Page 45 - Cinematic Thinking Philosophical Approaches to the New Cinema

Luchino Visconti 35

compact with the superior power of nature, sets to it that the possible trans-
formation dashes against the reality of the way things are. Rocco e i suoi
fratelli relates the tale of conformism after an attempt at change has gone
wrong: transformation through conformity is a betrayal of transforma-
tion, against which some measure their success and others do not survive.
Le caduta degli dei recounts the history of an irrevocable end to attempts
at transformation, the history of their parody or travesty, of their hellish
mockery by means of the alliance between capitalism and National Social-
ism. To this group Ilgattopardo also surely belongs, a film concerned with
the improbable maintenance of a superfluous social class, whose conven-
tions promise freedom from the unrestrained striving for profit and gain
after the revolution has extended reality, instead of realizing the possible.
The films in which not love and passion but rather art s beauty and
semblance vouch for the possible belong to a third group. Here, alongside
Morte a Venezia, a. film that schematically sets in opposition two concep-
tions of art, and Gruppo di famiglia in un interno> a film that brings to
the fore the beauty of works of the past and maneuvers it into a reflected
antithesis to the ugliness of the present, Bellissima and Ludwig must be
cited. In Ludwig a world of art, literally, is created: it is to remain undis-
turbed by the overpowering world of realpolitik, intrigues, and war, while
nonetheless filmically the plain documentation continually disrupts the
parade of sumptuous images. In Bellissima the longing to leave behind
everyday misery unmasks, against its will, the appearance of cinema as
mere illusion. Two short films keep company with this unmasking: Anna
Magnani, an anecdote that deals with the real Rome of fascism and the
Rome evoked by the stage song, and La strega bruciata viva, a sketch that
tears the mask away from the face of the film diva and then restores it. She
floats off in a helicopter.
There is, finally, a fourth group that, consisting of a single member,
can scarcely be characterized as a group. In Vaghe Stelle delVOrsa what
forces itself as something possible on the modern married woman and
Etruscan daughter is the enigmatic past itself. It contains the seed of a
liberation from the indifference of the present, encumbering the latter at
the same time with the reality of traumatic events. Into the vortex of this
reality, visually brought out by meanderings and whirlings, by reflections
and shadow plays, the free conduct of the women threatens to be swept.
How should one understand Adornos proposition that the possi-
ble, not the "immediately real," blocks the way to Utopia, the insight that