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Film-Philosophy International
Salon-Journal (ISSN 1466-4615) Vol. 9 No. 16, March 2005 |
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Nowell-Smith Meets Visconti, Redux: The Old and the New Geoffrey Nowell-Smith _Luchino
Visconti_ (Third Edition) London: British Film Institute, 2003 ISBN 0-85170-961-3 250 pp. For nearly four decades, the definitive study of the
films of Luchino Visconti has been, and remains, that of Geoffrey
Nowell-Smith, originally published in 1967. Visconti lived to make six more
films after _The Leopard_ (1963), the last to be considered by Nowell-Smith
in his original edition. Nowell-Smith momentarily caught up with the Italian
director's late-in-life frenzy of production when a second edition of his
book appeared in 1973, including new chapters on _Lo Straniero_ (1967), _The
Damned_ (1969), and _Death in Venice_ (1971). Before his death in 1976,
however, the director went on to make three more films -- _Ludwig_ (1973),
_Conversation Piece_ (1974), and _L'Innocente_ (1976) -- and thus
Nowell-Smith's classic text has been sadly out-of-date and incomplete for
more than 30 years. It is the third edition, just published, which attempts,
with mixed results, to fill this lacuna. The new edition contains, along with brief
considerations of the director's final three films, a new preface and a new
conclusion, both written in 2002. For better or worse, Nowell-Smith has
decided to keep intact the original chapters published in 1967, updating
minor details with a few scattered notes. He offers these older chapters
relatively untouched, as an exhibit showing what 'auteurist structuralism'
looked like when it first appeared in the 1960s -- followed by Peter Wollen's
groundbreaking study _Signs and Meaning in the Cinema_ (1969), which
favorably referred to Nowell-Smith's book. As he puts it in the new
Introduction, 'the text is thus presented as if in quotes, as a historic
document' (4). The effect of this decision, unfortunately, is to
produce a fragmented, sometimes purposely self-contradictory text that will
remind readers of Robin Wood's much-revised study of Hitchcock, which, though
equally insightful, is equally frustrating in its makeshift chronological
layering. Thus, in the Visconti book, a judgment published in 1967 can end
up, annoyingly, being commented upon in 1973, in either a note or a new
chapter, and then in 2003 there may be a comment upon the 1973 take on the
original 1967 opinion. Particularly bothersome are references to directors,
like Visconti and Rossellini, as though they were living, when in fact they've
been dead for thirty years (as is assumed, of course, in the new material).
There is also the question of the reliability and completeness of the
cinematic texts upon which Nowell-Smith's original analyses are based. In the
2002 note commenting upon his 1967 analysis of _The Leopard_ he says that he
has now seen, three times, the newly restored version of the film (in which
the final ball scene is greatly extended), yet 'I find there is very little
in what I wrote in 1967 that I would need to change' (93). He then proceeds
to cite several crucial changes in the restored version of the film, which
one suspects may very well have altered his response to it if they had been
considered fully. His method, happily and conveniently, is to examine the
films one by one. While this has the tendency to reassert the autonomy of the
fully self-present text and might potentially work against a more expansive
sense of intertextuality, Nowell-Smith loves to range across Visconti's
oeuvre and so a strong dose of intertextuality is already built in. However,
he often jumbles the order of the films to demonstrate thematic or political
continuities and readers not already intimately familiar with the
developmental chronology of Visconti's films may have a hard slog of it. Thus,
for example, when the chapter on _Senso_ is followed by the one on _The
Leopard_ (since both treat the Risorgimento), we also jump from an Italian
production to a production funded by a Hollywood studio starring a Hollywood
actor. Though Nowell-Smith predictably attacks both the studio and the actor,
we don't have the biographical or financial particulars to be able to judge
what has changed and what stays the same from the earlier film to the later
one. Similarly, _Vaghe Stelle dell'Orsa_ achronologically follows _White
Nights_ because both, according to Nowell-Smith, are structured around
metaphors. But these flaws are, for the most part, relatively
minor, and the original kernel of the book does provide the very interesting
'historic document' that Nowell-Smith would like it to be. He half-complains
