Experiences of Flânerie and Cityscapes in Italian Postwar Film

View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by IUScholarWorks STROLLING THE STREETS OF MODERNITY: EXPERIENCES OF FLÂNERIE AND CITYSCAPES IN ITALIAN POSTWAR FILM TORUNN HAALAND Submitted to the faculty of the University Graduate School in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of French and Italian, Indiana University OCTOBER 2007 Accepted by the Graduate Faculty, Indiana University, in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Doctoral Committee Distinguished Professor Emeritus Peter Bondanella Professor Andrea Ciccarelli, Rudy Professor Emeritus James Naremore, Professor Massimo Scalabrini September 24 2007 ii © 2007 Torunn Haaland ALL RIGHTS RESERVED iii For Peter – for all the work, for all the fun iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS My thanks go to the members of my dissertation committee, who all in their own way inspired the direction taken in this study while crucially contributing with acute observations and suggestions in its final stages. Even more significant was however the distinct function each of them came to have in encouraging my passion for film and forming the insight and intellectual means necessary to embark on this project in the first place. Thanks to Andrea for being so revealingly lucid in his digressions, to Jim for asking the questions only he could have thought of, to Massimo for imposing warmheartedly both his precision and encyclopaedic knowledge, and thanks to Peter for never losing faith in this or anything else of what he ever made me do. Thanks to my brother Vegard onto whom fell the ungrateful task of copyediting and converting my rigorously inconsistent files. v Torunn Haaland STROLLING THE STREETS OF MODERNITY: EXPERIENCES OF FLÂNERIE AND CITYSCAPES IN ITALIAN POSTWAR FILM The study focuses on urban narratives and characters within Italian cinema film in the period (1947-1971). Including neorealist classics and modernist masterpieces as well as more vernacular thrillers, from Ladri di biciclette (De Sica, 1947), Viaggio in Italia (Rossellini, 1953) and Le notti di Cabiria (Fellini, 1957), to La dolce vita (Fellini, 1960), L’avventura (Antonioni, 1960) and Morte a Venezia (Visconti, 1971) to La ragazza che sapeva troppo (Bava, 1963) and L’uccello dalle piume di cristallo (Argento, 1970), it produces new insight into films which have been much studied but never as a corpus and rarely, if at all, with an analytical focus on the city-walker. My approach to the cinematic city as a potentially multifaceted formation contingent on the eyes that see, relies in particular on Walter Benjamin’s theories on the flâneur - a narrative and discursive motif within which is embedded the representation and perception of modern life – and on Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the modern cinema as constituted around a viewing, rather than an (re)-acting, subject. This critical framework allows to account for the films’ nature as both products and reflections of Italy’s transition into a modern and predominantly urban society, while also privileging the movements and perceptions of the protagonists, each of whom is addressed as a specific realisation of the flâneur or the female flâneuse . Despite the major socio-cultural differences that separate their experiences, common among them is their troubled relationship with the urban crowd and exclusion from or unwillingness to adhere to official manifestations of the city’s life. Actual or perceived as it may be, their sense of displacement within increasingly disintegrated urban formations serve to shed critical light on social disjunctions in postwar Italy as well as on the cultural and moral losses involved in processes of modernisation and vi urbanisation. However, in contrast to the male wanderers who tend to remain inert or ultimately failing in their quests, the female urbanites who in these very years achieve access to previously forbidden male spheres prove considerable ability to fight an initial sense of alienation and make constructive use of non-official aspects of the cityscape. It is the flâneuses ultimately who demonstrate the rewarding quality of street-walking as a claim to subjectivity - to the right both to see and walk freely – and as a process of self-discovery with a potential for inner growth. Distinguished Professor Emeritus Peter Bondanella Professor Andrea Ciccarelli Rudy Professor Emeritus James Naremore Professor Massimo Scalabrini vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Dedication……………………………………………………………………………………..iv Acknowledgments……………………………………………………………………………...v Abstract………………………………………………………………………………………..vi Introduction: Cities of Walkers; Cinema of Viewers: Visualising Spaces of Modernity………………………………………………………………1 Chapter One: Views from Beyond: Exclusion and Transgression in the Postwar City………30 Chapter Two: Views from Within: Commodification and Alienation in the Miraculous City…………………………………….75 Chapter Three: Views from Beneath: Deception and Misrecognition in the Noir City……………………………………………..121 Chapter Four: Views from Outside: Self and Other in the Unhomely City…………………154 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………………..193 Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………………199 viii Lo sguardo percorre le vie come pagine scritte: la città dice tutto quello che devi pensare, ti fa ripetere il suo discorso, e mentre credi di visitare Tamara non fai che registrare i nomi con cui essa definisce se stessa e tutte le sue parti. 