Page 40 - Cinematic Thinking Philosophical Approaches to the New Cinema

30 Alexander Garcfa Düttmann

In Morte a Venezia, a film in which Visconti is extremely sparing
with dialogue, word and image drift apart. The words dominating the
brief, inserted flashbacks, the arguments about the life and death of art,
have something awkward and clumsy about them, something aesthetically
vulgar that does not fit the image. Is Visconti trying to make a silent film,
9
the silent film that, according to Cavell, has never been made? Do the
flashbacks therefore underline the helplessness and tedium of the words
while the music pursues an investigation of the gestural as that which is
the essence of cinema? The gestural composes the intensity of the image
and thus does not include only iconic poses, the boys upraised arm, but
also the city itself, the elements, light, colors, moods. Intensive images are
images at which one gazes to one s fill, insatiably, because they possess the
power to awaken the dead, the power of a "That's how it is." The dead of
the work of art are neither those who lived in the past nor the living who
10
have died a death in life and to whom the work of art addresses itself. To
speak of the dead is, however, not on this account senseless, because the
figures, even the landscapes that draw the figures into themselves and for
their part turn into figures, are just as little fanciful concoctions. Some-
thing somnambulistic corresponds to them. Before Amina sings and the
enlightened count familiarizes the baffled villagers with the phenomenon
of somnambulism, she is considered a ghost. Morte a Venezia reminds
the viewer that the dead have arisen, that the life that the film gives them
is both immortal and transitory, as though the dead were at the same
time unborn. Perhaps those images are beautiful that are traversed by this
muteness, the muteness of the point of indifference of transitoriness and
immortality to which no utterance comes near. The question before which
the film places the hesitant viewer is whether the "That's how it is" is
more than gay kitsch, the "That's how it is" of a self-indulgent and hollow
aestheticism or of a complacent and no less hollow yearning that reifies
beauty. The famous ball scene at the end of 77 gattopardo opens the "cin-
ematic circle" through its excess, even if the princes dance with the village
girl, the reflections on age and death before a painting by Greuze, and the
caricature of a general who carries himself as a social lion all have a dra-
maturgic function. It is as though Visconti wants to lead the film to the
threshold of the modern, as though by means of duration, of the turning
circle of repeated entries, movements, colors, and forms become autono-
mous and give rise to a web that lays itself over the tracks of the plot and
steadily breaks them up. There is a visible threat of a loss of overview.