in the new Introduction that, 'as a result of [Wollen's book] and subsequent
developments in film studies, the book soon came to be better known for two
pages of discussion of the so-called 'auteur' theory than for the 150 or so
pages devoted to Visconti and his films. Indeed I found myself being credited
with the almost single-handed invention of a sub-theory, 'auteur
structuralism', whose main tenet was thought to be the belief that the
defining characteristics of an author's work were not always those that were
most immediately apparent, nor were they necessarily things of which the
author himself was aware. In fact I did not think of what I was saying as
particularly original at all, although it was different from what most other
people were saying at the time' (3). Nowell-Smith also points out that, ironically, the hunt
for the author in film studies corresponded with the proclamation of the
death of the author in literary studies. In the 1967 Introduction, which is reprinted in this new
edition, he claims that auteurism is a 'principle of method, which provides a
basis for a more scientific form of criticism than has existed hitherto'
(10), a remark that clearly displays traces of early structuralism's
totalizing empirical urge; but it's the kind of statement that, 35 years
later, Nowell-Smith would himself presumably find amusing. More to the point,
he maintains (not unreasonably) that the 'purpose of criticism becomes
therefore to uncover behind the superficial contrasts of subject and
treatment a structural hard core of basic and often recondite motifs. The
pattern formed by these motifs, which may be stylistic or thematic, is what
gives an author's work its peculiar structure, both defining it internally
and distinguishing one body of work from another' (10-11). Perhaps most
interestingly, he goes on to claim that there actually is no coherent
structure in Visconti's films, thus working against the totalizing proclivity
of the theory of 'auteur structuralism' at the same time as he employs it. What is most interesting about Nowell-Smith's auteurism
is that it does not lead to an excessive concern with the intricacies of
formal technique for their own sake, as such a position might seem inevitably
to do. In other words, his auteurist focus leads him *toward* rather than
away from historical, political, philosophical, and theoretical concerns. In
short, this is an auteurism that still has a role to play in film studies,
and one that can take an appropriate, if somewhat circumscribed place
alongside more recent cultural studies approaches. Twenty-five years ago, in
an illuminating essay called 'Ideology, Genre, Auteur', Robin Wood said that
the workings of ideology in cinema are perhaps most clearly manifested where
genre and auteur intersect. He was speaking mostly about Hitchcock in the
context of American genre films, but I think his view is equally applicable
to European auteurist films as well, especially if we consider the art film,
as David Bordwell suggested years ago, as a genre in its own right. Ideology,
in other words, may manifest itself most clearly where it is activated and
channeled through one consciousness -- self-divided though that consciousness
must always be. The inherent biases of Nowell Smith's 'structural
auteur' approach can perhaps be seen in the virtual absence of any
information regarding the production or reception of these films, but that of
course is not a good reason to attack an overtly text-centered reading that
must have been quite liberating in 1967. Rather, I think, it indicates merely
that something more is needed now, and I doubt seriously if Nowell-Smith
would disagree. Another manifestation of his auteurism is the virtual absence
of any consideration of actors and acting (with the exception of the
autobiographical elements in the characters played by Burt Lancaster in _The
Leopard_ and _Conversation Piece_). Revealingly, Nowell-Smith omits actor
names following the introduction of new characters, a practice I had thought
universal in film studies. (Even the crucial Helmut Berger, Visconti's lover
late in life and the star of three of his later films, is barely mentioned.)
Which is not to say that he neglects character, for much of the book is taken
up -- perhaps too much so -- with readings of figures that stress character
psychology and motivation and that, on occasion, veer dangerously toward plot
summary. Nowell-Smith's great strength is his depth of literary
culture and historical (and historiographical) knowledge, and he brilliantly
brings these competencies to bear. Thus a discussion of _Vaghe Stelle
dell'Orsa_ in the context of Baroque painting is unexpected and illuminating.
