , 1999 , Seventeen years) have definitively imposed themselves), Wang Xiaoshuai ( Shiqi sui de dan che , 2001 , Beijing's bicycles ) and especially Jia Zhangke ( Zhantai , 2000 , Platform ), whose extraordinary Shijie ( 2004 ; The world ) testifies to economic development and the rapid process of modernization which is characterizing China at the beginning of the new millennium.

The team of Hong Kong directors is getting stronger, even after J. Woo's choice to work permanently in the United States. Think of Tsui Hark ( Qi jian , 2005 , Seven swords ), Wong Kar Wai (2046, 2004 ), S. Kwan ( Changhen ge , 2005 , Everlasting regret ), J. To ( Dai si gein , 2004 , Breaking news ) and P. Chan ( Perhaps love , 2005 ), who created a varied production, capable of ranging from action films to melodrama, from comedy to adventure films.

In Taiwan, on the other hand, in addition to A. Lee, who has been dealing with the models of c. American figures (as shown by the intimate western Brokeback Mountain , 2005 , The Secrets of Brokeback Mountain , for which he obtained the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and in 2006 the Oscar for directing), the figures of Hou stand out Hsiao-hsien, with his very personal rarefied and rigorous gaze ( Qianxi manbo , 2001 , Millenium mambo ; Zui hao de shi guang , 2005 , Three times ), E. Yang ( Yi Yi , 1999 , Yi Yi - And one ... and two ...) And Tsai Ming-liang ( Ni neibian Jidian , 2001 , What Time Is It There? ; Bu san , 2003 , Goodbye, Dragon Inn ). However, the Asian country that has most imposed itself internationally was Korea through the discovery of the work of Im Kwon-taek ( Chihwaseon , 2002 , Drunk with women and painting ), active since the sixties, and success from Park Chan-wook's 'revenge trilogy' ( Boksuneun naui geot , 2002 , Mr Vendetta ; Oldboy , 2003 , Old boy ;Chinjeolhan geumjassi , 2005 , Lady Vendetta ). The best known Korean filmmaker in Italy is Kim Ki-duk, who manages to naturally alternate a violent physicality and a peaceful spirituality in films in which the landscape is fundamental. Already appreciated in international festivals for extreme works such as Seom ( 2000 ; L'isola ) and Na-bbun-nam-ja ( 2001 ; Bad guy ), he was belatedly discovered by Italian distributors who circulated his latest films in theaters, including Bin-jip ( 2004 ; Iron 3 - The empty house).


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Fantasies of cinema before cinema

پنجشنبه 24 بهمن 1398
16:00
masoumi5631

Fantasies of cinema before cinema

the panoramas and the dioramas, the New World and the zootrope) with different and distant characteristics and origins. Yet it is undeniable that it was a long and slow journey that of the birth of the wonderful machine that produces moving images, or rather, a race obstacles, winding, full of detours, overlaps, coincidences, incomprehensible delays and forward leaks by many inventors, scientists, charlatans, street vendors, magicians and bricoleurs whose name is, for the most part, forgotten and which can be traced back to at the shadow theater and Leonardo da Vinci's experiments on the camera obscura. To get to that magmatic heap of inventions, patents, fantasy shots, dreams made and magical machines with unrepeatable names (praxinoscope, chronophotographer, phenachistoscope, bioscope, kinetograph, phonoscope), which characterized the previous decades of the true invention of cinema, otherwise known as the Lumière brothers' Cinématographe and made public on that fateful evening of December 28, 1895, at the Grand Café on the Boulevard des Capucines in Paris. But not only, to contend the primacy of the Lumière, there are the Americans Thomas Alva Edison and William KL Dickson (and in fact according to the historiography of the American area they are the first inventors with the Kinetoscope of 1893), the Englishman William F. Green , the German Max Skladanowsky and the Italian Filoteo Alberini, as well as another Frenchman, Georges Demenÿ. As if to say that the idea of ​​cinema was in the air; rather, in the thoughts, desires and dreams of all men, and that only a scientific delay has postponed their technical materialization. L' invention of cinema was many things: the fulfillment of a dream, the realization of a myth, the development of a technique, the fulfillment of photography, the adaptation of communication, the expansion of the visual and sound horizon, the recording of gaze and hearing, the penetration of the invisible. It was the idea that has covered the whole history of the visual arts and all the 'imperfect' forms of reproduction prior to photography, tirelessly feeding them with ever greater realism, in an attempt to implement what only cinema will bring to perfect fulfillment through that technological evolution that, from its birth onwards, has not ceased to offer incredible realistic coefficients to the audiovisual image. First with the advent of sound, then of color, cinemascope, dolby-stereo and surround sound up to the 'virtual reality' of the digital age, in which the viewer lives, within a simulated reality, generated by the computer, a synesthetic, simultaneous and fusional interaction experience three-dimensional, which, if on the one hand insists on the hallucinatory and dreamlike side of the cinematographic fruition, on the other it realizes more and more concretely the myth of total cinema desired by André Bazin. The cinema was finally the crucial intersection point that at the end of the 19th century. has seen a series of discoveries and inventions of fundamental importance align: together with the birth of psychoanalysis and the seventh art in that end of the century, in fact - to speak only of the most important discoveries - we witness the first transmission of radio signals, the birth of radiography and electronics and the invention of the disc gramophone. Behind the illusion of reproducing reality, of playing with it at will, of transfiguring it, of erasing it and inventing another that is more suited to our dreams, there are deep psychological needs to which cinema offers an albeit fleeting and alienating satisfaction . If cinema is first of all a phenomenon of thought, it is of unconscious rather than conscious thought: for its mechanisms of 'moving image', of 'impression of reality', of 'presence-absence' of the object film, the film in fact has to do with the unconscious of each spectator, that is, with the dream, with the ghost and with the imaginary, which are activated in the cinematographic fruition more than in other expressive forms. The appearance of cinema therefore satisfies a myth, an idea, and this myth is identified with an archaic imagination and desire in man. For André Bazin this archaic desire coincides with the possibility of a total and integral representation and reproduction of reality, with the "restitution of a perfect illusion of the external world" (Bazin 1958; trad. It. 1973, pp. 13-14) , which brings to its conclusions the long psychological history of the plastic arts, offering the viewer the illusion of stopping time, of winning over death. According to Edgar Morin (1956), cinema revives primordial magical experiences such as those of the double and of metamorphosis, so the spectator can be compared to the child and the primitive man. In Das Unheimliche, in fact, Sigmund Freud describes some beliefs relating to both intellectual uncertainty as to whether or not something is living, animated or inanimate, mortal or immortal, and to the impersonator's figure, as uncanny, as to the identification of the subject with another person. so that he doubts his own ego or replaces it with that of the foreign person "(Freud 1919; trad. it. 1977, p. 95); all beliefs, Freud continues, which belong to the perceptive modalities of the child and primitive man. And it is precisely with regard to the cinematographic image that Morin, taking up the Sartrian thesis of the image as a lived presence and as a real absence, connects it to the perception of the world by primitive man and the child, who have as common traits that they are not aware of the absence of the object and that they believe in the reality of dreams as well as that of waking up. For Jean-Louis Baudry the cinematographic device is a simulation of the psychic apparatus and tends to produce a regression to a stage of infantile development, thanks to which the spectator, hallucinating a fulfillment of desire, artificially rediscovers that state of fusion and abandonment in between there and the other, between the internal and external world there is neither separation nor difference (Le dispositif: approches métapsychologiques de l'Impression de réalité, in L'effet cinéma, 1978, pp. 27-49). dark room and the mechanism of the film projection are the reassuring familiar place where you can live the most incredible adventures, unknown and exciting, according to the Freudian mechanism of the heimlich, of the comfortable, of the familiar that transforms into unheimlich, into disturbing and uncanny. If for traditional arts it is in the deviation from the norm, in the deviation of the language or the graphic sign, in the intermediate world between the 'reassuring here' and the 'I don't know where it terrifies', in short, between the heimlich and the unheimlich, that artistic creation can be identified, in cinema this gap between the 'here' and the 'I don't know where', this leap from the known to the unknown, from reality to the imaginary, is already present in its own operating mechanism. That is to say that the main feature of cinema is not so much aesthetic, it is not so much in the masterpieces of its history, as in its invention,

Il mito

It often happens that ideas that develop in the imagination "can be dispersed and annihilated by contact with the real world" (N. Hawthorne, The artist of the beautiful, in Twice told tales, 2 vols., 1842; trad. It. 1977, p. 217). The opposite was true for cinema: the idea was transformed into a reality that made the boldest fantasies of the most daring visionaries come true, to become a more than perfect 'copy' of the richness of their visions. But before cinema became reality, mythical, fantastic, imaginary or concretely real places existed, where this idea, this myth of cinema materialized and revealed, where it was 'invented' before its technical modalities were invented and materials. The first stage from which to start this journey backwards can naturally be the most known and analyzed myth with respect to the desire for cinema inherent in man, that of Plato's cave, even if the myth told by the Greek philosopher is actually a moment of synthesis - as are all the myths - of previous experiences. Baudry suggests Chinese shadows, while Morin talks about the Wayang play of shadows and the Greek mystery cult, which was originally practiced in caves and was accompanied by representations of shadows (Morin 1956, p. 53). Plato, in the story that Socrates makes to Glaucone in the VII Book of the Republic, exactly reproduces the situation of the cinematographic device, in which the cave is similar to the dark room, the prisoners are comparable to the spectators, motionless and chained to their armchairs, and the shadows that pass on the wall are of the same nature as the images that flow on the screen. If one interprets then - following Franco Fornari and Baudry (F. Fornari, The rediscovery of the soul, 1984, pp. 142-150, and Baudry 1978, pp. 27-49) - the myth of the cave as if it were a dream, the cave as a symbol of the womb, prisoners as unborn men, therefore fetuses, and chains as a symbol of the umbilical cord, it can be assumed that the platonic cave reproduces the intrauterine situation where the fetus dreams within the womb breast. And then you can find the archetype that founds and includes cinema: the desire to return to the original place, to the situation of fusion between the self and the other, to the dream state in which, as Baudry says, there is nocinema device ). This interpretation can also be found in other manifestations and at other times: in the intertwining of real practices where cinema is anticipated and the fantastic places of this prefiguration, those invented by the romance fantasy, as in some short stories and novels that precede very little the birth of cinema, e.g. Mary Shelley's dream of 1831, Walter Scott's tale of mysterious mirror of 1828, Bram Stoker's The chain of destiny of 1875 and finally two well-known novels known as 'anticipations' of cinema: Philippe-August's Eve Future- Mathias Villiers de l'Isle-Adam from 1886 and Le château des Carpathes by Jules Verne from 1892.

The dream

"Il periodo in cui è ambientata la storia che sto per narrare ‒ scrive la Shelley in The dream ‒ è quello dell'inizio del regno di Enrico IV di Francia, la cui ascesa al trono e la cui conversione portarono pace al reame, ma non poterono sanare le profonde ferite che i due partiti avversi si erano reciprocamente inflitti negli anni precedenti" (trad. it. 1978, p. 66). E infatti il tema del racconto della Shelley è il tormentoso riavvicinamento tra la bella Constance de Villeneuve e il valoroso Gaspar de Vaudemont, il quale, essendosi trovato a combattere in campo avverso a quello del padre e dei fratelli della giovane donna, era considerato da lei il diretto responsabile della loro morte in battaglia. Era quindi un inflessibile codice d'onore, "un mare di sangue" a indurre Constance a dividersi dal "giovane tanto amato, con cui aveva scambiato giuramento di eterno amore" (p. 69). Ed è per realizzare questa riunificazione impossibile che la Shelley, grazie a un visionario espediente narrativo, inventa un vero e proprio dispositivo, formalmente molto vicino a quello della caverna platonica e quindi anche a quello cinematografico. Ma seguiamo il racconto: Constance ha appena detto addio per sempre a Gaspar il quale, di fronte al suo irremovibile rifiuto, la informa della propria decisione di partire per la Terra Santa. Una volta rimasta sola Constance non regge però al dolore straziante di quell'addio e così si affaccia "improvvisamente alla sua mente […] un pensiero. Dapprima lo respinse, quale puerile e superstizioso; ma esso non la abbandonò. Chiamò subito la sua governante: "Manon", le disse, "avete mai dormito sul giaciglio di santa Caterina?"" (p. 72).

Here is Shelley's device: Constance decides to go to sleep in St. Catherine's bed where, as tradition and superstition wanted, the saint would inspire her actions through dreams, visions sent from heaven. But in order to dream of her future life and the destiny of her love, Constance must arrive in an impervious and dangerous place and lie down on a very narrow ledge overlooking a precipice "under which the Loire flows deep and rapid". "The moon had not yet risen [...] and the night threatened to be stormy" (p. 76) when, through a tiring path, Constance arrives at a small chapel. He opens an iron door and "through a narrow and winding passage [...] he reached a cave which s' it opened on the side of the hill overhanging the swirling current […] Constance had some shivers and looked at the pallet: a narrow tongue of earth and a stone covered with moss, placed right on the edge of the precipice. He took off his cloak: this was one of the conditions necessary for the spell to be fulfilled […] he stretched out on the narrow bed, which barely allowed her to lie down and from which, if she had moved in her sleep, she would have fallen into the freezing cold underlying waters. At first it seemed to her that she would not be able to sleep [...]. Eventually he fell into a dream so sweet and languid as to feel the desire to abandon himself to it [...] "(pp. 78-79). But also another character approached, with a boat, to that lonely place:" below the steep hill, above the dark current,

Well, not only does the protagonist access a dangerous and impervious place, but this place of vision is, as in myth, a cave and the spectator-dreamer - similar to Plato's prisoner, forced to immobility because of the chains - must not absolutely move, under penalty of death. In addition, compared to the myth, Shelley adds a fleeting but essential touch: Constance - voluntary prisoner in search of her love, just as the 'captivity' of the viewer is voluntary, also in search of a 'lost love' - having having removed the cloak, "one of the conditions necessary for the fulfillment of the spell" (p. 78), she remains dressed in white. In this way, not only does he act as a 'spectator' of what he dreams - transforming his body into a real device, similar to the mechanism of cinema projection in which the spectator is both author and user, transmitter and receiver - but also allows, thanks to its appearance, as white as the white screen cloth, that another spectator can 'look' in turn. the place and position in which she finds herself that allow Constance to have dreams that have the same strength as reality and that will reunite her with the beloved man whom she thought she had to give up forever. "It is evident - Baudry writes - that cinema is not a dream: it only reproduces an impression of reality [...] which is comparable to the impression of reality provoked by the dream" (1978, p. 48). thanks to its white garment, like the white screen cloth, that another spectator can 'look' in turn. It is the place and position in which it is found that allow Constance to have dreams that have the same strength as reality. and that they will reunite her with the beloved man whom she thought she should give up forever. "It is evident - Baudry writes - that cinema is not a dream: it only reproduces an impression of reality [...] which is comparable to the impression of reality provoked by the dream" (1978, p. 48). thanks to its white garment, like the white screen cloth, that another spectator can 'look' in turn. It is the place and position in which it is found that allow Constance to have dreams that have the same strength as reality. and that they will reunite her with the beloved man whom she thought she should give up forever. "It is evident - Baudry writes - that cinema is not a dream: it only reproduces an impression of reality [...] which is comparable to the impression of reality provoked by the dream" (1978, p. 48). loved man whom he thought he had to give up forever. "It is evident - Baudry writes - that cinema is not a dream: it only reproduces an impression of reality [...] which is comparable to the impression of reality provoked by the dream" (1978, p. 48). loved man whom he thought he had to give up forever. "It is evident - Baudry writes - that cinema is not a dream: it only reproduces an impression of reality [...] which is comparable to the impression of reality provoked by the dream" (1978, p. 48).

Lo specchio

The tale of mysterious mirror di Scott si svolge a cavallo tra il Seicento e il Settecento a Edimburgo. La protagonista del racconto è lady Forester che, abbandonata dal marito ‒ brillante cavaliere e 'libertino patentato' della buona società scozzese, partito per la guerra nel Continente ‒ non avendo più sue notizie, si consuma nel dolore e nell'angoscia. In quel periodo, a Edimburgo, fa la sua comparsa uno strano e 'bizzarro' individuo, Battista Damiotti, comunemente chiamato il dottore di Padova, ma in realtà un ciarlatano che faceva uso di incantesimi e di arti illecite. Correva voce "che, in cambio di un certo compenso, sicuramente non trascurabile, il dottor Battista Damiotti sapesse svelare il destino degli uomini lontani, e mostrare ai suoi clienti l'immagine dei loro amici e l'azione in cui essi erano in quel momento impegnati" (trad. it. 1985, p. 34). Quando la voce arriva all'orecchio di lady Forester ‒ la quale è pronta a tutto, "pur di tramutare l'ansia in certezza" (p. 34) anche ad accedere "a tali fonti di conoscenza proibita" (p. 35) ‒ decide di rivolgersi al ciarlatano. All'ora del tramonto lady Forester, accompagnata dalla sorella, si avvia verso la casa di Damiotti, che si trova in un vicolo angusto e oscuro. Una volta che la porta si è chiusa dietro di loro, le due sorelle si accorgono che la casa è priva "di qualsiasi accesso della luce di fuori" (p. 38). "Ditemi", chiede loro il ciarlatano, "se avete il coraggio di guardare ciò che sono pronto a mostrarvi" (p. 43) e le informa: "la visione può durare solo lo spazio di sette minuti e se doveste interromperla pronunciando una sola parola, non solo l'incantesimo sarebbe rotto, ma potrebbe derivarne pericolo per gli spettatori". Le due nobildonne gli rispondono che sono decise ad attendere "con fermezza e in silenzio la visione che egli aveva promesso di mostrare". Dopodiché "l'uomo dalle arti magiche" si allontana e va "a preparare l'occorrente per esaudire il loro desiderio" (p. 44). Dopo pochi minuti, le due sorelle, al suono di uno strumento che non conoscono, probabilmente un'armonica, vengono portate in una "grande sala parata a lutto come per un funerale. In fondo […] una specie di altare rivestito dello stesso lugubre colore […] e cinque grandi fiaccole, o torce, poste su ciascun lato dell'altare" che "si accesero una dopo l'altra, all'accostarsi" (pp. 46-47) della mano del Damiotti. "Ma ciò che maggiormente colpì le sorelle ‒ scrive Scott ‒ fu un altissimo e ampio specchio, che occupava tutto lo spazio oltre l'altare e che, illuminato dalle torce accese, rifletteva i misteriosi oggetti posati su di esso". Ed è a questo punto che inizia la visione: "Improvvisamente la superficie dello specchio assunse un aspetto nuovo e singolare. Non rispecchiava più gli oggetti posti davanti ad essa, ma, come se contenesse un suo proprio scenario, cominciò a far apparire oggetti dal suo interno, dapprima in modo disordinato, indistinto ed eterogeneo, come delle forme che tentino di organizzarsi uscendo dal caos; alla fine secondo un disegno e una simmetria distinti e definiti" (p. 48). Ciò che le due sorelle vedono è "una scena reale ‒ racconta Scott ‒ come fosse rappresentata in un quadro, solo che le figure erano mobili invece che essere statiche" (p. 51) e la scena a cui assistono è un avvenimento passato che riguarda Sir Forester: uno sposalizio interrotto, un confuso duello e poi… improvvisamente, dopo sette minuti esatti, la visione svanisce.

L'evoluzione dal racconto della Shelley a quello di Scott è palese: in Scott infatti dalla 'mitica' caverna si passa alla descrizione di una vera e propria sala cinematografica, con gli spettatori 'paganti', fermi, attenti e in silenzio ‒ pena la rottura del patto 'comunicativo' tra il fruitore e il dispositivo ‒ con lo specchio come schermo e la proiezione di un vero e proprio film, un cortometraggio di 'cappa e spada', così come se ne produrranno tanti nel cinema delle origini e soprattutto nel cinema classico.

Diversamente dal racconto della Shelley, dove vi è una riproposizione in chiave di 'ossessione gotica' dell'archetipo cinematografico, in quello di Scott gli intrecci con esperimenti, giochi ottici e luoghi spettacolari reali iniziano a essere più concreti ed evidenti. Non soltanto il dottore di Padova, Battista Damiotti, ricorda l'altro Battista, Giovan Battista Della Porta, non di Padova ma di Napoli, studioso di magia 'naturale' e supposto 'inventore' della camera oscura (che può vantare, andando a ritroso, tra gli altri 'inventori', oltre a L. da Vinci, anche G. Cardano, L.B. Alberti, il filosofo arabo Alhazen fino a risalire ad Aristotele), ma lo specchio magico di Scott ha concretamente a che fare con gli strumenti ottici e i vari tipi di lenti deformanti che si iniziano a costruire a partire dalla fine del Cinquecento. In particolare con la lente anamorfica grazie alla quale, mediante il raddrizzamento allo specchio, "le forme esatte rinascono da un caos". Così scrive infatti J. Baltrušajtis, nel suo articolo L'anamorphose à miroir, a proposito del ritratto anamorfico di Edoardo VI a Somerset House: "I visionari di tutti i tempi dovevano amare queste raffigurazioni che rivelano il fantastico. Il raddrizzamento allo specchio, dove si vedono le forme esatte rinascere da un caos, ha d'altronde anch'esso questo elemento sovrannaturale" (in "La revue des arts", 1956, 2). "Come delle forme che tentino di organizzarsi uscendo dal caos" (p. 48), sono le parole esatte con cui Scott descrive l'inizio della visione nel suo specchio magico, anticipando così non solo il cinema, ma anche il legame che sarebbe nato, a un certo punto della sua storia, tra un'innovazione tecnica e cinematografica, quella del cinemascope, e la lente anamorfica, messa a punto dal francese Henri Chrétien nel 1929.

Even in the Greek cult of the Orphic mysteries - an antecedent of the Platonic myth, as Morin recalled - the mirror has the symbolic value of a screen that reflects the world: "Looking in the mirror Dionysus, instead of himself, sees the world reflected in it. So this world , the men and things of this world do not have a reality in themselves, they are only a vision of the god "(G. Colli, The birth of philosophy, 1975, p. 34). It is as if reality could not be looked at through the indirect vision of a mirror, under penalty of death: in fact Lady Forester is allowed to survive only because the terrible reality of her husband's betrayal and abandonment is shown to her reflected by means of ' mysterious mirror 'of a magician, anticipator of the mirror-screen of cinema magicians.' Perceptual analogy between the child and the spectator, of which Morin and Baudry spoke, then finds itself reiterated also with respect to another affinity, which has to do with a 'training' scene highlighted by psychoanalysis, that of castration. Starting from the theme of horror and the threat that comes from the direct vision of reality, a correspondence can be established between the infantile reaction to the perception of the lack of penis in women and the viewer's perception of the "impression of reality ". Proven affinity by resorting, even in this case, to a myth, that of the head of Medusa.The cinema, already so prefigured in the myth of the cave, is a copy of a copy of " Thus the hero becomes a paradigmatic gesture, from an ante litteram spectator who looks at reality only in the indirect vision of the shield-screen-mirror, similar in this to the lady Forester of Scott's story. Even for the child, who will happen to look the supposed 'female castration' in the face and be impressed by it, Freud, referring to a work by S. Ferenczi, notes an analogy with "the mythological symbol of disgust, the head of Medusa" (1923; trad. It. 1977, 9th vol., P. 566). And he says again: "We know the reactions of children to the first impressions of the absence of the penis. They deny this absence and believe they still see a penis [...]". The impression of reality, the presence-absence of the cinematographic image - the spectator "does not recognize" this absence and believes "psychoanalysis ).

