The Death's-Head Beneath
Film's Image of History
Daniel Edwards
A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts (Research)
School of Theatre, Film and Dance University of New South Wales
December 2004 CERTIFICATE OF ORIGINALITY
I hereby declare that this submission is my own work and to the best of my knowledge it contains no materials previously published or written by another peISOn, nor material which to a substantial extent has been accepted for the award of any other degree or diploma at UNSW or any other educational institution, except where due acknowledgement is made in the thesis. Any contribution made to the research by others, with whom I have worked at UNSW or elsewhere, is explicitly acknowledged in the thesis.
I also declare that the intellectual content of this thesis is the product of my own work, except to the extent that assistance from others in the project's design and conception or in style, presentation and linguistic expression is a'Clcnowledged. Abstract
Siegfried Kracauer's Theory of Film evokes the possibility that film can offer a unique experience of history, arising from its basis in photographic technology. This thesis reads Theory of Film through earlier drafts of the published book and Kracauer's "Photography'' essay of 1927, thereby exploring the key ideas that run throughout Kracauer's writings on film and photography. Central to his ongoing interest in these mediums is their ability to confront the viewing subject with an estranged image of material reality that is always past by the time we witness it in the image. In the Weimar era, Kracauer's interest in photography's ability to engender an experience of temporal disjunction forms part of a broader interest in modernity's dismantling of pre-modem belief systems and the reconfiguring of conceptions of time and mortality. In the post-war era, he comes to regard film and photography's potential to confront us with an experience of temporal disjunction as vital in maintaining a critical relationship with the past.
This thesis extrapolates Kracauer's ideas through a reading of Roberto Rossellini's war trilogy comprising Rome, Open Ciry, Paisa and Germaf!)I, Year Zero. Neo-realism is shown to be an important development in feature film form, in which the viewing subject is no longer encouraged to primarily engage with an emotionally affecting dramatic narrative. Rather, there is an emphasis on the material content of the image itself, and an implicit reflection upon the past nature of the material traces on screen and their relationship to our understanding of history. Germaf!)I, Year Zero in particular is read as an example of a work that memorialises the post war moment, partly by mourning the material devastation of the Second World War, but also by formally and thematically depicting the loss of faith in history as a process of progressive, dialectical change. In this way, Neo-realism intersects with many of the key experiences and assumptions that inform Kracauer's ideas in Theory of Film. Acknowledgments
First and foremost I would like to thank my supervisor, Doctor George Kouvaros of the School of Theatre, Film and Dance at the University of New South Wales. His interest in my work and dedication to this project has been unwavering across the many years it has taken to complete. George's detailed feedback on countless drafts and ready willingness to discuss my work has been absolutely crucial in the development of my ideas and their expression on the pages of this thesis.
Thanks also to my dear friends and fellow post-graduates Hamish Ford and Effie Rassos for their selfless willingness to read my work, provide feedback and engage in many hours of productive discussion. Getting to know them has made the post-graduate experience a truly enriching one.
I owe a debt of gratitude to the unfailingly helpful and polite staff of the Margaret Herrick Library in Los Angeles and the ever-affable Charles Silver at the Celeste Bartos Film Study Centre at the Museum of Modem Art in New York. They all greatly assisted my research during a trip to the United States in 2001.
A huge thanks to my mother, Jennifer Parry, and her husband, Peter Parry, for their emotional and occasional financial support during my years of post-graduate study.
Finally, thanks to Vanessa Rodd for her love and encouragement in the early stages of this thesis, and Michelle Loh for her invaluable support, patience and understanding while it was brought to completion. Contents
Introduction 1
Chapter One: The Death's-Head Beneath 12 Part One: Photography as Flat Death Part Two: Kracauer's "Photography" Essay and the Revelation of the Negative Part Three: The Suppression of Temporal Disjunction in Theory oJFilm Part Four: The Marseille Notebooks and The Death's-Head Beneath
Chapter Two: Neo-realism's Image of Histoty 47 Part One: Nee-realism as a Break with Previous Film Form Part Two: Rome, Open Ciry and the Newsreel Effect. Part Three: Paisa and the Interplay of Images Part Four: Germa,ry, Year Zero and the Ruins of History
Conclusion 92
Filmography 95 Bibliography 96 Introduction
This thesis examines the viewing subject's psychological relationship to the photographic image and the implications of this relationship for our experience of the filmic image. Through a reading of Roberto Rossellini's early Neo-realist films, I will argue that film has the potential to undermine positivist understandings of history as a causational chain of events, and instead provoke an understanding of history based on reflection, mourning and loss. The work of German theorist Siegfried Kracauer will play a central role in this argument, particularly his 1927 essay "Photography" and his 1960 book Theory ofFilm. 1 The past fifteen years have seen a significant re-evaluation of Kracauer's work, with one strain of this revival played out in a series of articles in Critical Inquiry and New German Critique in the early 1990s, and more recently in several books.2 This thesis will draw on the reading of Kracauer's ideas found in the work of Miriam Hansen and Gertrud Koch, applying and extending their understanding of Kracauer's ideas by interpreting Theory ofFilm as a response to certain developments in feature film production during the post-war era. Specifically, Chapter Two of this thesis will focus on three films directed by Rossellini: Rome, Open City (Roma, Citta Aperta, 1945), Paisa (Paisan, 1946) and Germmry, Year Zero (Germania, Anno Zero, 1947). The developments in Rossellini's style will be examined in order to trace how they resonate with certain ideas that underpin Kracauer's philosophical investment in the filmic medium in Theory of Film.
A key move in recent Kracauer scholarship has been to read Theory of Film through his earlier "Photography" essay. In Chapter One I will show how aspects of "Photography" intersect with Roland Barthes' writings on the medium in Camera
1 "Photography" in Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament: Weimar EssC!JS, translated and edited by Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), pp. 47-63; Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film-. The Redemption of Pf?ysical Reality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997). 2 The writers of Critical Inquiry and New German Critique read Kracauer's work of the 1920s in the context of Marxist-influenced materialist philosophers of the Weimar Republic such as Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, and his post-war books in relation to the work of thinkers like Adorno with the Frankfurt School. For a reading ofKracauer that stresses his differences with these thinkers, see Dagmar Barnouw, Critical Realism: History, Photograpf?y, and the Work of Sie!!fried Kracauer (Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press, 1994).
1 Introduction / 2
Lucida. 3 Barthes' writings provide a useful starting point from which to begin an examination of Kracauer's ideas. Both writers conceive of photography as a medium whose positivist attributes are antithetical to the working of human memory, but they also write of an overwhelming experience of 'pastness' when viewing historical photographs. This experience is such that the image itself appears "a representation of time."4 The theoretical basis of this thesis will revolve around this contradictory response to the photographic image and the implications of Kracauer's claim in Theory of Film that the particular "representation of time" offered by photography might also be incorporated into our experience of film. Taking up certain suggestions and allusions Kracauer makes in Theory ofFilm, I will show how the films of the Italian Neo-realists, and Rossellini in particular, provide an example of how the potential Kracauer sees in the filmic medium might actually play out in a feature film format.
Throughout this thesis, I shall refer to Neo-realism as a movement, although some commentators have questioned the validity of this description, since the Neo-realist films represent a range of approaches and subject matter made by filmmakers from a variety of political and religious backgrounds. Furthermore, the term Neo-realism does not seem to have come into use until early 1948, towards the end of the period in which the films usually characterised as Neo-realist were produced.5 While the Neo-realist directors never proclaimed themselves a movement the way the directors of the French Nouvelle vague did for a brief period in the late 1950s and early 60s, a strong case can be made that a small group of Rome-based filmmakers produced a body of work roughly between 1944 and 1948 which was a direct thematic and formal response to Italy's experience of Fascism and war, and that these films contain clear commonalities of both content and style, even as they are inflected with the particular quirks and prejudices of the individual writers and directors who created them. For this
3 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photograpf?y, translated by Richard Howard (London: Vintage, 1993, first published 1980). 4 Kracauer, "Photography", p. 49. 5 For a discussion of the term 'Neo-realism', see Tag Gallagher, The Adventures 2 Introduction/ 3 reason, Neo-realism can productively be discussed as a movement whose innovations not only represent a break with pre-war styles, but which also crucially influenced the direction of certain strains of cinema in the following decades. Rossellini was one of the leading lights of Italian Neo-realism in the second half of the 1940s. French critic Andre Bazin wrote a series of essays in the 1940s and early 50s that both analysed and celebrated the films of the Neo-realist movement, contextualising their innovations within the broader sweep of cinematic history. Since that time there has been a steady stream of critical writing on the topic. The last few years have seen three new titles on the life and work of Rossellini alone.6 It might justifiably be asked what could possibly be written about Neo-realism that has not already been said in the past sixty years. The writings of Siegfried Kracauer, I believe, offer insights into the workings of these films that have not been fully explored in any previous work on Neo-realism. Although it is more than four decades since Theory of Film was first published, for many years the book was either dismissed out of hand or seen, at best, as a relic of early, naive attempts to theorise the filmic medium. In the past fifteen years, writers such as the aforementioned Hansen and Koch, Heide Schliipmann, Patrice Petro and Thomas Y. Levin have re-examined Theory of Film as part of a broader effort to restore a sense of continuity to Kracauer's rather fractured oeuvre. Hansen's discussion of Kracauer's ideas on the pages of Critical Inquiry and New German Critique, and in her introduction to the 1997 edition of Theory of Film, has been central to the development of a new understanding of the relationship between Kracauer's Weimar-era articles (especially his "Photography" essay) and his post war English-language books.7 One of Hansen's most valuable contributions to the reappraisal of Kracauer's ideas has been her analysis of the Marseille notebooks, written while Kracauer and his wife were awaiting transit visas to escape Vichy France in late 1940. These 6 David Forgacs, Rome, Open City (Roma Citta Aperta) (London: BFI Publishing, 2000); David Forgacs, Sarah Lutton and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (eds.), Roberto Rossellini: Magician ef the Real (London: BFI Publishing, 2000); Gallagher, The Adventures 3 Introduction / 4 notebooks represent the earliest sketches of what eventually became Theory of Film and, as such, provide an important link between his pre-war essays and post-war books. Koch has built on Hansen's ground-breaking scholarship in her recent book Siegfried Kracauer. 8 Koch's discussion of the "Photography" essay in relation to the concerns of Theory of Film has proven especially useful in the writing of this thesis. 9 Eduardo Cadava has also made a substantial contribution to Kracauer scholarship with his book Words of Light, in which he discusses the links between Kracauer's work and the ideas of another key inter-war German theorist, Walter . . 10 B enianun. Despite the theoretical reappraisal of Kracauer's work in recent years, surprisingly few words have been dedicated to considering how Kracauer's ideas might be useful in understanding individual films or cinematic styles and trends. No doubt one reason for this is the somewhat slippery nature of Theory oJFzfm itself. Throughout the book Kracauer is brief in his comments about specific films, and does not offer any kind of historical account of the various cinematic styles he cites. However, he spends a great deal of time considering the aesthetic approaches to narrative feature filmmaking that might foster the viewer's critical engagement with film's rendering of an estranged "material reality." Kracauer constantly returns to the films of Italy's post-war Neo-realist cinema as an example of one such approach. I will argue that Kracauer's interest in Neo-realism is based on his belief that these films make possible a new experience of history. This experience short-circuits the notion of history as a positivist explanatory narrative. Instead, it offers an experience of 'pastness' based on an estranged rendering of the "facticity'' of everyday objects and incidents on screen. Crucial to this experience is an awareness that these objects and incidents are always already past by the time we witness them in the image. 