Bresson

The soul of things. On Alice Rohrwacher’s Dopo il cinema: le domande di una regista (2023). by Gerardo Muñoz

In the the long conversation Dopo il cinema: le domande di una regista (Edizioni e/o, 2023) conducted by Goffredo Fofi, the contemporary Italian filmmaker Alice Rohrwacher offers a series of reflections about the possibilities of artistic creation in the abysmal time of integrated spectacle that has fully brought to bear the erosion of the human capacity for attention and outward experience. Can cinema and film do anything in the wake of such humiliating and crushing reality? At first glance the late modernist critique of the value-driven image seems insufficient and merely rhetorical as the valence of dialectics has been dissolved in the pressure of real subsumption.  In a certain sense,  Dopo il cinema: le domande di una regista (2023) is a reflection written after the ambivalent commitment of cinema to awaken the spectator from the slumber of the absorption in order regime of standardization where the utopia of self-design realizes the objective abstraction in the acceleration of optimized and contained expressiveness. At no moment does Rohrwacher affirm that we are, indeed, “after cinema”, but throughout the dialogue the tone is that of  immediacy in an epoch that seems to be saturated by looping, real-time, and the intensification of life-exposure spectacle. If film is reduced to telling stories, then it falls into vulgarity, while contributing to the gigantic sedative layout that veils the annihilation of social reproduction. In  the last decade, Alice Rohrwacher has done a series of important and highly original films (Le meraviglie, Lazzaro felice, or La chimera) that signal a way out from the numbness of sight, relocating the  moving image to the mythic dialogue with the invisible, the mysterious, and the old craft of the fable narrative. Rohrwacher’s cinema is only magical to the extent that it subtract itself from the historical overindulgence that the autonomous historical man had to endure in its separation from nature.  

Filmmaking is no privilege site of creation, but if Ruíz was right, there are plenty of chamanic energies circumventing the cinematic experience. This is a prehistoric residue that, in her own style, Rohrwacher wants to hold on to. In Dopo il cinema  (2023), she admits that  any attempt to organize a new “political” cinema is out of question, as it was always grounded in the idealism of ‘consciousness’, which is now realized in the self-narcissistic exposition of the free-floating subject of market equivalence. Political cinema could only be arrogant and superfluous pedagogy at the mercy of the furious chatter of “cultural wars”. Is there a higher poverty? And yet this is what appears as ‘necessary ideological critique’ in some circles. In this sense, cinema is not the leading instrument for the work of imagination and Rohrwacher insistence on ‘creation’ drives the point home. Citing Elsa Morante (and perhaps implicitly Cristina Campo) Rohwacher defends the creation as an ongoing effort of a common intelligence to grasp the invisible and allow the eruption of joy in the life of characters. Similar to Robert Bresson who wanted the characters of his films to have an outlook as if they were castaways from the time of the first Adam in the earthly paradise; for Rohrwacher the thicket of creativity for our times is rooted in a contemplative gaze through which the external elements of the world can hone the one and true destiny of the irreducibility of the human species [1]. Rohrwacher’s assertion that she wants creation to establish proximity with the outside – devoid of attachment to religion, political parties, or moral principles –  presupposes a sound critique of all forms of idolatry that have modeled aesthetic production at the service of abstract historical needs (Rohrwacher 33). 

As a creator Alice Rohrwacher’s own point departure is thoroughly subtractive. This means leaving behind the subject of consciousness (the internal and self-sufficient producer of images, which today appears with the empty label of content creator), while opening the cinematic possibilities to the luminosity of a collective imagination in which the contemplation touches, albeit for a moment, the thought of the world (‘pensieri del mundo’) (Rohwacher 36). Obviously, this is no longer an artifice of cinema in its industrial and technological capacities; rather, it is the impersonal general intellect that refuses the integral planning that forecloses the wayward route of imagination, discovery, happiness, and the uncharted land in which the characters and spectators are taken by the seduction of the possibility of events (Rohrwacher 39). Whenever film, like a fairy tale, touches the truth of a not-yet administered world (an inapprehensible excess that resembles prophecy), then visual pedagogy ceases to be a task of cinema; rather, the process of film is one of “ex-ducere, cioè portare fuori, educare” (Rohrwacher 52). And as Cristina Campo understood well, the fairy tale (analogous to cinema for Rohrwacher) has at the center of its making the “raw material of existence…this material is the mystery of character…which maintains its traits to the end, and only be transformed by repeating the same errors, suffering the same defeats. The nature of this mystery is sometimes suggested with enchanting ambiguity” [2]. It is this ambiguity what expresses the caesura between existence and world – their strange noncoincidence – that has colored the experiential texture of Rohrwacher’s poetical cinema. 