It is also evident, especially for some characteristics of the place of the show, the combination of Scott's story and Étienne-Gaspard Robert's 'phantasmagoria', called Robertson. At the end of the eighteenth century, during the French Revolution, Robertson, physicist and illusionist, had had great success with the public, in Paris, with his phantasmagoria representations, made with the help of a fantascope, a magic lantern equipped with wheels that he could move silently on the rail. The famous illusionist first gave his representations in an apartment - as could have been Battista Damiotti's - but later he moved to the former Capuchin convent, where, according to the testimony of Georges Sadoul, " the showroom was a chapel which was reached through mysterious corridors and ruined cloisters until it found itself in front of a door covered with hieroglyphics which gave access to a gloomy, mourned and dimly lit room with a sepulcher lamp. Then Robertson appeared and began to evoke ghosts "(1948; trad. It. 19652, p. 171). Here too, as in Scott's story room, black vestments and curtains, demonstrating the fact that if Robertson imitated the Gothic tales , in turn, these stories imitated reality. Another analogy between Scott's story and an existing place, really founding the invention of cinema, is the one with the Museum which was designed and set up by Athanasius Kircher, the inventor of magic lantern and fixed projection, around the middle of the seventeenth century. This was the first scientific museum "interested in showing and demonstrating natural phenomena and showing functioning tools: it was essentially an active museum, which showed phenomena and not just objects" (Cialdea 1986, p. 356). In Ars magna lucis et umbrae (1646), the Kircherian work so important for the prehistory of cinema - where the dark room and the magic lantern are also described -, Kircher writes: "I do not ignore that magic mirrors can also be made in the which simulacra of absent objects can be shown as if they were present, of a genre undoubtedly similar to what Agrippa claims to have used "(cited in Ianniello 1986, p. 231).

È quello che succede non solo nel racconto di Scott, ma anche in Le château des Carpathes di Verne, quando, alla fine del romanzo, appare al protagonista Franz la donna amata, la cantante Stilla, ormai morta da anni. "Per mezzo di specchi inclinati secondo un certo angolo […] ‒ spiega Verne ‒ quando una forte luce illuminava il ritratto posto davanti a uno specchio, la Stilla appariva, per riflessione, "reale" come quando era nella pienezza della vita e in tutto lo splendore della sua bellezza" (trad. it. 1982, p. 146), collegando così il suo romanzo a uno dei più celebrati motivi delle 'fantasmagorie' di Robertson: l'apparizione della donna amata. Nel resoconto di queste rappresentazioni in un giornale dell'epoca, "L'esprit des Lois" del 1798, si può leggere, per es.: "un elegantissimo giovane chiede con insistenza l'apparizione di una donna da lui teneramente amata". Ed essa, puntualmente, appariva. "Spesso anche dei giovani venivano da me a chiedermi l'ombra delle loro amanti, delle mogli quelle dei loro mariti, dei giovani uomini soprattutto quella della loro madre", scrive Robertson nelle sue memorie (1831, p. 190).

If this motif of the appearance of the beloved woman is present in many fantastic literature, it has another illustrious 'real' antecedent in the experiments of a famous person, whom Robertson remembers, always in his Mémoires, as a real master: the count by Cagliostro, in some features very similar to Scott's Damiotti. Even Cagliostro in fact used to 'show', to nobles and prelates, in the most religious silence and stillness, the shadow of the beloved woman (Robertson 1831, pp. 190-93). But if the Cagliostro shows and other events of this type represent 'real' antecedents, going back in time, to an ancient time where reality, legend and myth intertwine seamlessly, there is the shadow theater, born perhaps in China or perhaps instead in India or Java or Egypt. Here, however, it is not interesting to establish the origin of this embryonic and admirably naive representation of 'moving images', but the connections that can be established with the best known legend that founded its origin. Between the 2nd and 1st centuries BC, sources said, the Chinese emperor Wudi was struck by the loss of Wang, the woman he loved. Just at that time, from an eastern province, a certain Schao-Wong arrived at the court who, to console the emperor, promised to revive "Wang once again; and so he did, moving behind a white canvas, in the light of a lamp, a shape of cut leather. In this way the emperor was able to see the shadow of his beloved and talk to her for whole nights. The story then presents, according to the traditions, different ends. But, more than the different locks, we like to underline in the legend - writes D. Pesenti Campagnoni - the immediate reference to one of the magical functions attributed thereafter to the "luminous projections" and to open a glimpse of the new horizons that it would inevitably have open. With the appearance of Wang's shadow, the possibility had been discovered of calling the dead back to life, of creating and making ghosts and ghosts act, evoking them from the dark. In this way a different world was shown, a world where dreams were transformed into reality, where nothing was impossible and the apparently unfulfillable desire of Wudi could be fulfilled "(Pesenti Campagnoni 1995, p. 98). only to the experiments on the apparition of the beloved woman put in place by Robertson, but also to what was written on December 30, 1895, in two articles that remained famous in the aftermath of the first public screening of the Cinématographe by the Lumière brothers. In the article that appeared in "Le Radical" you can read: "You could already grasp and reproduce the word, now you also grasp and reproduce life. You can, for example, review living your loved ones, long after having them lost. " The article published in "La Poste" echoes him: "When these devices will be available to the public, when anyone can photograph their loved ones no longer in a motionless but moving form, capturing their actions, family gestures, the words on lips, then death will cease to be absolute "(quoted in GM Lo Duca, M. Bessy, Lumière l'inventeur, 1948, pp. 47-48 and in N. Burch, La lucarne deinfini. Naissance du langage cinématographique, 1991, trad. en. 1994, p. 31). While G. Demenÿ, before the invention of cinema, wrote: "How many would be happy if today they could review the traits of a missing person" (cit. In Burch 1991; trad. It. 1994, p. 35). and demiurgic to recreate life, reflection on cinema as 'overcoming death', therefore have very ancient origins and are confused with desires, illusions and fantasies that have always belonged to humanity, as evidenced by the Chinese shadows, the phantasmagoria of Cagliostro and Robertson or the fantastic stories of the nineteenth century. And it is Freud himself to support, always in Das Unheimliche: " Biology has not yet been able to decide whether death is the inevitable fate of every living thing or just a case that normally occurs, but which perhaps could be avoided. The proposition: "All men are mortal" in fact makes a fine show in the treatises of logic as a model of universal assertion, but nobody considers it such and now as in the past the idea of ​​our own mortality is foreign to our unconscious "( it. 1977, p. 103). And he continues by observing that also everything that has "relationship with death", together with animism, magic, spell, omnipotence of thoughts, involuntary repetition and castration complex, is considered "uncanny". "

Lo schermo

In Stoker's The chain of destiny, the protagonist Frank, while he is sleeping, has a vision that describes it as follows: "I looked out the window that was right in front of the foot of the bed and I saw a light outside, which gradually became brighter , until the room was almost illuminated by daylight. The window looked like a picture, placed in the frame formed by the valance that hung above the foot of the bed, and by the heavy columns wrapped in the curtains that supported it "(trad. it. 1984, p. 27). From this window, described as a real screen, Frank will see the ghost of the devil appear, a frightening vision that will be repeated a second time and of which will be terrified and immobilized spectator Diana, the girl loved by Frank. And to Frank,

In front of the spectator in trance, the lover only has to break the screen and make the demons disappear, as in the Verne novel the mirror that made the Stilla appear alive is broken, broken by the knife of the baron of Gortz, also he , like Franz de Télek, hopelessly in love with the beautiful singer: "and among a thousand glass splinters that splash around the hall, the Stilla disappears [...]" (trad. it. 1982, p. 140).

Even for Stoker's story, it is possible to trace the romance invention to the reality of the experiments that can be counted as prehistory of cinema, for example. Kircher's optical machines, who exhibited "in front of stuoles of astonished but also amused faithful, incredible shows such as when, with a cylindrical mirror, he projects in the air the image of Jesus ascending to the skies, or using a concave mirror , of a hyperbolic lens and the light of a candle, projects the image of the devil on a wall "(Ianniello 1986, p. 231). "In this way - Kircher writes in Ars magna - inscribed in the mirror the figure of the evil demon and transmitted in a dark place can easily distract from the perpetration of evils" (cited in Ianniello 1986, p. 231).

When Étienne-Jules Marey - perhaps the most important of all the various inventors of the many pre-cinematographic machines, among all "these men possessed by their imagination" as Bazin defines them - aims to study the movements that the eye does not it can see, it connects science, magic and fantasy. "The guarantee of jamais vu", which had never been seen before, writes Jérôme Prieur about Robertson's séances fantasmagoriques (1985, p. 14). In the cinema before the cinema - prefigured in all these stories - one sees then what otherwise could never have been seen and that exceeds any possible reality: the vision of one's future life for Constance, a scene from the life of her distant husband for Lady Forester , the ghost of the devil for Frank and Diana, the apparition of the beloved woman, dead for years, for Franz de Télek in Le château des Carpathes, and finally the image of a 'graceful' dancer dancing and singing, also long dead, for Lord Ewald, the protagonist, together to the scientist Edison, of the most famous and most quoted novel among those imaginatively preceding the advent of cinema, Villiers de L'Isle-Adam's Eve future. Indeed, one could observe, with regard to these two novels already so close to the first public screening of the cinema Lumière, that in both the foreshadowing and the anticipation of the birth of cinema occur, in the imagination of the two writers, for the male desire to immortalize and capture the beauty of the female body. And what can this beautiful body of a lost woman be, dead and hopelessly distant, whom you want so much, if not that of the mother? "Because I often dream of her (indeed, I dream only of her), but it is never her" writes Roland Barthes, speaking of the mother (La chambre claire, 1980, p. 68).

In the red thread that captures in an only continuity an interpretative line that starts from the shadow theater and from Plato to get to Villiers de L'Isle-Adam, the invention of cinema can always be connected to the realization of the same desire, to the compensation for the same loss, that of returning to symbiosis with the maternal body. "I believe that much of the mythological conception of the world [...] is nothing but psychology projected on the external world" observed Freud (1904; trad. It. 1970, 4 ° vol., P. 279); and there is no doubt that, from Plato's cave to the fantastic tales of the nineteenth century, it is a matter of 'mythology'.

The projection

The substantial difference between the first three stories, which belong to the Gothic genre, and Ève future and Le château des Carpathes, which are instead two fantasy-science fiction novels, is that in the last two the idea of ​​cinema really begins to become a real phenomenon with all its technological apparatus, as indeed it was in the air of the times. In Verne's novel, for example, what could be considered a prototype of a cinema hall is described: "[...] a large hall [...] hung large curtains on the windows that did not let the outside light pass through, on the floor it was hung a high wool carpet that muffled the sound of footsteps [...]. On the left a stage covered with black fabrics was illuminated by a powerful light with some device placed in front of it, but so as not to be seen "(1982, p. 137), a description that refers to a place halfway between Damiotti's apartment and Robertson's showroom while in Eve future a precious "big white screen" unfolds before the gaze of the ever more astonished lord Ewald the features "of a very pretty and very young red-haired woman" will appear "life-size" (trad. it. 1966, p. 141). And there are not only the cinema, the screen and the spectators immobile and silent, or kidnapped and in a trance, there is also the description, in these two latest novels, of a real technical apparatus that preserves and reproduces 'moving pictures'. Indeed, the modernity of Ève future and Le château des Carpathes, compared to the three previous stories, it is precisely in revealing how these phenomena that may seem magical and extraordinary to the viewer, are scientifically understandable. For example. At the end of his novel, Verne writes: "It was a simple trick of optics [...] and what looked like a real woman was only a portrait" (p. 146); while the inventor Edison, in the novel by Villiers de L'Isle-Adam, explains with great meticulousness and abundance of details all the phenomena that gradually reveal themselves to the 'mute wonder' of their friend Lord Ewald. which real practice approached the fantastic, as had happened at the beginning of the eighteenth century in the French dictionary of Richelet, where the magic lantern was defined " dangerous, lonely, secret or forbidden. Edison's house is located at the "center of a network of electrical wires and surrounded by deep solitary gardens", the castle of Verne is not only inaccessible but rejects any extraneous presence, on the 'bed of Saint Catherine' there is a risk of death, the Damiotti's apartment is a 'forbidden' place and the devil is lurking in Diana's bedroom. Furthermore, the romance and the fantastic are not so much in the 'formal model', e.g. the evocation of loved ones, the sinister and fearful staging, the appearance of moving images, as for the content of the visions, which go far beyond the references and real practices and anticipate, thanks to the fact that they tell of real 'stories', not so much and not only the birth of cinema, but the history of cinema and its films.After attending the halls of the princes (with the catottric chests, the games of glass and mirrors or the 'Plaisirs du soir' at the court of Philippe d 'Orléans) and after having filled the children's rooms with magic (with the magic lantern, the phenachistoscope and the stereoscope, as recalled by Ch. Baudelaire, La morale du joujou in "Le monde littéraire", 1853, and M. Proust in the Recherche ) the cinema, from a closed, private, secret and inaccessible place, will come out 'outdoors', become itinerant, public and popular. Then from magic it will become reality, it will become cinema in the universally known form. the games of glass and mirrors or the 'Plaisirs du soir' at the court of Philippe d'Orléans) and after having filled the children's rooms with charm (with the magic lantern, the phenachistoscope and the stereoscope, as recalled by Ch. Baudelaire, La morale du joujou in "Le monde littéraire", 1853, and M. Proust in the Recherche) the cinema, from a closed, private, secret and inaccessible place, will come out 'outdoors', will become itinerant, public and popular. Then from magic it will become reality, it will become cinema in the universally known form. the games of glass and mirrors or the 'Plaisirs du soir' at the court of Philippe d'Orléans) and after having filled the children's rooms with magic (with the magic lantern, the phenachistoscope and the stereoscope, as recalled by Ch. Baudelaire, La morale du joujou in "Le monde littéraire", 1853, and M. Proust in the Recherche) the cinema, from a closed, private, secret and inaccessible place, will come out 'outdoors', will become itinerant, public and popular. Then from magic it will become reality, it will become cinema in the universally known form. 1853, and M. Proust in Recherche) the cinema, from a closed, private, secret and inaccessible place, will come out 'outdoors', will become itinerant, public and popular. Then from magic it will become reality, it will become cinema in the universally known form. 1853, and M. Proust in Recherche) the cinema, from a closed, private, secret and inaccessible place, will come out 'outdoors', will become itinerant, public and popular. Then from magic it will become reality, it will become cinema in the universally known form.

hallucination

As an 'unreal fantasy', as a non-existent place - in an interregnum that psychiatric manuals place between the second half of the nineteenth century and the first of the following century - cinema is instead prefigured in the hallucinations of schizophrenics and paranoids, that is, in the delusional vision of so-called influencing machine, described in an essay by Victor Tausk of 1919, but already known in the nineteenth century and already studied, for example, by the psychiatrist Pierre Janet. The 'influencing machine' or Beeinflussungsapparat, as it sounds in the German term, is a species of a magical or mystical machine from which mentally ill people had the illusion of being influenced and persecuted; it is, therefore, a product of the persecution delirium. In its typical form, it had the characteristics of a 'complicated machine' whose gears and functioning are incomprehensible and obscure to the patient himself. But at a certain stage in the development of the symptom, the 'influencing machine' can take the form of a magic lantern or a cinema. Tausk writes exactly: "It shows images. In this case it is usually a magic lantern or a cinema. The images are seen on a plane, on the walls or on the windows, and they are not three-dimensional like the typical visual hallucinations" ( 1919; trad. It. 1972, pp. 58-59). This connection between cinema and the 'influencing machine' suggests that there are deeper correspondences between the two devices and the consequent possibility of verifying some interpretations that have been given of the screen-spectator relationship. If for some essential characteristics the cinema is related to the dream, in this case we go from the dream to the delusion, a delusion that has to do with the image of one's body. In fact, thanks to the work with some sick people, Tausk discovers that at a certain evolutionary stage (if earlier or later than the one in which the 'influencing machine' is a magic lantern, he doesn't say it) the machine is the projection, in the external world, of the patient's body. "The projection of one's body should therefore be traced - writes Tausk - to an evolutionary stage in which one's body was the goal of object research. This must be the period in which the infant discovers, piece by piece, his own body as external world, in which he tries to touch his hands and feet as if they were foreign objects. These disjecta membra are then brought together in a homogeneous whole, which is under the control of a psychic unity, to which all the feelings of pleasure and displeasure flow: they are brought together in an ego. This process occurs through identification with your body. The ego, thus discovered, is invested with available libido; narcissism develops in relation to the ego psychism; with regard to individual organs as sources of pleasure, autoeroticism develops "(pp. 78-79). is invested with available libido; narcissism develops in relation to the ego psychism; with regard to individual organs as sources of pleasure, autoeroticism develops "(pp. 78-79). is invested with available libido; narcissism develops in relation to the ego psychism; with regard to individual organs as sources of pleasure, autoeroticism develops "(pp. 78-79).

According to Tausk's interpretation, therefore, in the delusional relationship with the 'influencing machine', the patient pathologically relives that phase of the imaginary formation of the Ego that Jacques Lacan would later define as the stage of the mirror and which, according to what Baudry observed ( 1978) and Christian Metz (1977), the viewer artificially reactivates the relationship with the screen. The analogy between the cinematographic device and the 'influencing machine', evidenced by the fact that, at its development stage, the 'machine' takes the form of a magic lantern or a cinema (i.e. a projector) and images that the patient sees are not "three-dimensional as the typical visual hallucinations" but two-dimensional, as in cinema, consequently concernscinematographic device and psychoanalysis ).

But not only: the delusional formation of the 'machine' indicates that there has been a failure, a pathology in the formation of the ego, that the mirror stage has suffered an arrest or disturbance in the process of differentiation between the subject and the object , between the ego and the other and that there is therefore, in the patient, a regression to the primary narcissistic stage. The body that the patient projects is in fact, according to Tausk, similar to the 'perverse polymorphic' one of the infant, whose sexuality is widespread in all its limbs and whose goals are auto-erotic. This regression corresponds not only to the loss of ego boundaries, but also to the state in which perceptions are not distinguished from representations and therefore to the situation of the infant, if not actually the fetus inside the womb. Because in check, in the pathology suffered by the formation of the ego there is the 'paranoid' disappointment caused by the trauma of birth, Tausk always maintains. This is in conclusion the 'influencing machine': once again a compensation, in this case 'delusional' for the end - unbearably disappointing - of what Lacan calls, with a beautiful expression, "the empire of the maternal body".

If the 'influencing machine' is the pathological, delusional and regressive formation caused by the 'disappointment' caused by separation from the maternal body, then cinema would be its artificial and mechanical, playful and consoling formation. According to Baudry "the long history of the invention of cinema" is influenced by man's desire to "manufacture a simulating machine capable of proposing perceptions to the subject that have the character of representations taken for perceptions" (1978, p. 47), just like the 'influencing machine' described by Tausk.

And here the circle closes. Between the mythical device, the Platonic cave; the fantastic device, that of the stories and novels of the nineteenth century; the delusional device, the 'influencing machine'; and the cinematographic device, which adds, reveals and interprets the others, runs the same thread, the same hallucinatory delirium, and finally the same dream, that of reactivating the type of fulfillment and the situation of fusion and abandonment ideally expressed by the state Christmas and prenatal.

At this point, some conclusions can be drawn which take the initial cue and legitimize the interpretation that sees in cinema the result - technically and historically given - of a long chain of ideas, shows, magical, religious and fantastic situations, as well as the development of optical, chemical and physical research. From the liberating hallucination of the Orphic mysteries to the 'influencing machine' described by the psychoanalyst Tausk, who approaches the schizophrenics of the early 20th century. to the 'diviners' of the mysteries and oracles of Apollo, passing through the myth of the cave and the fantastic tales of literature, cinema is configured as the solution of an enigma, that is, the formulation of an rational impossibility - reproducing reality in such a way that it looks like reality itself - which in the end, however, expressed a real, modern and technological object. But this object drags behind something of the dream and the myth that has been for millennia: "The primitive beliefs relating to the oppositions between animated and inanimate, between mortality and beyond death etc. - writes Francesco Orlando, referring to Freudian considerations by Das Unheimliche - they have never been forgotten, much less removed along the individual evolution from child to adult, as they have not been along the social evolution from animistic magic to scientific civilization: they have been rather 'overcome' "(1982, p. 16) .Cinema as a 'return of the surpassed',BIBLIOGRAPHY

É.-G. Robertson , Mémoires récréatifs scientifiques et anecdotiques du physicien-aéronaute EG Robertson , t. 1, Paris 1831.

S. Freud , Zur Psychopathologie des Alltagslebens , Berlin 1904 (trad. It. In Works , 4th vol., Turin 1970).

S. Freud , Das Unheimliche (1919) , in Sammlung kleiner Schriften zur Neurosenlehre , 5th vol., Wien 1922 (trad. It. In Works , 9th vol., Turin 1977).

V. Tausk , Über den Beeinflussungsapparat in der Schizophrenie , in "Internationale Zeitschrift ärztl. Psychoanal.", 1919, 5, 1 (trad. It. In Readings of psychoanalysis , edited by R. Fliess, Turin 1972).

S. Freud , Die infantile Genitalorganisation (1923) , in Studien zur Psychoanalyse der Neurosen aus den Jahren 1913-1925 , Wien 1926 (trad. It. In Opere , 9 ° vol., Torino 1977).

G. Sadoul , Histoire générale du cinéma , 1st vol., L'invention du cinéma, 1832-1897 , Paris 1948, éd. revue et augmentée (trad. it. Turin 1965 2 ).

E. Morin , Le cinéma, ou l'homme imaginaire , Paris 1956 (trad. It. Milan 1982).

A. Bazin , Qu'est-ce que le cinéma? , 1-4, Paris 1958-1962 (partial translation of Milan 1973).

CW Ceram , Archeology of the cinema , London 1965 (trad. It. Milan 1966).

Ch. Metz , Le signifiant imaginaire: psychanalyse et cinéma , Paris 1977 (trad. It. Cinema and psychoanalysis , Venice 1980).

JL Baudry , L'effet cinéma , Paris 1978.

M. Milner , The phantasmagoria. Essai sur l'optique fantastique , Paris 1982.

F. Orlando , Freudian enlightenment and rhetoric , Turin 1982.

J. Prieur , Séance de lanterne magique , Paris 1985.

Encyclopaedism in Baroque Rome. Athanasius Kircher and the Museum of the Roman College between Wunderkammer and scientific museum , curated by M. Casciato, MG Ianniello, M. Vitale, Venice 1986 (in particular R. Cialdea, Reflections on the Kircherian museum , and MG Ianniello, Kircher and l 'Ars magna lucis et umbrae ).

L. Albano , The cave of the giants , Parma 1992.

N. Savarese , Theater and entertainment between east and west , Bari 1992.

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D. Pesenti Campagnoni , Towards the cinema. Machines shows and admirable visions , Turin 1995.


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Cinema and the twentieth century

پنجشنبه 24 بهمن 1398
15:58
masoumi5631

Cinema and the twentieth century

There is a singular fatality between the invention of the Lumière brothers and the dawn of the so-called short century. Cinema perhaps invented the twentieth century: or was it the twentieth century that invented cinema? More correctly, the question should be asked as follows: what was the relationship between the imagination of a complex century such as the 20th century and an art form whose development stuck to the same century in a tenacious, decisive way? A great popularizing machine, cinema has spread the most sophisticated speculative achievements of its time, not because it has intentionally fed on them, but because it has naturally found itself suitable for them, even confused in them. The invention of cinema seems to contain in its womb, almost with the signs of a horoscope, the twentieth century in its entirety: needs, hazards, dreams, fears, prophecies. Cinema is then the only art - and it is, considering also the many doubts raised within it and the many attacks of which it was immediately targeted -, it is the only art to have been followed at birth and then in its transformations and successes from witnesses whose voice we listened to until a few years ago. However, it is not only a coincidence of dates between the twentieth century and cinema that provokes the formulated question: the answer does not end only in aligning time limits and some particular events. Between cinema and the century of quantum physics - we realize it today - fruitful ways of understanding were immediately intertwined. That art was born with characters common to many other intellectual adventures for the time that opened. The discovery of the camera did not come due to a fiery expressive urgency. It was a technological invention to promote products whose unexpected character then gave rise to a new art. But this priority, of technology over everything, and the consequent randomness, belong in a peculiar way to the profile of the twentieth century - and are the result of the long positivist reflection on the finality of the sciences; also the result of the crisis of that reflection, with the natural disengagement of the conception of doing, or of practice, from metaphysics. First of all, cinema brought pleasure, a modest pleasure, in following on the photographed and dynamic images, on the frames, moments captured in reality; then reflected on the white surface of the screen in a dark environment. The first kinetoscopes - active since 1894 - projected running horses or trains, street scenes, sports competitions. That aspect of the modern expanded which was then signed as a 'technical reproduction of reality', an ambition that has not narrowed within the specific confines of cinema, but has spread over the decades, fascinating and disturbing, to the point of undermining genetics, to draw proposals of plausible artificial intelligence and so on.