8 Gertrud Koch, Sie!fried Kracauer: An Introduction, translated by Jeremy Gaines (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). 9 Ibid., pp. 95-113. 10 Eduardo Cadava, Wordr ofUght: Theses on the Photograpf?y ofHistory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997). 4 Introduction/ 5 Chapter One will begin by examining Roland Barthes' response to photography in his 1964 essay "Rhetoric of the Image"11 and his later book Camera Lucida. Barthes' reflections in Camera Lucida are prompted by his "astonishment" at the paradoxical assertion of"that-has-been" in the photographic image.12 This experience of temporal disjunction will be fully explored in Chapter One, since it is central to the conception of photography found in the work of both Barthes and Kracauer. However, Andre Bazin's writings on photography are worth considering here, since his work is underpinned by a historical account of the medium's particular form of indexicality that is useful in understanding Barthes and Kracauer's ideas. In "The Ontology of the Photographic Image", Bazin places photography's invention in the context of a history of the visual arts that is informed by a desire to preserve time in order to stave off the finality of death.13 Bazin begins with a discussion of mummification in ancient Egypt, which he argues represents a pre-modem expression of the preservation obsession. Pre Enlightenment religious ideas equate the literal preservation of the body with the preservation of the person in some form of after-life.14 The gradual advent of modernity in Europe, with its concurrent secularisation of society under the principles of science and reason, saw this pre-modem desire for corporeal preservation sublimated in the 19th century quest for a form of integral, automatic image-making technology.15 The religiously-informed need for literal preservation was subsumed by the desire for realistic representation in the visual arts, or "the creation of an ideal world in the likeness of the real."16 As Philip Rosen stresses in his essay on the preservation obsession underpinning Bazin's historiography, even if the obsession with constructing "imaginative indications of the possibility of defeating time" finds modem expression in image-making technologies born of instrumental, scientific reasoning, the preservation obsession itself remains 11 "Rhetoric of the Image" in Roland Barthes, Image Music Text, essays selected and translated by Stephen Heath (London: Fontana Press, 1977), pp. 32-51. 12 Barthes, Camera Lucida, pp. 93-94. 13 "The Ontology of the Photographic Image" in Andre Bazin, What Is Cinema?, essays selected and translated by Hugh Gray (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1967, essay originally published 1945), pp. 9-16. 14 Ibid., p. 9. 15 Ibid., p. 10. 16 Ibid. 5 Introduction/ 6 outside of rationality: "[T]he desire to defeat death is clearly an impossible one; hence, it can only continue to exist as an obsession, not a rational project." 17 Renaissance-era developments such as the discovery of perspective facilitated the creation of images more in accordance with an anthropocentric perception of physical reality. But it was the 19th century development of image production by automatic means which, for the viewing subject, distinguished photographic realism from all others. Bazin argues that photography's technological basis encourages a psychological investment in the image's apparently indisputable assertion of presence at the moment of exposure, creating a forceful conjunction of time and space for the viewer. Thus, Bazin's particular notion of photographic indexicality is not based on the appearance of photographic images, but rather our knowledge of how these images are produced.18 Our understanding of photographic technology demands that the image's referent be present before the camera at the moment of exposure. In the words of Rosen, the photograph may be understood as an indexical sign to the extent that "[a]n indexical sign indicates or attests to the existence of something. In the case of a genuine index, the referent .. .is an existent whose presence is required in the formation of the sign."19 This is why, according to Bazin, we tend to give more credence to the fuzziest historical photograph over a painting, even though the painting may tell us more about what the scene looked like: "A very faithful drawing may actually tell us more about the model but despite the promptings of our critical intelligence it will never have the irrational power of the photograph to bear away our faith."20 Bazin views the invention of film as a further development in the striving for a perfect, integral realism, since it adds duration to our experience of automatically produced images.21 However, the introduction of duration creates an ambivalence in the viewing subject's relationship to the medium, since the desire to disavow 17 Philip Rosen, "History of Image, Image of History: Subject and Ontology in Bazin", Wide Angle, 9:4 (1987), p. 14. 18 Bazin, "Ontology", p. 12. 19 Rosen, "History of Image", p. 12. 20 Bazin, "Ontology", p. 14. 21 "The Myth of Total Cinema" in Andre Bazin, What Is Cinema?, pp. 20-21 (essay originally published 1946). 6 Introduction / 7 time is paradoxically undermined by the viewer's confrontation with duration in the cinema. Rosen describes this ambivalence in the following terms: [A]utomatically produced images are founded from a desire that the concrete be preserved, stopped in time, and this desire leads to the special appeal of cinema, when the subject is led to open itself to a revelatory experience of reality; but reality itself evolves in time, and is even perceived in time.22 Photography also generates an ambivalence in the viewing subject, but of a slightly different kind. In order to maintain our psychological investment in the photographic image, we "must necessarily read a past in the image-not a past as a signified (as in, say, a historical painting) but rather a past of the signifier."23 By giving us an image whose contents is so strongly associated with the moment of the image's creation, photography has the capacity to confront us with an overwhelming experience of temporal disjunction. So while photographic technology seems to promise that everything may be preserved from the ravages of time, in maintaining this promise the medium must confront the viewing subject with a powerful experience of temporal disjunction, or an awareness of time's passing. This paradox is central to Kracauer's conception of photography as a medium that both disavows and encourages an experience of "pastness" for the viewer. Although Kracauer offers no historical account of the viewer's psychological investment in photographic indexicality, like Bazin he regards this indexicality as containing a crucial temporal element: "[T]he photograph ... must be essentially associated with the moment in time at which it came into existence."24 However, in the "Photography" essay, Kracauer argues that photographs are also employed in the daily print media as transparent optical signs that disavow distance and time by rendering current people and events as objects available for consumption. Part Two of Chapter One will examine Kracauer's claim that the photographic 22 Rosen, "History of Image", p. 18. 23 Ibid., p. 14. 24 Kracauer, "Photography", p. 54. 7 Introduction / 8 image has become so pervasive in modem industrialised societies that our psychological investment in its evidential force has become an uncritical acceptance of the image's positivist 'truth value.' By 1927, Kracauer felt that the photograph had become a substitute for collective human memory and critical analysis, a phenomenon most evident in the print media of Weimar Germany, where "[t]he blizzard of photographs betrays an indifference towards what the things mean."25 The photograph records outward appearances by automatic means, but the meaning of those appearances is often treated as self-evident in the mass media. At the same time, Kracauer's critique of how photography is consumed in modem societies is tempered by what he regards as the possibility of a new experience of history, arising from what Koch describes as the image's automatic "spatial fixation of a past moment ... as dead matter."26 Photography renders all before the lens indiscriminately, recording the kind of material historical detritus that cognitive memory tends to forget, such as the appearance of clothes and accessories. It is the viewer's confrontation with this estranged material reality that generates the sense of temporal disjunction often experienced when examining old photographs. In provoking an experience of history based on a sense of material loss, photography has the potential "to offer an antidote to its own positivist ideology."27 Thus, the promise photography seems to hold that everything can be kept for history might equally provoke an awareness that history is that which is always already passing away, leaving only its material trace in the frozen instant of a photographic exposure. The third and fourth parts of Chapter One will examine how Theory ofFzlm, published more than thirty years after the "Photography" essay, shifts Kracauer's interest to a consideration of how film might utilise its basis in photographic technology to provoke a similar experience of temporal disjunction and critical reflection in the viewer. His argument in Theory of Film is based on the belief that film may be able to encourage a reflection on its status as a trace of the physical appearance of past moments. Due to its discursive aspects, a film is able to provide a context for its own images in a way photographs cannot. While the 25 Ibid., p. 58. 26 Koch, Siegfried Kracauer, p. 99. 27 :Miriam Bratu Hansen, introduction to Kracauer, Theory of Film, p. xxvi. 8 Introduction/ 9 filmic image may form part of a narrative discourse, the estranged image of physical reality on screen can also convey a powerful sense of pastness. In this way, the cinema has the potential to become an arena in which a mass public can develop a critical relationship with the past through a memorialising of, and mourning for, that which has always already been lost to history. In the Marseille notebooks, Kracauer describes this experience of temporal disjunction in the cinema as one which "includes the death's-head beneath" the flow of images on screen.28 Chapter Two will demonstrate that Kracauer's post-war investment in cinema may be read partly as a response to the films of the Italian Neo-realist movement made in the years immediately following the Second World War. It will be shown that Neo-realism, like Theory efFilm, was born in the context of Fascism, war and industrially-organised genocide, and represents an attempt to understand and interact with the world and contemporary history in a new way in the wake of these experiences. When considered as a response to shifts in cinematic practice, Theory efFilm becomes part of a much broader strain of film theory which identifies N ea realism as representing a radical break with pre-war styles. Andre Bazin was one of the first writers to systematically theorise this view.29 More recently, French philosopher Gilles Deleuze similarly structured his historical schema in Cinema 1 and Cinema 2 around a shift that occurred with Neo-realism.30 He writes of a palpable crisis of action in these films at the level of protagonistic agency. According to Deleuze, Neo-realism represents a breakdown in the "sensory motor schema" whereby characters appear increasingly overwhelmed by the situations in which they are placed.31 Characters cease to be protagonists and 28 Kracauer quoted by Hansen, ibid., p. vii. 29 See for example "An Aesthetic of Reality: Neorealism (Cinematic Realism and the Italian School of the Liberation)" in Andre Bazin, What Is Cinema?: Volume II, essays selected and translated by Hugh Gray (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1971, essay originally published 1948), pp. 16-40. 30 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis, USA: University of Minnesota Press, 1986, first published 1983); Cinema 2: The Time-Image, translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis, USA: University of Minnesota Press, 1989, first published 1985). 31 Deleuze, Cinema 1, pp. 141-159. 9 Introduction / 10 become, like the audience, mere observers of their own situation, reflecting the camera's observation of their situation in a particular time and space.32 Kracauer, Bazin and Deleuze all perceive a new kind of realism in these post-war films which picture time and space via "a new type of tale capable of including the elliptical and the unorganised, as if the cinema had to begin again from zero."33 All three writers, however, conceive of this new realism in slightly different ways. Bazin's work has been extensively critiqued since his essays first appeared in the 1940s, and his writings still offer the most illuminating contemporaneous account of the Neo-realist cinema. The immense philosophical project of Deleuze's Cinema books has inspired numerous articles and books analysing and extending his arguments, and no doubt will continue to do so. As noted, Kracauer's oeuvre has also been the subject of considerable theoretical debate over the past decade and a half. Chapter Two will extend these debates by considering how Theory ofFilm might contribute to a new understanding of Neo-realism. It is not my intention to provide a historical overview of Neo-realism per se, but rather to consider how Kracauer's conception of film as a form of photographic media can illuminate certain aspects of the Neo-realist approach that have not previously been considered. In this way, the films can also provide a fruitful vehicle for a discussion of how Kracauer's theoretical investments in cinema's potential might actually play out in practice. Chapter Two will discuss Neo-realist film form through a detailed examination of Rossellini's 'war-trilogy' comprising Rome, Open City, Paisa and Germa1!)1, Year Zero. I will show how the Neo-realist aesthetic can be seen developing across these three films, from the relatively classical narrative structure and form of Rome, Open City to the new kind of cinematic experience offered by Germa1!)1, Year Zero. It is through this new experience of the image that I chart the memorialising possibilities offered by the filmic medium. It should also be noted that for the purposes of this work the photographic and filmic image are considered in terms of pre-digital modes of technology. The focus of this thesis is primarily historical, to the extent that Kracauer's ideas and 32 Deleuze, Cinema 2, pp. 1-6. 