biographycinema

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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