The kinetoscopes projected real products of a popular art, which, however, contrary to those, for example, of the literature thus defined by historians, had no relationship of derivation and corruption with the cultured art: at first they lacked a some definable and sure precedent of culture, linguistic models to be exploited or something similar. The only precedent was the eye, eye curiosity, which looks at reality and tends to capture and memorize it. Photography was a precedent, but it lacked movement, the disruptive new element that is of cinema, an imponderable, decisive qualitative leap. That capture, that memorization, the camera managed to make it tangible with the stratagem of obliterating its illusory and subjective character. On the other hand,

Fu dunque la cronaca quotidiana il contenuto delle prime pellicole. E la testimonianza dei fatti si rivelò per l'intero secolo un assillo, un'urgente necessità di comunicazione e rappresentazione, assai più pressante di quanto non fosse stata fino ad allora la cura con cui cronisti e storici si erano dedicati a testimoniare avvenimenti attraverso la parola scritta. Sembrò, la macchina da presa, lo strumento inedito e insostituibile per avere certezza dell'accadere: e, d'improvviso, soddisfece così un'esigenza diffusa inventando sia il modo per ottenerla sia gli stessi contenuti soddisfacenti. In questo stratagemma di partenza il cinema fu insieme il prodotto e il promotore del secolo che si apriva.

At its inception, therefore, the camera was a means of simply recording and replicating what was moving in front of it - a popular, even naive way of entertainment, fun for simple minds. The sophistication of that medium immediately fascinated the eyes of those who, in looking, wanted nothing more than to escape the dialectical efforts of thought. It was occasions for comedy - the gardener who has to water the garden and instead does not tame the force compressed in the rubber hose and waters himself - to gain the favor of an audience seduced only by the repetition of the movement of a movement as if it were a pure phenomenon sideshow. The device that was set in motion was in itself, in its simplicity, more than sophisticated: he exploited the surprise of those who unwittingly fell into a trap under the aware eyes of those who observe him. The spectators laughed - the gardener was soaked with water - and the game was done. The realistic, actual fact of the hoax crystallized the myth of the cinematographic illusion. But it also crystallized the myth of second-degree knowledge, the stratagem of self-reference which was the philosophical and expressive ambition of the whole 20th century. The intertwining of philosophy and cinema, over the decades, would have become increasingly close and stimulating. And it was immediately difficult for those familiar with the history of Western thought to escape the parallel between the dark projection room and Plato's cave. The room seemed the realization of that magical place of ritual recognition where images on the screen, for a luminous reflection coming from the bottom, provoke in those who follow them the emergence of forgotten memories or of needs removed. But not only that. An imaginary world was also formed which materialized the symbols of the wrinkled existence, of secret subjective events, glimpsed almost in the halo of a dream, and nightmares and desires, even omens. In those same years, S. Freud was investigating the cinema of the unconscious human interiority projecting outside, as obstacles or deviations of behavior, ancient and dramatically recognizable, exorcisable signs. Psychoanalysis had a great future in the knowledge of the internal mechanisms of a film. Meanwhile, kinetoscopes were enriched with a adventure with unpredictable dynamics, at first linked to occasions that had futile comic aspects, tailored for amusement park goers, not even children but idle with every ream, servants and soldiers in free exit, some pensioners, some gigolos: no one who could be held up as an art lover. When the first narrative films were shot - the testimony is rich on this - the photographers who engaged in it recruited the actors not among the professional actors but among the frequenters of bars and second-rate trattorias, street people who did not have better to do and that she was invited to pretend this or that gesture in front of the room. And the places where these archaic dramatizing shorts were shown had far from a good reputation. IS. Panofsky recalls that in 1905 there was only one Kino in Berlin throughout whose name was The meeting room, the use of English veiled for exoticism a precise purpose: the room was a meeting place for spectators looking for occasional company, to take advantage of furtive erotic needs, to be consumed preferably in anonymity and in the dark. But even this character, product and symptom of mass and metropolitan society, is specific to the significant marginality of behavior that the century has tasted and observed in itself with analytical scruple, almost a right to be underlined as a value. In short, born as a shady appendix to an amusement park, cinema immediately prefigured its triumphal future: it offered itself, at its very birth, as the decisive epitome of modernity. it was only one Kino whose name was The meeting room, the use of English veiled for exoticism a precise purpose: the room was a meeting place for spectators looking for occasional company, to take advantage of furtive erotic needs, to be consumed preferably in anonymity and in the dark. But even this character, product and symptom of mass and metropolitan society, is specific to the significant marginality of behavior that the century has tasted and observed in itself with analytical scruple, almost a right to be underlined as a value. In short, born as a shady appendix to an amusement park, cinema immediately prefigured its triumphal future: it offered itself, at its very birth, as the decisive epitome of modernity. it was only one Kino whose name was The meeting room, the use of English veiled for exoticism a precise purpose: the room was a meeting place for spectators looking for occasional company, to take advantage of furtive erotic needs, to be consumed preferably in anonymity and in the dark. But even this character, product and symptom of mass and metropolitan society, is specific to the significant marginality of behavior that the century has tasted and observed in itself with analytical scruple, almost a right to be underlined as a value. In short, born as a shady appendix to an amusement park, cinema immediately prefigured its triumphal future: it offered itself, at its very birth, as the decisive epitome of modernity. the room was a meeting place for spectators looking for occasional company, to take advantage of furtive erotic needs, to be consumed preferably in anonymity and in the dark. But even this character, product and symptom of mass and metropolitan society, is specific to the significant marginality of behavior that the century has tasted and observed in itself with analytical scruple, almost a right to be underlined as a value. In short, born as a shady appendix to an amusement park, cinema immediately prefigured its triumphal future: it offered itself, at its very birth, as the decisive epitome of modernity. the room was a meeting place for spectators looking for occasional company, to take advantage of furtive erotic needs, to be consumed preferably in anonymity and in the dark. But even this character, product and symptom of mass and metropolitan society, is specific to the significant marginality of behavior that the century has tasted and observed in itself with analytical scruple, almost a right to be underlined as a value. In short, born as a shady appendix to an amusement park, cinema immediately prefigured its triumphal future: it offered itself, at its very birth, as the decisive epitome of modernity. product and symptom of mass and metropolitan society, it is specific to the significant marginality of behavior that the century has tasted and observed in itself with analytical scruple, almost a right to be underlined as a value. In short, born as a shady appendix to an amusement park, cinema immediately prefigured its triumphal future: it offered itself, at its very birth, as the decisive epitome of modernity. product and symptom of mass and metropolitan society, it is specific to the significant marginality of behavior that the century has savored and observed in itself with analytical scruple, almost a right to be underlined as a value. In short, born as a shady appendix to an amusement park, cinema immediately prefigured its triumphal future: it offered itself, at its very birth, as the decisive epitome of modernity.

Thus cinema was born as a form of popular and urban culture towards the end of the 19th century. In fact, to affirm with Wim Wenders that cinema and metropolis have become adults together means both to underline how dark and equivocal those first rooms were - even in the 1940s Sandro Penna could write in verse of an eros that finds "his little angel" in a "shady" stalls "- both to reaffirm the social weight that cinema has had for the civilization of the 20th century, right from its being a very particular place, a meeting room, to develop as an aggregating moment for wider symbols. Cinema has been and is the lingua franca of the world; and barriers, ideological and political walls have been broken through its force with the elusive and subversive hand of art - of a art, however, whose connotation claims to be immediately not a privilege for a few but an event, as is characteristic of metropolitan life, which affects everyone, without differences of class, and that everyone collects in their womb with a persuasive ability that is both simple and elementary and bold for a complex occasion and as obscure as the dark room where it takes place. The cinema appeared to urban life when the urge to inventory the existing through the novel, as he had known it in the 19th century. , was going into crisis. The shape scanned by chapters, paginated between the white margins of mostly bound volumes, crumbled for needs that the outlines of grammar and syntax seemed to no longer contain. The instrument of poetry was no longer what the classics of romanticism had known and divulged. A different sense of psychological reality seemed to shatter the consolidated forms of rhetoric. In parallel, the perspective caliber of the drawing that the painters had sought with constant passion for centuries as a necessary frame for the condensation of colors melted on the canvases of the Impressionists; and the search for new grammars, new syntaxes implemented, at the dawn of the new century, by that handful of young people who on the map of Europe then took the name of cubists, supremacists, futurists, surrealists etc., revealed new and certainly solutions not easy to assimilate by the masses. Our perceptions, it turned out, had to be organized no longer in linear and monistic patterns, since these distorted and reduced fluidity and mobility, they disheartened the wealth derived from the source from which they received matter, continuous nourishment: that source is the depth of consciousness, the unconscious. Philosophy questioned the connection between cause and effect. That connection, I. Kant had already declared it, was only a mere structure of the mind, a logical way of organizing cognitive data: far from a fact that experimental science could verify. Indeed, the science on this went into open and revolutionary aid, relativism triumphed. The uniqueness of the causal relationships was the result of a rusty philosophical tooling. The same unity of the ego, mirroring this, was shipwrecked, and it appeared, as L. Pirandello later dictated, 'one, nobody and one hundred thousand'. The matter of the mind was intertwined with its own memory - indeed, it was memory that represented the most effective and decisive material content of the mind, and perceptions could only make sense in the exercise, even unconscious, of memory. H. Bergson found the persuasive figure of all this, while M. Proust let its meaning rise in a novel with a structure as vast as a cathedral. Of so much expressive and philosophical travail - for which a system of communication that Western civilization had left to settle in long and severe times, and which had been able to integrate the social ladder in its entire broad articulation - was wandering the catalyst and the immediate solver by establishing and disseminating a new communication system based on entirely new intellectual relationships. The causal connections were replaced by the association of images, a physical and temporal articulation within which several pieces, glued together, create a montage of information and knowledge certainly temporary, even private, but which shrewdly, handcrafted, it presents an objective possibility of communication that bypasses any difference of culture and language in the spectators. This was cinema as the lingua franca of the century, an expressive system that metabolized the complexity of the crisis of the various languages ​​of art, offering a solution that was never fixed, however adhering to a world that made provisional and consumerism its decisive brand. VV Mayakovsky, with his insatiable and disruptive genius, said that cinema represented for him "a conception of the world". The best Russian cinema that was contemporary of him made the montage and the associational system that derived from it an exemplary instrument from which the whole world cinema has drawn both expressive and communicative strength. For the poet of The Cloud in Trousers, those words meant not only that cinema, as he also said, was the weapon to destroy traditional aesthetics, but that it revealed an impetus that went beyond the solitary to enjoy a poem, act ordinary and customary of any reader. The cinema built a different, unexpected way of being in the world, exceptional compared to forms of expression that could seem contiguous such as the novel, the theater, the painting. The darkness in the room recreated the reader's solitude, completely different from that of the theater spectator; in addition, compared to a painting and a novel, the cinema envisaged, with its even 'shady' suggestions, a temporal succession of events constructed so that the imagination could be exercised in parallel, and the spectator, only even among the crowd of the hall , saw the shadow of his dreams, his obsessions and at the same time moral or immoral urgencies, mirrored on the screen with the plastic evidence of a concrete reality. And yet, regardless of all the differences that can be found between the various cinemas that have arisen in every corner of the planet, each with its own specific characteristics of style, dramatic content and visual matter, cinema constituted a general or global language, a frame of feelings where the majority recognized themselves. Cinema has truly been, as Béla Balász thought, one of the most useful tools for the diffusion from one continent to another of a common idea of ​​man surrounding many wars and tragedies. This diffusion is linked to images of faces and gestures that remain in the memory of the spectators in the manner of a cult; as well as the replication of plots and pathetic dissolution of the same, to genres that in parallel - melodrama, adventure, comedy, thriller and so on - proceed and exude each other, so that life seems to be reflected in them and to constitute oneself, to look at oneself, to devour oneself, to incinerate oneself, and to resurrect integral in its enthralling energy. The gestural and expressive mimicry had to be such as to make it understandable to those who had culture and who did not, to those who were wealthy and to those who had no shares on the stock exchange and not even bank accounts, whatever language or dialect they spoke; but it had to be understood in the same way in New York, Tokyo, Rome and Siberia, as in Persia in Patagonia in Alaska. But, before we went that far, making the material bases of production and distribution of products robust, a polarity of purpose was defined at the origins of this singular event which would then nourish an articulated, lively history: on the one hand the cinema of the in reality, the fixed chamber that captured the happening, according to the optical criterion of the Lumière; on the other the room in front of which the reality to be grasped was the pure invention of fantasy, go out for that dreamlike journey into the darkness of conscience, or of the hall, which Georges Méliès foresaw - in short, a movement that opened up to the story. As for creative timeliness regarding narration, it should not be forgotten that the first 'action' film, The great train robbery by Edwin S. Porter, bears the date of 1903.

This nascent narrative, halfway between novel and theater, raised some technical and language problems. On a stage there is a coherent vision, and a flat and synthetic time on which the spectator's eye and intellectual sagacity are aligned. On the screen, this is not the case: the same scene can scroll shattered into details, for close-ups and long shots; and even if the so-called sequence-plan is used, in whose frame an entire action can be enclosed, the movement of the room or its fixity signifies a different time than that of the spectator. Between the screen and the audience the time planes go in parallel but are not identical. On the screen there is an independent creation of time, while in the room the perceptual alienation of that in which it is immersed develops. It was the editing, for the certainty that the materials captured by the room had to be aligned according to a sense, therefore inventing the language of the screen, to spread impalpably that Esperanto and that expressive product whose technique would have influenced so deeply the behavior, values, mental processes of all humanity during the twentieth century. Just as the principle was affirmed that narrative procedures plundered in abundance by theater and literature could be used in a film, it was immediately understood that filmed theater would curb and dishearten the spectacular possibilities of cinema; and the idea that the medium could be susceptible to an experiment that underlined its autonomy from any other form of expression - even if they were just a theater or a novel, made its way. On the one hand, avant-garde writers, the Dada and the Surrealists, ventured on this path; on the other, some director fascinated by contemporary literary ventures, free from the naturalist tradition, such as the young Sergej M. Ejzenštejn, immediately perceived which expressive force an image could load, a frame linked to the next one according to the logic of disparity, of emotional contiguity and factual or causal inconsistency. Ejzenštejn came to this intuition on the thread of the achievements of Russian poetry, and also of Russian music born from the womb of symbolism between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. However, it is important not to harness his intuition in the network of cultural ancestry, but to consider its linguistic novelty, in harmony with what other directors with a completely different intellectual history, e.g. David W. Griffith the creator of cinematographic narrative grammar, they could ascertain and earn on their own. The Lumière brothers had brought the human eye to fix the fourth dimension through the suppression of real space and time and through the mental capture of simultaneity of action. But this virtual, logical simultaneity was precisely the editing that offered it as a simple means of communication; so that one frame, glued to the next, acquired meaning only from the whole of the process and, even if isolated, the meaning was still recovered within its location. Just like words, L. Wittgenstein argued in Philosophische Untersuchungen, they have meaning not because they find truth in an external referent to them but because of the 'linguistic game' in which they are located, just as the different words of a film, as many as its frames, create speech not for a reality external to them but for the autonomous reality as a whole, which is a function of their truth. We learn the words 'from certain contexts', Wittgenstein taught us: and his teaching quickly became common sense. It is in the context of editing and film that a frame acquires the significant value of a word, while outside of that context its meaning vanishes. So cinema is the epitome and mirror of the most subtly disruptive cognitive achievements that the century has elaborated - also with regard to the so-called revolution of language, the tendency to believe that the human creation of the word has only internal verifications, the result of a mediating experience with the world, and such as to constitute it. Cinema, devouring reality and transforming it into expression, has therefore created series of images that have overlapped the normality of lived time - that is, it has created a 'second time'; and in this 'second time' the viewer found himself living another existence just as real as his first.

Parallel speech can be made with regards to space. The experience of the Californian photographer E. Muybridge who photographed animals and athletes in movement in the seventies and eighties of the 19th century, printing single frames on a centimeter background, had sparked great interest among some artists and painters. In Paris, for example, J. Meissonier exhibited those plates in his own studio at the end of 1881 by presenting the author to a select group of friends, including A. Dumas son. He wanted to discuss the visibility potential. The opportunity to capture the movement, to fix it in images according to the space-time succession fascinated the most diverse talents. We know how much the naked athletes caught by Muybrigde in sequence of photographic shots have, for example, impressed, passed the time, the imagination of a painter like F. Bacon. But already at the beginning of the twentieth century, unison with cinema, painting frequently aimed to put on canvas the retinal fragmentation of a single image. Thus, simultaneism, the analogical asystematicity of the literary experiments of those years, fed nourished by cinema. The more cursive cinema, more surrendered to an obvious communicative, despite everything, suggested an inventive boldness that was unprecedented. The proof is found in Futurist cinematography, a poster signed by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Bruno Corra, Enrico Settimelli, Arnaldo Ginna, Giacomo Balla and Remo Chiti on 11 September 1916. It states that the book is "an absolutely past-run means of preserving and communicate the thought ", while the cinema" will sharpen, it will develop sensitivity, speed up the creative imagination, give intelligence a prodigious sense of simultaneity and omnipresence. "The Marinettians continued:" At first sight the cinema, born a few years ago, may already seem futuristic, that is, devoid of past and free of traditions: in reality, it, rising as a theater without words, inherited all the most traditional rubbish of literary theater. "Despite this," all the immense artistic possibilities of the cinema are absolutely intact. The cinema is an art in itself. The cinema must therefore never copy the stage. Being essentially visual, the cinema must first of all make the evolution of painting: detach itself from reality, from photography, from the graceful and solemn. Becoming anti-graceful, help to FW Nietzsche's belief that there are no facts but only the interpretation of them, the mental elaboration that man gives them. The reality, the facts that cinema signs are facts and realities passed to the filter of an eye, of a mind that has selected them, structured, coordinated them, composed them in a defined form, and therefore provided with a plastic topicality that makes them competitive with the world, to life. On this line, cinema has represented the mass medium, the cheapest, for the knowledge of the real, in the apperception that the real is always and only the result of a mental structure that is the source of the same vision, as a structure, organization. J. Supervielle claimed that cinema had polarized all human senses in the eye, that in cinema every spectator became a big eye, producing cinema a revolution in sensitivity, in the anthropology of the century, whereby the prevalence of the visual has gradually devoured, absorbed every other form of communication. The cinema animated the objects, managed to burden them with new meanings according to the logic of assembly. On a stage, a gun is only a prop. But cinema has close-ups. "The browning that a hand slowly extracts from a half-open drawer [...] suddenly comes alive. It becomes the symbol of a thousand possibilities" (J. Epstein, L'écran du verre, in "Les cahiers du mois", 1925 , 17-18; trad. It. In Cinéma. The creation of a world, 2001, p. 19). The cinema has increased, on a secular path, the symbolic values, animistic objects: taught everyone that an object in itself is never nothing. The stolen letter located in strong exposure in the eponymous story by EA Poe will never be insignificant again, but as the writer knew, it triggered, triggered and triggered forever an alarming amount of circumstances, a drama that tightened or melted, and also a freedom of representation whereby it will never again be an inert or inanimate object. In this way, cinema has accustomed us to grasp a continuous generality of meanings from which knowledge cannot escape. The network within which the cinema has enclosed the world with an unstoppable endemic speed is almost equal to that woven by churches and places of worship: only that churches and places of worship in carrying out their work took millennia, the cinema a few decades. he taught everyone that an object in itself is never nothing. The stolen letter located in strong exposure in the eponymous story by EA Poe will never be insignificant again, but as the writer knew, it triggered, triggered and triggered forever an alarming amount of circumstances, a drama that tightened or melted, and also a freedom of representation whereby it will never again be an inert or inanimate object. In this way, cinema has accustomed us to grasp a continuous generality of meanings from which knowledge cannot escape. The network within which the cinema has enclosed the world with an unstoppable endemic speed is almost equal to that woven by churches and places of worship: only that churches and places of worship in carrying out their work took millennia, the cinema a few decades. he taught everyone that an object in itself is never nothing. The stolen letter located in strong exposure in the eponymous story by EA Poe will never be insignificant again, but as the writer knew, it triggered, triggered and triggered forever an alarming amount of circumstances, a drama that tightened or melted, and also a freedom of representation whereby it will never again be an inert or inanimate object. In this way, cinema has accustomed us to grasp a continuous generality of meanings from which knowledge cannot escape. The network within which the cinema has enclosed the world with an unstoppable endemic speed is almost equal to that woven by churches and places of worship: only that churches and places of worship in carrying out their work took millennia, the cinema a few decades.