33 Deleuze, Cinema 1, p. 211. 10 Introduction / 11 the films discussed pre-date even analogue forms of video technology. Consequently, the issues posed by digital imaging technologies are not discussed here. Which is not to say that Kracauer's ideas are of purely historical interest. Although Hollywood filmmaking in particular has been revolutionised by digital imaging technologies, American commercial cinema is still obsessed with creating an effect of photographic realism in the most basic, uncritical sense of the term. As this thesis will show, Kracauer's writings point towards the possibility of employing film's realist effect in a quite different way, which is not necessarily precluded by digital technology. As Miriam Hansen notes: [S]ince the photographic approach in Kracauer's theory of film is as much a matter of aesthetic effect as one of material specificity, it is already understood as a translation or troping of the principle of photographic alienation into another medium-that is, as a matter of stylistic and rhetorical choices involving particular cinematic techniques ... rather than as a matter of medium ontology.34 An understanding of earlier conceptions of photographic realism can better prepare us to critique notions of realism in the present. The aim of this thesis, however, is to demonstrate how Kracauer's writings on film may assist us in understanding the innovations of the Neo-realist cinema, while a discussion of Rossellini's films in terms of Kracauer's ideas will lift the ongoing reappraisal of Theory of Film out of the purely theoretical realm. In this way, the reading of Theory ofFilm and Rossellini's war-trilogy will prove mutually illuminating. 34 Hansen, introduction to Kracauer, Theory of Film, p. xxxv. 11 Chapter One The Death's-Head Beneath This chapter will examine the relationship between two apparently contradictory responses to the photographic image in the work of Siegfried Kracauer. On the one hand he claims that "the flood of photos sweeps away the dams of memory", yet on the other, he describes an overwhelming experience of melancholic 'pastness' in the viewing of certain photographic images.1 The manner in which these two responses play out in Kracauer's work is crucial to his understanding of the photographic medium, which also informs his investment in the filmic medium in Theory of Film. An initial examination of Roland Barthes' essay "Rhetoric of the Image" and Camera Lucidawill assist in fully explicating Kracauer's ideas. Both theorists' writings on photography contain important commonalities, while Barthes develops certain terms and concepts which provide a useful entry point into Kracauer's work. I will show how Kracauer extends his ideas regarding photography in Theory of Film by conceptualising an approach to filmmaking that draws upon the medium's basis in photographic technology. To trace his particular investment in motion pictures in the finished text of Theory of Film it is necessary to gain an understanding of the conditions under which the book was conceived and the work's genealogy in a series of notebooks written some twenty years prior to Theory of Film's publication. It is through the figure of what Kracauer calls the "death's-head" evoked in these notebooks that we can gain a better understanding of the particular experience of history offered by the filmic medium. In mapping the implications of Kracauer's pre war writings on photography for his later work, this chapter will draw on the scholarship of Miriam Hansen and Gertrud Koch, particularly Hansen's discussion of the early drafts of Theory of Film. 1 Kracauer, "Photography", pp. 56-58. 12 Part One Photography as Flat Death In their writings on photography, both Kracauer and Barthes conceive of the medium as an entry for the photographed subject into a kind of "flat death."2 An examination of Barthes' work shows that his response grew out of an earlier semiotically-informed analysis of the way meaning is constructed in photographic images. This analysis led to Barthes discerning certain characteristics in our experience of photographs which he regards as unique to the medium. In 1964, Barthes published an essay entitled "Rhetoric of the Image." In keeping with his broad theoretical concerns of the time, the essay is primarily concerned with identifying the various cultural and ideological codes and signifiers which comprise a photograph's connotative meanings.3 Examining a photograph that forms part of a magazine advertisement for Italian pasta, Barthes notes the green, red and yellow colours of the vegetables laid out in the picture. The colour scheme is intended to convey a symbolic connoted meaning, in that it evokes a cultural code assumed to be known by the viewer; namely an association with the colours of the Italian flag and a certain notion of "Italianicity."4 The colours would clearly not carry the same connotations for someone unfamiliar with the symbols of Italian nationhood. The advertisement also contains a linguistic element (the brand name "Panzani") which assists in anchoring and limiting any other connotative meanings that the viewer might read into the picture.5 Importantly, however, below these levels of connotation, Barthes discerns a layer of denoted meaning which precedes all but the most basic cultural codes. The image's connoted meanings are built upon, and to some extent 'naturalised' by, this layer of denotation. Any viewer who has at least learnt to recognise pictures as being 2 Barthes, Camera Lucida, p. 92. 3 Barthes, "Rhetoric of the Image", pp. 32-51. 4 Ibid., pp. 34-37. 1 Ibid., pp. 33-34 & 37-41. 13 The Death's-Head Beneath/ 14 representations of objects will immediately recognise the photograph's denotation of vegetables on a table. It requires a further recognition of cultural signifiers to then respond to the linguistic element and the connoted meanings intended by the arrangement of the vegetables and their colour. Of course, any kind of image can invoke denotative meanings, and all but the most abstract pictures tend to do so. However, because of our knowledge regarding photography's automatic means of image production, we respond quite differently to a photograph's denotative force than to that of a painting. A photograph is formed by the instantaneous action of light on a light-sensitive surface, whereas a painting is reliant on the skill and cognitive actions of a painter in reproducing a scene. Denotation is central to our understanding of photography because at the level of the viewer's perception, the photograph appears to be a literal imprint of light reflected by the object itself. In this way, photography seems to collapse the gap between the signified and signifier (between the object and the object's image), to the point where the relationship becomes "quasi-tautological."6 The effect whereby the gap between signified and signifier appears to collapse means that the image's connoted messages are often rendered invisible, seemingly arising "naturally" from denoted meanings which themselves seem objectively obvious and beyond ideology. The photograph's apparently objective mode of image production, and the image's consequent denotative force, allows the photograph to be a powerful conveyer of naturalised ideological meanings. Importantly, like earlier theorists of photography such as Kracauer and Bazin, Barthes stresses the importance of the viewer's knowledge regarding the manner in which the photographic image is produced. According to Barthes, our investment in photography's particular relationship to the photographed object is based upon the instantaneous and automatic nature of the image's originary moment: "[f]he scene is there, captured mechanically, not humanely."7 In "The Ontology of the Photographic 6 Ibid., p. 36. 7 Ibid., p. 44. 14 The Death's-Head Beneath/ 15 Image", Bazin makes a similar point, claiming that photography radically affects our psychological relationship to the image not through "the result achieved but in the way of achieving it.',s For both Barthes and Bazin, the viewer's investment in the image's evidential force depends upon the viewer's basic knowledge of photography's automatic means of image production. The particular investment we have in photography's denotative force leads Barthes to conclude that our response to the image contains a crucial temporal element.9 The viewer's knowledge of photography implies, or even demands (if our investment in the image's evidential force is to be maintained), that the referent must have been present before the lens at the moment the image was produced. A photographer cannot photograph from memory the way a painter can re-create a past scene. The photograph, therefore, is distinguished from all other images not by its degree of spatial accuracy, but by the unique conjunction of spatial and temporal referentiality implied by photography's method of image production. It is the viewer's perception of a seemingly irrefutable image of the past, existing in the present, that renders the photograph for Barthes an object of maddening paradox: [A]t the level of this denoted message ... the real unrea/iry of the photograph can be fully understood: its unreality is that of the here now .. .its reality that of the having-been-there, for in every photograph there is the always stupefying evidence of this is how it was, giving us, by a precious miracle, a reality from which we are sheltered. 10 Barthes only touches upon this paradox towards the end of the "Rhetoric" essay, but returns to it in his final book, Camera Lucida. This work opens with a description of 8 Bazin, "Ontology", p. 12. 9 Barthes, "Rhetoric of the Image", p. 44. 10 Ibid. 15 The Death's-Head Beneath/ 16 an experience which harks back to Barthes' earlier claims regarding photography's denotative force: One day, quite some time ago, I happened on a photograph of Napoleon's youngest brother, Jerome, taken in 1852. And I realised then, with an amazement I have not been able to lessen since: "I am looking at eyes that looked at the Emperor."11 In attempting to analyse this amazement, which he says no-one else seems to share "nor even to understand", Barthes becomes obsessed in Camera Lucida with "an ontological desire" to find out what photography is "in itself."12 As in his earlier essay, Barthes locates the source of his amazement in photography's apparent ability to manifest an impression of its object with such unique force: "A specific photograph, in effect, is never distinguished from its referent (from what it represents), or at least it is not immediate!J or generaf!y distinguished from its referent."13 Once again, Barthes stresses the importance of the viewer's knowledge of how photographic images are produced, claiming that photographs are distinguished from all other forms of still image "by the way in which the object is simulated."14 In the case of the photograph of Napoleon's brother,Jerome's eyes obviously existed at the same time as Napoleon, but the workings of photographic technology also demand that the image of those eyes was produced by the automatic action of light at that same time. Jerome must have been present before the camet:a and the original photographic plate at the moment the image was taken in 1852. Our investment in the photograph's referentiality necessitates the perception of a 'when' in the image that is a different 'when' to the moment of viewing, and this 'when' is bound to the moment of the image's original production. 11 Barthes, Camera Lucida, p. 3. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid., p. 5. 14 Ibid. 16 The Death's-Head Beneath / 17 In Camera l.Jlcida, Barthes conceptualises this perception of temporal disjunction in the photographic image as an experience of death. Whether or not the person pictured is now living or dead, the moment of exposure, and the person of that precise moment, is always already gone. For a photographic image to appear as a photographic image, we must accept our absence, and the absence of any other subject, from the reality it depicts, and the absence of the depicted moment from the present. For Barthes, this move is by necessity a catastrophic entry for the pictured subject into "flat death", the reduction of time and memory to a fixed, flat image that can never be transformed by the living subject except by an act of refusal: "either the drawer or the wastebasket."15 This catastrophe is particularly apparent in historical images depicting persons and environments that no longer exist in any physical form: "[T]here is always a defeat of Time in them: that is dead and that is going to die."16 These pictures seem to speak of a death that pre-empts the subject's literal death. Regarding an ancient picture of two little girls watching an early aeroplane, Barthes writes: "[H]ow alive they are! They have their whole lives before them; but also they are dead (today), they are then already dead (yesterday)."17 Barthes' attitude towards this reduction of the subject to a "flat death" wavers between two positions in Camera Lucida. On the one hand, Barthes considers this reduction as being symptomatic of an age which has renounced ritual, religion and monuments as the agents of tradition and memory, replacing them with "History", or "memory fabricated according to positive formulas, a pure intellectual discourse which abolishes mythic Time."18 Photography, as a mechanical means of image production which seems to promise that everything from the past might be kept and made available again in the present, is the most obvious manifestation of an age "no longer able to conceive duration, affectively or symbolically."19 On the other hand, Barthes remains fascinated by the temporal paradox at the heart of his own 15 Ibid., pp. 92-93. 