More importantly, he is able to modify the standard view that Visconti is
indebted for his historical approach to Italian Marxist theoretician Antonio
Gramsci by throwing Gyorgy Lukacs into the mix. It quickly becomes clear that
it was Lukacs more than Gramsci who sanctioned Visconti's political analysis
of great historical moments (the Italian Risorgimento, the Nazi period),
while at the same time allowing him to indulge in an orgy of the nineteenth
century bourgeois realism that Lukacs so stoutly defended. Interestingly,
Nowell-Smith prefers a Visconti who looks *through* his literary sources to
the history that lies behind them, and faults the director's increasing
focus, later on, on the cultural artifacts themselves. The chief problem with
the latter approach, according to Nowell-Smith, is that, to be critical in
regard to these cultural artifacts, a consideration of the apparatus of
signification is necessary, and by definition this is impossible in a context
of Lukacsian bourgeois realism. (Though this last claim may be debatable, a
mistake like Visconti's ill-conceived adaptation of Camus's _L'etranger_,
which Nowell-Smith thoroughly despises, becomes more understandable through
the critic's insistence that there's no real event to anchor the film's
interpretation, and hence there's little to do beyond attempting, lamely, to
translate the style and general sense of anomie. Similarly, the critic
loathes what Visconti has done to Thomas Mann's novella _Death in Venice_,
which he says 'is not merely an empty film but a pretentious film --
pretentious and above all parasitic' (166). (On the other hand, in his
point-by-point comparison of Visconti's last film, _L'Innocente_, with the
second-rate Gabriele D'Annunzio novel upon which it's based, all the kudos,
not surprisingly, go to the film.) One of Nowell-Smith's best and most illuminating tactics
is to help us understand one film by comparing it -- in its largest
philosophical outlines -- to another. This tactic is so much in evidence in
his discussion of the director's adaptation of Camus's _L'etranger_ that most
of the chapter is actually given over to an in-depth analysis of _The
Leopard_ instead, focusing on the reality upon which the novel is presumably
based. Yet Nowell-Smith never really convincing explains how this 'historical
real' is available to us through the subsequently-produced cultural artifact,
and why the filmmaker consistently chose to rely upon this superfluous
mediation in the first place. But if the real of history is only problematically
available in these films in ways that Nowell-Smith perhaps does not want to face,
his historical readings are often excellent. His discussion of the relation
of nineteenth-century Italian novelist Giuseppe Verga's analysis of the
Southern question to Visconti's Marxist-inflected one in _La Terra Trema_ is
solid and illuminating, as is his exploration of the operatic nature of much
of Visconti's work, which goes beyond facile comparisons made in the interim
by lesser critics. Nowell-Smith not only claims that opera is central to
Visconti's method and subjects, which is obvious, but specifies the exact and
complex ways in which this is the case. (For example, his discussion of how
the characters in _Senso_ portray real figures and opera characters at the
same time.) While discussing the complexly anti-neorealist film _Bellissima_
(1951), he moves easily to a smart consideration of the role of laughter in
Visconti's films. Even better is his linkage of the director's comedy in the
short called _Il Lavoro_ to his stage productions, the latter an area that
most film critics seem happy to avoid. His discussion of the relationship
between the historical events recounted in _Senso_ and the post-war political
situation is also illuminating, as when he has Visconti asking himself: 'Did
the revolution that might have happened in 1943-7 fail in the same way and
for the same reasons as that of 1860-70? Or did it not also fail *because*
the first one had failed, because the ruling class was allowed to establish a
tradition of continuity . . .' (71). Importantly, however, Nowell-Smith also
understands that the main focus of Visconti's analysis in this film 'is
concerned with the relationship of personal and class attitudes, rather than
with political forces external to the main drama' (71). Even better is his
insistence -- contra those who reject Visconti for his supposed 'decadence'
-- that, beginning with _Senso_, the themes of 'moral degeneration and moral
incapacity' that arise 'are to be understood first of all historically, as
products of a response to a historical and class situation in which the
individual feels himself bound by the past and unable to adapt to the
present' (77). One problem that arises from Nowell-Smith's heady focus
on grander subjects is that occasionally the specificity of the individual
films gets lost. Furthermore, space limitations (the book is jam-packed with
large photos) prevent Nowell-Smith from offering more than a handful of close
readings. The result of this commitment to an intellectual rather than a
formal approach to the films is that cinematic techniques often rate little
more than a hasty paragraph or two tacked on to the end of each chapter.
Nevertheless, it must be admitted that these scattered paragraphs, though
brief, often do give evidence of a very sharp eye; for example, in his
demonstration of the way space and colour in _Senso_ signify class relations,
or the manner in which the binary thematic division of _White Nights_ is
spatialised by means of the bridges over the canals featured in the film, or
in his telling if slightly unfair complaint that _The Damned_ is
'expressionism with nothing to express' (152). The theoretical ballast that the book depends on is
often sophisticated, as in the delineation of the films' relation to history,
but at other times much less so, especially regarding conceptions of realism
-- for example, when he claims that _Ossessione_ is 'the most realistic of
Visconti's films' (26), without providing any gloss on that notoriously
problematic term. The same thing is true of his discussion of Visconti's
complicated relation to neo-realism which would be more nuanced had it begun
with a more detailed discussion of the nature of neo-realism itself.