The visual image was therefore first coded in black and white: what was the result of a technical imperfection - on which we worked intensely to overcome it - became the peculiar expressive space of cinema, a sign of a transfiguration of reality, or element essential training of reality itself. The code, just invented, discovered within itself a second code, preformed by subtraction reality by conditioning it to an a priori contrast, to a polarity of non-colors in which he went discovering the possibility of settling progressive shades. The myth of the film image was born from this simplification, taking on an unprecedented semantic complexity. The shooting technique refined the style, and the style gained prominence of legend in objects and faces, finding them in their possible truth and dramatic-expressive function through the play of lights and shadows. First of all objects, faces - faces: the stars, the stars. Shadows and lights cut out fixed figures: the generous knight and the villain, the vamp and the good girl, the family man and the sink, the woman who seduces to betray, the innocent who sacrifices himself even in honor if the situation requires it. These figures that were born from the novel, from the melodrama, from popular legends, even from the news, in addition to being dressed in obvious attributes suitable for the scene, were shaped, imbued with light in black and white. In that contrast, dramatic conflicts seemed to have no possibility of relationship: the complexity of psychologies was entrusted to the simplicity or depth of vision. The events could not be immediately terrifying, consoling or comic. For their understanding, the caption, the explanatory sign in printed words - equivalent of medieval titles and parchments, was presented to the simple audience who frequented the rooms, according to E. Panofsky's happy intuition. Soon, with the creation of faces-for-the-cinema, their acting, the pearly shine of the white epidermis and the dark circles that dug the darkness, the language became richer and more communicative, dramatic, exhilarating. There is, in the suggestion of the audience, a very strong qualitative leap between the great actor, the great theater actress and the screen stars. The gap is given by the fact that the stars on the screen are presences in detail - face, hands, legs, parts of the body, and therefore physical, sensual intimacy - with the consequent risk of being very strong in the spectator's imagination. On the stage, the actor and actress were the focus of a distance, the center of a space-time perspective, and were above all a voice. On the screen, the stars were real epiphanies. And those epiphanies - a procession over the decades that is always renewed - in being born from the darkness they were configured precisely as myths. So, in the course of those epiphanies, it is possible to retrace palpable signs of history: the face of Lillian Gish is anomalous compared to that of Katharine Hepburn for make-up, appearance mode: from the 1920s soaked in cursing and pleasure in drifting we move on to respectable gamble of the Thirty. In Italy, after the age of the deep bistro of the silent, the soap-and-soap girls of white telephones, e.g. Irasema Dilian or Carla Del Poggio represent evolution and censorship at the same time, that is, the mannered innocence desired by a regime that rigged its illiberal brutality with familisms. A gap towards a different and new time, of adherence to an ambiguous existential tragedy, must have underlined the faces frozen by the passion of Clara Calamai in Obsession (1943) of Luchino Visconti and Anna Magnani in Rome, open city (1945) by Roberto Rossellini . Likewise the men, their faces, their bodies became from shadows on the screen shadows of history, or rather symbols and enigmas of history, from the hair polished by the glitter of Clark Gable to the lead-gray silk pajamas that a limping Paul Newman wears in Cat on a hot tin roof (1958; The cat on the hot roof) by Richard Brooks or the broken-down tuft of Rebel's Jimmy Dean without a cause (1955; Burnt Youth) directed by Nicholas Ray.The films, therefore, were, are a story in the round: but the story had to to be acted, embodied by those bodies, by those faces, according to an organic relationship between the acting and the technical procedures of the filming. Panofsky always compares this relationship with the engraving technique of an artist like A. Dürer, who could do without color - but here the color resurrect elsewhere, in the relationship between drawing and burin, in the cross between expression and wisdom artisanal between white spaces and shaded spaces. The acting on the screen - we can still say it today, regardless of effectiveness and the contribution of the sound dialogue - it will always have to compensate for the expressiveness, very accentuated in theater, with the normality of everyday life, with a gesture that cannot fail to fit into the meshes that the recovery with its technical conditioning creates, and which ends with being part. The myth of the star, of the diva, in the very rich range that can now be described, cannot therefore be isolated from the complex cinematographic device, from a construction in which everything must converge to an ultimate goal - the articulation of that virtual time-space which is then the A film tells us that cinema is also an elusive tool. Unlike a theatrical show, a film is not born and dies in one evening; but he is unable to look without being looked at. If, as we said, trains the eyes of the spectators to the fourth dimension, this happens because instead of starting from an abstraction - the novelist's blank page, the painter's canvas or bare wall - he starts from objects, from people who undergo signs of movement to be made in front of the room as if they were objects. The film starts from materials, that is, prophylactic materials, which must be manipulated, brought back to a stylistic figure, projected into a structure. Panofsky wrote: "Cinema, and only cinema, does justice to that materialistic interpretation of the universe that, whether we like it or not, pervades contemporary civilization" (1995; trad. It. 1996, p. 115). And precisely with his 'materialism' he was able to supplant landscape painting or romantic landscape painting. After the cinema, for example, that painting has become the painting of materials for the landscape, from A. Burri, E. Morlotti and F. Bacon, to R. Rauschenberg and J. Pollock. In other words, cinema has been a stimulus to painting over the course of the century, reversing a relationship that at the beginning had a completely different approach - it seemed -. And the novel? Several voices of critics and literature theorists wanted to show that the film replaced the novel - it would have devoured it, sucked it into vitality, making it something completely superfluous; in short, it would have supplanted him. If cinema has a great debt to the novel, today the debt that the novel has to the cinema is very great. And this is because film and novel are spurious products, open construction sites, when closed, armored forms also appear - they are a novel by E. Hemingway, by A. Moravia, a film by Howard Hawks, by Alfred Hitchcock for example. Instead, in their being precisely spurious products, films and novels have become infected and continue to spread. Isn't it just impossible to think J. Dos Passos or the last D. DeLillo without cinema - isn't F. Kafka's visual lucidity cinema? - but it is impossible to think of cinema without D. Hammet or A. Robbe-Grillet, that is, not to consider what are the reflections that two forms of narrative excellence have postponed each other. Even controversially. The compact and walled page of Th. Bernhard's novel, for example, in its pure vocalizing emotion, absorbing any fortuitous vision to the sound of the word, in negative it connects to the cinema, feeds on it as an antidote, and for releasing it appeals to a tragedy always looming over life. The cinema, then, in the same way as the novel, advancing the century, he began to look at himself, to refer to his own structures, to his own procédés as an essential and indispensable nourishment, also relying on the wave of quotationism increasingly widespread in the narrative of the twentieth century. I am thinking, for example, of the presence of the film crew led by Jean-Pierre Léaud who interacts with the Brando-Schneider story in Bernardo Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris (1972) as a function from which the camera declares that it cannot escape, a nourished suffering, even perverse, but precisely irreplaceable. How much coeval fiction was close to the same dilemma? It is true that a difference is possible to mark it - quotationism, the conceptual bottleneck of self-reference, for the cinema after the sixties of the century it was also an effective way of recovering its own history, its successes, its expressive and social incisiveness. For fiction, that bottleneck meant perhaps only an impoverishment of language, the denunciation of an insufficiency difficult to dub, but the cinema has known during the 20th century. other different attunements with the spirit of the time. In expressing its permeability to widespread materialism, in being a strong means of communication in the diffusion of ideas and values, cinema has not denied the possession of politics. Fascism, Nazism, communism, and even the democratic, anti-fascist initiative of the United States, for example, of cinema have made use of it as a useful and irreplaceable means of propaganda, of persuasion. The direct possession of the cinematographic production structures was and is for the dictatorships, and for those governments that have voted their power on mass persuasion, an aim pursued with no holds barred (not by chance the Republic of Salò decided to transfer Cinecittà from Rome to Venice). The camera can document everything, it can shape everything according to specific directions, it can reconstruct the picture of reality ad libitum, since as we have said it is its reconstruction, its interpretation, even easily sectarian, the only road that is disclosed in front of it. But this should not lead us to speculate that cinema is ultimately a simple tool of power. The same exemplary case of the 'Nazi' films by Leni Riefenstahl, Triumph des Willens (1935; The triumph of the will) or Olympia (1936-1938; Olympia), show a opposite exemplarity - that of an aestheticism that nullifies political characterizations at the very moment in which it exalts them. In cinema, as in any art, the so-called expressive gesture counts, and not that content that can be summarized in some practical, political or functional formula. Precisely because it is incapable of looking without being watched, cinema captures what it sees only to offer it at a glance: and in this linear but deeply complex logic, it has summarized the relationship with the century that created it in its symbols.BIBLIOGRAPHY

L. Chiarini , Cinema , Rome 1935.

B. Balázs , Der Film: Werden und Wesen einer neue Kunst , Wien 1949 (trad. It. Il film , Turin 1987 2 ).

SM Ejzenštejn , Film form , London 1949 (trad. It. The cinematographic form , Turin 1986 2 ).

E. Morin , Le cinéma, ou l'homme imaginaire , Paris 1956 (trad. It. Milan 1982).

Ch. Metz , Le signifiant imaginaire: psychanalyse et cinéma , Paris 1977 (trad. It. Cinema and psychoanalysis , Venice 1980).

S. Cavell , The world viewed , Cambridge (Mass.) 1979.

S. Cavell , Pursuits of happiness. The Hollywood comedy of remarriage , Cambridge (Mass.) - London 1981 (trad. It. Turin 1999).

P. Bertelli , The cinema machine and the subjected imagination , Turin 1987.

S. Cavell , In quest of ordinary: lines of skepticism and romanticism , Chicago 1988 (trad. It. The rediscovery of the ordinary , Rome 2001).

F. Casetti , Theories of cinema , Milan 1993.

R. Barthes , Sul cinema , edited by S. Toffetti, Genoa 1994.

E. Panofsky , Three essays on style , ed. I. Lavin, Cambridge (Mass.) - London 1995 (trad. It. Milan 1996).


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historical evolution

پنجشنبه 24 بهمن 1398
15:55
masoumi5631

The cinema form in its historical evolution

A reality in the plural

Cinema must be thought of in the plural. It is in fact a collection of films, which form a patrimony of discourses in images and sounds; it is an industry that produces and circulates these films; it is an art form that interacts with other areas of expression; he is a medium who enters the panorama of mass media; it is a cultural object around which debates, studies, controversies are intertwined; it is even the shape that the world seems to assume when it becomes a show, as the current phrase "It seemed to be in the cinema ..." clearly explains. In parallel, the cinema has changed over the years, and has taken on ever new profiles and structures: it was a silent art, for some an evolution of the mime, and then became a talking art, sometimes too close to the theater; was a' occasion of popular entertainment, presented in temporary places, to then become a collective rite, to be celebrated in the great cathedrals of the cinema palaces; he was a dominant medium, almost the epitome of mass communication, to then become a niche, however always prestigious, of the wider audiovisual field; it was a place where rapid and heterogeneous shows were offered, which were the first films in one or two reels, to then become one of the typical places of twentieth-century narrativity, that is, an area in which the recounted story was able to experiment with new clothes and new solutions. Cinema must be thought of in the plural. Even when you only face a slice of such a complex and changing reality, as we will do in the next pages in which we will focus on the forms of representation that cinema has developed, in fact we always have to deal with something that tends to go beyond the pre-established boundaries, and irresistibly recalls other components. In particular, we will analyze the great 'forms of the gaze' that cinema has come to experience. These forms have weighed primarily on the type of language that films have gradually adopted, and more precisely they have determined what a film was to show, in what order and from what perspective it had to do it. However, they also weighed on the production processes, given that the work of 'making' a film has always taken into account the formal structures that it then had to adopt. They weighed on the type of experience experienced by the viewer, given that the ways in which reality is staged have largely determined the attitudes and positions that those who watch a film are adopting. They weighed on the expressive and communicative fields in which the cinema was inserted, given that they conditioned the system of loans, differentiations, casts etc., between the arts or between the media. Finally, they weighed on the very idea of ​​cinema, for example, on the social role that was attributed to it, given that the ways in which it came portraying the world were what the current opinions were most confronted with. the forms of representation of cinema and in particular its great 'forms of gaze' will be followed here by a now widely accepted periodization (Gaudreault, Gunning 1989). It leads to distinguish between original cinema (from 1895 to the years between the first and second decade of the twentieth century), classic cinema (from the second half of the 10s to the 1950s, with large internal articulations) and modern cinema (from the years Fifty onwards), to which can be added the cinema that defined itself at the turn of the two millennia, and which someone calls post-modern. We will define the great 'forms of gaze' of each period giving here and there some indication of the connections between these 'forms of gaze' and the other aspects of cinema. The cinema of the origins: showing and attracting. - Although recent studies (Dagrada 1995²) have highlighted the extreme richness and complexity of the linguistic solutions adopted, it is however possible to identify some recurring aspects. First of all, we have to deal with 'autarchic' shots: each shot ends in itself the presentation of an event or a situation, and, in parallel, each event or situation occupies one and only one shot. This is evident in the very first production: think of the Lumière or Edison films, made up of a single shot, corresponding to the length of a reel that can be loaded into the camera. But this also applies to the production that at the beginning of the century begins to offer films with multiple shots: if we consider a work such as Le voyage dans la Lune (1902; Il viaggio nella Luna) by Georges Méliès, we can see that the passing from one frame to another coincides with the end of a scene and the beginning of a new scene, not linked to the previous one (Gunning 1990). The consequence is that the shots add up to each other, rather than succeeding one another; there is an accumulation rather than a concatenation. Hence an evident effect on film temporality: the events represented seem to have a duration, but not an authentic development. Secondly, we are dealing with a substantially flat space, devoid of depth: or rather, with a less one-dimensional space of that offered, for example, by the shadow theater or the magic lantern, but also unable to reach that thickness and practicability that other spectacular devices such as the landscape and the diorama had begun to experiment and that the cinema will reach only later. The visual flatness of early cinema is linked to at least five factors (Burch 1991): a substantially vertical lighting, which uniformly illuminates the filmed field; the fixity of the camera, anchored to the tripod; its horizontal and frontal position with respect to what is represented; the frequent use of painted backdrops; and finally the placement of the actors, relatively far from the camera lens, turned to it in acting, and with rare movements towards the front or the background of the scene. Among other things, such a system entails the spectator the feeling of being 'external' to the picture of the action: in the face of the events depicted, but also distanced from them. On the other hand, the image on the screen does not seem to possess obvious strengths. It is mostly polycentric, that is, characterized by the simultaneous presence of several areas of attention; especially the overall plans appear swarming and confused, overcrowded with people and objects. Furthermore, this image is also basically centrifugal, in the sense that the reality often depicted overflows from the painting: the characters enter and leave the scene, the environments continue towards the off-screen, making it clear that there is more besides what it shows. In this respect, the framing of the origins of cinema (cf. Burch 1991) appears as a clipping in some way random compared to the space-time continuum: it does not clearly organize the appearances on the screen, nor does it motivate what it excludes, as a sort of mosaic crammed with figures, ready to leave many tiles, even important ones, outside their borders. With a representation that, precisely for this reason, it seems to capture reality in its randomness and immediacy: literally, 'live'. Fourth, the film is presented as a 'non-self-sufficient' text. The sense of what appears on the screen is not always evident; to make it clear, it takes someone in the commentary room to tell the story, a barker who together values ​​and explains what the film shows (Le bonimenteur de vues animées, 1996); or that the viewer can make use of his previous knowledge, as novels, pièces and themes are presented briefly, or for 'mother scenes', and not in their completeness or in their development (Staiger 1992). And the fact that those who follow the film must use information that this does not give them, contributes to making the viewer feel 'external' to what they see.

A. Gaudreault and T. Gunning define the overall profile that emerges from all these characteristics as a regime based on showing, that is, on the simple presentation of a situation, real or fictitious, with no intention of 'telling it'; and on the attraction, that is, on the will to do what appears on the screen, even if it were a simple live shot as in Lumier's 'views', a reason for surprise, a short but vivid show, a small shock to the eye of the viewer. Early cinema 'exhibits' reality, whether real or fake: it does not expose it according to the canons of a complete and self-sufficient story (interpretation contested by Staiger, 1992); he offers it simply to the eye, with a gesture which, however, is already very strong in itself. And the origins of cinema ' it attracts its viewer: it captures its attention for what it shows, whether it is a cross-section of realistic life, or a make-up aimed at leaving you banned, or a simple close-up that makes the face portrayed terrible and monstrous; and excites curiosity for his ability to reproduce and recreate the real. Show and attract; exhibit and provoke. Hence a show structure based on the exhibitionist confrontation: images destined to 'surprise' and 'hit' appear on the screen; in the hall, there is a spectator who never forgets to be in the cinema. A game of crossed challenges, which makes the game very dense. or a trick aimed at leaving you dumbfounded, or a simple close-up that makes the face portrayed terrible and monstrous; and excites curiosity for his ability to reproduce and recreate the real. Show and attract; exhibit and provoke. Hence a show structure based on the exhibitionist confrontation: images destined to 'surprise' and 'hit' appear on the screen; in the hall, there is a spectator who never forgets to be in the cinema. A game of crossed challenges, which makes the game very dense. or a trick aimed at leaving you dumbfounded, or a simple close-up that makes the face portrayed terrible and monstrous; and excites curiosity for his ability to reproduce and recreate the real. Show and attract; exhibit and provoke. Hence a show structure based on the exhibitionist confrontation: images destined to 'surprise' and 'hit' appear on the screen; in the hall, there is a spectator who never forgets to be in the cinema. A game of crossed challenges, which makes the game very dense. images appear destined to 'surprise' and 'hit' on the screen; in the hall, there is a spectator who never forgets to be in the cinema. A game of crossed challenges, which makes the game very dense. images appear destined to 'surprise' and 'hit' on the screen; in the hall, there is a spectator who never forgets to be in the cinema. A game of crossed challenges, which makes the game very dense.

The possibilities of the gaze

On the level of the form of vision, these different traits of early cinema also refer to another, parallel, underlying characteristic: the exploration (more open than systematic) of the possibilities linked to the gaze. Possibility in a double sense: what is in fact brought into play is on the one hand the ability of the cinema to capture and re-propose reality; on the contrary, to analyze in depth the actual world and at the same time to propose fictitious universes; on the other hand is the breadth and diversity of aspects that can be filmed; that is, proposed again to the eye, but often also made to be discovered. Therefore the expression possibility of the gaze must be taken in both its active and passive meaning: it refers both to the attitude of the beholder (the 'penetration force' of the machine), as to the extreme variety of what is looked at (the 'availability' of the world). This means that the nucleus that emerges and imposes itself is that constituted by the binomial of seeing and power; a 'power' which in turn can be understood both in the Foucaultian sense of 'submission' (M. Foucault, Le mots et les choses, 1966), and in that of 'possibility' (Friedberg 1993). And the binomial seeing and power is connected precisely on one hand to the extraordinary richness of the real (true or fake) offered on the screen, on the other to the ability of the cinematographic device to satisfy the spectator's desire for new scopic experiences. origins from this perspective allows to clarify some essential points. First of all it helps to understand its function. During the nineteenth century, on the level of perception of the world, we had to deal with a somewhat curious phenomenon: the intensification of visual stimuli corresponded to the impression of no longer being able to grasp the surrounding reality. W. Schivelbusch illustrates this experience by talking about the first train journeys: the traveler was subjected to a bombardment of sensations and at the same time he could not distinguish with precision the landscape that ran under his nose (Geschichte der Eisenbahnreise, 1977; trad. It 1988, pp. 24-67). But similar situations were also found in urban areas: the light that penetrated inside iron and glass buildings such as the Crystal Palace revealed to visitors every secret of the environment and at the same time made them lose their sense of space and volumes (W. Schivelbusch, Lichtblicke. Zur Geschicthte der künstlichen Helligkeit im 19. Jahrundert, 1983). Even the experience of the crowd (experience that with the 19th century became daily) went in the same direction: the individual immersed in a multitude was excited by the number and variety of those who made it up and together he was unable to frame the faces in front of him, nor did he really get to know who was next to him (cf. G. Simmel, Über das Abenteuer, in Philosophische Kultur. Gesammelte Essais, 1911 and Die Grosstädte und das Geistleben, 1903, in Brücke und Tür. Essays des Philosophen zur Geschichte, Religion, Kunst und Gesellschaft, 1957). Compared to these phenomena, which characterize the era in which the cinema was born, the latter plays a precise role: on the one hand it further multiplies the visible glimpses, on the however, something else makes them fully graspable. It dazzles with its light, but brings reality into view; it gives new glimpses to every shot, but it also makes them perfectly decipherable; fills the screen with presences, but this does not mean that it is over who is in the room. In short, it enhances the richness of reality (in a few minutes, the whole world appears on the screen); and at the same time it re-establishes a domain (the viewer can make this world his own). In this sense, we can well speak of a game that includes both an intensification and a restitution: cinema feeds even more the cascade of visual shocks, but also remedies the sense of loss that they induce. Secondly, refer to the cinema of the origins as a field of possibilities related to the gaze also helps to understand its nature. The main way the Nineteenth century lived the growing presence of technologies was to see them as a means to regulate the forces of nature and, through them, to further take over the world. In addition, the nineteenth-century devices were also characterized by an extreme spectacle: just think of the steam locomotive, perhaps the most typical emblem of this universe of machines, and the admiration it aroused both for its performance and for its beauty . This means that these technologies had several features of cinema; and, reversibly, that the cinema of the origins well reflected the spirit of the technologies of the time. His work on reality, moreover, demonstrates this well: in any way you interpret it (capturing reality to bring it closer to us; but also capturing it to reveal its most secret movements; or to prolong the life of beings and things; or to build with it a world made of the same fabric of dreams ...), it presents itself in the guise of a work dedicated to the exploitation and appropriation of what the world can give; and a work that produces shows and that appears to be a show in itself. In this context, the choice to show and to attract appears to be very symptomatic again.Finally, thinking about the origins of cinema in terms of an exaltation of the possibilities of the gaze allows us to see also its tensions and ambiguities. Every resource and every achievement has a sunny and dark face. As in the case of the railway: a technological device that cancels distances and at the same time upsets the previous landscape with its tracks, viaducts and tunnels; which allows the intoxicated speed and at the same time exposes you to the risk of accidents. The train allows you to subdue space and time, and at the same time blows up its measurements. In the same way cinema summons the entire universe, real and imaginary, on the screen, but also reveals its less tolerable and usual aspects; fills the spectator's eyes, but also arouses terror or bewilderment. It is no coincidence that in the films of the early days the tricks were so frequent: used above all to overturn the laws of nature (a demolished wall returns whole; a diver rises from the water and lands on a trampoline), they present the world as uncontrollable and therefore as a potential threat. Nor is it a coincidence that in the early cinema the Granguignolesque or erotic dimensions were so popular (severed heads,

