Review: Domietta Torlasco (2008) The Time of the Crime: Phenomenology, Psychoanalysis, Italian Film. Stanford California: Stanford University Press. Alan Fair Manchester Metropolitan University Those of us who love the cinema are in love with ghosts, with spectral figures that admit to their presence and their absence as they appear and vanish on the illuminated surface. Each object, each character inhabits the same luminous environment, an environment that we experience in the present tense of our viewing and listening. Not just representations of some prior, superior(?) reality but a flow of images to use Pasolini s term, that enjoy their own ontological democracy; that grass, that person in the grass, that bench, the bird that lands there, all of these images feed into the same space, a space that seems to grant them a specific kind of existence, the cinematic. This mise en scène of the transient is also paradoxically monumental. It is as though its presence teases us with the potential of its absence. It is no wonder then that certain aspects of the cinema would consider this aspect as one worthy of enquiry, this vanishing and returning, and it this phenomenon that Domietta Torlasco in her compact methodical study addresses. I say methodical, for what strikes the reader is Torlasco s effective mode of analysis. She spends the four chapters that make up the book examining, one might say investigating, the work of four film makers from, what one might term, the golden age of Italian art cinema: Antonioni, Blow Up (1966), The Passenger (1975), Cavani, The Night Porter (1974) Pasolini Oedipus Rex (Edipo Re, 1967) and Bertolucci s, The Spider s Stratagem (1970). But she never moves directly to the film under scrutiny, for in each critical move she first describes in the present tense her own encounter with Film-Philosophy ISSN: 1466-4615 303
other artistic texts, and it is by means of these mediated meditations that she articulates her critical practice. Her central terms are Merleau-Ponty s phenomenology as best exemplified by The Visible and the Invisible and Lacan s reading of the subject as one that is found in the future anterior of analysis. By combining these encounters with close readings of specific moments from the films studied she leaves us, at the end, in a labyrinth from which the new can emerge (110). The first chapter deals with Antonioni s self-reflexive tale of photography and crime. Torlasco introduces us to the film by way of her encounter with a series of photographs which, she tells us, were published in 1930, X Marks The Spot, photographs that depict the sites of Chicago gangland killings, each photograph marked by an X presumably placed by policemen or their forensic teams. 1 Here Torlasco begins to hint at her project, to encounter herself in the act of reading, to self-consciously catch herself caught by the textual apparatus. She writes about looking at one of these photographs, I can make sense of the human form. Yet this form is not a permanent possession of mine. Another imperceptible turn of the head, a prolonged blink, and the body disappears, again dissolving itself into the frozen surface of the lake. I become prey to a composite feeling, a strange mix of wonder and anxiety. My vision is dispersed throughout the plane of the picture, which now coincides with the surface of the lake, and cannot focus on any single point. For a few moments, I cannot even trace this act of looking back to my eyes I see with my body and my body is dispersed. It is my whole body that meets the corpse and dissolves with it. I am too in the process of vanishing. (16) The author brings her body into the weave of this text that she looks at and at the same time is caught in the weft of the apparatus of the book I am reading. What this gambit leads us to is, of course, exactly the complex of diegetic and extra diegetic looks and affects that the film Blow Up achieves. 1 I wonder if Howard Hawks had seen this book? Some short time after its publication Hawks, in the early summer of 1931, set about making, what was to become the ur-text of gangster films Scarface (1932) In Scarface each time a murder is about to be committed we see, embedded as it were in the mise en scène, an X. We are also shown, more prominently, an X after the crime. X marks the spot indeed. Film-Philosophy ISSN: 1466-4615 304
By means of a close reading of specific moments in the film Torlasco is able to convince us of this method, this approach, here she discusses a moment from Blow Up: Since the separation of primary and secondary identification has positioned the spectator in two places at the same time here with the camera and over there with the character it is possible to suggest that I (as character) am being watched by myself (as camera). On the other hand, while occupying the new viewpoint, which lies close to what had previously been the vanishing point, we sense that someone else is here, further behind us or perhaps all around, a stranger whom we cannot see but whom we can perceive, as we perceive the sound of leaves rustling in the wind. (23) This of course echoes with the idea of Lacan s use of the term the gaze : I can only see from here, but I am seen from everywhere, this sense of the subject as an effect of the visible is something that Torlasco most clearly argues in her chapter on Pasolini s film. In the third chapter she begins by considering Cézanne s persistent desire to render the Mount Sainte-Victoire. They solicit my attention, she says, with meticulous intensity (64). Here again we have this imbrication of the viewer and the viewed, the paintings are rendered with the meticulous intensity that her reading adopts. This time she not only passes through the medium of Cézanne and his paintings but also through a reading of these works by Merleau-Ponty. She sees in Merleau-Ponty s study the manner in which the form of the representation is enmeshed with the matter of the work. Space, she argues is both crystalline and fluid, tightly structured and vibrant (65). Cezanne s desire to capture light is a desire to capture time to give time a physical aspect, he shifts his position in relation to his subject and thus moves through space and time and makes material this movement, makes material of this movement. She discusses the phenomenon of a perception, often alluded to by painters, of feeling themselves gazed upon by the object that they paint. Far from producing a tear in the realm of perception, the painter s experience brings us back to the paradoxical reflexivity of the sensible, that reversibility between the seer and the seen, the toucher and the touched, that our body remarkably exemplifies (66). Film-Philosophy ISSN: 1466-4615 305
