Vighi - Traumatic Encounters in Italian Film: Locating the Cinematic Unconscious

Traumatic Encounters in Italian Film

Locating the Cinematic Unconscious

By Fabio Vighi

Traumatic Encounters in Italian Film

Locating the Cinematic Unconscious

By Fabio Vighi

First Published in the UK in 2006 by

Intellect Books, PO Box 862, Bristol BS99 1DE, UK

First published in the USA in 2006 by

Intellect Books, ISBS, 920 NE 58th Ave. Suite 300, Portland, Oregon

97213-3786, USA

Copyright 2006 Intellect Ltd

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Cover Design: Gabriel Solomons

Copy Editor: Holly Spradling

Typesetting: Mac Style, Nafferton, E. Yorkshire

Electronic ISBN 1-84150-950-7 / ISBN 1-84150-140-9

Printed and bound in Great Britain by 4edge Ltd.

Acknowledgements

First I wish to express my gratitude to the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), as without their support I would never have been able to complete this monograph as expeditiously as I did. I am also indebted to Geoffrey Nowell-Smith for his precious words of advice, to May of Intellect for her assistance, and to Mat for his contribution as copy-editor. I would also like to thank Antonis (Gus), Csar (Boludo) and Andrs (Faf) for always distracting me from my writing at the right time, and especially Heiko, whose intellectual energy and contagious enthusiasm I enjoy in the Lacanian sense of the term! I must also acknowledge those students who in recent years have taken my courses on cinema at Cardiff University, for they have often acted, unconsciously perhaps, as a silent cause of my fascination with film. Finally, a special thanks to Alice, for all those reasons one should never even try to understand.

Acknowledgement is here made to Rai Cinema, British Film Institute and Centro Studi Archivio Pier Paolo Pasolini, as well as to the distributors of the films whose images have been used in this book.

Previous versions of some materials of this volume have appeared as the following publications: Lacan for cinema today: the uncanny pouvoir de la vrit (Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society, vol. 10 n. 1, 2005); Encounters in the real: subjectivity and its excess in Roberto Rossellini (Studies in European Cinema, vol. 1, n. 3, 2004); Pasolini and Exclusion: iek, Agamben and the Modern Sub-Proletariat (Theory, Culture and Society, vol. 5, n. 20, 2003); Unravelling Morettis (political) unconscious: the abyss of the subject in La stanza del figlio (Journal of Romance Studies, vol. 3, n. 2.)

INTRODUCTION

In the last sequence of Bernardo Bertoluccis cerebral puzzle La strategia del ragno (The Spiders Stratagem, 1970), Athos Magnani Jr (Giulio Brogi), the films protagonist, is at the train station preparing to leave Tara, his hometown. He had arrived at that same train station a few days earlier, determined to discover the truth about his fathers mysterious assassination, more than 30 years before. An anti-fascist fighter, Athos Magnani Sr (also played by Giulio Brogi) had allegedly been killed by an unidentified fascist sniper in the towns opera house during a performance of Verdis Rigoletto, and had since been celebrated as a legendary and unsurpassed hero by the inhabitants of Tara. However, by the time he decides to leave, the son has been exposed to a devastating truth: his father was not murdered by the enemy but had instead consciously staged his own assassination after betraying a plot to kill Benito Mussolini, so that he would be idealised as an anti-fascist martyr. His comrades, not the fascists, had killed him ... Alone in the sun-beaten station, pale and forlorn, Athos hears from the loudspeaker that his train is ten minutes late. The delay increases to twenty minutes, then half an hour, and so on, until he decides to set off on foot along the railway line. As he walks away the camera closes in on the tracks showing them covered in long grass, a clear signal that no train could have passed through Tara for weeks, or perhaps even longer.

This final image of the grass eclipsing the railway tracks functions as a cinematic figuration of the explosive character of the Lacanian unconscious the central topic in this book for it is an image that retroactively erases the narrative framework within which we attempt to decipher the meaning of the film. The symbolic search for the father comes to a stalemate that first bewilders the son and then brings him to the verge of madness, whilst simultaneously causing the narrative to implode. More to the point: if no train has passed through Tara for weeks, then the initial return of the son is recast as an event that could not have happened, or could only have happened in a radically changed temporal dimension. And is not this impossibility the real target of Bertoluccis narrative? The very fact that the father is eventually portrayed as an impostor is a logical consequence of this narrative deadlock, in as much as Magnani Sr comes to embody the failure of his symbolic role, a notion here clearly suspended on the abyss of its own cause. To paraphrase the films title, by the end of the journey the fathers stratagem is fully exposed, its web of fictions blatantly revealed. The brave son accomplishes his mission precisely by deconstructing the meaning of paternal authority into its incongruous conflation of heroism and cowardice, fiction and void.

Strategia del ragno

The sons approach to the enigmatic cause of the fathers death the kernel where the truth about the father is situated slowly reveals that the film is less a chronologically coherent narrative than an attempt to visualise the surreal spectacle of the unconscious. Bertoluccis strategy comes to full fruition with the conclusive scene at the deserted railway station, as we realise that Tara was always a fantasmatic place disconnected from our perception of space and time, providing an ideal figurative backdrop to the directors endeavour to project the unconscious onto the silver screen. This final close-up on the grass engulfing the railway, therefore, signals the definitive failure of interpretation, the limit dimension where truth and void overlap. However, Lacanian psychoanalysis tells us that it is precisely through these failures that interpretation paradoxically succeeds, since the target of the analysis is the kernel of non-sense that demarcates the unconscious: The fact that I have said that the effect of interpretation is to isolate in the subject a kernel, a kern, to use Freuds own term, of non-sense, does not mean that interpretation is in itself nonsense (Lacan, 1998a, p. 250). Thus, it would seem that in La strategia del ragno Bertolucci successfully establishes a figurative link with the unconscious.

Yet, as I shall further develop in the final pages of the present study, this conclusion is far from satisfactory. Founded as it is upon the awareness of Bertoluccis manipulation of the viewers expectations through a deliberate deployment of psychoanalytic theory, the above reading misses the most profound structural function played by what in this book, drawing on Jacques Lacan and Slavoj iek, I theorise as the cinematic unconscious. For if in Lacanian terms the unconscious of film can only be defined as a paradoxical knowledge that does not know itself