It should be added that the characteristics of the origins of cinema bring him closer to all those places and moments in which the view is simultaneously excited and nourished. A. Friedberg (1993) discusses at length two of these places or moments: the department stores with their display of goods; and trips organized in the first mass tourism. In them, cinema finds the ideal preparation for that mobile (that is, a continuous passage from one object to another) and virtual (that is, ready to capture images of things before even things in itself) that will constitute the trait of bottom. In them he finds a situation in which the possibilities of vision already have cause to be exalted; in which the eye comes to capture the world, and the world comes to reveal all its riches. If, on the other hand, the areas of communication and entertainment are more properly considered, the closest proximity is with those media and those arts that make performance and interpellation their strong point. Think of the magic lantern shows, but also the fair entertainments, the circus, the music hall and above all the vaudeville, that is, those places where the spectator is surprised with 'extraordinary' performances, provoked in his habits and called directly involved (Allen 1980; Leutrat 1985); it is here that the abundance of stimuli and at the same time the challenge to seize them reach their peak; it is here that the omnivorous desire for visual experiences finds its nourishment in a reality full of surprises. And therefore those intellectuals of the time who accused the cinema of being a slum phenomenon were right; more reason than their colleagues with a progressive spirit, who compared it to literature, theater, pantomine, and therefore enrolled it directly in the great aesthetic tradition to enhance the new art; they simply did not understand - neither one nor the other - that some of the crucial junctions of the time manifested themselves better in some approximate and generous number offered in the shacks than on many scenes, on many platforms or on many pages of heavy volumes. : narration and transparency. - As you know, the transition from original cinema to classic cinema is a fairly complex process: it roughly spans the years between 1907 and 1914, but with some advance and some delay; it follows the 'national routes' (Italy, France, England, Scandinavian countries) which are often partial and offset from each other; however, it finds its point of condensation in the United States, around two names such as Biograph and David W. Griffith, which best interpret their needs; and ends with the development of an industrial and linguistic system, identifiable in Hollywood cinema, which it would have held for more than forty years, despite some internal revolutions such as the introduction of sound (Bordwell, Staiger, Thompson 1985; Burch 1991 ). In terms of production processes, the most significant transition point is probably the one (around 1907) from the cameraman system to the director system, which marks the start of a progressive specialization of roles; or, in terms of products, that from a composite program to a program centered on a fictional feature film (around 1911); or, in terms of consumption, that from an 'occasional' offer as was that guaranteed by street vendors to a 'permanent' offer, linked to the birth of the first 'fixed sites' (the nickelodeons around 1905, and the' masonry theaters) ', e.g. in Italy around 1907). The horizon that is being set is what would have characterized cinema for a long time: an industry capable of churning out 'series prototypes' (each film is unique, and yet it resembles what has already been seen: hence the importance genres), based on a collective work well coordinated by the production company (the producer is the figure who guarantees the functioning of the machine), aimed at maximizing the consumption of its products (each film must have a universal appeal), and spread, starting from its elective center, Hollywood, all over the world (The American film industry, 1976). But the traits that mark cinema as an industry have a correspondence, and perhaps their very foundation, as well as in the typical processes of the whole cultural industry of the period, also in the traits that mark cinema as a language. And it is precisely on the passage from the primitive to the classic way of representation that it is important to linger.The first element to underline is the affirmation of a principle of linearity: the frames, instead of approaching each other, are arranged in a true and proper succession. The change is twofold. In terms of film syntax, we move from a regime of autarky to a system of biunivocal relationships: the shots no longer appear as autonomous segments, which exhaust in themselves the situation they have to show, but are connected to each other; each recalls the previous one and prepares the next, proposing itself as a continuation of the one and premise of the other (the canonical example is: 'armed man who advances - gun who shoots - opponent who falls'); or even each takes up the previous one and continues in the following, proposing itself as their complement and as their integration (the canonical example is: 'pursuers - pursued - pursuers'). This allows, among other things, to break the scene into several moments, and at the same time to keep them together: the découpage was born with the system of connections at the base of the analytical montage (saturation connections, as in the case of the assembly 'character who looks - object looked at'; connections of specification, as in the case of the assembly 'total - full figure - detail' etc. .). In terms of large display forms, instead, we move from a bipolar to a tripolar structure: instead of an initial situation and its eventual reversal, the film offers an opening, a development and a conclusion. This means that it can progress gradually through a dense network of passages; in short, it can relax and acquire a real development. The overall result is to give cinematographic temporality a new meaning: it no longer has to do with a simple duration, but with an authentic becoming. The time of the film, from a mere 'container' of events, becomes an 'arrow' that accompanies its progress; it becomes 'carrier' time, vector time (Burch 1991; Bellour 1980; Bordwell, Staiger, Thompson 1985). It can be added that filmic temporality in classical cinema actually takes two forms, most of the times combined: either we run towards a final goal, according to a teleological model; or, albeit more rarely, we aim at a point from which the story can start again, according to a cyclical model. Secondly, the need to better organize the portion of reality shown on the screen emerges: the picture no longer looks like a relatively chaotic cross-section, but it begins to structure itself both on the surface and in depth. The film image in fact acquires a sense of order: what the viewer's attention must focus on occupies the central part of the picture (centering techniques); and if the points of interest are more than one, they are connected to each other so as to be either symmetrical or parallel (right / left articulation, or top / bottom). At the same time, the film image also acquires a sense of depth: several centers of attention are located in the picture on several different levels; chiaroscuro lighting is used, with differentiated areas of light; indoor shots alternate with outdoor shots, which distance the closure of the visual horizon; above all, multiple points of view are adopted, not only from the front, but also 'internal' to the situation presented (think of the construction that best exemplifies this new way of shooting, and that will be imposed with relative rapidity: the field / counterfield, in which the camera alternately moves from a character to someone or something in front of him - his interlocutor, or his object of attention etc. - and in this way literally occupies the heart of the scene). The result is to build an 'all-round' space: no longer just contemplable, as is that of early cinema, but in some tangible and practicable way (see Burch 1991). Thirdly, it is no longer necessary to resort to knowledge previously owned or supplied on the edge of the film; the film itself suggests all the useful information to reconstruct and follow the story told. In short, the text reaches its self-sufficiency. Various elements play an essential role in this regard. Think, for example, of use of captions and then, with sound, to the frequent presence of an external narrative voice (voice over) and, more generally, to the dialogues between the characters: the insertion of the word in the body of the film allows to reinforce and make explicit the sense of what happens on the screen without needing any other help. But also think about how an ever closer correspondence is established between the characters' behaviors and their moods: this allows you to read something invisible through a set of visible gestures, and therefore to fully grasp what would otherwise be difficult interpretation. Above all, a systematic link is offered between the various data presented by the film: a seemingly random clue dissolves previously created doubts; two parallel events illuminate each other; an unexpected raises the expectation of how it will end; repeated behavior confirms the character of the character etc. The film creates a dense game of references that complement each other, and in this way locks in on itself. The result is the construction of a complex and coherent plot that self-justifies and feeds itself. Fourthly, those in the room are no longer 'facing' the film; on the contrary, it is 'sucked' into the diegetic world and somehow finds itself 'living' what is happening on the screen. First of all the conditions of use of a film change: we try to cancel the noise of the projector; the darkness in the room is accentuated; armchairs are used that allow you to isolate yourself from your neighbor etc. (Gomery 1992). This means that one no longer has the continuous perception of 'being in the cinema': the viewer can forget this situation. Then the type of image used changes: from shots that tend to 'displace' or 'distance' the viewer, we move on to shots that allow him to follow the events narrated from the best possible observation point (so much so that the point of view offered by the film looks like a real vantage point), and at the same time not to get lost despite the accentuated fragmentation of the plans. A sort of internal 'orientation system' is therefore created. Finally, the communication regime changes: instead of a continuous questioning of the viewer, called into question by what or by whom the film shows, an identification process is triggered (Morin 1956; Metz 1977); those who follow the film project themselves into the characters in action on the screen, share their adventures, often marry their gaze (the subjective), mentally take on the role. The overall result is that the viewer can immerse himself in the narrated world: he can enter into it without getting lost; it can occupy every point and participate in every moment; he can adhere to events by literally forgetting himself and his actual condition. Therefore a linear succession of shots, which allows an articulation of the scene and a development of the story, with the conquest of a vector time; an organization of the painting both on the surface and in depth, aimed at giving it order and thickness; a self-explanatory film, and that draws within itself its spectator. These traits bring back to two great basic characteristics of classical cinema: the fact of being a narrative cinema, and the fact of having a transparent filmic writing. That classical cinema is a narrative cinema does not simply mean that you tell stories; rather, it means that it is capable of integrating individual places and individual moments into a multiple but unitary, articulated but coherent universe: in an accomplished diegetic world (cf. Gaudreault, Gunning 1989; Chatman 1978; Bordwell 1985). The film can multiply the shots, and with them the spaces and times depicted; what matters is that all these spaces form an overall territory, in which there is contiguity between the different areas and the possibility of passing from one to the other; and in parallel that the whole of these times draws a wider arc, in which each moment collects the legacy of the previous one and weighs on the fate of the following. In short, if you think of Griffith's The birth of a nation (1915), it is essential that the Cameron house, the war front, Washington, fit into a single map (one could say: in geography of a nation); just as it is essential that in Intolerance (1916), also by Griffith, the last day of Babylon, Friday of the Passion, the night of the massacre of the Huguenots constitute the passages of a single story (even if it is the history of humanity ); it is only because there is an integrated space-time that narration can take hold. It should be added that narrative integration is strengthened by the privilege accorded to action: it is in fact the activity of the characters that act as the glue between the different places and the different times. As it should be added that the narrative integration is also reflected on the type of story told: a story that, whatever its setting, tends to compare two apparently incompatible positions and to find a mediation between them (think of the western , e.g., in Stagecoach, 1939, Red Shadows, with the clash between the apparently inflexible sheriff and the young man who seems to have taken the bad road, and the ability of each of them to 'adapt' to the other). narrative integration makes the film appear as an orderly and complete organism and the diegetic world as parallel to the real one, transparent writing leads to masking all the steps that allow to reach such a goal. In fact, classic cinema does not tolerate that the stage fiction is revealed and to do this it removes any reference to the processing that underlies the film (typical is the ban on the actor to 'look in the car'). Above all, classic cinema pursues a direct and effortless apprehension of what is narrated: procedures such as centering, the connection on movement and gaze, the prohibition of overriding the field, the rule of 30 ° etc., aim to make people perceive reality on the screen, however, without realizing that you are perceiving it. This choice corresponds to a more general orientation that seems to take hold in the first half of the twentieth century, and which leads to consider technical devices no longer as a 'show' in which the submission of the forces of nature and the conquest of the world are celebrated, but rather as 'prostheses' which seemingly naturally prolong the faculties of man. Not everyone adheres to such an orientation; just think of the artistic avant-garde, and their choice to make aesthetic work evident and problematic together with the means they use; but his statement is clear in the world of production and goods, in which the principles of ergonomics and the dream of robotics progressively make their way (as well as of course in the field of war, as suggested by P. Virilio, Guerre et cinéma. Logistique de la perception, 1984). The invisibility of the cinematographic machine goes in this direction.

La necessità dello sguardo

Fin qui, sia pure in una rapida sintesi, i grandi caratteri del cinema classico. Lo sguardo che emerge da una simile situazione non è più chiamato a magnificare delle possibilità, ma a stabilire una necessità; non è più volto a evocare un potere, ma ad affermare un dovere. L'idea che sembra sostenerlo è infatti riassumibile nello slogan 'Si deve vedere così perché così impongono sia le leggi della visione sia le leggi della natura'. Dunque si ha a che fare con un imperativo, e con un imperativo che investe tanto lo sguardo in sé quanto l'oggetto dello sguardo: appunto, si 'deve' vedere così, e questo sia perché 'così si vede', sia perché 'così è ciò che si vede'.

On the first side, classic cinema seems to justify its duty through a reference to the mechanisms of vision in general: a link is invoked between this and the cinematographic vision, and an obligation of one towards the other is established. In fact, the operation is complex, and is done through multiple moves. The first consists in trying to demonstrate that between the cinematographic device and the perceptive (but more widely, psychic) ​​device of the spectator there is a subtle equivalence. This idea, as well as being at the center of many theoretical interventions of the time (think among all of H. Münsterberg, The photoplay. A psychological study, 1916, but the idea of ​​a closeness between the two 'machines' punctuates the whole a theoretical line on cinema, that goes from Münsterberg to Morin and Baudry, but also to Bordwell), fully guides the practical experimentation that accompanies classical cinema: in fact, the search for the best way to film things obeys this principle; and it is in relation to it that one can understand the techniques that gradually come into use. Consider, for example, the way in which space is divided into different types of planes and the way in which these planes follow one another in a sequence (see Bordwell, Staiger, Thompson 1985). Generally it ranges from an overview of the environment in which the story takes place (establishing shot), to a series of narrower shots, which accompany the center of the action captured both in its essential moments, with medium fields, close-ups, details etc., both in the reactions it causes in bystanders (reaction shot); the action is followed in its unfolding, up to a final shot showing the environment possibly transformed by the events that took place (re-establishing shot). Well, both the way in which the planes are chosen, as well as the way in which the sequence is constructed, tend to simulate the perceptual experience of an observer present at the scene (Burch 1991). In particular, we try to re-propose its probable path on the place of events, from its appearance on the scene to its approach to the heart of the action, up to the final detachment; even more, we try to re-propose the way in which his attention is progressively displaced, from the overall look to the more targeted looks, up to the rapid control during closing; and somehow we also try to re-propose his desire to know, from the initial curiosity to making direct contact with events, up to the final saturation. Therefore, the gaze of cinema and the human gaze seem to coincide. In reality, the correspondence is imperfect: an actual observer would see in one way less well, in the other something more than the film shows to its viewer. Hence the second move, which overlaps the first one: if a complete equivalence cannot be established between the two looks, it can however be assumed that the cinematographic one works as the human one would work if the latter were to the best of its ability. This means that the cinematographic gaze can be chosen as the 'ideal form' of the natural gaze: it proposes its basic mechanisms, and in doing so it highlights the most appropriate ways of operating; it follows its paths, and in doing so highlights its canonical behaviors. In other words, the cinematographic gaze punctually applies that 'grammar of seeing' that each of us follows daily but in an approximate way; on the contrary, he applies it so well that he literally manages to embody it. Here is the point: since the idea of ​​equivalence does not hold, the idea of ​​canonicality or grammaticality takes its place; if the cinematographic gaze is only 'almost' like the human gaze, in exchange one can elect it as an 'example' of the other. The paradoxical effect is to create a 'truer than truth' look; and anyway to reiterate the fact that at the base of the game there is a need (' you have to see it this way because you see it this way, or rather because you have to see it like this'). The same dynamic is also found with regard to the second duty at the basis of classical cinema, that which affects the object of the gaze rather than the gaze itself ( you have to see it like this because that's what you see '). The game reproduces the previous scheme, as here too the first move is to establish an equivalence between the world depicted on the screen and the real world: an equivalence that is strengthened by the photographic basis of cinema, by the techniques of staging, by the choice of characters that recall human types etc. However, the world on the screen is 'almost' equal to the real one. As Jean-Luc Godard will say, in the cinema blood is only red: nobody really dies, and nobody dies as they really die. Hence the need for a second move, which accompanies and permeates the previous one: the world on the screen, if it is not a perfect duplicate of the world in which we live, is however an ideal representation of it, which gives us back its essential data; those whom we would not otherwise grasp in the chaos of existence. This means that the fictitious world stands as a canon of the real world: it expresses the typical trends, the intimate laws; makes explicit the underlying "grammar". The presence of a story is decisive in this process: narrating in fact means bringing out the plot of events beyond their apparent chaos. In any case, the result is that the universe on the screen can present itself as 'truer than truth' (what you see is a reality in its 'essence');

The mechanisms that have been briefly retraced explain the great strength of classic cinema. His images can be beautiful or ugly, rich or poor, but very rarely they are approximate: they tend to embody a cogent and at the same time optimal point of view, the one from which things must be seen so that they become immediately clear to their observer. In this respect there may be personal choices, but not random solutions; there is a convention at stake, but not the intervention of an arbitrariness. Even the characters and events narrated can be interesting or banal, vivid or flat, but they are never meaningless: they tend to translate real figures and situations in someone or something that could represent its key features, the substance behind appearances. Think about it, how Cary Grant's attitudes give shape to the idea of ​​ease, or how James Dean's face summarizes the idea of ​​youthful unease; but also to how the conflict between law and desire is reflected in the contrast, typical of melodrama, between family duties and extramarital temptation, or in the contrast, typical of the western, between the need for settle down and the appeal of adventure. What occupies the screen tends to function as a synthesis and emblem of what happens in life. typical of the western, between the need for settle down and the call of adventure. What occupies the screen tends to function as a synthesis and emblem of what happens in life. typical of the western, between the need for settle down and the call of adventure. What occupies the screen tends to function as a synthesis and emblem of what happens in life.

After all, all the great Hollywood genres present characters and narrative junctions that take up and exemplify real characters and situations. Think of the musical, in which the reversibility of show and life speaks of the need to reconcile being and appearing. Or the sophisticated comedy, in which the emergence of the whim (the unbridled Katharine Hepburn of Bringing up baby, 1938, Susanna, of Howard Hawks) speaks of the need to balance individual identity and social norm. Or the western, in which the solitude of the knight without spot and fear (Shane, 1953, The knight of the lonely valley, by George Stevens) speaks of the difficulty of maintaining a purity of behavior. Or to the gangster film, in which the fascination exercised by the gangster speaks of the pervasiveness of evil and its proximity to social success (for such genres see Altman 1987; Cavell 1981; Warshow 1962). These characters and situations, precisely because they recall recurring realities and summarize their basic data, are not mere stereotypes, but are proposed as authentic archetypes, that is, as representations in which each spectator can grasp the essential scheme, the structure profound, of what in his existence he happens to encounter in multiple forms and occurrences.

On the other hand, it is precisely this presence of archetypes that allows classic cinema to become a gigantic 'laboratory of the collective imagination': the largest of those ever activated. His stories offer ideas and figures that immediately enter the circle, nurture skills and memories, help understand individuals and facts, connect different experiences and cultures. In this way, a patrimony of symbols is composed which serve to decipher reality and together to talk about oneself and the world, to expand private lexicons and together to forge a common vocabulary, to face the contingent and together to grasp the essentials. In this sense it can also be said that classical cinema is the great place in which our era has elaborated the myths it needed; analogy between ancient and modern myths cf. McConnell 1979). analogy between ancient and modern myths cf. McConnell 1979).

At least two more notations are required. The first: if films offer myths, they must necessarily trigger rites. It is no coincidence then that the consumption of classic cinema presents itself as a strongly ritualized moment, in which individuals perform recurring gestures, and do it in unison, until they feel part (and together to feel part) of a community that goes beyond the audience in the hall. Hence the appearance of a third 'duty', which this time involves the fruition practices: 'you must see it this way because everyone sees it this way'; going to the cinema, and going in that way, is a sign of belonging and citizenship. After compliance with the laws of perception and compliance with the laws of nature, classical cinema boasts, and proposes, a

Second notation: the duty, the sense of necessity that govern the gaze originate in the ability to unify around ways that appear 'natural' (so you see, so is the world, so you do) individuals who otherwise would not have the same point of reference. The years in which classic cinema is affirmed are in fact marked by some extraordinary processes: drastic loss of identity and roots (the disappearance of cultures and homelands determined by the First World War), large phenomena of deterritorialization (mass emigration, accentuated urbanization), continuous threats of social fractures (the tensions connected to the Great crisis), and conversely frequent attempts to find a refoundation (in negative, the great totalitarianisms between the two wars), the the emergence of a global horizon (feeling like citizens of the world, which overlaps with feeling like members of a community), and the emergence of a culture, mass culture, which acts as a new unifying background. In this context, cinema plays its part in that it highlights what are, or is supposed to be, the 'grammars' of seeing, the real and the social respectively, and proposes them as canons to be conformed and recognized. What is therefore put into play is an explicit work of cultural and social integration: this cinema offers a look and visions on which it is legitimate, and indeed a duty, to converge. And it congregates the spectators in a large and unique audience, which shares the same perception and the same sense of things, or if you want the same imagination and the same myths. In parallel with other arts that had tried or seek to perform the same function (bourgeois literature and theater, academic and anti-academic painting up to the end of the nineteenth century, reportage photography, etc .; in short, the arts of transparent narration) In short, this cinema is proposed as a guide in an increasingly complex and difficult world. The profile of classical cinema so schematically traced finds in the years between 1915 and 1945 numerous and different interpretations. The work of 'canonization' of the gaze and the world is sometimes based on the exploitation of already consolidated mythical universes (think of a genre like the western or a director like John Ford); sometimes instead it faces less exploited landscapes and less definable behaviors (think of the film noir or the characters played by Humphrey Bogart); sometimes highlights the mediation of the show (think of the musical); sometimes instead, perhaps within the show, he accepts the irruption of current affairs (the number Remember my forgotten man, which painfully describes the consequences of the Depression, is hosted in a back-stage musical like Gold diggers of 1933, 1933 , The dance of lights, by Mervyn LeRoy); sometimes pursues everyday life and sometimes targets melodramatic lighting (Meet John Doe, 1941, John Doe Arrives - The Dominators of the Metropolis, by Frank Capra, and Casablanca, 1942, by Michael Curtiz); sometimes he chooses prose and sometimes tries poetry. It depends on the poetics of the directors, and even more from the production policies of the studios and the social and cultural contexts (including national contexts) in which films are born and circulate. Of course, not all cinema between 1915 and 1945 falls within the profile traced; there are experiences extraneous to its logic, from Soviet formalist cinema (see the voiceformalism ) to 'pure' French cinema, to the many film experiments of the historical avant-garde (see the avant-garde film voice). These experiences bring to light an entirely different idea of ​​cinema: a cinema still conceived as a space of attractions and as an attraction itself, and therefore under the banner of possibility rather than necessity (think in particular of the avant-garde; after all, the same classic cinema continues to work on attractions in parallel to the story, for example, in the slapstick comedy or in the musical or, albeit under track, also in other genres: Gunning 1990); or a cinema called to reproduce thought processes, and therefore to explicitly make themselves 'discourse' on things, rather than their 'reflection' (even if nature with its processes finds in this 'discourse' a profound response: think of the according to Ejzenštejn, and to the extraordinary reflection he offers us with Neravnodušnaja priroda, 1945-1949; trad. en. The not indifferent nature, 1981, 1992³). As there are variations of classic, there is also an anticlassic that spans the period in question. However, the fact remains that for over thirty years classic cinema, with its heart in Hollywood, is completely dominant, and that we must wait for the end of the Second World War to feel its first cracks.

Modern cinema: the truth of things and the procedures of the film

Exiting classic cinema is a long-lasting process, to which multiple factors contribute. Transformations take place in the social scenario: the Conflict, the Holocaust and the Bomb make it clear that the dream of a community without borders held together by the same visions and the same sensations is only an illusion. Transformations take place in the cinematographic machine: the film industry loses its compactness, both because production and operation are separated by virtue of an important antitrust ruling, and because a mode of production based on independent producers is emerging, which is not always compliant with policies of the studios, either because numerous national cinemas appear or reappear on the scene, capable of (or forced to) experiment with new avenues. Transformations take place in the composition of the public: the generalist and undifferentiated audience is joined by more defined and more targeted audiences, also ready for quality consumption. Above all, transformations in the media landscape weigh: television, which began to prevail between the 1940s and 1950s, absorbs functions and products that were previously typical of cinema.Designing the great features of modern cinema, with particular attention to linguistic aspects, is a complex undertaking as the points of reference are often contradictory and because the roads are still very diversified. You can try to draw an approximate map of the territory. The modern was born from two very distant experiences, and yet readable in parallel, namely neorealist cinema on the one hand (Roberto Rossellini), with his need to get out of the staging logic and find a closer relationship with reality, on the other the American 'flamboyant' cinema of the fifties (Samuel Fuller, Nicholas Ray etc.), with his need to exacerbate the conventions to explore their tightness and limits, possibilities and spare parts; it matures thanks to directors such as Michelangelo Antonioni or Ingmar Bergman, divided by the way they proceed, but united by the desire to fold the cinema into an expressive form; is affirmed with the Nouvelle vague (François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Agnès Varda etc.), but also with the 'new cinemas' of the Sixties (European, Latin American, Asian), each with its inspiring motifs and choices stylistic; consolidates with the authors of the seventies and eighties, engaged in the search for personal poetics (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Theo Anghelopulos, Woody Allen, Martin Scorsese, Andrej Tarkovskij), but also in a review and an overturning of the surviving genres (Robert Altman); it includes experimenters who risk marginality (Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, Chantal Akerman), but also directors who want to talk with the great cinema (Bernardo Bertolucci, still Scorsese); finally it seems to find its celebration in the work of Wim Wenders, who makes the modern, consciously, a way. The painting is deliberately hyperschematic: the great inspiring masters such as Jean Renoir cannot be forgotten; nor keep silent about the role of Orson Welles, whose Citizen Kane (1941; Fourth power) represents in many ways the culmination of the classic and at the same time the opening point to the modern. The main features of this picture remain to be identified. First of all, there is an image no longer attentive only to the heart of the events represented, and ready to change its perspective when the situation evolves (think of how classic cinema chose the shot in function of the fact told and how it changed as the story progressed); on the contrary, there is an image that wants to be as available and receptive as possible, determined to open up to all aspects and moments of reality, and therefore characterized more by a widespread curiosity than by targeted attention. The refusal of any preventive or forced selection occurs, for example, in the frequent attempt to grasp the whole sphere or the whole arc of the action, either by associating the different participants in the story in the same shot, or by incorporating its different phases into a single shot. In the first case, the recovery and use of depth of field is essential, which allows you to keep an eye on a space in all its planes simultaneously; in the second, the use of the sequence-plan is decisive, that is, a shot long enough to exhaust a portion of the story told, and therefore able to give us back the whole development of an action, rather than its individual moments, or just a few of them. The depth of field and the sequence-plane (on which, as stylistic procedures of the modern, A. Bazin's analyzes remain fundamental) effectively constitute the usual procedures in modern cinema, both alone and in association. Their use leads to grasp the action not only in its completeness, but also close to the environment that hosts it; on the contrary, to drown the action in the environment, in order to strip one of its exceptional nature and to highlight its complexity in the other. In fact, if the action is depicted in all its moments and with all its participants, it loses its strength: it is diluted, dispersed (more: what emerges is also the existence of states of inaction; of moments empty, of passive characters). In return, the environment comes to the fore, that is, that portion of the world that welcomes an event, but also that precedes and goes beyond it; who sees him intervene, but who is not necessarily influenced by it. The result is that you no longer have to deal with 'highlights' on the screen that reproduce the essential phases of the event told, but with 'generic' or 'indistinct' portions of space and time, which also capture the less significant passages of an event, and even more that dissolve this event in the horizon that hosts it : areas and moments 'any', even if not less steep. At the same time, there is an image that tends to underline its image status: if on the one hand it expresses the effort to get as close as possible to reality, from the The other does not hide that it is a representation of it, and therefore to act as its reinterpretation rather than as its mirror. It follows that the film, the more it tries to be a faithful and passive witness to the facts, the more it must accept that it is also a linguistic object, or a complex of signs, and therefore, compared to those facts, an illustration and a filter. Hence the frequent use of filming that renews and disturbs the traditional ways of filming the world, underlining the temporary nature of the drawing and at the same time the intrinsic cinematographic nature of the operation. Think of the décadrages, that is to say the type of shots that privilege empty areas, objects placed far from the center of the painting, bodies hovering between the field and the off-field, and which in this way move and complicate the point of view on things, instead of choosing a flat and direct look at them: the result they bring is to make the work of cinema manifest and problematic (Bonitzer 1985). But here also a frequent work on genres, aimed at laying bare their basic rules and making them appear in all their evidence and artificiality: both to underline the constructive nature of the film and to try to revitalize its measures and functions. Think of the pastiche, the ironic cast, the use of the second degree (J.-L. Godard, from À bout de souffle, 1960, Until the last breath, up to Masculin féminin, 1966, The male and the female, he is the master): the result of this type of intervention is to highlight the architecture on which the images and sounds rest, and at the same time to test its possible stability.

What is the turn that the film takes, the fact remains that the viewer is no longer led, shot after shot, to reconstruct the diegetic world and to grasp its intrinsic values, but finds himself having to decide in first person where to pay attention, how to connect the different portions of space and time, what importance to give to what is being seen. Opposite it has portions of the world without clear lines of force and often has ambiguous representations regarding their status; its sensation, therefore, can only be that of disorientation. To which he can react either by merely taking note of what is shown to him (after all the world is like this: undecidable ...), or by venturing along entirely personal paths, to the point of building his own story, and to choose the references with which it feeds (after all the real lessons are like this: full of hidden meanings ...). These traits make clear how modern cinema is opposed to classic cinema in its two main axes. The anti-fiction dimension emerges in all its evidence. If the universe that faces the screen is indistinguishable and ciphered, it becomes difficult to highlight its plot; indeed, this plot perhaps does not exist at all and, if there is, it carefully hides among the folds of events; therefore the space for the story is very thin; it is probably a lost space. On the other hand, a sort of opacity of writing emerges. If the image shows its nature as a sign, it becomes inevitable to dwell on the reasons why these signs are produced and the ways in which they work.