16 Ibid., p. 96. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid., p. 93. 19 Ibid. 17 The Death's-Head Beneath/ 18 experience of the photograph. For Barthes, a perception of a "that-has-been" in the image undennines the positivist implication inherent in photographic technology that everything may be kept for History. Instead, the photograph can act as a kind of death mask, a "certain but fugitive testimony" of a moment irrefutably lost to time, of which we retain only a deathly trace.20 Barthes claims that photography's positivist aspects are exemplified by the way in which photographic images are consumed in modem industrialised societies. He regards the unrestrained use of photographs in newspapers, magazines and advertisements as an attempt to habitualise their consumption, and render banal the image's confrontation with death. The photograph's conflicting, yet concomitant role as both a denier of time and a death mask evoking the pathos of past life is made explicit in Camera Lucidds final chapter, where Barthes writes: "[f]he ... means of taming the Photograph is to generalise, to gregarise, banalise it until it is no longer confronted by any image in relation to which it can mark itself, assert its special character, its scandal, its madness."21 He goes on: Mad or tame? Photography can be one or the other: tame if its realism remains relative, tempered by aesthetic or empirical habits (to leaf through a magazine at the hairdresser's, the dentist's); mad if this realism is absolute and, so to speak, original, obliging the loving and terrified consciousness to return to the very letter ofTime.22 This dialectical response to the photographic image sketched by Barthes in the closing pages of Camera Lucida provides a useful entry point into the writings of Siegfried Kracauer. He similarly conceives of photography as a kind of death for the pictured subject, or more precisely, the reduction of the subject to a kind of ghost haunting the present.23 However, like Barthes, he also regards the consumption of 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid., p. 118 22 Ibid., p. 119. 23 Kracauer, "Photography'', p. 56. 18 The Death's-Head Beneath / 19 images in the daily press as a means by which society disavows time. Casting an eye over the explosion of photographs in all forms of print media in Weimar Germany, Kracauer comments: ''What the photographs by their sheer accumulation attempt to banish is the recollection of death."24 Like Barthes, Kracauer critiques the manner in which conditions of circulation alter the viewer's perception of photography, but Kracauer's concerns are broader and more politicised in scope than Barthes' quite personalised work in Camera Lucida. As such, Kracauer's work is best understood in the social and political context in which it was produced. 24 Ibid., p. 59. 19 Part Two Kracauer's "Photography" Essay and the Revelation of the Negative Throughout the period of the Weimar Republic (1918-1933), the vast majority of Siegfried Kracauer's writings appeared in the 'feuilleton' section of the liberal daily newspaper Die Frankfurter Zeitung. 25 The feuilleton section occupied the bottom third of every page, and was primarily concerned with issues of cultural commentary and criticism. Kracauer joined Die Frankfurter Zeitung as a writer in 1921, and became an editor in 1924, publishing nearly 2,000 articles in the paper before his dismissal in 1933. In tracing the shifts in Kracauer's intellectual development during his career as a journalist and cultural critic in Germany, it is important to consider the unstable and unpredictable historical and political context in which he was working. The abdication of the Kaiser shortly before the armistice which ended the First World War resulted in the declaration of a German republic just days before the cessation of fighting. This declaration was followed by several months of street fighting in many of Germany's urban centres, triggered primarily by forces of the radical left seeking to emulate Russia's Bolshevik revolution of the previous year. These uprisings were violently suppressed by armed right-wing forces employed by the nascent republic, and a system of parliamentary democracy instigated with the national government based in the city of Weimar. There is no doubt that the parliamentary democracy of the Weimar Republic represented a radical break with the 19th century Imperial order in Germany, and an abrupt thrust for the country into conditions of 20th century modernity. Yet the national defeat and violent civil conflict which inaugurated the era meant that, from the beginning, it was modernity experienced as a highly contested terrain made up of fiercely divided political and cultural forces. For Kracauer, and many other German 25 The biographical details of Kracauer's life during the Weimar period are taken from Thomas Y. Levin's introduction to Kracauer, The Mass Ornament, pp. 1-30. 20 The Death's-Head Beneath / 21 intellectuals of the period, their observations were vitally informed by what Hansen describes as "the experience of modernity as living on the brink of catastrophe."26 The spectre of military defeat and suppressed revolution continued to hang over the destabilising recurrences of hyper-inflation, mass unemployment, assassinations, and aborted uprisings which characterised life in the Weimar Republic for most of its fifteen year life. In his first few years working for Die Frankfurter Zeitung, Kracauer's observations regarding the unstable social, political and cultural milieu of Weimar Germany were infused with what Thomas Y. Levin describes as a "resigned and even lapsarian metaphysical tone."27 To Kracauer it seemed capitalist industrialisation and its attendant processes of economic and scientific rationalisation had systematically dismantled all existing belief systems, evacuating the world of any meaning or truth beyond the inanities of consumption and profit.28 The First World War was perceived as simply the most extreme manifestation of what Elizabeth Young-Bruehl describes as "a quality of devastation" and lack of meaning that had tainted the entire fabric of life in the modem age. 29 However, from around the mid-1920s Kracauer's writing began to reflect a more dynamic view of history, strongly influenced by Marx and informed by a dialectical understanding of the recurring crises he saw unfolding around him. Rather than regarding the modem era as the end-point of a process of decay, Kracauer began to view the post-war world, and Germany in particular, as a site of contesting forces which would determine the ultimate outcome of the project of rationalisation initiated in Europe by the Enlightenment.30 Echoing Marx's conception of historical development as taking place in a series of stages precipitated by revolutionary 26 Hansen, introduction to Kracauer, Theory of Film, p. xi. 27 Levin, introduction to Kracauer, Mass Ornament, p. 13. 28 The Mass Ornament contains several examples of Kracauer's early Weimar work. The essays "Those Who Wait", from 1922 (pp. 129-140) and ''Travel and Dance", from 1925 (pp. 65-73) are both examples of the resigned tone of his work from this period. 29 Elizabeth Young-Bruehl speaking in the film One W try S tree!, directed by John Hughes, Australia, 1992. 30 Levin, introduction to Kracauer, Mass Ornament, pp. 16-17. 21 The Death's-Head Beneath/ 22 "breaks", Kracauer came to regard the historical process as a dialectical struggle between irrational "nature" (which included humankind's pre-modem mythical belief systems) and the liberatory potential of human reason. The secularising effects of Enlightenment thought had brought reason into European society as a dominant force. The history of Europe since that time had been the progressive, albeit violent and uneven, negation of myth. Llke many leftist Weimar intellectuals, Kracauer believed that capitalism had played an important role in fuelling the revolutionary changes that had swept Europe since the Enlightenment, but as a system of economic and social organisation it was ultimately unable to transcend its own shortcomings. The immense productive forces of the modem age were still being organised to principally benefit a small elite, rendering capitalist class structures and property relations just as irrational as the hereditary structures of feudalism. Promises of genuine mass freedom and equality of opportunity had been subsumed by commodity fetishism and the power of individual consumption. In periods of extreme economic crisis, when the power of commodity fetishism was diminished, the strength of political movements aiming to alter the structures of capitalism were forestalled either through direct repression, or appeals to irrational notions of ultra nationalism and/ or racial unity. Kracauer's writings in the second half of the 1920s became focussed on how modernity might transcend its capitalist shackles and deliver on its promise of mass equality and freedom. The Weimar Republic's chronic instability no longer seemed symptomatic of a society reaching the final stages of a long historical process of decay, but evidence of the Enlightenment's unfinished project of rationalisation. If this project could be brought to fruition, then the conditions of Weimar Germany might hold the possibility of a new type of society, socialist in nature and comprised of individuals open to the fluid, de-centred forms of subjectivity encouraged by the conditions of modem urban life. Such a society would require transcendence of the rationalist drive taking place in the service of capital, and its replacement with a form of reason based around the fulfilment of human needs. "The Mass Ornament" essay, published in June 1927, contains one of the clearest articulations of Kracauer's 22 The Death's-Head Beneath / 23 philosophical position at this time. Conceiving of the rationalised economic structures of Weimar Germany as a kind of "ratio", or mathematical system of relations, Kracauer writes: [T]he Ratio of the capitalist economic system is not reason itself but a murky reason. Once past a certain point, it abandons the truth in which it participates. It does not encompass man. The operation of the production process is not regulated according to man's needs, and man does not serve as the foundation for the structure of socroeconorruc• · orgamsatlon.· · 31 However, Kracauer makes clear that he rejects any retreat into pre-modem economic or social structures: [Some] reproach capitalism's rationalism for raping man, and yearn for the return of a community that would be capable of preserving the allegedly human element much better than capitalism. Leaving aside the stultifying effect of such regressive stances, they fail to grasp capitalism's core defect: it rationalises not too much but rather too little. The thinking promoted by capitalism resists culminating in that reason which arises from the basis of man.32 Once Kracauer understood the conditions of Weimar Germany as resulting from the forestalment of the Enlightenment project, he began to perceive in the mass entertainments and representational media of the modem era potentially radical surface expressions of modernity's mostly unrealised liberatory potential. In a series of essays Kracauer focused on these surface expressions, sketching out the possibility of a utopian moment of transcendence in the experience of the distractions and 31 ''1be Mass Ornament" in Kracauer, Ma.rs Ornament, p. 81. 32 Ibid. 23 The Death's-Head Beneath / 24 entertainments of city life by the urban masses, a moment he describes as the "revelation of the negative."33 "The Mass Ornament" essay clearly outlines the role popular entertainments could play in the dialectical struggles Kracauer saw unfolding around him. The essay uses the formations of a dance troupe called "The Tiller Girls" as a metaphor for the subjectivity of the Weimar urban population. The troupe specialised in mass machine-like dance formations.34 The women were subject to military-precision training in order to produce mass arrangements in which the individual was dissolved into "girl clusters." Their movements appear to Kracauer as "demonstrations of mathematics", as opposed to the 01:ganic, individualised expressions of pre-20th century dance forms such as ballet.35 Llke the economic relations of capitalism, Kracauer refers to the system of machine-like movements which give rise to the precise formations of the Tiller Girls as a kind of "ratio": an exact system of relations between bodies and body parts conceived along mathematical lines. The mass "ornaments", or formations of bodies produced by this system of relations, are progressive to the extent that they encourage a certain degree of self-recognition by the masses, living and working in a society in which the individual is subsumed in the rationalised economic and social order of capital.36 Kracauer regards the "mass ornaments" produced by the Tiller Girls' formations as reflex aesthetic expressions of the prevailing social and economic conditions. However a reflex aesthetic expression does not in itself represent a transcendence of these conditions: "The Ratio that gives rise to the ornament is strong enough to invoke the mass ... [but] ... It is too weak to find the human beings within the mass and to render the figures in the ornament transparent to knowledge."37 33 Kracauer quoted by Levin, introduction to Kracauer, Mass Ornament, p. 20. 34 Kracauer, 'The Mass Ornament", end note 1, p. 356. 35 Ibid., p. 76. 36 Ibid., p. 79. 37 Ibid., p. 84. 