Flavia Laviosa 365 GAETANA MARRONE
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Flavia Laviosa 365 GAETANA MARRONE THE GAZE AND THE LABYRINTH: THE CINEMA OF LILIANA CAVANI Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. 308 pp. he Gaze and the Labyrinth is a long-needed book on Liliana Cavani and her cinema. Cavani, one of the few famous women in the Italian film industry, whose work, in both documentary and fiction, represents a significant contribution to cinematic art, is also one of the most controversial and thought-provoking filmmakers who has not received the credit that she deserves, and who has been a long-neglected figure in the international discussion. Cavani has given a large number of interviews and her films have been widely reviewed in numerous publications, as Marrone s bibliography shows at the end of her book, but, except for a limited number of theoretical and critical articles in academic journals, her works have not been adequately and thoroughly studied. Cavani s first feature to win her international reputation as a film director was Il portiere di notte in 1974. She was helped by her cast, Dirk Bogarde and Charlotte Rampling, but she was also in command of an explosive storyline. The inspiration for the film came from her research into camp survivors conducted during her period making documentaries for RAI in the early Sixties, as Cavani explains in detail in her introduction to the published screenplay (Einaudi, 1974) and in the interview given to Claire Clouzot ( Entretien Ecran, June 1974, 37-42). The film was inspired by personal encounters with two women who had survived the concentration camp experience and by Nazi newsreel and propaganda material which Cavani had screened while preparing a documentary, History of the Third Reich for RAI, in 1962. In 1965, she directed a television film titled The Women of the Resistance and, during the screening of this documentary, a woman told Cavani that after the war ended, she returned every summer to Dachau, where she had been imprisoned for three years. Cavani s documentaries gave her the historical background, psychological understanding, and cinematic experience to explore in her German trilogy, Il portiere di notte (The Night Porter), Al di là del bene e del male (Beyond Good and Evil, 1977), and Interno berlinese (The Berlin Affair, 1985) the nature of impact of WW II on Europe. The complex aesthetic nature and socially, politically, and sexually controversial themes of Cavani s films, as well as the difficulty in exploring her works from a feminist perspective, have resulted in a paucity of scholarly sound studies (Marguerite Waller, 1995; Laura Pietropaolo, 1989; Mirto Golo Stone, 1989; Kaja Silverman, 1980 & 1988; Teresa de Lauretis, 1976; Molly Haskell, 1975). Therefore, The Gaze and the Labyrinth is the only extensive book on this prominent director s works. The author discusses how Cavani articulates the language of the gazes as a polyphonic language and Flavia Laviosa 366 the labyrinth is a poetic metaphor that designates the predominant Cavanian structure of the interior (9). The book is divided into three main parts. In Part I, The Labyrinth: Cognition and Tragic Imagination , each chapter is devoted to the analysis of the drama of the individual in three films: Francesco d Assisi (1966) Cavani s opera prima; Galileo (1968), and I cannibali (The Cannibals, 1969) where Antigone s story is represented in a modern version. Part II, The Transgressive Gaze: Style as Tension , offers a close reading of Cavani s German trilogy. Marrone writes that in these films the characters unveil their most hidden feelings and thoughts in an interior that becomes the theater of greater historical realities (82) and she focuses on the visual discomfort the spectator experiences in viewing these films. The author also explains that Cavani s cinema is characterized by two forms of transgression: one, as represented by the idealist transgressing the limits of social conventions while in search of self-realization and identity and best expressed in the characters of Francesco, Milarepa, Galileo, Antigone; and the other, the transgression more malevolent and dangerous, where the undoing of the historical time is enacted through the couples abysmal, ruinous sexual fantasies, a mechanism of perpetual entrapment (8) as represented in the German trilogy. In Part III, Metaphors of Vision , the author examines Cavani s second Francesco (1989) and Milarepa (1973), the story of the eleventh-century Tibetan poet. In the conclusion, Marrone considers briefly Cavani s 1993 film Dove siete? Io sono qui which addresses the theme of silence vs. sound both philosophically and sociologically. Through the magnifying lens of her camera, Cavani explores and portrays the rich universe of deafness. The book ends with a detailed filmography including short feature films, documentaries, feature films, operas and screenplays. Marrone provides also an extensive and comprehensive bibliography of Cavani s writings and interviews as well as works about the director mostly in Italian and English, with some in French and German. The complex aesthetics and poetics of Cavani s films combined with the impossibility of applying a feminist theoretical model to her works have caused a reluctance in film critics and scholars in examining her cinema. Annette Kuhn and Susannah Radstone, editors of Women in Film, An International Guide, state that although not insensitive to feminist issues, Cavani would not identify with feminism and they define her films as a difficult case of analysis for feminist critics (1990: 68). Marrone does not address Cavani s female authorial signature and for this reason, Judith Mayne (who has attempted to answer the question whether there is a female authorship with a specific female tradition and tangible female canon in filmmaking and, if there is one, how can it be defined and theorized in The Woman at the Keyhole: Feminism and Women s Cinema, 1990) expresses The Gaze and the Labyrinth: The Cinema of Liliana Cavani 367 some concerns about how Cavani s status as a woman director affected her status as a film director in her review of Marrone s book (Italica 79 [2], 2002, 287). On the other hand, Kaja Silverman tries to trace female authorial desire and subjectivity within Cavani s films which have proved singularly intractable to other kinds of feminist analysis, and have therefore been largely neglected (The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema, 1988, p. 188). Teresa de Lauretis also has commented on how Cavani s work fails to fit into any of feminist critical categories (Alice Doesn t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema, 1984, p. 87). Marrone s volume brings a theoretically innovative and intellectually rigorous analysis to Cavani s cinema of ideas (xiii). It is the first comprehensive book on this critically renowned Italian director and it can be considered the benchmark for any future work on Cavani. Marrone s vast research, lucid and clear study adds new knowledge to the understanding of Cavani s rich body of cinematographic art. FLAVIA LAVIOSA Wellesley College, Wellesley, Massachusetts .