But these traits also show that at the basis of modern cinema there are very different thrusts between them (De Vincenti 1993). On the one hand there is the desire to get to the truth of things: to grasp them in their singularity and concreteness, to restore their density and indeterminacy, to recover all their subtle dynamics. What matters is that cinema knows how to capture and return reality. On the other side there is the desire to lay bare the procedures that allow you to portray the world on the screen: therefore to make a cinema that first of all reflects on itself, showing its nature as a 'last' on the real , highlight the logic behind it. What matters is that the film confesses and explains the processes and mechanisms on which its work of representation is based. In this sense it can well be said that in modern cinema there exists a perfect coexistence of realism and formalism; attention to things and attention to representation each require their own space. It should not be surprising then that in this cinema sometimes conflicting stylistic choices meet: the abolition of the staging, in the name of a 'direct grip' on the world, but also the exaltation of the staging, in the name of idea that every representation is born from a 'work' on reality; an acting that aims at naturalism, to the point of choosing actors taken from everyday life, but also an acting that touches virtuosity, to the point of presenting itself as a 'quote' of gestures and postures already implemented;

And the game of polarities could continue. In any case, we are far from the equilibrium and functionality of classic cinema, with its ability to keep the gaze, world and representation together; here the three terms seem to disassociate from each other, and push each in its own direction. Above all, we are far from the sense of duty that permeated that cinema; the horizon that emerges is quite another.

Awareness of the gaze

In fact, if we focus on the forms of vision, we can well say that modern cinema liquidates classical cinema in its basic trait: rather than a connection between seeing and duty, what is imposed is the link between seeing and knowing. The idea that emerges is precisely that which cinema presupposes and at the same time brings into play some form of knowledge: a knowledge that does not necessarily coincide with an explanation or a rationalization of the phenomena investigated, but that tends rather to become aware of both reality, both of the ways in which cinema catches it and fixes it on the screen; a knowledge that has something together of sensitivity, apperception and self-awareness. In this new horizon, the constraints of necessity (precisely, 'having to see') seem to melt, replaced by a different type of virtue (precisely, 'knowing how to see'); and the landscape takes on new and more marked profiles. It must be reiterated above all that the knowledge of the modern has undoubtedly multiple faces. On the one hand, it presents itself as an effort to understand the real: and therefore the essential is to make contact with reality; on the contrary, having always been on his side with discretion and availability; only if you have understood it deeply can you film it, and film it to reproduce it on the screen (or, if you pass from the filmmaker to the viewer, to retrace it on the screen, and retrace it to grasp its meaning). On the other hand, on the other hand, this knowledge presents itself as a reflection on the work of the film: if it is true that cinema is above all a device thanks to which it is possible to construct a discourse on things, giving the the illusion of their immediate presence on the screen, all that remains is to explore this device, to expose its operating modes, to bring its effects to the surface, to revisit its previous results. So the essential is to have a full knowledge of the cinematographic machine, to avoid that the film becomes simply the place of an illusion (or, always passing from the filmmaker to the viewer, to avoid that the film becomes a trap in which to be prisoners).

In short, there is a 'knowing how to live' (or, for those who follow the film, a 'knowing how to relive') as opposed to a 'knowing how to show' (and for the viewer a 'knowing how to observe'); a maieutic commitment (to let things unfold their meaning) as opposed to a systematic self-reference (to make explicit what is being done step by step); an idea of ​​cinema as a very sensitive antenna directed towards the world as opposed to an idea of ​​cinema as a linguistic exercise that reflects itself; some might even say, Rossellini opposed to Godard. The dividing line between the two fronts is at least apparently clear. And yet the knowledge that permeates the modern, although it is evident in differentiated forms, also unifies the territory. Both because it gives it a common basis. Both because it allows for circularity. It is useful to go deeper into this passage. Going back over the two fronts, we are now in front of a praise of the experience (the essential is to make contact directly with things, before talking about them, and therefore to make signs intervene), now to a praise of language (the main thing is to master the universe of signs, before saying something, and therefore to confront the world). During the twentieth century, these two options sometimes led to extreme positions, that is, on the one hand, to immerse oneself in the existing without ever being able to represent it, on the other, to talk to each other that postpones the moment of reference to reality indefinitely . However, even more often during the twentieth century the experience and language have shown themselves as two closely related measures. In fact, the premise of the other was seen in each. Even more, in each one we saw the emergence of the other, hidden among its folds. Hence a frequent overlapping of measures: well exemplified by those authors who combine passion for reality and passion for texts; or who open themselves programmatically to the surrounding universe and equally programmatically practice linguistic experimentation (consider in this regard the notion of modern text advanced by R. Barthes in De l'œuvre au texte, in "Revue d'esthétique", 1971, 3; trad. It. In The buzz of the language, 1988, pp. 57-64). Hence, above all, that completely typical ability of the modern work of presenting itself as a cross-section of the world in which fragments of reality and fragments of discourse coexist, and at the same time as a self-regulated text whose operation contributes as much peculiar aesthetic choices as a reference to the laws of nature (the double reference to the laws of aesthetics and the laws of nature appear in many of the 'manifestos' of the twentieth century). In other words: hence the vocation of the modern work to propose itself as a portrait and as a self-portrait. posters of the twentieth century). In other words: hence the vocation of the modern work to propose itself as a portrait and as a self-portrait. posters of the twentieth century). In other words: hence the vocation of the modern work to propose itself as a portrait and as a self-portrait.

These dynamics are also present in modern cinema. More than extreme choices, which are not lacking (the clearest examples are found in experimental cinema, especially in the structural cinema of the US underground), there is in fact a frequent circularity between the two poles. References to experience that end in a celebration of language (think, within Neorealism, of Giuseppe De Santis). Attempts at new paths in terms of language justified by the desire to better represent the experience (8 1/2, 1963, by Federico Fellini). Metalinguistic irony combined with the search for an absolute psychological truth (Jean-Pierre Léaud as opposed to Marlon Brando in Last tango in Paris, 1972, by B. Bertolucci). Reinterpretation of genres to eliminate their filtering power (Mc Cabe and Mrs. Miller, 1971, I compari, by R. Altman). Self-confession that ends in the apology of cinema (La nuit américaine, 1973, Effect night, by F. Truffaut). And so on. As a seal of this circularity, Rossellini and Godard must be remembered: after all, it is no coincidence that one after Rome, the open city (1945) shoots a metalinguistic film such as The Killing Machine (1952), and that the other before Pravda (1969) shoot a film that challenges documentary ways like Deux ou trois choses que je sais d'elle (1966; Two or three things I know about her) .In this sense, the awareness that underlies both 'knowing how to live' and 'knowing how to show' works as a discriminating factor but also as a unifying trait. In fact, it now feeds a realistic cinema, now a metalinguistic cinema. Nonetheless, it allows us to grasp the same basic need behind the various choices: this requirement consists in making the gaze an opportunity of knowledge, even if not necessarily determined, rational.It should be added that this tension towards awareness makes the film no longer an instrument pedagogical and directive, as it was for the classic, but a place of criticism. Criticism of traditional images and sounds, in the name of more valuable images and sounds; to the usual forms of gaze, in the name of a more acute gaze; to the existing, in the name of the possible. Just as this tension towards awareness pushes the directors to make research and the different options that appear to them a question, even if not above all, of morality: that is to say to propose an ethics of aesthetics, according to the beautiful definition of Miccichè (1972, p. 18). The cinema of late modernity: beyond the photographic image, beyond the collective consumption. - The eighties, and then with more decision the nineties of the 20th century, see a further change of scenery. The cinema doubled the first century of life and found itself engaged in some radical changes. In particular, it faces two challenges that invest its basic characteristics, those that seem to mark its deepest nature: respectively its nature of 'animated photography' and its nature of 'spectacle for collective enjoyment'. On the one hand, in fact, new ways of producing film images are developed, without going through the photographic device. This is the case for all special effects based on the potential of electronics. The dinosaurs of Jurassic Park (1993) by Steven Spielberg, unlike King Kong (1933) by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, are born from a pure mathematical algori-tmo: they materialize on the screen without having ever had a actual existence, not even that of a puppet. With this they make the cinema make a real leap (moreover already announced by other films, albeit in a less exemplary way, and destined to become even more evident when it comes to the use of virtual actors): that is, they offer it the opportunity to give up to objects, landscapes, bodies; in short, they lead him to free himself from reality. Now it is clear that the cinematographic images thus obtained (but, by resonance, the others, which in the meantime continue to be used) do not have those traits of credibility, evidence, meaning, who had traditional cinematic images. What they retain is only the similarity with reality (a similarity that can also reach virtuosity); instead, they lose, irremediably, the direct existential link with the real, no longer called to determine with its concrete presence what appears on the screen. On the other hand, new ways of consuming the film are determined, without going through the room. Cinema faces a different and more articulated social life: in videotapes or videodiscs and digital media; on the home TV, offered freely (as a means of acquiring audiences to be sold in turn for advertising), or through a subscription, or pay-per-view, or VOD (Video On Demand); broadcast over the air, via cable or via satellite; on the computer screen, thanks to the CD-ROM or via the Internet. It is evident that an audiovisual product so used does not trigger the psychological or social dynamics, nor does it work on the imagination or critical awareness of a society, nor does it provoke adhesion and comparison, like the films used in traditional forms. It is a more direct and at the same time more flexible consumer product. It is hardly worth mentioning that these two radical changes coincide with the emergence, in the background, of a new media landscape: a landscape that is born from the confluence of the universe of the show and universe of communication promoted by information technology (New communication technologies, 1993); and a landscape marked by at least three major structural features. First, the presence of production conglomerates that deal not only with cinema, but also of entertainment, information, telecommunications etc. Secondly, the offer not of single products or services, but of composite 'packages'. It is no coincidence that the rooms now tend to also have a bookstore or a restaurant, and even more that they are increasingly allocated within large shopping centers, alongside dozens of other establishments where both tangible goods are sold, both intangible assets (Friedberg 1993). Thirdly, easy accessibility to the products and services of this sector: they are in some way perpetually available, thanks to the enormous transport potential of the distribution network, which is increasingly made up of cables that connect a very large number of points and on which digital signals travel. This means that the acquisition of a product and service is determined by the needs of the user (or at least it appears: in reality the bottlenecks are still numerous): the latter can build his menu 'freely'; and if he is a cinephile, he can compose his vision program by drawing them from archives that function as an ideal film library. So we have come to compose a media landscape marked by globalization, availability, compatibility, multimedia and interactivity. It is clear that cinema in this context loses its specificity and autonomy and becomes part of a larger territory (see Cinema: second century, third millennium. First report, 1998). Its location is often on the edge of the system. An example are all those productions that outside the mainstream pursue characteristics such as expressive and authorial ability, or aesthetic research and innovation; typical values ​​of a previous season, but which now seem out of the way with respect to the new market of images and sounds. This does not mean that these productions do not offer very significant works: on the contrary, they offer extraordinary films but in some way 'niche'. In fact, it is perhaps in this area that some of the recent masterpieces of cinema are found. After all, it is typical: aesthetic enjoyment often requires 'out of date' works to achieve it. However, many times the position of the cinema is central to the new picture. Think of those cases in which the film acts as a towing product, and is proposed as the pivot of a overall operation (it serves precisely to put on the market at the same time a disc, a book, a video game, a fashion line etc .: with consequences both economically and symbolically); or think of those cases in which the film mobilizes the advanced technologies on which the system is based, and takes on the role of a real laboratory for the new forms of social imagination (the reference is naturally to the cinema of special effects, not only ' toy ', but also a new way of conceiving the world); or think of those cases in which the film acts as a trigger or terminal for new forms of visual experience (e.g., when it consolidates the use of new points of view, such as extreme subjective or large totals, first experienced on television , especially in sports broadcasts, and then destined to switch to video games; or when it creates forms of fruition that somehow anticipate and prepare for virtual reality, as in the Parisian Géode, a completely enveloping room). Moreover, the characters of the films that best interpret the season that could be called of late modernity (or even of postmodernity, if the latter term was not a little worn by now: see Canova 2000), these are precisely: great technological investment, ample use value and strong connections with the system. Which corresponds, on the level of language, the search for maximum spectacle (the example is S. Spielberg, opera omnia); the repeatability of the formula, both through sequels or prequels, and through real and proper clones, perhaps in parodic form (Rocky, Rambo, Star Trek, but also the couple Independence day and Mars attacks!); and the use of procedures derived from other areas of expression or from other media, and often taken without any mediation (SuperMario Bros, Jumanji etc.). George Lucas' Star Wars (1977; Star Wars) by George Lucas is somehow the initiator and the emblem of this cinema (it is clear, not the only one produced this season, but certainly the one that best represents its spirit). And nevertheless, even when it assumes a prominent position, even when it places itself at the center of the system, it is still a part of the overall territory: a part that must be aware of the whole: the tautological gaze. - On the level of the ways of vision, the formula that marks the cinema of late modernity or postmodernity is 'what is seen is what is there'. L' filmic image seems to affirm the pure and simple presence of something on the screen: the 'being there' of a 'figure to be seen', nothing more; as in a tautology. However, this requires some clarifications. First of all, this 'being there' has no ontological pretension or consistency: it does not refer in any way to the existence of any reality, but only to perceptible presences on the screen; it is not an imprint of the world, a trace of an object or a body; it is, if you will, pure signifier. In parallel, it does not imply any subjectivity, that is, it does not manifest the presence of an author committed to expressing himself; if anything, it is only a component of a design (most of the time an economic-industrial project) to which it corresponds with perfect functionality. Therefore no postponement; no want to say. This explains well why the images of late modern cinema often appear 'indifferent': they can arouse amazement and admiration, but they do not discriminate between truth and falsehood, or between meaning and senselessness, nor are they distinguished from each other on the basis of these parameters. Even if, on the other hand, this cinema reserves images which, precisely because they seem to rediscover the taste of a strong reference to reality, even that of the set, take on an unprecedented impact. Think, for example, of the last sequence of Schindler's list (1993; Schindler's list - Schindler's list) of Spielberg, with the Holocaust survivors who take the actors who played the part by the hand, and you comparisons with the rest of the film, and indeed with the rest of Spielberg's cinema, which is instead the maximum example of 'indifference'. But think also of Abel Ferrara, who with Snake eyes (1993; Occhi di serpente) or The funeral (1996; Fratelli) fights the 'indifference' of images through a sort of cruelty theater, in which the actors are brought to an extreme condition, moreover made explicit by the story told. And think above all of David Cronenberg, who in particular with Crash (1996) makes 'indifference', both of images and of life and sexes, a kind of tragic obsession. So, after the cancellation of the need that distinguished the classic, the end of the awareness that marked the modern also emerges, in which the challenge to reality and language played an essential role. In its place, a gaze that merely aligns the images on the screen, to verify its presence, to optimize its effects. A gaze without adjectives: a tautological gaze. Secondly, this 'being' of 'something to see' leads to building a world that is somewhat paradoxical. Not so much because it is a universe that no longer has a necessary connection with the actual one. How much because it is a world that seems to have lost its traditional parameters. On the screen, in fact, a reality is often drawn without measure, too big or too small, or if you want to be caught from too far or too close (think of the frequent use of 'excessive' shots: extreme detail and total chock). An uneven reality, which brings together objects and individuals that are different from each other and often incompatible (think of the extraordinary heterogeneity of the universe of Blade runner, 1982, by Ridley Scott). A reality without a center and without direction (think of the worlds that literally are not together, such as those frequently described by Brian De Palma, a director who deeply explores the sense of dispersion). A reality without origin or without originality (think of the practice of remake and quotation: déja vu is not only accepted, but also becomes a strength). A reality without conclusion and without closure (think of the series: as Spielberg explained, there are no stories, but only episodes) .Finally, this 'being' of 'something to see' allows you to load the different types of different values cinema consumption. The 'zero degree' gaze that the viewer makes right from the film can in fact 'reshape' depending on the different situations of use (which involve differently the degree of awareness of the spectator, if passionate, cinephile, film student, etc.) These are the three main aspects that the 'being there' of 'something to see' brings into play game: an indifferent gaze, which gives body to a paradoxical world, and which takes on different values ​​depending on the context of use of the film. The idea of ​​a vision that defines itself, or that begins and ends on itself (as we have said: a tautological gaze) gives reason for all three of these traits. However the cinema of late modernity, both for its characters and for the picture in which it operates, does not limit itself to giving a particular twist to its gaze: it also leads it to confront its borders, pushes it beyond its borders.

Beyond seeing

As already pointed out, late modern cinema loses that link with reality that seemed essential for producing filmic images. The latter no longer necessarily arise from a reality placed in front of the camera. In many cases they acquire verisimilitude, but they lose their cast, imprint: they increase their value as icons at the expense of their status as indices. This applies above all to images created through electronic procedures; but it inevitably affects the entire body of the films. One of the effects is that cinema in some way changes its position: it is no longer comparable to the arts or the indexical media, primarily to photography; instead he approaches the media and the iconic arts, such as painting, illustration etc. More precisely, it enters the area of ​​simulation practices, alongside video games, role-playing games or virtual reality. Moreover, it is precisely in this way that it can continue to maintain faith in the function that has always distinguished it, that of celebrating the closeness and availability of things, the grasping and retraceability of the world. At the end of the 20th century and at the beginning of the 21st he does it precisely by simulating the real: in the impossibility of linking the world thanks to an existential bond, he limits himself to imitating it, but with such perfection that the reality on the screen can be superimposed on the actual one. that of celebrating the closeness and availability of things, the graspability and retraceability of the world. At the end of the 20th century and at the beginning of the 21st he does it precisely by simulating the real: in the impossibility of linking the world thanks to an existential bond, he limits himself to imitating it, but with such perfection that the reality on the screen can be superimposed on the actual one. that of celebrating the closeness and availability of things, the graspability and retraceability of the world. At the end of the 20th century and at the beginning of the 21st he does it precisely by simulating the real: in the impossibility of linking the world thanks to an existential bond, he limits himself to imitating it, but with such perfection that the reality on the screen can be superimposed on the actual one.

This fact profoundly changes the balance on which the gaze of the cinema rested. First of all, seeing redesigns its relationship with imagination. In fact, the loss of indexicality lays bare a fact that cinema has always been aware of, but which it often tends to keep in the background: the fundamentally illusory nature of the presence of reality on the screen. The film can well celebrate the proximity and availability of things: but what it shows us is not where it appears; if there has been, it is now elsewhere (Melchiorre 1972). In this sense, seeing in the cinema has always meant filling an absence, filling a hole; in short, dealing with a small hallucination (Baudry 1978), which leads perception to weave precisely imagination. L' photographic-based image tried to regulate this problem by boasting its own nature as a 'world footprint'; an imprint that directly preserved the memory of the objects and bodies that had left it, and therefore allowed to evoke them exactly as if they continued to be there. To the actual absence of things that image responded with a call so strong as to make them present. Late modern cinema, with its icon images, overturns the mechanism. Since there is no longer an existential link at stake with the world, but only the attempt to resemble it as much as possible, the absence of things appears completely clear and at the same time not at all dramatic. This means that you no longer have to forcefully evoke what is not actually there; Rather, you are required to recognize what appears on the screen; and to recognize it in the two senses of the term, that is to identify it and accept it. Here is the point: we move from evocation to recognition; seeing always mixes with imagining, but this component of imagination changes sign. It mixes with seeing without fear and without restraint; in harmony with the different way of making the world next, or rather, of building the proximity of the world. Secondly, almost as a form of compensation, seeing shifts even more towards feeling. In fact, late modern films tend to mobilize the whole range of perceptions: they involve the whole body, so to speak, and not just the eye. This is due to the extreme wealth of stimuli they can give: they offer perfect images, of great detail, in a pressing way, projected on large screens and accompanied by enveloping music. After all, this is their field of action: as copies and no longer tracks, they must reproduce the pulse of the world, not evoke it. Except that in reproducing it they lead him to excitement. The result is that watching a movie means immersing yourself in a sort of total experience. In which often we are no longer guided by the need to reconstruct what appears on the screen, but rather by the pleasure of abandoning ourselves to the rhythms of the film, its suggestions, the overabundance of sounds etc. This intensification of the cinematographic experience involves another change: assisting to a film means less and less to see a film in a suitable environment, and more and more to enter an environment that the film creates, precisely for its sensory richness. This is, moreover, in harmony with one of the most evident trends in the media field: from the media that 'adapt' to one's own environment of use (for example, the TV), we move on to those that themselves constitute an environment in which to insert oneself ( eg the Internet, with its creating a simulated conversation situation which the user accesses). Finally the new status of film images forces seeing to reconsider its relationship with reading and listening. The word, written or pronounced, and even more the voice, occupy a territory traditionally opposite to that of the image; they represent the domain of writing and orality as opposed to the domain of visuality. However, the fall of indexicality in cinema changes the terms of the comparison: if only because it allows or forces other signs, other media, to make an impression or a cast of reality. Among these media, the voice seems to perform this function very well. In fact, it is the voice that is better able to recall the presence of a momentarily absent body or seems to really return all its characters. Think technically of the great care for the sound systems of the room, as if the image needs to be listened to before being seen. Or think, with a touch of emotion, of the voice of J.-L. Godard who comments on his latest works, as if only it can explain the author's presence. Or think, as an extreme example, of the voices that fill the monochrome screen of Derek Jarman's Blue (1993), the only possible testimonies of the truth of a life. but also the word. Including the one written, also capable of making a trace of being there or of having been something more than the image can now do. Seventy years after the top intellectuals announced triumphantly that 'the time of' image has come ', to sanction the passage from the old testament of written and oral culture to the new testament of visual culture, cinema must confront itself, and in a new way, with a frontier that perhaps it had forgotten. This is probably the last challenge that an optical device faces; the extreme edge towards which seeing must go. See letters to hear a voice. See with the ear relying on listening. See the buzz of reality. See with your eyes closed. also capable of making a trace of being there or of having been there of something more than the image can now do. Seventy years after the top intellectuals announced triumphantly that 'the time of the image has come' To sanction the passage from the old testament of written and oral culture to the new testament of visual culture, cinema must confront itself, and in a new way, with a frontier that it had perhaps forgotten. This is probably the last challenge that an optical device faces; the extreme edge towards which seeing must go. See letters to hear a voice. See with the ear relying on listening. See the buzz of reality. See with your eyes closed. also capable of making a trace of being there or of having been something more than the image can now do. Seventy years after the top intellectuals announced triumphantly that 'the time of the image has come' To sanction the passage from the old testament of written and oral culture to the new testament of visual culture, cinema must confront itself, and in a new way, with a frontier that it had perhaps forgotten. This is probably the last challenge that an optical device faces; the extreme edge towards which seeing must go. See letters to hear a voice. See with the ear relying on listening. See the buzz of reality. See with your eyes closed. there has been something more than the image can now do. Seventy years after the top intellectuals announced triumphantly that 'the time of the image has come', to mark the passage from the old testament of written and oral culture to the new testament of visual culture, cinema must confront itself, and in a new way, with a frontier that perhaps it had forgotten. This is probably the last challenge that an optical device faces; the extreme edge towards which seeing must go. See letters to hear a voice. See with the ear relying on listening. See the buzz of reality. See with your eyes closed. there has been something more than the image can now do. Seventy years after the top intellectuals announced triumphantly that 'the time of the image has come', to mark the passage from the old testament of written and oral culture to the new testament of visual culture, cinema must confront itself, and in a new way, with a frontier that perhaps it had forgotten. This is probably the last challenge that an optical device faces; the extreme edge towards which seeing must go. See letters to hear a voice. See with the ear relying on listening. See the buzz of reality. See with your eyes closed. the time of the image has come ', to sanction the passage from the old testament of written and oral culture to the new testament of visual culture, cinema must confront itself, and in a new way, with a frontier that it had perhaps forgotten. This is probably the last challenge that an optical device faces; the extreme edge towards which seeing must go. See letters to hear a voice. See with the ear relying on listening. See the buzz of reality. See with your eyes closed. the time of the image has come ', to sanction the passage from the old testament of written and oral culture to the new testament of visual culture, cinema must confront itself, and in a new way, with a frontier that it had perhaps forgotten. This is probably the last challenge that an optical device faces; the extreme edge towards which seeing must go. See letters to hear a voice. See with the ear relying on listening. See the buzz of reality. See with your eyes closed. last challenge that an optical device faces; the extreme edge towards which seeing must go. See letters to hear a voice. See with the ear relying on listening. See the buzz of reality. See with your eyes closed. last challenge that an optical device faces; the extreme edge towards which seeing must go. See letters to hear a voice. See with the ear relying on listening. See the buzz of reality. See with your eyes closed.BIBLIOGRAPHY

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T. Gunning , Le style non-continu des premiers temps , in "Les cahiers de la Cinémathèque" 1979, 29.

