Page 43 - Cinematic Thinking Philosophical Approaches to the New Cinema

Luchino Visconti 33

sunlight whose conspicuousness Visconti ensures throughout, even strew-
ing the sand with blindingly reflective, tiny mirrors. The glinting knife
of the Arab youth stabs at his murderer's eyes. Meursault refuses to wear
the mask of subjectivity that, within the prevailing society, imposes a re-
lationship to a transcendence—to the transcendence of a meaning whose
possibility hypocrisy realizes. Such a meaning, for which the "stranger"
is sued, can take on the shape of a sons or husband's love, reverence for
God, camaraderie, or respect for institutions. One could claim that soci-
ety must first become like Meursault, that it must tear down the barrier
of the possible as the barrier of meaning grown rigid, and that it must put
an end to the confusion of reality and possibility in order to prepare the
way to Utopian openness. Perhaps this thought would have emerged more
graphically from the film if Visconti had not had to bow to the wishes of
the Algerian French writer s widow. In the event, Visconti was not able
to draw the social and historical context more sharply: its exposition is
limited to vignettes sometimes bearing grotesque traits and to the use of
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authentic objects and locations. In a text written in 1967 Visconti refers
to the student riots and says that in the literature of the period there are no
heroes who have a stronger tie to the moment than Meursault: "The figure
that best expresses the mentality of the young belongs to their parents'
generation." 14
Even though nearly all of Viscontis films revolve thematically around
the failure of attempts at transformation, the theme varies from film to
film. Four variations on the failure resulting from an orientation by the
difference between reality and possibility can be discerned, four groups
that occasionally overlap and in turn require differentiation.
To the first group belong those films in which the possible clings
to a love or a passion that breaks with the real, that seeks to break through
a historical, social, artistic paralysis. In Ossesslone, Visconti's first feature
film, whose plot is drawn from an American crime novel, a drifter falls
in love with an ambitious woman, a former prostitute unable to hold out
any longer in the narrowness of a petty-bourgeois, fascistoid environment.
She seizes the opportunity for transformation but only in order to climb
the social ladder. Making his appearance as a fairground artist and por-
trayed as a homosexual, the figure of an entirely uninhibited veteran from
the Spanish Civil War touches, as it were, tangentially the fateful circle
drawn by reality and possibility. This figure, because it does not promise
simply a possible life, a life that has still first to be lived, opens the circle.