1 Italo Calvino. Le città invisibili . INTRODUCTION Cities of Walkers; Cinema of Viewers: Visualising Spaces of Modernity Preliminaries: Streets; Flânerie ; Cinematic city “When history is made in the streets,” Sigfried Kracauer writes in a well-known passage of the redemption of physical reality that motivates his film theory, “the streets tend to move onto the screen” ( Theory of Film , 72). Some decades earlier, Walter Benjamin had spoken of 19 th -century Parisian streets as “a dwelling for the flâneur ; he is as much at home among the façades of houses as a citizen is in his four walls” (Charles Baudelaire , 37). 2 Both Kracauer’s felicitous capturing of the ideological and artistic foundation for Italian neorealism, and Benjamin’s reflections on the habitus of the flâneur – the leisurely stroller and observer who roams the streets in search of the essence of the metropolis – will here serve as a starting point for an examination of the urban narratives we see characterise and interconnect a group of stylistically and thematically different films which are all representative of Italian postwar cinema. It will begin with Vittorio De Sica’s neorealist classic Ladri di biciclette (1947), the film that Kracauer specifically 1 “The look runs along the streets like written pages: the city tells you everything you have to think, it makes you repeat its discourse and while you think you are visiting Tamara you do nothing but register the names with which she defines herself and all her parts.” All translations, unless otherwise stated, are mine. 2 Further references to Charles Baudelaire are indicated with CB and page number. 1 refers to as an example of cinema’s ability to capture “the flow of life” within urban streets, and conclude with Luchino Visconti’s adaptation of Thomas Mann’s novella Morte a Venezia (1971) which, if juxtaposed to his La terra trema (1948), clearly indicates how far both Visconti and Italian national cinema eventually moved away from both the historical context and artistic principles of neorealism. While such differences – of subject matter, aesthetics, and modes of enunciation - separate Ladri di biciclette and Morte a Venezia , what they do share is their way of establishing a man’s walk through urban streets as the basis for a subjectively lived cinematic city. Kracauer’s observation on the affinity between cinema and the urban flux points to the perceptively cinematic quality of the modern city and its status as one of the founding and certainly most lasting sources of inspiration for cinematic creation. The very modes and rhythms of the moving image would seem to be modelled on those of the metropolis, while the cinematic gaze embodies the flâneur ’s unique sense for voyeuristic inquiry into urban locations and characters. Between these two quintessentially modern entities, there is a relation of mutual dependence - of, in Sergey Daney’s words, “complicité” and “destin commun” (121) - that gives life to the great city-films of the silent era, as demonstrated by Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1926); Berlin: Die Simphonie der Grosstadt (Walter Ruttman, 1927); and The Crowd (King Vidor, 1928), and subsequently to a wave of gangster movies, such as Little Caesar (Mervyn Le Roy, 1931) and Scarface (Howard Hawks, 1932). The cinematic city comes eventually to establish itself as a dominant narrative and stylistic component of the American film noir as well as of a current of social realism that in the immediate postwar years characterises European cinema. Films such as Der Verlorne (Peter Lorre, 1945) and Die Mörder sind unter uns (Wolfgang Staudte, 1946) are symptomatic of the tendency within the German and Austrian Trümmerfilme , as well as in other waves of “ruin-films” in France, Great Britain and Italy, to portray physically and 2 psychologically damaged cities, where spatial testimony was accompanied and often reinforced by human dramas of poverty, loss and social disintegration (Sorlin, “La cinematografia europea,” 738). The urgency that more specifically faces neorealist directors is, of course, to create

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