24 The Death's-Head Beneath / 25 Nevertheless, it was Kracauer's hope that the urban audience's unconscious recognition of their conditions of life in the formations of the mass ornament could contribute to a more conscious awareness of their subordinate place in the existing economic and political order. Only when such an awareness was achieved could the Enlightenment's unfinished project be brought to completion. In the heated political climate of Weimar Germany, the only alternative resolution to the contradictions within capitalism's economic and political system seemed to be a final descent into an apocalyptic irrationality presided over by the ultra-right. Kracauer rejected romantic or classical artistic endeavours which led the audience away from the rationality of the capitalist system into pre-modem "mythological structures of meaning."38 He believed that the only kind of consciousness that could truly resolve the contradictions of the modern age led "directly through the centre of the mass ornament, not away from it."39 The second key essay articulating Kracauer's philosophical position of this period is "Photography", published just a few months after "The Mass Ornament." In keeping with the dialectic sketched out in the earlier article, Kracauer views the pervasiveness of photographic images in Weimar Germany as indicative of the modem age's empty, unreflexive rationality, but also welcomes photography's ability to reveal the "desubstantialised metaphysical condition" that characterises modem life.40 Kracauer equates the photographic medium with a kind of positivist historicism, which holds that historical reality can be understood by "reconstructing the course of events in their temporal succession without any gaps."41 He regards the explosion of photographs in all forms of print media in Weimar Germany as an uncritical embracing of photography's apparent ability to preserve the past in an endless proliferation of undifferentiated images, which have the effect of dissolving past and present into one eternal photographable present that "sweeps away the dams of 38 Ibid., p. 86. 39 Ibid. 40 Levin, introduction to Mass Ornament, p. 22. 41 Kracauer, ''Photography", p. 49. 25 The Death's-Head Beneath / 26 memory."42 In constructing reality in this manner, picture magazines banish any "recollection of death", and with it any kind of critical relationship with the past.43 Kracauer illustrates the way in which photography has been incorporated into capitalism's cycle of consumption and planned obsolescence with a discussion of an image on the cover of a contemporary film magazine. The cover portrays a twenty four year old "demonic diva", photographed standing in front of the Hotel Excelsior on the Lido. 44 The photograph is employed by the magazine to refer to a living actress, functioning as "a reminder of her corporeal reality."45 The photograph's object (the diva) is part of everyday reality, albeit in this case a reality largely mediated through other representational media (people recognise the actress primarily from her screen appearances). Although Kracauer does not discuss the magazine's content in his essay, the relationship between the magazine and the diva's contemporaneous films is no doubt further reinforced with text referring to contemporary events (or rumoured events) in her life. The picture of the diva is intended to be perceived as a picture of a living person whose current appearance is almost identical with that of the person in the photograph (taken one month before Kracauer wrote the essay). Contemporary reality tends to integrate the photograph's spatial elements, and this effect is intentionally enhanced by the context in which the image is presented: a monthly film magazine intended for immediate consumption and disposal. In this way, the context serves to enhance the photographic medium's apparent collapsing of the gap between signified and signifier. The photograph functions as "an optical sign for the diva, who is meant to be recognised."46 In contrast to this employment of photography in the mass media, Kracauer evokes an alternative experience of photographic images. This arises from the antithetical relationship between the image of the past produced by photographic technology 42 Ibid., p. 58. 43 Ibid., p. 59. 44 Ibid., p. 47. 45 Ibid., p. 54. 46 Ibid. 26 The Death's-Head Beneath / 27 and the image of the past produced by memory. Human memory tends to retain from the past only that which is personally significant, while photography records all appearances before the lens without discrimination, producing an image that Kracauer suggests "from the perspective of memory ... consists partly of garbage."47 He illustrates this claim with a discussion of a photograph depicting a grandmother taken in 1864, when she, like the contemporary diva, was aged 24. In contrast to the image of the diva, what is immediately apparent in the photograph of the grandmother is not her face and body but her 19th century clothing. Her attire appears to Kracauer as a costume-like set of "alien trappings."48 The photograph has indiscriminately captured all the historical detritus of the grandmother's surrounds in minute detail. At the time of the image's production, this detail would have remained largely unnoticed by the observer, since it was "incorporated into life" as the grandmother's personal accessories, just as the diva's fashionable clothing and accessories appear entirely natural to any observer in 1927. The older photograph of the grandmother, however, has disintegrated into its constituent elements, revealing a material reality from which the contemporary viewer is estranged. Far from appearing natural, this realty looks strange and entirely arbitrary: The grandmother dissolves into fashionably old-fashioned details before the very eyes of the grandchildren ... They laugh, and at the same time they shudder. For through the ornamentation of the costume from which the grandmother has disappeared, they think they glimpse a moment of time past, a time that passes without return. Although time is not part of the photograph like the smile or the chignon, the photograph itself, so it seems to them, is a representation of time. 49 47 Ibid., p. 51. 48 Ibid., p. 56. 49 Ibid., pp. 48-49. 27 The Death's-Head Beneath/ 28 Although the photograph invokes a strong sense of pastness for the grandchildren, it tells them very little about the grandmother herself. In fact, as Kracauer notes, there is only the family lore to identify the figure in the photograph, since all witnesses to the grandmother's appearance in 1864 have long since passed away. In viewing the photograph of the grandmother, her descendants no longer see the image of a loved human being, but rather the registration of a past spatial configuration, of which the grandmother's body and attire has become simply a part. The photograph reveals nothing of her personal history, but something of her physical appearance at the moment of exposure, and especially her clothing and accessories. It is this reduction of the human subject to an object among other objects, a piece of historical detritus haunting the present, that Kracauer regards as the source of the unsettling experience of temporal disjunction that occurs in the viewer of aged photographic images: A shudder runs through the viewer of old photographs. For they make visible not the original but the spatial configuration of a moment; what appears in the photograph is not the person but the sum of what can be subtracted from him or her. The photograph annihilates the person by portraying him or her.50 For Kracauer, it is through this confrontation with a sense of radical temporal disjunction that the photograph contains the potential to undermine its own positivist ideology. The nature of photographic technology means that the viewer tends to associate the appearances recorded in the image with the moment at which the photograph was taken. Yet the image itself is unable to imbue these appearances with significance, presenting the viewer with an image of the past that is dead and fundamentally alienated from meaning. In the words of Gertrud Koch: [A]s a medium photography cannot present the "history" of the object photographed. Although the photo reproduces "reality", the latter emerges in the photo only as the spatial fixation of a past 50 Ibid., pp. 56-57. 28 The Death's-Head Beneath / 29 moment, in other words, as dead matter. In light of the above, we can pinpoint an ambivalence in photography, namely its inability to convey that "significance" which structures memory.51 Positivist historical discourse seeks to incorporate events into a progressive linear chain, which always ends with the inevitability of present conditions. In contrast, Kracauer argues that the photograph presents us with a radically discontinuous temporality, a set of "alien trappings" from the past which reveal the arbitrary nature of past conditions, and by implication the arbitrary and "provisional status of all given configurations", including those in the present. 52 If the mass ornament represents a reflex aesthetic expression of present conditions, the photographic image makes clear the provisionality of those conditions and, by inference, their changeability. We can see in the "Photography" essay the beginnings of Kracauer's later concern in Theory of Film with the photographic medium's ability to "record as well as reveal visible, or potentially visible, physical reality."53 Although he does not use the term "material reality" in the "Photography" essay, the key concepts that inform Theory of Film are all introduced in the 1927 article. These include the emphasis on photography's automatic recording of external appearances, the medium's ability to engender an experience of temporal disjunction in the viewer, and the fundamental conflict between the image of the past presented in the photograph and the image of the past forged by human memory. In 1927, these concepts underpin Kracauer's investment in photography as a medium that could potentially undermine the uncritical assumptions of positivist historical discourse. In Theory of Film, his interest shifts to the implications of photographic technology for the filmic medium. He explores the possibility that the cinema might provide an arena in which a mass public can confront the paradox of photographic images, not in order to encourage a realisation of how present conditions might be changed, but to engage in a unique 5t Koch, Sielfried Kracauer, p. 99. 52 Kracauer, "Photography", p. 62. 53 Kracauer, Theory oJFilm, p. 4. 29 The Death's-Head Beneath / 30 form of remembrance. The next two sections of this chapter will examine this shift in Kracauer's thinking, and the relationship between his post-war books and Weimar era essays. 30 Part Three The Suppression of Temporal Disjunction in Theory of Film When the Nazi Party came to power in Germany in 1933, Kracauer was forced to join the exodus of Jewish intellectuals fleeing the country. He sought refuge in Paris, where he was summarily fired by Die Frankfurter Zeitung and forced to eke out a living as a freelance writer for the remainder of the decade. When Germany invaded France in 1940, Kracauer and his wife were once again forced to flee, initially south to Marseille, where they waited many months for a chance to cross the Pyrenees into neutral Spain. They managed to make the crossing early in 1941, and in Spain were able to join a boat sailing for New York, where Kracauer was to live until his death in 1966. In the United States, Kracauer produced two book-length English language works: From Caligari to Hitler: A P.rychological History of German Film, and Theory of Film: The Redemption of Prysical Reality, as well as the never completed, posthumously published History: The LJst Things Before the LJst. 54 For many years these three works formed the basis of his reputation in English-speaking countries, and to this day The Mass Ornament remains the only book-length collection of his Weimar-era essays available in English. The question of how Kracauer's post-war books, especially Theory of Film, relate to his pre-war writings is one that has perturbed commentators for decades. At a surface level, Theory of Film seems quite at odds with the essays of the Weimar period. The earlier essays have been praised for their ground-breaking investigations of popular culture and the "phenomenology of everyday life", while Kracauer's post war work has frequently been viewed as a lapse into the essentialism of "American sociology and cold war anticommunism."55 54 Siegfried Kracauer: From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of German Film (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1947); History: Last Things Before the Last, edited by Peter Lehman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969). 55 Patrice Petro, "Kracauer's Epistemological Shift'', New German Critique, 54 (Fall 1991), pp. 136 & 132. 31 The Death's-Head Beneath / 32 The notion of an "epistemological shift" has been put forward by some writers wishing to extol Kracauer's Weimar work over his post-war books.56 Such a notion tends to efface the continuities in Kracauer's thinking, as well as avoiding consideration of political and historical factors which may have influenced the changes. Rather than conceiving of a rupture between the two major phases of his career, recent Kracauer scholarship has argued that there are certain key concepts that carry over into his post-war writings, but that Kracauer's investment in these concepts shifts with the altered social and political milieu of the post-war era. Central to this shift is the fact of the Holocaust. After the Nazis' industrially-organised genocide, it simply was not possible to maintain the kind of hope Kracauer had once invested in the Enlightenment's project of rationalisation. As Hansen notes, in the wake of the Holocaust the outcome of the historical gamble Kracauer evokes in his essays of the 1920s regarding the potential future direction of modernity "could no longer be thought through to the end, not even imagined on the level of aesthetics."57 Writers such as Hansen, Koch, and Heide Schliipmann have made this point central to their reassessment of Theory of Film and their understanding of the book as a consideration of "film after Auschwitz."58 They have argued that it is through the historical rupture of Nazism, war, and the Holocaust that we may begin to access a sublimated project in Theory of Film that shadows the finished text. According to this reading, Kracauer's investment in film after the war lies in the medium's memorialising possibilities and the hope for "a kind of survival, which is formed by the reproductive media."59 Theory of Film opens with a chapter on photography, which provides the most overt link with Kracauer's Weimar-era work. As in the earlier "Photography" essay, Kracauer views the medium as a form of representation in keeping with the 56 Ibid., pp. 132-134. Petro discusses the ways in which various theorists have understood the 'schism' in Kracauer's work, and sketches the historical background of the broader concept of "epistemological shifts." 