The central characters of Rohrwahcer’s films (Lazzaro felice, La chimera) are symbolic personifications of forms of life that are neither alive nor dead; neither mythic nor mundane; neither fictional nor historical determined (each of her films are also landscapes of specific territorial Italian communes); there are both things at once, and they maintain their musical tonality in their own symbolic protuberance, precisely because they cannot be divided and forced into the civilizational narrative at the expense of the exhaustion of the mystery of form (Rohrwacher 63). In fact, Rohrwacher, so attuned to Joseph Roth’s indictment of the Hollywood’s hollow gestalt announced in the The Antichrist (1933), reminds us that the word “devil” (diaballo) implies cut and division; whereas, the symbol, cultivates and renews the mysterious enchanted dimension of the world in which no reified image (any image that could be potentially any other) can hold the human species as hostage in the  cacophonous prison of senselessness. And is not this radical evil – an assumed and distributed morality of the active consumer, who always works “for his own interest” – the most basic unit of the transmission of the image-spectacle from which one has to flee from? The mythic or fairy-tale-like leveling in Rohrwacher is no metaphoric transport; it becomes the cinematic potential to see the world with a clear third eye. 

No easy task of course. Deposing the fictitious machine entails exerting a movement of exodus towards the outside, which Rohrwacher assuredly calls the invisible as that which restitutes the soul of things. The symbol is a passage against the seduction of the pleasure principle of self-enjoyment and parodic personal heroisms. And this is perhaps the most powerful and original testament of Rohrwacher aesthetic sensibility in Dopo il cinema (2023): “Ma nel memento in qui quella cose emanano – direi irradiano – un’anima, subito ne abbiamo più cura, e la cura come abbiamo detto è un atto eversivo. Un’azione poetica” (Rohrwacher 64). And poetry remains not only the dwelling place of human beings; but, fundamentally, the lacuna in a world that refuses to come to completion. Perhaps ‘cinema’ – or, rather, ‘cinema after cinema’ – in Rohrwacher’s view only emerges as a gnostic symbol that prepares the birth of a new earth, as if planting a seed for seasonal germination (Rohrwacher 64). In each character, image, symbol, and gesture, Rohrwacher’s filmmaking plunders into the position of redemption against the cruel reduction of the objective madhouse: restituting the soul in things dignifies the inheritance of terrestrial human species as if it is always coming into presence for the very first time. The eros of cinema becoming an enduring task — and is not ultimately what we feel in each of Rohrwacher’s films? The joyous spirit of the saltimbanca: in and outside the world’s reality, the symbol lives and outlives the fixation of this world.

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Notes 

1. Robert Bresson. Bresson on Bresson: Interviews 1943-1983 (nyrb, 2013), 277.

2. Cristina Campo. “On Fairy Tales”, in The Unforgivable (nyrb, 2024), 33.

Photogenesis and the invisible: on John Cassavetes’ Shadows (1959). Notes for a seminar presentation. by Gerardo Muñoz

i. What is your name? Every time that I have watched John Cassavetes’ Shadows (1959) I end up facing the same question: what is taking place in this film? Perhaps it is the incorrect question insofar as Shadows (1959) is, first and foremost, a film about the event; about “what takes place”. Unlike Hollywood’s telic form over conflict, the whole premise of Cassavetes’ method of improvisation is a way to liberate the event in the moving image. This is what I would like to call here a photogenic event. The whole structure of Shadows is, to this effect, the bringing-fourth of appearing without narration or naming. Hence, what takes place is the way in which characters or figures emerge from light, retracting from the plunge unto theatricality. The photogenetic effect in Cassavetes is a way out of the logic of naming: remember “what is your name?”, as Bennie asks very early in the film (the café sequence). Indeed, the naming is always what emerges after the event, once boredom has kicked him and the separation from light and shadow, human and animal, theater and theatrically have taken place. The taking place in Shadows is a return to an abysmal site predating naming, faces, or intentions: it is absolute proximity.

