Page 44 - Cinematic Thinking Philosophical Approaches to the New Cinema

34 Alexander Garci'a Düttmann

And because it probably denounces the lovers in their guilt, it closes the
circle. In Senso, in which operatic melodrama and an exacting exposition
of historical events keep company, a countess committed to the resistance
during the Austrian occupation of Venice falls under the spell of a young
officer in the occupying army and, in the name of passion, betrays her
background and convictions. In Le notti bianche, adapted from the novella
by Dostoyevsky, the forces of a love that bursts every social convention
and therefore appears a delusion, a pure possibility, come up against the
forces of a love for whose reality recognition according to the dominant
customs stands guarantor. In 7/ lavoro, the captivating chamber play that
Visconti contributes to the portmanteau film Boccaccio 70, a spoiled girl
with a rich father in Burgenstock has to acknowledge that the Milanese
count whom she has married is a conformist halfwit. Even love is not ex-
empted from the law of exchange, proving to be labor, business, prostitu-
tion. The last shot shows a part of a woman's mouth, distorted, as though
a fetishistically dismembering gaze wanted to pin itself to the body, as
though such labor were the work not only of the prostitute but likewise of
the camera. It thereby perhaps remains undecided whether the girl, whom
her spouse calls simply "Dolly," sheds tears, with which she avows her
failure, or smiles like a sphinx because she has understood that the pos-
sible blocks the path to Utopia, to a state of affairs no longer defined by
socially imposed barriers. The doll becomes an adult, as a prostitute or as
a wife. Valuable and beautiful objects increasingly fill the rooms traversed
by the precise camera. They are either bourgeois status symbols, or in their
fullness they are no longer distinguishable from vacuity, beautiful and
valuable, because they no longer possess a function. In Morte a Venezia the
sight of a desired beautiful body, like a helpless yearning pointing beyond
a society in decline and an art become stale, seals the death of the artist. In
Gruppo difamiglia in un interno the forces of an art connoisseurship van-
ishing completely into the past clash with the forces of an unexpected love
that wavers between physical and paternal love and neglects to produce a
continuity, to pass on a legacy. The son, who nonetheless is not a son, dies
before his father and thereby condemns him likewise to death.
To the second group belong those films in which the possible is the
occasion of a revolt against social exploitation, against the unjust distribu-
tion of property. In these films reality again and again robs the hope for a
transformation of its force. La terra trema narrates the story of such a revolt
in a Sicilian fishing village: the lack of solidarity among the fishermen, in a