Here again we find ourselves enveloped in a subjectivity marked by a position within the visible field. It is here, in this chapter, that the volume is at its most provocative and its most satisfying; it is here that she manages the dominant themes of the book, the visible and the temporal as distinguished by phenomenology and psychoanalysis. Oedipus is not a traveller through time but rather a traveller in time. For Pasolini as for the other directors the cinema has a special quality, explicitly in Pasolini, only because he writes so eloquently about such things. The cinema can allow us access to the hidden life of things. It can help us to realise this relationship between time and place as the present tense of an experience and the future anterior of meaning. We might argue that experience always lacks a dimension, the dimension of its memory; it is as though in memory experience finds its completion. In Pasolini s film Torlasco isolates two moments, at the beginning and at the end of the film, two moments of vision that are almost identical with each other, but not quite because, she argues, what this time of the Oedipal is a realization (sic) of both the emergence and the dissolution of the subject, exposing him as the being who is subjected to a heterogeneous time and a dispersed vision (73). It is here in this world of the visible that we encounter the time of the future anterior: Conversely, the prologue constitutes what will have been in a distant future, and yet is presented as the origin of the past. At the end as well as at the beginning, there appears to be no other time than the time of the Oedipal transgression (74). If Pasolini deals with a mythic past that is always part of a continuous present then Bertolucci, the youngest of the artists here considered, chooses an historical past converted into myth that exists in the present. The Spider s Stratagem is taken from a suitably labyrinthine tale by Borges. The visible is a trap, Lacan notes in his discussion of Merleau- Ponty s work quoted here, There is not a single one of the divisions, a single one of the double sides that the function of vision presents, that is not manifested to us as a labyrinth (87). Bertolucci s film, photographed so beautifully by Vittorio Storaro, leads on a journey of self-discovery, a discovery marked by a peculiar form of the visible. A young man returns to Film-Philosophy ISSN: 1466-4615 306
Tara (not the mythical plantation of Gone With the Wind, although, of course, this resonance is not without a shiver of recognition) to discover the truth of his anti-fascist father s exploits and thereby the truth of himself. We might see it as another reworking of Oedipus. In the end the father disappears much like the, at first unseen, body in the photograph in Blow- Up. The closer we get to the truth the more it disappears, our investigative eye peers to deeply into the detail, other things emerge, but the object of scrutiny disappears. Again Torlasco guides us to the perimeter of the narrative by way of another medium, the Cretan Labyrinth. By examining Umberto Eco s modelling of labyrinths into three basic forms she is led to her thesis, one that states that the film articulates the temporality of the future anterior as the chiasm of light and darkness (92). She utilises in her analysis a suitably labyrinthine quote from Lacan s Ecrits, What is realized in my history is not the past definite of what was, since it is no more, or even the present perfect of what has been in what I am, but the future anterior of what I shall have been for what I am in the process of becoming. (97) Torlasco argues that Bertolucci realises in the story of this young man the affirmation of truth, a truth, it seems, that was destined to be in as much as it is realised through the retroaction of a narrative that weaves, as only films can, this past and the present within the perception of the viewer. In this film we are offered flashbacks to the time of a crime, an enactment that in the film is never indicated by the rhetoric of classical editing, no wavy picture, no extreme close-ups, no voice over, we simply move, within one shot between temporal moments where the two characters who share the same name, Athos, father and son, are played by the same actor, just as in the Pasolini film. What seems the same is dispersed through the cinematic apparatus. At the end of the film we are offered a long tracking (literally) shot of the railway lines that were the medium by which Athos, the son, has been transported back to this place and back to a time before his own beginnings. As the camera glides forward over the rail lines weeds begin to Film-Philosophy ISSN: 1466-4615 307
grow over them. In Britain we call these rails, the permanent way, rails that never seem to meet except in our vision as we look toward the future or turn our heads around and look backwards. By examining these four filmmakers work Torlasco offers us a snapshot of a particular cinematic moment, the moment of high modernism in Italian cinema. Each one of these filmmakers were witnesses in one way or another to the fascification of their culture, that their practice was affected by this political fact must bear some weight. The Time of the Crime situates us alongside the writer, like a detective, like an analyst, like an art historian, we search through the symptoms, the clues the marks of a culture for that which is always both visible and invisible like the tromp l oeil of film that as it passes through the gate of the projector alternates between light and its absence. Is this crime that appears only in as much as it disappears the crime of history that, at least in the period under discussion, weighed so heavily on Italy s artists and intellectuals? Somewhere in these films maybe we can discern a peculiar anxiety, one that informs this subject, these characters that exist in a universe that asks the neurotic s question. I apologise for not having discussed the chapter on Cavani, the only copy I was able to acquire of the film was an awful English version that made it difficult to think through some of the writer s observations and analysis. What this book does offer is a valuable reading of film as part of a textured history of the subject both in her visible world and in the time of her becoming. That the writer chooses to situate herself in the present tense of both her readings and the reader s offers a critical dimension that informs the reception of her argument, which allows for an effective way of re-situating the reader in the critical discourse of film analysis. Finally we might note that what Torlasco asks as her central question, is there a possibility of full speech or is there only its tantalizing promise?, This question has a satisfying sense of the uncompleted. Film-Philosophy ISSN: 1466-4615 308
Filmography Antonioni, Michelangelo (1966) Blow-Up. Italy/UK. Antonioni, Michelangelo (1975) The Passenger. Italy. Bertolucci, Bernardo (1970) The Spider s Stratagem. Italy. Cavani, Liliana (1974) The Night Porter. Italy. Hawks, Howard (1932) Scarface. USA. Fleming, Victor (1939) Gone With The Wind. USA. Pasolini, Pier Paolo (1967) Oedipus Rex. Italy. Film-Philosophy ISSN: 1466-4615 309