Similarly, when he takes up melodrama in _Senso_, his 40-year-old discussion
naturally lacks any reference to the important theorizing regarding that
genre that has occurred in the interim. Again, such an omission is completely
understandable given his decision to regard the ur-text as a 'historical
document', but less than satisfying if you want to better understand how
melodrama works in these films. Nor is there the slightest reference to anything that
might resemble feminist, poststructuralist, or psychoanalytic theory, with
the exception of a single strange reference to Freud in which, during an
otherwise excellent discussion of _Bellissima_, Nowell-Smith atypically
claims that the real-life director Alessandro Blasetti, who appears in the
film, is acting as a kind of super-ego to it. In general, Nowell-Smith is not
shy about offering opinions, but rather expresses subjective judgments as
though they were obvious to everyone -- a good example is his description of
Angelica's (Claudia Cardinale) invitation to the Count to dance at the end of
_The Leopard_, a transcendent moment in which youth inclines to old age, but
a gesture which he dismisses as 'naive flattery' (86). He also calls
Cardinale's presence in _Vaghe Stelle dell'Orsa_ 'a gross error of casting'
(109), then in a footnote from 2002 admits to being 'a bit embarrassed' by
this negative judgment (122), which he now completely reverses. Perhaps this
example also provides a useful warning about Nowell-Smith's many aesthetic
judgments that are obviously more subjective in nature than he once thought. The perennial themes promised in the structural
auteurist approach gradually emerge: betrayal, from the very beginning, in
_Ossessione_; sexual relations as always tied up with money and class (seen
clearly in _Il Lavoro_); operatic melodrama, first foregrounded in _Senso_,
and so on. And Nowell-Smith is at his absolutely most penetrating in his
welcome appreciation of three of the director's most neglected films:
_Bellissima_, _White Nights_, and _Vaghe Stelle dell'Orsa_. In his discussion
of _Rocco and His Brothers_, he also gets right what is, I think, the central
tension in Visconti's films, that between an intellectual belief in social
progress vs a nostalgia for a lost world. While this is rather obvious
nowadays, it wasn't when the book first appeared. There is some evidence that the new chapters which close
the new edition of the book were written in haste, since even the chapter on
_Ludwig_, a film which Nowell-Smith rightly thinks is a masterpiece, is
largely devoted to plot summary. The subsequent chapter on _Conversation
Piece_, in which Lancaster plays a character who seems virtually identical to
Visconti, is handled with amazing, perhaps excessive *delicatesse* regarding
the autobiographical question, especially in its sexual permutations. In
fact, the single biggest problem with the third edition is that the new
chapters on Visconti's last three films are written with hardly a reference
to the director's homosexuality. Such an absence would of course be
understandable in the earlier versions of the book, since Visconti in his
lifetime never 'came out' in the modern sense of the term, and in an earlier,
gentler day, privacy was somewhat more respected than it is now. Yet by 2002
these facts about Visconti's sexual proclivities had become even banal, and
at this point there is no excuse for avoiding the autobiographical aspects of
a film like _Ludwig_, which is, after all, about a homosexual character
(played by his lover) that the director was immensely attracted to. For some reason, Nowell-Smith saves a discussion of
Visconti's gayness until the new conclusion, where he offers some
intelligent, if limited, general observations, to-wit that the principal
manifestations of Visconti's homosexuality lies not so much in the display of
homoerotic desire (though I think there is much more of this in the films
than he realizes), but rather in the sadness that comes in not having had a
family. Readers can make of this what they will. Interestingly, he criticizes
Italian critics in his conclusion for having neglected this aspect of
Visconti's life and creative production, but he has done the same himself,
even in chapters written in 2002. But quite a bit in Nowell-Smith's treatment
of this still immensely intriguing director remains absolutely first-rate.
What we need now is something that will revisit these films with all the
additional weapons that the subsequent four decades of film, cultural, and
gender theory have provided us. Winston-Salem, North Carolina, USA Copyright © Film-Philosophy 2005 Peter Brunette, 'Nowell-Smith Meets Visconti, Redux: The
Old and the New', _Film-Philosophy_, vol. 9 no. 16, March 2005
<http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol9-2005/n16brunette>. |
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