RC Allen , Vaudeville and film , 1895-1915. A study in media interaction, New York 1980.

Film before Griffith , ed. JL Fell, Berkeley 1983 (in particular A. Gaudreault, Temporality and narrativity in early cinema. 1895-1908 ).

The mechanics of the visible. The cinema of European origins , edited by A. Costa, Florence 1983.

J.-L. Leutrat , L'alliance brisée. Le western des années 1920 , Lyon 1985.

E. Dagrada , Bibliographie internationale du cinéma des premiers temps , Montreal 1987, 1995².

A. Costa , The moral of the toy. Essay on Georges Méliès , Bologna 1989.

A. Gaudreault, T. Gunning , Le cinéma des premiers temps: a défi à l'histoire du cinéma? , in L'histoire du cinéma. Nouvelles approches , éd. J. Aumont, A. Gaudreault, M. Marie, Paris 1989, pp. 49-63.

Early cinema. Space, frames, narratives , ed. Th. Elsaesser, A. Barker, London 1990 (in particular A. Gaudreault, Showing and telling. Image and word in early cinema , pp. 274-281.

T. Gunning , The cinema of attractions. Early film, its spectator and the avant-garde , pp. 56-62).

Ch. Musser , The emergence of cinema. The American screen to 1907 , New York 1990.

N. Burch , La lucarne de infini. Naissance du langage cinématographique , Paris 1991 (trad. It. Parma 1994).

T. Gunning , DW Griffith and the origins of American narrative film. The early years at Biograph , Urbana 1991.

J. Staiger , Interpreting films. Studies in the historical reception of American cinema , Princeton (NJ) 1992.

L. Mannoni , The grand art of the light and the shadow. Archéologie du cinéma , Paris 1994 (trad. It. Torino 2000).

Le bonimenteur de vues animées / The moving picture lecturer, sous la direction de J.-P. Simon , "Iris", 1996, 22, nr. monograph.

On the critical-theoretical debate of the early days:

G. Grignaffini , Knowledge and theories of cinema. The silent period , Bologna 1989.

On classic cinema:

R. Warshow , The immediate experience. Movies, comics, theater & other aspects of popular culture , Garden City (NY) 1962 (in particular Movie chronicle: the westerner and The gangster as tragic hero ).

The American film industry , ed. T. Balio, Madison 1976.

R. Bellour , Alterner / raconter , in Le cinéma américain. Analyzes of films , éd. R. Bellour, 1st vol., Paris 1980.

S. Cavell , Pursuits of happiness. The Hollywood comedy of remarriage , Cambridge (Mass.) 1981 (trad. It. Turin 1999).

D. Bordwell, J. Staiger, K. Thompson , The classical Hollywood cinema. Film style & mode of production to 1960 , New York 1985.

R. Altman , The American film musical , Bloomington 1987.

On modern cinema:

N. Burch , Praxis du cinéma , Paris 1969 (trad. It. Parma 1980).

L. Miccichè , The new cinema of the 60s , Turin 1972 (in particular Introduction to a conclusion , pp. 7-22).

L. Miccichè , The reason and the look. Essays and notes on cinema , Cosenza 1979.

The skin and the soul. Around the Nouvelle Vague , edited by G. Grignaffini, Florence 1984.

P. Bonitzer , Décadrages. Peinture et cinéma , Paris 1985.

P. Montani , The debt of language. The problem of aesthetic self-reflexivity in sign, text and speech , Venice 1985.

Nouvelle vague , edited by R. Turigliatto, Turin 1985.

New American cinema. Independent American cinema from the 1960s , curated by A. Aprà, Milan 1986.

J. Aumont , L'œil interminable. Cinéma et peinture , Paris 1989.

Poetics of the nouvelles vagues , edited by A. Aprà, Venice 1989.

Free cinema and surroundings. New English cinema, 1956-1968 , edited by E. Martini, Turin 1991.

G. De Vincenti , The concept of modernity in cinema , Parma 1993.

The volumes on individual national cinemas published annually by the Pesaro International New Cinema Exhibition are essential.

On postmodern cinema:

V. Melchiorre , The symbolic imagination. Philosophical anthropology essay , Bologna 1972.

F. La Polla , The new American cinema, 1967-1975 , Venice 1978, 1985².

End of the century video cultures , Naples 1989.

F. Colombo , Synthetic shadows. Electronic image theory essay , Naples 1990.

F. Jameson , Signatures of the visible , New York-London 1990.

The new communication technologies , edited by G. Bettetini, F. Colombo, Milan 1993.

A. Negro , Disenchanting transparencies. Forms and strategies of postmodern cinema , Rome 1996.

Media Observatory , Cinema: second century, third millennium. First report , edited by F. Casetti et al., Rome 1998.

G. Canova , The alien and the bat. The crisis of form in contemporary cinema , Milan 2000.

On the new characteristics of fruition, F. Casetti, R. Odin , De la paléo- à la néo-télévision: a sémio-pragmatique approach , in "Communications", 1990, 51, nr. monographic: Télévisions / Mutations.


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Introductory paths

پنجشنبه 24 بهمن 1398
15:51
masoumi5631

Scientific omens of a future cinema

The most recent studies have proposed a redefinition of the term pre-cinema with its insertion into spectacular practices and above all of scientific research, giving particular importance to their connections. There is no "one straight line, or linear perspective, that combines the history of cinema with that of its long incubation and prior preparation. Everything that preceded the occurrence of the conditions for the advent of cinema history is the story of many confluent stories. , parallel, communicating and divergent "(GP Brunetta, The journey of the icononaut, 1997, p. 494).

Historiography on the origins of cinema (in particular the studies of Michel Coissac, Georges Sadoul and Jean Mitry) only partially grasped the extent of the problem. Starting from the seventeenth century, there are descriptions of various types of dark rooms, all based on the simple principle of a ray of light which, through a small hole, recreated the external images inside a dark space. This phenomenon, although already known since ancient times and described in the works of medieval authors such as John Peckham (1240 ca.-1292) or Ibn al-Hayṯam (called Alhazen, ca. 965-1039), takes on particular importance from Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) onwards for its value as a metaphor for vision, traced back to the problem of image formation using optical devices. "The experience, which shows how the objects send their spices or similarities intertwined within the eye in the albugino omore, it is shown when for some small round spiraculo the spices of the aluminized objects will penetrate into a strong dark dwelling. Then you will receive these spices in a white paper placed inside this house somewhat close to it. And you will see all the aforesaid objects in it with their own figures and colors; but they will be lesser and more so, because of the said intersection. Them simulacra, if they are born from the sunlit spot, they are actually painted on it, which is meant to be very thin and seen from the side "(Code D, sheet 8 recto A, 1485-1490). The description is fundamental to understand the moment when the problem of a vision begins to arise ' equipped ', which radically changes the natural vision employed by ancient science. Following Leonardo's research, lenses and mirrors were variously combined in dark rooms, magic lanterns, microscopes, telescopes and countless other optical instruments, to obtain enlarged, shrunken, multiplied figures. Anamorphic projections and mirrors had dominated the scientific literature and continued throughout the eighteenth century to maintain a place of honor in the manufacturers' treatises and advertisements, becoming the simplest and most usual optical amusements. spread interest in science and its tools even outside the narrow circle of specialists, the conquest of new 'audiences' and new 'stages', the proliferation of a scientific literature aimed at the growing number of collectors and amateurs, explain the sensational nineteenth-century developments in the optical-spectacular setting. Eighteenth-century scientism sought the visually striking effect through the application of the physical, perspective, optical and mathematical arguments developed in the Renaissance. Starting from the seventeenth century and, in a more incisive way, from the eighteenth century, the creation and construction of images in spectacular function, thanks to the unprecedented observation possibilities opened by optical instruments, gave birth to a completely new collective visual heritage, in which it prevailed the search for wonder, as in the suggestive descriptions of the microscopic observations traceable in the eighteenth-century scientific texts. The telescope and the microscope, expanding man's perceptive possibilities, determined the widening of his visual, mental, ethical and aesthetic horizons, opening new dimensions and worlds never imagined to his gaze. Observation appropriated new dimensions, new beings, new landscapes, identifying unprecedented objects of wonder, study and speculation, which pushed man to practice new physical and mental spaces. Giovanni Rucellai (1475-1525) in Le api , a poem dedicated to Gian Giorgio Trissino and published posthumously, at the behest of these, in 1539, better known to zoology scholars than to historians of optics, proposes the description of a very first microscopic observation: the bee anatomy examined with a concave mirror, used as a simple microscope. The great Florentine humanist celebrates the wonderful and surprising character of the images enlarged by the mirror, capable of prodigiously transforming an infant into a colossus and a bee into a dragon: "[...] And it would seem incredible, if I narrated / some of their members how are they / which are almost invisible to our eyes [...] / [...] So if you want to know this way, / take a nice shiny and hollowed mirror, / in which the small shape of a child / may it be even from the mother's mouth, / you look like a big colossus, / similar to that of the Sol that was in Rhodes [...] / [...] So you will see multiplying the image / from the concave reflection of the metal, / in such a way, that the of which we are their debtors in natural history, and in anatomy. The aromatic infusions, a drop of vinegar, are populated with such a prodigious quantity of small animals, that Helvetia and China are deserts and loneliness in comparison ... "(1737, pp. 108-09). to the predilection for the infinitely small one also perceives the fact that the optical instruments assigned to its analysis were more accessible to the general public. Algarotti evokes the fantastic stellar panoramas hidden in the eye of an insect, jumping with a singular effect of alienation from the size microscopic to the telescopic one: "If the eye of a fly, which looks like a small, almost formless prominence, looks under the microscope, it appears to be nothing but a compound of thousands and thousands of small eyes, like some nebulous stars in the sky, an anthill of thousands of small stars can be seen with the telescope. In some insects there were even thirty-four and more, each of which, in its extreme smallness, such a perfect crystalline lens, like ours, had "(pp. 109-10).

In the interesting eighteenth-century variant of the solar or projection microscope (halfway between the microscope and the magic lantern), the spectacular dimension became striking: in fact, the instrument projected the highly enlarged image of insects or others into a dark room small animals, by means of the sunlight collected and amplified by a mirror that could be variously inclined, by a microscope and by a converging lens. Small eighteenth-century optical instruments, which had the character of pure and simple divertissements, linked to the playful and gallant spirit of the century, such as polemoscopes, pocket darkrooms, zogroscopes, poliscopes, attest to the growing visual 'curiosity' that the instrument provoked and that would have come to real forms in the following century '

The association between science and entertainment typical of eighteenth-century experimental physics is an obligatory starting point for understanding the developments of the nineteenth century, which saw an expansion of methods, areas and users. The visual dimension was a fundamental aspect of the popularizing spirit of the age of enlightenment: the phenomena of spectacularization necessarily passed through that privileged communication channel which is the gaze. In Nouvelles récréations physiques et mathématiques of 1770, one of the most significant scientific treatises for richness and clarity of display, in describing some suggestive catottric effects of 'moving' the images, Edme Gilles Guyot (1706-1786) observes: "Of all our senses that of sight is certainly the most subject to illusions;

The decisive role of optics in eighteenth-century spectacular experimentalism is perceived by the size of the space dedicated to it by the treatises, as well as by the same methods of scientific dissemination. During the 18th century. the scientists-demonstrators were in fact showmen, capable of captivating and persuading the public by making use of highly suggestive visual experiments, as well as the necessary individual qualities of charm and 'stage presence'. These characters conducted the optics experiences with a vast array of lenses, mirrors, prisms, microscopes, telescopes, dark rooms, optical boxes and magic lanterns, collecting the curiosity and enthusiasm of the spectators. The public's gaze gradually widened to transform itself from Enlightenment curiosity into omnivorous nineteenth-century voyeurism, so pervasive as to be structured in various ways, on the border between science and play, but with a decided prevalence of the more playful aspects; a vast technical manual supported the diffusion of these tools, divulging their use to the countless self-taught scientists. Faced with an ever wider and more diversified demand, the nineteenth-century publishing published continuous texts for the general public, based on the schematization of subjects encoded by eighteenth-century treatises, sometimes conducted on previous reductions (to cite just one example, see the successful translation Recreations in mathematics and natural philosophy, 1803, by Charles Hutton, from the text of 1694 by J. Ozanam). But already between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries from a scientific and specialist literary production, linked to a closed and sacred conception of knowledge as a treasure of the few and a privilege to be jealously guarded, we had moved on to texts based on an idea of ​​knowledge that took shape precisely from the seventeenth-century scientific revolution and it proved to be the patrimony of many, useful and transmissible, communicable, conceived for the benefit of the entire community, the fruit of the collective and no longer the exclusive prerogative of a very limited number of brains, who conducted their research in all secrecy. The academies and scientific societies that proliferated in Europe in the first decades of the seventeenth century were the field of application of this new idea of ​​knowledge (P. Rossi, The Philosophers and the Machines, 1962, pp. 68-103). The conception of "

From the beginning of the eighteenth century the new experimental method was introduced into the academic environment with the courses of 'natural philosophy' of the first English demonstrators disciples of Isaac Newton (1642-1727), from John Keill (1671-1721) to Francis Hauksbee (1666 -1713?) To John Théophile Desaguliers (1683-1744). In France, Abbot Jean-Antoine Nollet (1700-1770), who followed the path taken by Dutch popularizers and vulgarisers such as Willem Jacob Storm 's Gravesande (1688-1742) and Pieter or Petrus van Musschenbroeck (1692-1761), made populate the method. The first chair of experimental physics in Paris, commissioned by Louis XV at the Collège de Navarre, was assigned to J.-A. Nollet in 1735. From 1743 his six volumes of Leçons de physique expérimentale were published, a work that not only distinguished itself from those that had hitherto appeared in terms of organic and theoretical and methodological completeness and for the wealth of original experiences, but which marked a fundamental milestone on the indicated path of the transition to the great nineteenth-century popularization. The Leçons were in fact informed by a declared didactic intent, which was confirmed in the publication, almost thirty years later, of the Art des expériences (1770), the first manual designed specifically for amateurs, as a guide to the construction of the instruments. -Aignan Sigaud de la Fond (1740-1810), another great French popularizer, pupil and successor of Nollet at the Collège de Navarre, giving to the press in 1775 the work Description et usage d'un cabinet de physique expérimentale explicitly addressed to amateurs : " We cannot therefore encourage enough those amateurs who multiply each day, and who, zealously applying themselves to the study of the facts, try to get the best equipment related to their interests and the kind of work they intend to follow. One cannot therefore expect much from this general taste, which extends to our most distant Provinces, from this noble emulation, which overcomes the difficulties that oppose it and which currently engages almost all Physics Professors in obtaining excellent machines and in setting up the toilets "(p. XV).

Considering the stated intents, the structure and the type of interlocutor to whom these works intended, it was easy to foresee, within a few decades and with the beginning of the new century, the transition from the public and spectacular dimension of science to the private and domestic, with the transformation of the collective show into a private game, or rather into a 'toy'. Gerard L'Estrange Turner, punctually outlining the picture of the passage from the demonstration apparatus of the 18th century. to the varied universe of children's games and amusements of the following century, and particularly of the Victorian age, he underlines how knowledge was consciously or unconsciously absorbed through play (Scientific instruments and experimental philosophy 1550-1850, 1990, p. 384).

The eighteenth-century treaties and the trade cards of the manufacturers clearly show, alongside production aimed at satisfying the demand for complex machines for scientific and professional use, the existence of a vast repertoire of more commonly used tools intended for the playful dimension . The nineteenth-century production was based above all on tools designed in the eighteenth century for individual use, for private play, to which the optical devices of the richest collecting and professional practice were mixed, as evidenced by their presence in the catalogs and descriptions of the most important collections weather. Many types and models of optical boxes and darkrooms were also offered in pocket format as well as prisms, anamorphoses, magic lanterns and other small instruments' useless', completely free from any scientific use, pure and simple divertissements (such as small pocket poliscopes, in wood or brass, known in England with the term dragonfly which, thanks to a prismatic lens, allowed multiplied vision of an object, with a simple but suggestive phantasmagoric effect of figures and colors). The polemoscope, whose invention at the end of the 18th century. it is attributed by Mathurin-Jacques Brisson and by Jean-Étienne Montucla to Johannes Hevelius (1611-1687), it dates back to 1637 and is an even more curious and emblematic case. Telescope equipped with an inclined mirror and a lateral lens, designed as a war instrument, enjoyed great fortune throughout the eighteenth century especially in its portable version, as a theater spectacle. Nollet describes it in detail, underlining its peculiar dimension of "seeing without being seen", on which the well-known darkroom mechanism was based, so seductive and delightful because it placed the viewer in the ambiguous and fascinating position of a voyeur. great variety of optical and catottric boxes for domestic entertainment, united by the same type of private use, mostly individual. The zogroscope, which made its appearance since the early eighteenth century as an elementary variant, for private use, of pantoscopes or new worlds, was one of the most interesting tools, as it anticipated subsequent developments by prefiguring the visual obsession of the century. Pantoscopes, present in the squares of Europe, they had repertoires of views variously animated by simple but suggestive light effects, observable from the eyepieces inside the magical 'cassele'. The zogroscope was a very simple instrument for observing optical views, equipped with a magnifying glass and a 45 ° reflecting mirror. The image was positioned upside down at the base and observed through the large convex lens in the mirror, where it could be seen straight, enlarged and three-dimensional. There was something evidently paradoxical in the artifice, as the result was of little effect compared to the direct vision of the image. His suggestion was therefore linked to the fact of "looking through", to the charm of a vision in which an instrument was placed between the gaze and its object. The zogroscope would therefore seem more a product of the omnivorous observation curiosity typical of the time; in this case, looking became a practice largely free from its object, fun in and of itself, by virtue of the interposition of the instrument, which charged this mediated vision with a power of suggestion superior to that of direct vision, while the The psychic condition of the beholder was changing due to the presence of the tool which made it more engaging and full of expectations.

The popular publishing, which reworked the most illustrious models mentioned and found in the world of childhood a new privileged reference, supported this passion for self-taught scientific entertainment that spread in the nineteenth century. The association of play and sport often became an educational vehicle in the various branches of physics: in Philosophy in sport made science in earnest by John Ayrton Paris (1785-1856), president of the Royal College of Physician, who appeared in 1827 and was continually republished in the following decades, the author declared the programmatic intent to "instill in young minds the basic principles of natural philosophy with the help of popular games and youth sports". The large chapter dedicated to optics described all the games based on the phenomenon of retinal persistence, including Joseph-Antoine Ferdinand Plateau's phenachistoscope (1801-1883) and the thaumatropium, created by the same author. Based on the education-delight combination of the eighteenth-century matrix, the rich nineteenth-century scientific publishing production, of a popular nature, found another exemplary text of its spirit and structural characteristics at the end of the century in the treatise of Gaston Tissandier (1843-1899) from emblematic title Les récréations scientifiques, ou l'enseignement par les jeux (1881). In his brief introduction, the author refers to the seventeenth-century treatise by Jacques Ozanam (1640-1717), the first to introduce and apply scientific term the lucky term récréations, dear to 19th century science communicators. Tissandier accuses the illustrious predecessor of lightness in including even "the games of the bussolotti and dexterity" in the field of science, and in dealing with the games of "delightful physics", which are nothing but "ingenious superchierie", stating the method of the experiments described in his work is rigorously scientific, although it was also proposed "for the purpose of educating while having fun" (trad. it. 1882). According to the author, the optical experiences described had the advantage of being able to be realized with elementary instruments, which anyone could have built. Tissandier offers the catalog of the most popular optical games of the 19th century. starting from the simplest: discs and color tops, stroboscopic discs, all the instruments based on the phenomenon of retinal persistence, from the thaumatropium to Plateau's phenachistoscope, from the zootrope to the praxinoscope-theater of Émile Reynaud (1844-1918), up to the deforming mirrors, prisms and anamorphoses. In this way an explanation of the phenomena and devices designed to verify them is carried out with didactic clarity, and the report of experiences that seemed to border on the field of pure entertainment is also offered. The "decapitated speaking" experiment, carried out with the simple use of two 45 ° mirrors, appears exemplary in this sense: "A few years ago, the speaking decapitated obtained in Paris and in a large number of other cities a real success of curiosity. Visitors looked into a room where they could not penetrate, and where they saw a three-footed table; above this table there was a human head, resting on a cloth in the middle of a tray. This head widened its eyes and spoke; it certainly belonged to a man whose body was absolutely disguised ... If a stone had been thrown between the feet of the table, the mirrors reflecting the walls on the right and left would have broken. An unbeliever made use of this process one day "(trad. It. 1882, pp. 171-72). Furthermore, Tissandier describes in a particularly suggestive way some effects of apparitions produced by transparent glasses, which were part of the rich and multifaceted strand nineteenth-century macabre and phantasmatic, and are attested by numerous iconographic repertoires. The study of the mechanisms of the moving image in the 19th century. it implies the need to follow the evolution of the magic lantern, the optical machine that fascinated scientists and technicians since the seventeenth century, engaging them in the development and improvement of increasingly sophisticated models, devices and animation modes. The story of these technical advances and of the varying and diversifying of the iconographic trends is rich and fascinating and unfolds through scientific treatises, from the "magic or thaumaturgical lantern" by Athanasius Kircher (1602-1680), in the Ars magna lucis et umbrae ( 1646), until the dissolving views of the nineteenth-century manuals. With its role as an eminently spectacular optical artifice, in the eighteenth century the magic lantern enjoyed the highest consideration in the scientific field and was repeatedly the subject of academic dissertation. Samuel Urlsperger and Georg Erich Remmelin presented a doctoral thesis on the magic lantern in Tübingen in 1705, prefiguring the possibility of a didactic use of the instrument to illustrate subjects of natural history, history and sacred history, geography and mathematics (Phaenomena laternae magicae, 1705) . In June 1713, Samuel Joannes Rhanaeus presented the Novum et curiosum laternae magicae augmentum quod dissertatione mathematica to Jena. After a historical introduction aimed at affirming the dignity of the topic, appealing to the prestige of authoritative scientists and describing their research and the results achieved in the improvement of the magic lantern, the author proposed the first description of some animated projection glasses, designed and manufactured by himself, minutely illustrating their mechanisms and effects.

In the same physics course that WJS's Gravesande published in Leiden in 1720-21, the magic lantern was recognized as the protagonist of the many reflex reflector machines used "to show useful and pleasant shows". The treatise is of fundamental importance as it offers the most accurate technical description of the structure and use of the instrument at that date: description followed and taken up by successive authors without particular modifications. Regarding the glasses, the author notes that "the subjects must be represented on a flat glass and painted with delicate colors" (col. I, p. 873), they can be formed by round glass disks, with a diameter of five inches , fixed three by three in wooden frames; or the figures are painted in succession on glass bands, also

At the end of the eighteenth century the techniques of image animation and the relative repertoires for the magic lantern were diffused in Europe through the popular work of EG Guyot, which testified to the different quality levels already existing in the production of images for magic lantern: on the one hand the most common one of the glass intended for popular use, used in the squares by the numerous itinerant lanternists, on the other the more sophisticated one of the images reserved for collecting and therefore for the domestic entertainment of a cultured and refined public. The ludic vein flanked the fantastic one: a section of the treatise of 's Gravesande, in fact, was dedicated to the projections on the smoke and the suggestive ghostly apparitions that this technique allowed to evoke,

The slides of the fantastic vein perpetuated the nightmares of the popular and religious imagination finding in the magic lantern a technical improvement with respect to the attempts to arouse spectra and apparitions with the use of parabolic mirrors, as well as with respect to the macabre iconography, mostly attributable to the environment religious, of the first lantern-scientists of the second half of the seventeenth century. This repertoire was not typical of the itinerant show: those who proposed it, showmen who can be placed in the borderland between science and magic, were complex and ambiguous figures and, in the eyes of the public of the time, at least as mysterious as their own artifices. Étienne-Gaspard Robertson (1763-1837), aeronaut physicist, is among these the most complex. In the Mémoires récréatifs, scientifiques et anecdotiques (1831-1833) emerges its rich culture that mixed the most diverse suggestions: Giovan Battista Della Porta and Athanasius Kircher, Cagliostro, black magic and spiritism, the spectacular tradition of the magic lantern, the shadow theater of Dominique François Séraphin (1747-1800), but also the texts and practices of the new experimental physics. As a physicist he proposed experiences that ranged from chemistry to electricity and pneumatics, from pyrotechnics to areostatics. Attracted on one side by the world of magic and the occult, Robertson was equally enthusiastic about the achievements of science, of which he was passionate supporter and of which he exalted precisely, in apparent contradiction with his love for the irrational, the merit of having brought back realities that appeared prodigious and supernatural to rationally understandable causes, clearing the mists of credulity and superstition. A rich apparatus of scenographic artifacts and spectacular acoustic and light effects, which combined with the simultaneous projections obtained with fantascopes and magic lanterns, enhanced his representations in a sort of total show, orchestrated and directed by himself. The fantascope was patented by Robertson on March 27, 1799: it was a technically perfected magic lantern, for the construction of which he had used great technicians such as the London optician Peter Dollond for the optical part and the Parisian Pierre François Antoine Molteni for the body of the lantern, also adopting, to enhance lighting, the lamp invented in 1780 by Aimé Argand (1750-1803). Mounted on a mobile trolley, equipped with rubber-coated wheels to cushion its noise, it was placed behind a transparent screen to project without being visible to the spectators, and moved back and forth to reduce and magnify the images painted on glass, fixed or animated, making them approach, move away or disappear suddenly.

