biographycinema

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

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