Page 47 - Cinematic Thinking Philosophical Approaches to the New Cinema

Luchino Visconti 37

have something unreal about them, as though the object of depiction were
her perception of reality. One must distinguish between two ways in which
the possible is impotent, but likewise between a reality to which change
addresses itself because it blocks the paths and a reality from which the
barriers have been removed. Does the mysterious figure of the sister in La
terra trema not embody this reality? Does it not embody the freedom from
externally imposed barriers, from the barrier of reality and from the barrier
of the twofold helpless possibility?
In his films, as in his opera and theater productions, Visconti sets
considerable value on a particular sense of reality, on the significance of
the "immediately real." In 1966, reviewing the experiences with the the-
ater that he had gathered over the course of two decades, he alludes, seem-
ingly ironically, to the image that people had made of him and put into
circulation: "This lunatic Visconti, so it is believed, he wants real, authen-
tic jewellery by Cartier, taps from which real, authentic water flows, real,
authentic French perfume in the phials standing on the dressing table,
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Flemish linen on the beds." In an essay on invention and tradition, in
which six years before shooting was to start he is already thinking over the
film that would come to be known as La terra trema: Episodio del mare,
Visconti justifies the relevance that the sound of a voice or the roar of the
ocean has for him, as though the authenticity of the reproduced sounds
would help the work disclose an essential reality and secure it for itself. 17
The roar of the sea was for the composer Luigi Nono the true central
character of the film; when he was to collaborate on producing the sound
track for Lo straniero, he wanted to draw his compositional material from
noises and thereby avoid the impression that they were being heard only
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"by chance." Coining the phrase "visionary aestheticism," Deleuze con-
tends that the objects and the surroundings in Visconti take on an "au-
tonomous, material reality" that gives them an importance in themselves
whereby they no longer operate as the frames, recipients, and vehicles of
action. The senses, free of their orientation by the precepts of action, invest
the objects and surroundings so that "dreamlike" connections arise: "It is
as if the action floats in the situation, rather than bringing it to a conclu-
sion or strengthening it." 19 Is the "dreamlike" connection not evidence
of that reality that is no longer the reality of a barrier—in La terra trema
"the grand vision of man and nature, of their perceptible and sensual
unity"—which more deeply defines the "communist consciousness" than
the "struggle with nature and between men"? Is that which is indissolubly