Philip Carpenter (1776-1833), the most important English manufacturer of lanterns and optical instruments of the beginning of the century, active first in Birmingham and later in London on Regent Street, patented in 1820 his simplified and portable version of the phantom scope, the lantern Phantasmagoria, designed to be used both as a simple magic lantern and for phantasmagoria shows.Henry Langdon Childe (1781-1874), who began his career just as a glass painter for Philipsthal's phantasmagorias, was the other great protagonist of the phantasmagoria and more generally of all the technical experimentation linked to the image projected during the 19th century. An article in "The optical magic lantern journal" (April 1894, 59, pp. 69-70) proposed the meticulous account of a well-known series of glasses of his production,

In the last decades of the 19th century. the macabre vein was almost entirely supplanted by the didactic and moralistic repertoires and then moved to the playful territory, in the vast production of playful glasses, where the images appeared stripped of any horrifying connotation: this is the case of the skeleton, whose dance, obtained thanks with a slide or a crank, it almost always ended up breaking down into a thousand pieces like a harmless toy. A playful little skeleton was also the protagonist of one of the most famous and technically significant magical lantern mechanisms of the Victorian age, the band choreutoscope, invented by the Englishman Lionel Smith Beale (1828-1906) in 1866 and perfected by William Charles Hughes in 1884:

Even fading, later widely used in cinema, was a technique that allowed to create particularly suggestive image animation effects. Childe experimented and developed it probably between September 1836 and February 1837. The invention, which represented the most suggestive and advanced image projection technique, had an important contribution in the work of Ph. Carpenter who, in 1821 , created the first method of mechanical reproduction of the image on glass: the copper-plate sliders, which made possible the serial production of the same subject, while ensuring good quality and accuracy in the drawing. In these years a real industry was born capable of placing on the market images of the most varied repertoires at relatively low costs. Basically the Carpenter technique consisted in the hot impression of a subject on the glass by a copper incision: the contours were thus fixed and then moved on to the delicate phase of coloring. The scientific and didactic repertoire benefited to a large extent from new production techniques. The first series of copper-plate sliders produced by Carpenter, a set of eighteen plates, was dedicated to natural history. Their success meant that in 1823 Carpenter published his Elements of zoology as an accompanying manual to the new series, which included fifty-six slides, distributed according to the Linnaeus system in the different classes of mammals, birds, amphibians, fish, insects and worms. the outlines were thus fixed and then moved on to the delicate phase of coloring. The scientific and didactic repertoire benefited to a large extent from new production techniques. The first series of copper-plate sliders produced by Carpenter, a set of eighteen plates, was dedicated to natural history. Their success meant that in 1823 Carpenter published his Elements of zoology as an accompanying manual to the new series, which included fifty-six slides, distributed according to the Linnaeus system in the different classes of mammals, birds, amphibians, fish, insects and worms. the outlines were thus fixed and then moved on to the delicate phase of coloring. The scientific and didactic repertoire benefited to a large extent from new production techniques. The first series of copper-plate sliders produced by Carpenter, a set of eighteen plates, was dedicated to natural history. Their success meant that in 1823 Carpenter published his Elements of zoology as an accompanying manual to the new series, which included fifty-six slides, distributed according to the Linnaeus system in the different classes of mammals, birds, amphibians, fish, insects and worms. a set of eighteen slabs was dedicated to natural history. Their success meant that in 1823 Carpenter published his Elements of zoology as an accompanying manual to the new series, which included fifty-six slides, distributed according to the Linnaeus system in the different classes of mammals, birds, amphibians, fish, insects and worms. a set of eighteen slabs was dedicated to natural history. Their success meant that in 1823 Carpenter published his Elements of zoology as an accompanying manual to the new series, which included fifty-six slides, distributed according to the Linnaeus system in the different classes of mammals, birds, amphibians, fish, insects and worms.

Since 1820, developments in the photographic technique, a determining element in the birth of cinema, have undergone a series of research and acquisitions, sometimes even random, by scientists and artists of different backgrounds and backgrounds. Joseph-Nicéphore Niepce (1765-1833) made the first heliography, a positive image on a metal support, not reproducible, in 1822; in 1833, Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre (c. 1787-1851) developed a system for fixing the photographic image on silver plates treated with iodine vapors and exposed to light in a dark room. In 1835 William Henry Fox Talbot (1800-1877) carried out the modern procedure of negative-positive photographic reproduction. The search to perfect the machines and shorten the exposure times continued in the following decades, while photography spread as a collective passion becoming an industry, laboratories and shooting studios multiplied and production extended and specialized to encompass every field of visible reality. The birth of new forms of entertainment was connected to the use in the their scope of photography and, with the increase in the possibility of reproducing the image that derived from it, the repertoire of traditional shows increased dramatically with a production of stereoscopic views on paper and glass, projection positives, animated photographs intended to observation by optical instruments. Scottish scientist David Brewster (1781-1868) built the stereoscope in 1844, one of the most popular optical machines in the Victorian era, based on the three-dimensional effects produced by binocular vision. The apparatus was equipped with lenses through which two identical photographic images could be observed, one with the right eye and the other with the left; simultaneously seen converged into a single virtual image, which by virtue of the binocular vision was perceived in relief. The models of the nineteenth-century stereoscopes varied widely: from a simpler hand-held, portable type, equipped with lenses and an image-holder frame, to elaborate column viewers, finely decorated and painted, inside which they could be observed, rotating the external side knobs, dozens and dozens of photographs: an instrument similar to the eighteenth-century worlds both for the type of use, based on the "look inside" mode,

The aletoscope was patented in 1861 by the photographer Carlo Ponti (1822 / 24-1893) and used to observe specially prepared photographs (colored, perforated and placed on a curved frame), in order to create day and night effects, depending on whether the vision was in transparency or reflected light, by means of two side mirrors.What contributed significantly to the enormous development of the animated image market starting from 1860 was the introduction of photographic plates for magic lantern, which ended up replacing the painted ones by hand. The American Lorenzo J. Marcy in 1872 started marketing a new model of magic lantern, the Sciopticon, equipped with a more elaborate optical system than the previous ones, with double condenser and paraffin lighting; the photographic plates were in fact affirmed on the market in a massive way, with a vast didactic and recreational repertoire. Starting from 1880 ca. a moralizing production was imposed: the mechanical glass and the fading gradually gave way to the new extremely successful repertoire of lifemodels or living pictures, black and white photographic stories, subsequently hand-colored, composed of series of images in sequence, with models living taken on the background of scenarios painted or reconstructed in the studio. This production and the first results of cinema were connected on the technical level of the ways of representation, and on that of the thematic contents and purposes. Many anonymous actors began their careers in the photographic studios of the main specialized London companies, and then ended up on the set of the first cinematographic films. The period between 1877, the year in which for the first time Eadweard Muybridge (pseudonym of Edward James Muggeridge, 1830-1904) carried out his studies on the analysis of movement, and the presentation to the public of the Cinématographe Lumière in Paris on December 28, 1895, constituted a fundamental research phase characterized by inventions that prepared the way for the new vision system and of which the studies and tools of Muybridge and Étienne-Jules Marey (1830-1904) constituted the fundamental stages. In 1879 Muybridge created the first projection of moving images with the zoopraxiscope, presenting his device for the first time in Europe in 1881, at the Paris studio of Marey. The photographer publicized his research with a conference-demonstration tour in America and Europe. Physiologist Marey, enthusiastic about the new techniques of photographic analysis of movement, perceived the scientific insufficiency of the method and in 1882 developed the photographic rifle, which allowed the shooting of twelve consecutive photographs on a circular plate that turned automatically in jerks. Dissatisfied with this instrument, as the images appeared as black silhouettes against the light, unsuitable for an analysis of animal movement, Marey was later able to take a decisive step forward with the chronophotographer, who perfected in 1888, replacing the glass plate with the George Eastman (1854-1932) and obtaining the first chronophotographs on a single strip. Eastman and Henry M. Reichenbach patented the film with celluloid support with lateral perforation in 1889. In 1891 Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931), who had noticed the advantages of celluloid film, patented the kinetoscope, presenting it to the public in May 1893 (the first pay room for kinetoscope shows was opened in New York in 1894). Among the studies and tools developed by other scientists and photographers variously engaged in the identification of new principles and in the realization of new technical achievements, mention should be made of the electrotachiscope of Ottomar Anschütz (1846-1907), perfected in 1890, the phonoscope of Georges Demeny (1850-1917), Marey's assistant, 1891, Herman Casler's mutoscope, built in 1894 on the principle of Linnet's cinematographer. English publishing produced a series of detailed and exhaustive technical manuals on the use of the optical lantern, equipped with rich illustrative apparatuses. It has been observed that "this catalog, destined to be rapidly supplanted by cinema, is a macroscopic demonstration of the progressive development of the project of visual domination of all possible realities. Photography allows a definition of places which no viewer had ever been able to to offer and above all there is no longer a hierarchy of importance within the visible. Everything falls right into the field of the visible and is promoted to be the object of privileged observation "(GP Brunetta, Il viaggio dell'icononauta, 1997, p. 15) . use of the optical lantern, equipped with rich illustrative apparatus. It has been observed that "this catalog, destined to be rapidly supplanted by cinema, is a macroscopic demonstration of the progressive development of the project of visual domination of all possible realities. Photography allows a definition of places which no viewer had ever been able to to offer and above all there is no longer a hierarchy of importance within the visible. Everything falls right into the field of the visible and is promoted to be the object of privileged observation "(GP Brunetta, Il viaggio dell'icononauta, 1997, p. 15) . use of the optical lantern, equipped with rich illustrative apparatus. It has been observed that "this catalog, destined to be rapidly supplanted by cinema, is a macroscopic demonstration of the progressive development of the project of visual domination of all possible realities. Photography allows a definition of places which no viewer had ever been able to to offer and above all there is no longer a hierarchy of importance within the visible. Everything falls right into the field of the visible and is promoted to be the object of privileged observation "(GP Brunetta, Il viaggio dell'icononauta, 1997, p. 15) . it is a macroscopic demonstration of the progressive development of the visual domain project of all possible realities. Photography allows a definition of places that no landscape artist had ever been able to offer and above all there is no longer a hierarchy of importance within the visible. Everything falls right into the field of the visible and is promoted to be the object of privileged observation "(GP Brunetta, Il viaggio dell'icononauta, 1997, p. 15). it is a macroscopic demonstration of the progressive development of the visual domain project of all possible realities. Photography allows a definition of places that no landscape artist had ever been able to offer and above all there is no longer a hierarchy of importance within the visible. Everything falls right into the field of the visible and is promoted to be the object of privileged observation "(GP Brunetta, Il viaggio dell'icononauta, 1997, p. 15).

In 1887 the monthly publications of the "Optical magic lantern journal and photographic enlarger" began, in order to update the large audience of professionals on the continuous patents and technical discoveries, on their authors and production laboratories. The magic lantern, which became optical, was increasingly configured as an information tool capable of reaching ever wider audiences, creating a knowledge and a common iconographic patrimony, which managed to bring the most diverse audiences closer together.

Many optical devices of the 19th century. they represented a simplification of the machines used in the spectacular practice of the previous century, but most of the most widespread mechanisms and games were based instead on the principle of persistence of the retinal image: it was in fact from the third decade of the 19th century. that the research on this phenomenon, which had illustrious antecedents in I. Newton and even in Claudius Ptolemy (100 ca.-170 ca.), gave rise to a series of optical amusements that would soon become very popular, enjoying an extraordinary commercial success .

In the chronological span of about seventy years of studies on the physiological principles of vision and in particular on the perception of movement, conducted by scientists from different countries, often active in full solitude, without contacts and connections, there was a rapid succession of new devices , each of which represented an improvement and advancement compared to the previous one on the road of the animation of the image that would have led to the invention of the cinema. The English physician and mathematician Peter Mark Roget (1779-1869) presented his experiments on the "curious optical illusion" produced by the movement of advance and rotation of a wheel on its axis, observed through special slots, to the Royal Society of London. Starting from Roget's experiment and by replacing the slits with an intermittent light, the physicist Charles Wheatstone (1802-1875) studied and described the stroboscopic effect in 1827: intermittent lighting allowed to block the movement of a body by breaking it down into a series of fixed instants ("Quarterly journal of science", 1827, 1, p. 351). Even the Englishman Michael Faraday (1791-1867) attempted, towards 1830, to stop the movement by carrying out the well-known experiment: observing a spinning cardboard gear wheel reflected in a mirror, the image was perceived as perfectly static. The studies then concentrated both on the rendering of the animation of still images and on the decomposition of the movement. Well richer in consequences in terms of invention of new optical devices for playful or spectacular use was the study of retinal persistence. William Henry Fitton (1780-1861) and JA Paris competed in 1825 for the primacy of the invention of the thaumatropium, a cardboard disc that had two complementary figures on both sides, which overlapped forming a single image obtained by the rapid rotation on the own axis. The experiment was received with enormous interest by the scientific world and, using a repertoire of playful images, among which the then well-known bird in a cage, became a very popular game.J.-AF Plateau in 1829 discussed an important thesis at the University of Liège on the persistence of bright impressions on the retina; in 1832, who became a professor of physics at the University of Ghent, he developed the phenachistoscope, a rotating disk which, reflected in a mirror and observed through a small slit, created the movement of a sequence of images arranged circularly on one face of the disk itself (Sur un nouveau genre d'illusion d'optique , in "Correspondance mathématique et physique de l'observatoire de Bruxelles", 1832, 7, pp. 365-68). Less well-known and fortunate devices were the cinestiscope (1853) of the Austrian Franz Freiher von Uchatius (1811-1881), which allowed the projection on screen, through a magic lantern, of two disks, one with images painted on glass, the other equipped with slots such as the phenachistoscope, operated synchronously; or Henry Renno Heyl's fasmatropium (1870), a projection phalakistoscope perfected with respect to von Uchatius's device, which allowed to animate a series of eighteen photographs on glass through an intermittent rotation movement and a shutter. The Englishman John Linnet patented the cineographer in 1868, which became one of the most popular children's games: a small block of paper consisting of a series of pieces of paper, each of which carried only one phase of a certain movement, the sequence of which could be reconstructed by fast scrolling, so as to obtain a movement accomplished with the animation of a considerable number of images. The praxinoscope, one of the most complex and suggestive optical machines on the spectacular plane, was developed in 1877 by É. Reynaud: it was a variant of the zootrope of William George Horner (1786-1837), of which he maintained the structure, replacing the slots with a polygonal prism located in the center of the cylinder. The new process produced a smoother movement and greater image brightness. The optical machines subsequently created by Reynaud were based on the same principle: in the praxinoscope-theater (1879) the animated image was integrated by a fixed theatrical backdrop; the projection praxinoscope (1880), applied to the magic lantern and perfected in 1888 with the optical theater, was a real show machine with a rather complex operation, which allowed to offer the public projections of a few minutes with animated images on different backgrounds . Between 1892 and 1895 Reynaud staged his luminous pantomimes daily at the Musée Grévin in Paris with great public success, until the first of the Lumière of March 22, 1895 which marked the point of arrival and connection, but it would be more correct to speak of a fundamental stage, of all the experiments hitherto carried out in the search, almost manic, of animation devices always more elaborate. An evolutionary path whose complete picture must necessarily also include research and discoveries in the field of photography, materials science and lighting technology of those years.BIBLIOGRAPHY

Cited texts:

A. Kircher , Ars magna lucis et umbrae in decem libros digesta. Quibus admirandae lucis et umbrae in mundo, atque adeo universa natura, vires effectusque uti nova, ita varia novorum reconditiorumque speciminum exhibitione, ad varios mortalium usus, pandantur , Romae 1646.

J. Ozanam , Récréations mathématiques et physiques qui contiennent plusieurs problèmes d'arithmétique […], Paris 1694 ( Recreations in mathematics and natural philosophy: containing amusing dissertations and inquiries concerning a variety of subjects the most remark-able and proper to excite curiosity and attention to the whole range of the mathematical and philosophical sciences, translated into English by Charles Hutton , 4 vols., London 1803).

S. Urlsperger, GE Remmelin , Phaenomena laternae magicae ad stateram expensae dissertatione academica per principium isodynamicum explicata [...] praeside Johanne Cunrado Creilingio [...] publicae ventilationlica exposita to Samuele Urlspergero et Georgio Erico Remmelino , Tubingae 1705.

SJ Rhanaeus , Novum et curiosum laternae magicae augmentum, quod dissertatione mathematica [...] sub praesidio M. Bonifacii Henrici Ehrenbergeri , [...] publico doctorum examini exponit Samuel Joannes Rhanaeus , Ienae 1713.

WJS's Gravesande , Physices elementa mathematica experimentis confirmata, sive Introductio ad philosophiam newtonianam , lib. V, in particular Postal Code. XVII, De Lucerna Magica , pp. 873 et seq., Lugduni Batavorum 1720-21.

F. Algarotti , Newtonianism for ladies, or Dialogues over light and colors , dial. III, Naples 1737.

JA Nollet , Leçons de physique expérimentale , 6 vols., Paris 1743-1748.

EG Guyot , Nouvelles récréations physiques et mathématiques, contenant, toutes celles qui ont été décovertes & imaginées dans ces derniers temps, sur l'Aimant, les Nombres, l'Optique, la Chymie, & c., & Quantité d'autres qui n ' ont jamais été rendues publiques , 4 vols., Paris 1769-70.

JA Nollet , L'Art des expériences ou Avis aux amateurs de la physique, sur le choix, la cons-truction et l'usage des instruments, sur la preparation et l'emploi des drogues qui servent aux expériences , 3 vols., Paris 1770 (trad. it. The art of experiences; work that serves as a continuation and fulfillment for him Lessons in experimental physics , 4 vols., Venice 1783).

JA Sigaud de la Fond , Description et usage d'un cabinet de physique expérimentale , 2 vols., Paris 1775.

JA Paris , Philosophy in sport made science in earnest; being an attempt to illustrate the first principles of natural philosophy by the aid of popular toys and sports , 3 vols., London 1827.

É.-G. Robertson , Mémoires récréatifs, scientifiques et anecdotiques du physicien-aéronaute É.-G. Robertson , 2 vols., Paris 1831-1833.

G. Tissandier , Les récréations scientifiques, ou l'enseignement par les jeux , Paris 1881 (trad. It., Milan 1882).

Among the stories:

G.-M. Coissac , Histoire du cinématographe de ses origines à nos jours , Paris 1925.

G. Sadoul , Histoire générale du cinéma , 1er vol., L'invention du cinéma, 1832-1897 , Paris 1948, édition revue et augmentée (1ère éd. 1946; trad. It. Torino 1965).

J. Mitry , Histoire du cinéma , 1er vol., 1895-1914, art et industrie , Paris 1967.

On Code D (sheet 8 recto A), 1485-1490:

F. Bevilacqua, MG Ianniello , Optics from its origins to the beginning of the 18th century , Turin 1982.

Among the main seventeenth-century scientific treatises:

J.-F. Niceron , La perspective curieuse ou Magie artificielle des effets merveilleux de l'otique, par la vision directe, la catoptrique, par la réflexion des miroirs plats, cylindriques et Conques, la dioptrique, par la réfraction des crystaux , Paris 1638.

M. Bettini , Apiaria universae philosophiae mathematicae, in quibus paradoxa, et nova pleraque machinamenta ad usus eximios traducta, & facillimis demonstrationibus confirmata [...] Accessit ad finem secundi tomi Euclides applicatus et conditus ex apiariis , 2 vols., Bononiae 1642.

J. Du Breuil , La perspective practique , 3 vols., Paris 1642-1649.

C. Schott , Magia universalis naturae et artis, sive, Recondita naturalum & artificialium rerum scientia […] Opus quadripartitum , 4 vols., Herbipoli 1657-1659.

A. Tacquet , Opera mathematica […], Antverpiae 1669.

Among the numerous studies dedicated to anamorphosis:

J. Baltrušaitis , Anamorphoses ou magie artificielle des effects merveilleux , nouv. éd., Paris 1969 (1ère éd. 1955; trad. it. Milan 1978).

F. Leeman , Anamorfosen. Eenspel met waarneming, schijn en werkelijkheid , Amsterdam 1975.

E. Battisti et al. , Anamorphosis. Evasion and Return , introduction by J. Baltrušaitis, Rome 1981.

On the mirrors:

J. Baltrušaitis , Le miroir. Essai sur une légende scientifique; révélations, science-fiction et fallacies , Paris 1978 (trad. it. Milan 1981).

Fallit Imago. Mechanisms, fascinations and deceptions of the mirror , edited by B. Bandini, D. Baroncelli, Ravenna 1984.

On the spectacularization of science:

G. L'Estrange Turner , Scientific instruments and experimental philosophy 1550-1850 , Aldershot-Brookfield 1990.

RE Rider , El experimento como espectáculo , in La ciencia y su público. Perspectivas históricas , edited by J. Ordoñez, A. Elena, Madrid 1990, pp. 113-46.

D. Raichvarg , Science et spectacle, figures d'une rencontre , Nice 1993.

On the attribution of the polemoscope to Hevelius:

M.-J. Brisson , Traité élémentaire ou principes de physique, fondés sur les connaissances les plus certaines, tant anciennes que modernes, & confirmés par l'expérience , 2 ° vol., Paris 1797², p. 326 (1st éd. 1789).

J.-E. Montucla , Histoire des mathématiques […], nouv. éd., Paris 1799-1802, book III, p. 566 (1st éd. 1758).

About Kircher:

Encyclopaedism in Baroque Rome. Athanasius Kircher and the Museo del Collegio Romano between Wunderkammer and scientific museum , curated by M. Casciato, MG Ianniello, M. Vitale, Venice 1986.

Athanasius Kircher. The World Museum , edited by E. Lo Sardo, Rome 2001 (exhibition catalog).

On the figure and work of Robertson:

F. Levie , Étienne-Gaspard Robertson. La vie d'un fantasmorge , Brussels 1990.

On the figure and the work of Carpenter:

H. Bollaert , Phantasmagoria , in "The new magic lantern journal", 1983, 3, pp. 9-11.

J. Barnes , Philip Carpenter , in "The new magic lantern journal", 1986, 2, pp. 8-11.

D. Henry , Carpenter & Westley , in "The new magic lantern journal", 1986, 1, pp. 8-10.

On the studies that led to the animation of the image:

FP Liesegang , Zahlen und Quellen zur Geschichte der Projektionskunst und Kinematographie , Berlin 1926.

H. Bollaert , Optical toys and the development of the projected image , in "The new magic lantern journal", April 1986, 1-3, pp. 36-43.

V. Pinel , Chronologie commentée de l'Invention du Cinéma , Paris 1992.

For an in-depth analysis of Plateau's research:

D. Robinson , Masterpieces of animation , in "Griffithiana", December 1991, 43.


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