ii. The vocation of the quotidian. The photogenetic image works through the texture of life: this is why in Shadows nothing truly happens in virtue that everything takes place. The difference between happening and taking place is an irreducible distinction; mainly, what happens is not provoked a mediation between subjects and objects, but rather at a moment when both subject and object coincide only to immediately suspend each other. What takes place is life’s destiny, which ultimately entails that we are figures of exposure before we are subjects of narrative and causality. As in a diary or a midnight party, what takes place is the clandestine life once it enters in relation with other bodies, languages, and gestures. In this sense, Shadows remains faithful to one and only one principle: how to transfigure the boredom of factical life into a vocation of a clandestine life. It is not too clear that Cassavetes arrives at a successful answer to this problem; almost as if, indeed, to remain clandestine is to insist on the “invisible” image that is always missing from every life. The promiscuity between shadows and light transpires the possibility of the living all the other invisible and nonexistent lives that are scarified within that which we call “life”. 

iii. Under the glorious sky. If the task of vocation opens to the invisible in life, then this means that there is always a dimension that is exterior the anthropological determination. In the solitude of the nocturnal splendor of the late modern metropolis – as in the instance in which Lelia is outside of a Manhattan theater lost in thought or contemplating the shimmering lights above – the existence of the human shines along with the embers of the sky. This most definitely an inherence of paganism in the sense of the medium in life as a mode of appearance without judgement. As one can still contemplate it from the frescos at Villa Fernesina, the pagan gazing towards the sky is not a flight towards abstraction or transcendence, but rather a releasement of life’s destiny as affirmed in the terrestrial presence [1]. Paradoxically, at the moment of the total subsumption of life into the Spectacle, the medium frees the possibility of the deconstitution of life into the modes and resources of appearing. From the photogenic perspective, this entails full saturation on the horizon; from the pagan perspective, the onwards unfolding of existence becomes a fragment in the exploration of the common sky. 

iv. Inharmonious tonality. Now, fragmentation opens a heterochronic disassociation between images and events. Indeed, all of Shadows unfolding bears witness to the way in which the tonality of life is always at odds with the attunement of the rhythms of the world. It is in this threshold where interiority of the self and exteriority of music point to the peak of prophecy. For one thing, because music is the medium through the residual mystery of the “inexpressive” becomes the process of traversing the ecstatic formlessness of the event [2]. This disharmony dislocates the homogenization vis-à-vis the sky of cinematography. Bresson says something very beautiful about this disharmony: the image of cinematography must be such that it puts in relation the voice and the steps of a person in a way that the protagonist themselves have not foreseen [3]. This nocturnal knowledge between image and sound, rhythm and tonality of life, becomes the triumph of the photogenic medium in which life dissolves in a kinetic outburst without recourse.

v. The invisible and intoxication. At a very superficial dimension, Shadows is about alcohol consumption; hence about what happens to a life under the stage of intoxication. The only knowledge is that of the oblique pedagogy in which the way of the flesh becomes a pathway for language, friendship, and violence among other bodies. There is no transgression as an intoxicated subject, since intoxication is already the violence against the substance of the subject. In other words – and this was suggested to me by the contemporary artist and designer Claudia Patricia – the logistics of errancy is being able to do otherwise from a site in which no other possibility could have emerged. This absolute necessity moves against reality and the future planning of the metropolis. And here I must return to the beginning: what takes place is what allows a relation with the invisible. Already in 1959, Cassavetes understood that intoxication redeems an ethical life against an epochal phase in which total anthropological exposure would become the concrete utopia of the socialization of capital. 

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Notes 

1. Fritz Saxl. La fede astrologica di Agostino Chigi. Interpretazione dei dipinti di Baldassarre Peruzzi nella Sala di Galatea della Farnesina (Bardi Edizioni, 2017).

2. Gianni Carchia. “Dialettica dell’immagine: note sull’estetica biblica e cristiana”, in La legittimazione dell’arte: studi sull’intelligibile estetico (1982). 

3. Bresson on Bresson: Interviews, 1943-1983 (NYRB, 2016).