57 Hansen, introduction to Kracauer, Theory of Film, p. xxiv. 58 Heide Schliipmann, "The Subject of Survival: On Kracauer's Theory ofFifnl', New German Critique, 54 (Fall 1991), p. 112. 59 Ibid., p. 114. 32 The Death's-Head Beneath / 33 conditions of modernity. Photography has enlarged humankind's vision, destabilising traditional perspectives and revealing physical phenomena normally invisible to the naked eye. 60 The emphasis of Kracauer's analysis in Theory of Film has changed, however, to a prescriptive concern with the properties of the medium itself. The book's opening chapter on photography sets out the thesis upon which Kracauer's theory of film aesthetics is based, namely "the assumption that each medium has a specific nature which invites certain kinds of communications while obstructing others."61 In attempting to discern photography's "specific nature", Kracauer identifies the conflict between formalism and realism as the medium's key point of theoretical contention. 62 It is important to stress that Kracauer does not endorse a simple minded realist approach over creative formalism, but instead proposes a mixed approach in which formalist elements are employed in order to enhance a realist effect. Formalist tendencies should never take precedence over "realist loyalties", and the photographer's sensibilities should always remain secondary to his or her "determination to record and reveal nature."63 Defining what constitutes a methodology that "records and reveals nature" is of course highly problematic. In Theory of Film's first chapter, Kracauer sets about justifying his conception of the "correct" use of the medium with a circular argument. He claims that it is possible to objectively identify aesthetic principles that are in keeping with a photographic approach. Hence these principles, by definition, must constitute the 'correct' photographic approach. The medium is said to have four central affinities which must be respected. These are: an affinity with un-staged reality, an affinity with random fortuity, an affinity with indeterminate meaning, and an affinity with fragmentary representation suggestive of a world beyond the image.64 Once these "natural affinities" have been established as central to the photographic approach, 60 Kracauer, Theory of Film, pp. 8-9. 61 Ibid., p. 3. 62 Ibid., pp. 4-12. 63 Ibid., pp. 15-16. 64 Ibid., pp. 18-20. 33 The Death's-Head Beneath / 34 they can then provide the basis for what Kracauer calls the "cinematic approach."65 This is because, for Kracauer, instantaneous photography remains film's key constitutive element, despite the acknowledged importance of other factors such as editing and sound. Film, like photography, "is uniquely equipped to record and reveal physical reality and, hence, gravitates towards it."66 The degree to which filmmakers partake of this "cinematic approach" then provides a schema by which various filmic practices can be placed in a hierarchy of legitimacy. It is useful to examine exactly what Kracauer means in the book by "physical reality." It is one of Theory of Film's key concepts, appearing throughout the text and in the book's subtitle. It also provides an important link to his Weimar-era emphasis on photography's ability to record external appearances. Early in Theory ojFilm Kracauer states: "[I]he only reality we are concerned with is actually existing physical reality the transitory world we live in. (Physical reality will also be called 'material reality' ... )."67 As outlined earlier, Kracauer's Weimar-era investment in photography was based on the medium's ability to automatically record the surface appearance of people and objects at a particular instant in time. Similarly, "material" or "physical" reality in Theory of Film is, for Kracauer, quite literally the surface appearance of objects as they are manifested in the photographic and filmic image: that is, through the automatic registration of light reflected by objects, and focused by a lens on a light-sensitive strip. This photographic appearance is not, of course, necessarily concurrent with how the object would appear to human consciousness if looked at in reality. Indeed, as has been shown, the confrontation between the cognitive processes of memory, and the automatic rendering of an image produced by photography is central to Kracauer's Weimar-era investment in the medium's ability to confront the viewer with an image of the past alienated from meaning. The important point in Theory of Film continues to be the medium's automatic means of image production, which allows for the instantaneous formation of an image based on the indiscriminate recording of surface appearances, as opposed to a memory 65 Ibid., pp. 37-39. 66 Ibid., p. 28. 67 Ibid. 34 The Death's-Head Beneath / 35 image formed through the processes of human cognition. Hence Kracauer's continued interest in photography's ability to create an image of material reality devoid of human consciousness, or as he puts it, photography's rendering of "nature as it exists independently of us."68 The prime feature that distinguishes film from photography, in terms of its registration of material reality, is motion in time, a concept described by Kracauer in Theory ojFilm as "the flow of life."69 If material reality is the literal surface appearance of objects as registered by the camera, the "flow of life" is that registration in time, as it appears on the cinema screen. This is why Kracauer's flow of life is a "material rather than mental continuum."70 He does not assume any kind of essentialist, all encompassing correlation between our 'reality' and the world on screen (which is obviously shaped to tell a story, create a mood, provoke emotions and so on), but he does identify film's potential to automatically register the physicality of what is before the lens at the moment of filming as something unique to the cinema. In the words of Koch: Kracauer ... assumes that films do not reflect the social world in the form in which it has become second nature, but instead present the physical world in its facticity, that is, in the manner in which it occurs in objects. 71 The title of Theory of Film's final section, "The Redemption of Physical Reality", indicates the rather curious way in which Kracauer's continued interest in issues of spatial reproduction is emphasised in the book, while the temporal concerns of the 1927 "Photography" essay appear to be given less weight. This final section also provides Theory ojFilm's subtitle. Citing Edward Steichen's famous Fami!J of Man photographic exhibition of 1955 at New York's Museum of Modem Art, Kracauer 68 Ibid., p. 18. 69 Ibid., p. 71. 70 Ibid. 71 Koch, Siegfried Kracauer, p. 82. 35 The Death's-Head Beneath / 36 concludes his book with the hope that film, through its capturing of the material appearance of life around the globe, can reveal a commonality of human experience that may encourage the various races to come to terms with their differences. Film's ability to render visible everyday life, to redeem the physical world from obscurity behind barriers of habit and indifference, is validated by the possibility of a greater understanding and "rapprochement between the peoples of the world."72 However, contained within the liberal-humanist sentiment with which Kracauer concludes Theory of Film, there remains vestiges of his earlier concern with an experience of temporal disjunction in viewing photographic images. This experience, far from redeeming physical reality, "conjures up anew a disintegrated unity ... [a] ... ghost like reality" which remains unredeemed, haunting the present like a spectre.73 The vestiges of Kracauer's interest in this unredeemed photographic reality can be traced through a series of notebooks he filled in the latter part of 1940, while he and his wife were trapped in Marseille awaiting visas that would allow them to cross into neutral Spain. The notebooks can in turn assist in tracing the lines of a sublimated project in Theory of Film, which is the book's main source of interest for contemporary film scholars. 72 Kracauer, Theory of Film, p. 310. 73 Kracauer, "Photography", p. 56. 36 Part Four The Marseille Notebooks and The "Death's-Head" Beneath The notebooks that Kracauer filled in Marseille provide a sketch for a book on film aesthetics that eventually became Theory efFilm. Miriam Hansen discusses these notebooks at length in her article "'With Skin and Hair': Kracauer's Theory of Film, Marseille 1940", and then again in more detail in her introduction to the 1997 edition of Theory efFilm. Both these pieces trace Theory efFilm from its embryonic stages in the notebooks, thereby undermining the notion of a schism between Kracauer's Weimar essays and post-war books. The Marseille notebooks emphasise the play of chance and contingency on the silver screen in a manner reminiscent of Kracauer's Weimar-era essays on cinema. His interest in film during the 1920s had centred on the medium's ability to further the fragmentation of the modem subject, thus undermining the unique, sovereign subject of bourgeois ideology. Particularly in the American slapstick comedies of the period, Kracauer perceived a physical representation of the "intermediary realm of improvisation and chance" that was the potentially liberating flip-side of modernity's often brutal dismantling of all pre-modern social and cultural structures.74 Slapstick's engagement with anarchic destruction, and the importance of chance intercessions in its scenarios, marked the genre as an arena in which modernity's de-centred subjectivity was given an open, improvisational inflection, subtly undermining the mythology that sought to integrate the contradictions of the capitalist order. In an article from 1926 entitled "Artistisches und Amerikanisches", Kracauer articulated the genre's appeal in precisely these terms: 74 Miriam Bratu Hansen, "America, Paris, the Alps: Kracauer (and Benjamin) on Cinema and Modernity" in Leo Charney and Vanessa R. Schwartz (eds.), Cinema and the Invention ef Modern Ufe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), p. 372. 37 The Death's-Head Beneath / 38 One has to hand this to the Americans: with slapstick films they have created a form that offers a counterweight to their reality. If in that reality they subject the world to an often unbearable discipline, the film in turn dismantles this self-imposed order quite forcefully. 75 In 1940, Kracauer still views the cinema as an arena where a mass public can live out the conditions of modernity in a heightened form of sensory experience, and as such slapstick comedy remains central to Kracauer's discussion of the medium. As I have already noted, after the Nazis' program of mass genocide organised along industrial lines, Kracauer was understandably reluctant to invest the same utopian hopes in modernity's radical deconstruction of all existing traditions, beliefs and forms of subjectivity. Apart from the consequent disappearance of the slapstick genre from Kracauer's published theory of film aesthetics, the most significant difference between the Marseille notebooks and Theory of Film is the envisioned conclusion. In 1940, and interestingly even in outlines of the book up until the mid-1950s, the final section of the work was to be a chapter variously entitled "Kermesse funebre", "Danse macabre", and "The Death's Head."76 Although Kracauer never actually wrote this chapter, the Marseille notebooks contain an epigram which may point towards the ultimate concerns it would have taken up. The epigram reads, in part: Film brings the whole material world into play ... It does not aim upward, toward intention, but pushes toward the bottom, to gather and carry along even the dregs. It is interested in the refuse, in what is just there-both in and outside the human being. The face counts for nothing in film unless it includes the death's-head beneath. "Dance macabre." To which end? That remains to be seen.77 75 Kracauer translated and quoted by Hansen, ibid., p. 373. 76 Hansen, introduction to Kracauer, Theory of Film, p. xxiv. 77 Siegfried Kracauer, Marseille notebooks (unpublished manuscript) quoted by Hansen, introduction to Kracauer, Theory of Film, p. vii. 38 The Death's-Head Beneath / 39 As with his conception of photography in the 1927 essay, Kracauer conceives of film here as a medium that registers the "refuse", the "dregs", the forgotten detritus of history that is "just there" when the camera opens its shutter. In capturing this refuse, film can engender a confrontation with a reality essentially alienated from the processes of human cognition and memory, revealing through an experience of temporal and spatial disjunction the "death's-head" beneath the surface appearance of things. In other words, through its use of photographic technology, film has the potential to provoke a similar experience of loss and death in the viewer. Traces of a concern with the death's-head do remain in certain sections of the finished Theory ef Film, and it is through these passages that we can begin to understand the sublimated project that recent Kracauer scholarship has detected in the book. The first of these passages occurs early in Theory efFilm during the opening chapter on photography. In the book's clearest echo of the 1927 essay, Kracauer describes the way in which time causes photographs to disintegrate into their spatial components, presenting us with the image of a past material reality from which we are fundamentally estranged. Discussing family photo albums, Kracauer comments: With the passing of time, these souvenirs undergo a significant change of meaning. As the recollections they embody fade away, they increasingly assume documentary functions: their impact as photographic records definitely overshadows their original appeal as memory aids. Leafing through the family album, the grandmother will re-experience her honeymoon, while the children will curiously study bizarre gondolas, obsolete fashions, and old young faces they never saw. And most certainly they will rejoice in discoveries, pointing to odd bagatelles which the grandmother failed to notice in her day.78 78 Kracauer, Theory ofFilm, p. 21. 