Page 48 - Cinematic Thinking Philosophical Approaches to the New Cinema

38 Alexander Garcfa Düttmann

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possible in the event—Deleuze names it the "visionary's part" —not in
turn precisely this "immediately real," by no means the possible that is
distinguished from the real and hence doubly helpless?
Youssef Ishaghpour claims that in some of Viscontfs films there
is not too much, but rather too little, sense, as though the director and
viewer would take pleasure in things that extricate themselves from the
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"tyranny of meaning." One can, however, also infer from this movement
of flight that the "cinematic circle" is not made to revolve by an idea of
the idea or a significance of the significance. In a review of the pioneering
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production of Goldoni's comedy La locandiera, with which Visconti in
1956 visited Paris, Roland Barthes interprets the attention paid to things
as a reference to the mediation that marks the historical transition from
the character part to the social type. 23 The individual achieves objectiv-
ity with the object, by means of it, through the resistance that it offers.
Naming Brecht, Barthes speaks of a "realistic theatre." Such an interpreta-
tion complements the remarks on the relationship between human beings
and things in Visconti's early manifesto concerning "anthropomorphic
cinema." Taking the place of the reified, conventional, and rhetorical, of
the interest in things "for their own sake," a "reality of art" is to emerge
that concerns itself with "living human beings in the midst of things." 24
What happens at the beginning of Rocco e i suoifratelli is, according to the
Catalonian filmmaker Marc Recha, just as inseparable from "every corner
of the basement apartment" as from the "gestures" of the figures. 25
The care that Visconti expended on the selection and display of
objects in his works need not be reduced to a concern with the effective-
ness of a given production design and the response of the audience. Per-
haps it can be taken as a sign for that "immediate reality" that he wanted
to create with every film, every theater and opera production, as a sign for
an awareness ofthat reality that the work of art itself is. Like the text in
which Adorno's proposition stands, works of art strive for a reality that
comes toward them whenever between element and significance a conti-
nuity arises that for its part is not subordinate to a significance and that
on no account excludes, for example, the interruption of the "cinematic
circle." For philosophy this is as much as to say that one does not possess
truth but rather holds oneself within it. For art this is as much as to say
that art is not something possible or a proxy of a possibility, not even criti-
cally or negatively. What the successful films created by Visconti express is
that transformations have always already occurred. They do so by means of