Page 41 - Cinematic Thinking Philosophical Approaches to the New Cinema

Luchino Visconti 31

Convention disintegrates, and the liberation of the compositional materi-
als of the film directs attention to their contingency. But does not the gaze
likewise dive into the peculiarity ofthat world of the aristocracy to which,
as it is already said in the novel, specific laws apply? Indeed, this world, as
Deleuze writes in his book The Time-Image, resembles a "synthetic crys-
11
tal." It has its place outside of history and nature, outside of the Divine
Creation, and is perhaps nothing other than a world without acts.
In the Utopia of the "cinematic circle"—to which Visconti surren-
ders himself perhaps above all in La terra tréma, a film epic in which
the individual passes over into the type, history into myth, the image
of reality into the reality of the image—"element" and "significance,"
thing and thought, are immediately real. Here the abyss between reality
and possibility closes, and the possible (the possibility of the "element"
or "significance") no longer blocks the very way that it seems to open.
But here an observation that Cavell makes in the appendix to his film
book is important. He speaks of "ideas" that find "incarnation" in certain
images, and he adds that a "power" corresponds to them that he compares
with the "power" of a phrase of music or of poetry. This "power" is pro-
nounced "inexplicable." 12 Is it a "power" because it is inexplicable? What
does Cavell mean? Perhaps that there is no idea of the idea, no signifi-
cance of the significance, no significance that could emerge from the "cin-
ematic circle," crossing out its actuality and investing it with a definition.
The significant thing, the sign, has no significance outside the "cinematic
circle." In other words one never does justice to a film by explaining its
significance, by assigning to each "element" and the coherence of the "ele-
ments" a significance that elevates itself above the "elements." Whenever
one measures a film by whether or not one is able to explain its signifi-
cance, it inevitably comes across as formalistic or melodramatic, as though
it had succumbed to a surplus of thingliness or an exaggerated emotional-
ism. Conversely, going no further than bare descriptions of "elements,"
a stasis against which Cavell warns repeatedly, proves just as unsatisfac-
tory and alien to art. The significance of the significance crosses out the
actuality of the "cinematic circle," turning the immediate reality of the
"elements" into something possible, into the indifferent and thus always
merely possible reality of bearers of significance. Or is it the case that only
by accepting a significance of the significance one can speak of a closure of
the circle—indeed, of a circle at all? The drifting apart of word and image
in Morte a Venezia is, for one, the lack of a context, whereas for another,