39 The Death's-Head Beneath / 40 In keeping with the earlier essay on photography, Kracauer hints at a contrast between the workings of human memory and the photographic image. Initially the family snapshots serve to invoke memories of the scenes they depict, but over time they become impressions of an alien material reality which appears increasingly arbitrary. Kracauer explicates this contrast between memory and photography with a passage from The Guermantes W ~' the first volume of Marcel Proust's epic Remembrance of Things Past. Once again, the passage revolves around the image of a grandmother. The narrator of the story describes the experience of visiting his elderly relative after a long absence. Previously, he had only seen his grandmother through the filter of his love for her: We never see the people who are dear to us save in the animated system ... of our incessant love for them, which before allowing the images that their faces present to reach us catches them in its vortex, flings them back upon the idea that we have always had of them, makes them adhere to it, coincide with it.79 The narrator's absence has interrupted his own animation of his grandmother's countenance, and for a moment he sees her as a detached witness would: "The process that mechanically occurred in my eyes when I caught sight of my grandmother was indeed a photograph."80 Suddenly, instead of a loved person whose image had always been viewed "through the transparent sheets of contiguous, overlapping memories", the narrator is confronted with the alienated image of a stranger, "sitting on the sofa, beneath the lamp, red-faced, heavy and common, sick, lost in thought, following the lines of a book with eyes that seemed hardly sane, a dejected old woman whom I did not know."81 79 Marcel Proust quoted in ibid., p. 14. 80 Ibid. 81 Ibid. 40 The Death's-Head Beneath/ 41 The passage from Proust clearly delineates the same difference between memory images and photographic images that Kracauer perceived in his Weimar essay. Memory images are shaped by our perceptions, emotions, and experiences, which inevitably alter over time. In contrast, the photographic (or filmic) image fixes those contingent aspects of material reality that our memories expunge, through the split second automatic action of light. The crucial difference between the two lies in the subject's relationship to his or her own memories on the one hand, and his or her relationship to a mechanically-produced image of material reality on the other. This difference between the memory image and the photographic/ filmic image, implicitly set up in Theory of Film's first chapter, is important in understanding Kracauer's employment of the Medusa legend in the final section of the book The tone of the passage on the legend is curiously at odds with Theory ojFilnls optimistic "family of man" conclusion a few pages later. According to the famous Greek legend, the Medusa's gaze would paralyse all who looked upon her. Athena instructs Perseus to slay the Medusa by looking at the monster's reflection in a polished shield, thus avoiding the Medusa's paralysing stare. The moral Kracauer derives from this tale is: [W]e do not, and cannot, see actual horrors because they paralyse us with blinding fear; and that we shall know what they look like only by watching images of them which reproduce their true appearance ... The film screen is Athena's polished shield.82 Film can force us to confront images of horror that would disappear behind "veils of panic and imagination" were we to encounter them in reality.83 It is significant that this section contains one of Theory of Film's very few explicit references to the Holocaust, as Kracauer cites the films made of the Nazi concentration camps as examples of the medium's ability to redeem horror from invisibility. (In regard to this 82 Ibid., p. 305. 83 Ibid., p. 306. 41 The Death's-Head Beneath / 42 claim, Koch notes that in Allied films made of the camps just after their liberation, Germans being forced to confront the mountains of corpses can be observed turning away from the horror with "violent movements."84) For Kracauer, these "mirror reflections of horror are an end in themselves", forcing the spectator to incorporate these filmic images of past lives and past deaths into his or her own memory images. Or as Kracauer puts it, these images "beckon the spectator to take them in and thus incorporate into his memory the real face of things too dreadful to be beheld in reality."85 Film can thus redeem from oblivion that which our memory alone would expunge, either through an apparent lack of significance (as with the grandmother's true appearance in Proust's passage), or through a kind of traumatic repressed memory (as in the witnessing of the death camps). According to this reading, Theory of Film's final suggestion that film can redeem the appearance of everyday life from invisibility, and thus unite humankind in a realisation of common experience, is actually a displaced expression of a wished-for solidarity with the past, which in the wake of the Holocaust takes the form of a "dedicated commemoration of the dead."86 Hence, the redemption offered by the filmic image paradoxically relies upon the images themselves remaining unredeemed in terms of their absorption into the explanatory discourse of positivist historiography. Redemption takes place only at the level of the viewer's experience of an unredeemed image of the past, unfolding before him or her and allowing for a unique form of "anamnestic solidarity with the dead'', who continue to inhabit the present in a space and time which has ceased to exist off screen.87 In a quite personalised passage on old newsreels early in Theory of Film, Kracauer describes the particular form of experiential commemoration the film medium potentially offers. Significantly, the films Kracauer refers to in this passage are all 84 Koch, Siegfried Kracauer, p. 109. 85 Kracauer, Theory of Film, p. 306. 86 Koch, Siegfried Kracauer, p. 106. 87 Ibid., p. 113. 42 The Death's-Head Beneath / 43 newsreel compilations comprised entirely, or in part, of footage from the pre-war era of his youth: The thrill of these old films is that they bring us face to face with the inchoate, cocoon-like world whence we come-all the objects, or rather sediments of objects, that were our companions in a pupa state. The most familiar, that which continues to condition our involuntary reactions and spontaneous impulses, is thus made to appear as the most alien. If we find these obsolete sights funny, we respond to them also with emotions which range from fright at the sudden emergence of our intimate being to nostalgic melancholy over the inexorable passing of time.ss While it is evident how newsreel footage of streets frequented in our youth might provoke such an affective response in the viewer, Koch notes that it is less clear how the commemorative experience offered by film's particular rendering of material reality might function when dealing with death on a mass scale. The courage required to examine the horror of the death camps on film may be an extreme manifestation of the "anamnestic solidarity with the dead'' immanent in our apprehension of any photographic/filmic image's assertion of "that-has-been", but as Koch points out, in the case of the Holocaust any form of commemorative redemption through the recording of material reality on film runs up against intrinsic limits. The essence of genocide is mass absence, not only of life, but in the case of the Holocaust, the absence of the people who "literally went up in smoke, having left behind them no visual mnemonic trace that could herald their redemption."s9 Koch regards this point as central to Kracauer's apparent reluctance to examine the Holocaust head-on in any of his post-war writings. In the final instance, mass genocide is simply not reconcilable with Kracauer's emphasis on the visual. However, the question of how to directly represent the Holocaust on film, or even whether it should be represented, 88 Kracauer, Theory of Film, pp. 56-57. 89 Koch, Siegfried Kracauer, p. 113. 43 The Death's-Head Beneath / 44 has been a source of constant debate amongst filmmakers and theorists for decades. This would seem to indicate that mass genocide represents the limit of cinema's representational capabilities in general, rather than simply a blind spot in Kracauer's conception of the medium. Even though any direct representation of the Holocaust on film runs up against intrinsic limits, the spectre of the war and Nazi genocide certainly contributed to the desire Kracauer detects in certain strains of post-war cinema to capture and memorialise the ephemeral material configurations of an everyday life that had been rent asunder. Rather than focusing on Kracauer's reluctance to deal with how the Holocaust might be directly depicted on film, it is perhaps more useful to ask how the commemorative experience of the image he describes in Theory of Film is actually manifested in feature films of the post-war period. In considering this question, we come to the crux of the conflict Kracauer discusses in Theory of Film's opening chapter between photography's realist and formalist tendencies. To the extent that the filmic image attests to the existence of an object before the lens at the moment of exposure, it shares photography's potential to render an indexical image of material reality. However, Kracauer argues in Theory of Film that it is only through the implementation of certain aesthetic practices that filmmakers might incorporate the medium's rendering of the "death's-head" beneath the material reality projected on screen into the viewer's experience of the film. Kracauer's sorting of various filmic practices into a hierarchy of legitimacy in Theory of Film is most productively understood as an attempt to identify those approaches to feature filmmaking that rrught encourage such an experience. Throughout the book, he repeatedly cites the products of the Italian Neo-realist movement as examples of just such an aesthetic. The following chapter will examine the N eo-realist films of Roberto Rossellini in light of Kracauer's claims, and consider how these films can be read as a direct formal and thematic response to the experience of war and Fascism. 44 The Death's-Head Beneath / 45 I have shown that in the work of both Siegfried Kracauer and Roland Barthes, the experience of temporal disjunction provoked by the photographic image is figured as a form of "flat death." Both Kracauer and Barthes claim that the photographic image's indexical force is not necessarily the result of the accuracy with which the photograph records outward appearances, but rather the viewer's knowledge regarding the means by which the image is produced and the consequent association in the viewer's mind between what the image depicts and the instant of its production. In his "Photography" essay of 1927, Kracauer contrasts the photographic image with the memory image we retain of the past. Memory retains that which is personally significant, whereas the camera indiscriminately records the external appearance of objects, presenting us with an image of an estranged material reality no longer permeated by human consciousness. In his later work, beginning with the Marseille notebooks of 1940, Kracauer extends this conception of the photographic image to his understanding of film. In the Marseille notebooks, Kracauer writes of an always immanent experience of temporal disjunction in our perception of an estranged material reality in the filmic image, describing this experience as a kind of "death's head" just below the "flow of life" that film evokes on screen. Gertrud Koch argues that his investment in this "death's-head" rests upon the belief that it represents a uniquely modernist experience of "pastness" for the viewer, an experience of time that becomes a form of endless commemoration, or "anamnestic solidarity with the dead." Kracauer's conception of cinema in Theory efFilm points towards the medium's ability to foster a consciousness of time that is not based on an understanding of the past as a link in the causational chain of history. Rather, the medium might foster an awareness of the past as a series of unique ephemeral moments which are only ever able to leave a trace of their passing. The filmic image can confront us with an image of history that remains unredeemed, haunting the present as a literal impression of a material reality which has always already passed away. Thus, film has the potential to 45 The Death's-Head Beneath/ 46 forestall any understanding of history as a straight-forward linear narrative which can be unproblematically reconstructed, and instead might encourage the viewer to reflect upon history as that which is lost to time. In other words, film might restore a perception of time and duration to our understanding of the past, thereby undermining the assumptions upon which positivist conceptions of history are based. 46 Chapter Two N e o - r e a 1 i s m ' s I m a g e of H i s t o r y The previous chapter outlined Siegfried Kracauer's contention in Theory of Film that the filmic medium offers the possibility of presenting the viewer with an image of material reality from which we are essentially estranged. Kracauer constantly returns to the films of Italy's Neo-realist movement as examples of works which foster the viewer's engagement with this aspect of filmic experience within a feature film context. The formal and thematic innovations of Neo realism encouraged this form of engagement in order to forge a new approach to the memorialising of contemporary history on screen. Kracauer is not alone in regarding the Neo-realist movement as an important development in narrative feature film style. Theory of Film forms part of wide body of writing that views N ea-realism as an important break with pre-war cinematic conventions and styles. This account of film history has a particularly strong tradition in France; as well as Siegfried Kracauer's work, this chapter will draw on the observations of French theorist and critic Andre Bazin, and the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, in order to further explicate the innovations represented by Neo-realism. For Deleuze, Neo-realism's turn to the material at the level of film form was concurrent with a "crisis of action" at the level of film narrative, arising from a loss of faith in the possibility of human agency in the face of events as overwhelming as the Second World War. The historical context in which Neo-realism developed will also be sketched out in this chapter in order to provide a fuller understanding of the account of the movement offered by Bazin and Deleuze. The second part of this chapter will discuss how some of the possibilities Kracauer evokes for the filmic medium can be seen playing out in various ways in the early work of Roberto Rossellini, through a detailed examination of his war trilogy comprising Rome, Open Ciry, Paisa and Germmry, Year Zero. It will be shown that the style Rossellini develops across these three films contains something of 47 Neo-realism's Image of History/ 48 the memorialising possibilities offered by film which underlie Kracauer's investment in the medium in Theory of Film. 48 Part One Neo-realism as a Break with Previous Film Form In Theory of Film, Kracauer writes that Neo-realist directors like Rossellini and Vittorio De Sica are essentially concerned with "the kind of life which only the camera is capable of revealing."1 For Kracauer, this "kind of life" is the everyday objects, gestures and configurations that make up an environment we take for granted, like the "odd bagatelles which the grandmother failed to notice in her day." The film aesthetic Kracauer describes in Theory ojFilm is one that could incorporate the medium's rendering of the "death's-head" beneath its record of people and objects in time into an open-ended, explorative narrative film form. In other words, an approach to cinema that would include a photographic affect of temporal disjunction in the viewer's relationship to the image, allowing the medium to function as more than a literary-based form of dramatic story-telling. Kracauer explicitly contrasts the aesthetic he describes with that of traditional historical period dramas which rely upon retrospective historical discourse to inform their re-creations of the material appearance of past eras. Furthermore, at the level of narrative Kracauer argues that historical dramas tend to construct the past as a linear chain of known events commensurate with classical dramatic narrative structures. As such, "the world they show is an artificial creation radically shut off from the space-time continuum of the living, a closed cosmos which does not admit of extensions."2 In the Neo-realist cinema, Kracauer detects a different approach to history on screen, an engagement with the material contingencies of the present rather than a material re-creation and narrativising of the past. I will show in this chapter that in Neo-realism generally, and Rossellini's war-trilogy in particular, there is an overwhelming sense of history. But it is not history presented as a final known image, or the representation of an era via recognisable historical "markers" and a retrospective narrativising of historical events. The episodic nature of the N eo-realist films, 1 Kracauer, Theory of Film, p. 254. 2 Ibid., p. 78. 49 Neo-realism's Image of History/ 50 combined with conclusions which generally fail to resolve the depicted conflicts and situations, tend to have the effect of cooling the viewer's emotional involvement in the drama. This is turn encourages a certain pensiveness and contemplative engagement with the image's material content. Neo-realism and Kracauer's Theory of Film were both developed in the years following the Second World War; just as Kracauer's concern with film's memorialising possibilities is crucially informed by the experience of Fascism, war and genocide, Italy's Neo-realist cinema can only be fully understood in light of Italy's wartime experiences. Discussing the origins of Neo-realism in the Italian Communist newspaper f'Unita in 1955, Umberto Barbaro stated that "we can never fully understand the Neo-realism of the Italian cinema unless we take ourselves back to the spirit and history of anti-Fascism."3 Clearly, there is a link between the Liberation movement in Italy and the early products of Neo-realism, most obviously at the level of subject matter. Rome, Open Ciry focuses on the clandestine anti-Fascist resistance in Rome during the winter of 1943-44, and two of the six episodes in Paisa deal with the anti-Fascist partisan struggle in northern Italy. Furthermore, there is a wealth of evidence to indicate that the Neo-realist filmmakers regarded their films as part of a general re-invention of Italian life in the immediate post-war era. Neo-realism represented an attempt to relate to the environment of post-war Italy in a new way, and to memorialise the Italian people's experiences rebuilding the country in the wake of Fascism and war. Italy's wartime experience was crucially differentiated from other European countries such as France by the fact that its Fascist government initially entered the war as an ally of Nazi Germany. However, a series of military disasters culminated in the Allied invasion of Sicily in mid-1943, prompting Mussolini's own cabinet to depose the dictator and sue for peace with the Allies, with the support of the Italian King. An armistice was signed on the 3rd of September 1943, which immediately precipitated a German invasion. Hitler had Mussolini rescued from prison and taken to Northern Italy, where the Nazis instigated a 3 Umberto Barbaro quoted by Mario Cannella, "Ideology and Aesthetic Hypotheses in the Criticism ofNeo-realism", translated by John Mathews and Judith White, Screen, 14:4 (Winter 1973/74), p. 9 (article originally published 1966). 50 Neo-realism's Image of History / S1 Fascist puppet-state known as the Republic of Salo. The King and Generals who had ousted Mussolini fled to Allied-held territory in the south, while a coalition of Communists, Social Democrats, and Christian Democrats formed the Committee of National Liberation in the German-occupied north. The Committee co ordinated an armed partisan struggle against the Germans and Italian Fascists, fought primarily by Communist guerillas and ex-Italian Army troops loyal to the King. As Allied forces slowly advanced up the Italian peninsula from mid-1943 to mid-1945, northern Italy experienced a civil war fought by leftist and centrist partisans against Italian Fascist forces actively supported by German troops and the Nazi police apparatus. Thus, the Liberation struggle in Italy comprised partly of a protracted civil war between Fascist forces and a popularist guerilla movement. The result was the forcible politicisation of a generation of Italians who had come of age under Mussolini's rule. Members of Italy's comfortable middle-class, including many in the Rome-based film industry, were brought face to face with the harsh political realities of Italian Fascism and German Nazism for the first time. Some writers have viewed the conversion of many film industry personnel to the anti-Fascist cause during 1943-44 as a cynical career move, and it is true that many of the leading figures of Italy's post-war cinema had earlier enjoyed the favour of Mussolini's regime. Rossellini, for instance, produced three feature films under the Fascist government between 1941 and 1943. The first of these, The White Ship (La nave bianca, 1941), was made with the direct support of the Italian Navy's cinema department, led by the documentary filmmaker and committed Fascist Francesco De Robertis.4 The film even won the Cup of the National Fascist Party at the Venice Film Festival of 1941.5 In Rossellini's defence, it should be noted that most of the prominent figures involved in the Neo-realist movement commenced their careers under Mussolini's rule, and that for an entire generation of Italians, Fascist dictatorship represented the only form of government they had ever experienced. Rossellini was only 16 when the Fascists came to power. Federico Fellini, co-writer of Rome, Open Ciry and Paisd, was only 2. All the ~ Peter Bondanella, The Films of Roberto Rosse//ini (Cambridge, New York and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 11. 5 Ibid., p. 34. 51 Neo-realism's Image of History/ 52 principle directors and writers involved in the Neo-realist movement were born in the 191 0s at the earliest, and had never known anything but Mussolini's government for their entire working lives. It should also be noted that, in contrast to both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, the commercial film industry in Italy was largely left in private hands, although it is true that the regime provided heavy subsidies and funded many initiatives which continue to provide the foundations of Italy's film industry to this day. The Venice Film Festival, for example, commenced in 1934, when the government added a film component to the already existing Venice Biennale arts festival. The still-existing Centro sperimentale di cinematografia film school was set-up in 1935, and Rome's Cinecittd studio complex was personally opened by Mussolini in 1937.6 The regime also maintained a documentary/newsreel unit, Istituto Luce, whose explicit purpose was to produce propaganda along party lines. However, most film historians now agree that the Italian Fascists fostered a commercial industry modelled on Hollywood, rather than "the rigidly controlled popular culture of Soviet Russia or Nazi Germany."7 In any case, those Italians genuinely committed to the Fascist cause, including members of the film industry such as Francesco De Robertis, fled North to Salo in late 1943.8 In contrast, Rossellini remained in Rome and became the Christian Democrat representative in the underground film-worker's union. This brought him into contact with members of the armed Resistance, including the Communists, and placed him in considerable personal danger.9 Throughout this period, the whole of Rome endured severe shortages of food, clothing and electricity. Young men were rounded up at random for military service or forced labour in German munitions factories. There were numerous atrocities perpetrated, including the mass deportation of Rome's Jewish population, and the Fosse Ardeatine massacre, in which German forces executed over 300 Italians just outside Rome in retaliation for the death of thirty-two German troops in a partisan 6 Ibid., pp. 5. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid., p. 12. 9 Forgacs, Rome, Open City, pp. 23-24. 52 Neo-realism's Image of History / 53 attack. 10 Under the impact of these experiences, it seems unlikely that Rossellini's conversion to the anti-Fascist cause was purely opportunistic in nature. Peter Brunette's assessment in his book Roberto Rosseliini is more convincing: As countless interviews and personal testimonies have shown, it was in this climate of fear and violence that Rossellini and other lukewarm "Fascists", overwhelmed by the brutality of events, became instantly and genuinely politicised.11 It was the encounter with the realities of Nazism which was decisive for Rossellini and many others in the Italian film industry. The brutality of the German occupation and the civil war, as well as Italy's culpability in the development of European Fascism, explains the fervent desire felt by many Italians to remake Italy from scratch when hostilities finally ceased in 1945. Italy's specific social and political history meant that the war and Liberation were widely perceived by many Italians as a historical rupture and new beginning, as opposed to a return to any kind of pre-war sovereignty. Cesare Zavattini, scriptwriter for many of Vittorio de Sica's most well known Neo-realist works, succinctly described the difference between Italy's Liberation and that of countries like France: "For them, everything continued; for us, everything begun."12 Zavattini's comment conveys the awareness many Italians had in 1945 of partaking in a moment of potentially radical change. The sense that the war represented a major historical break was present throughout Europe in 1945, but Italy's wartime experience gave this feeling a particularly potent shape and force. Italian novelist and former partisan Italo Calvino described the general sentiments of Italy's cultural producers at this time: 10 Of the 2,091 Jewish people deported from Rome during the Occupation, 111 survived the war. Forgacs provides extensive information on the deportation of Rome's Jewish population and the Fosse Ardeatine massacre in Rome, Open City, pp. 64-65. See also Peter Brunette, Roberto Rossellini (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1996), p. 38. 11 Brunette, Roberto Rossellini, p. 38. 12 Cesare Zavattini, "A Thesis on Neo-realism" in David Overbey (ed.), Springtime in Ita!J: A Reader in Neo-realism, translated by David Overbey (Hamden, USA Archon Books, 1978), p. 69 (essay compiled from three articles originally published 1952, 1953 and 1954 respectively). 53 Neo-realism's Image of History / 54 We had lived through the war and the younger of us-who had just been in time to serve as partisans-did not feel in the least crushed, defeated, 'burnt out', but victorious, propelled by the impetus of the recent battle, sole trustees of its inheritance ... what we felt responsible for was a sense of life as starting from scratch, a general, problematic fury and our ability to survive agony and danger; but our attitude was one of defiant gaiety. 13 The sense that Italy was restarting from ground zero is also evident in an autobiographical piece Rossellini wrote for Cahiers du cinema in the mid-1950s. Rossellini blithely ignores the early stages of his film career, starting his story in 1944 with the statement: "In 1944, immediately after the war, everything was destroyed in Italy. The cinema was no exception."14 The existence of a relatively intact, well-trained film industry in Italy allowed directors like Rossellini to continue making films, even as the war was still being fought in the north of the country. The horrific experiences of 1943-45 lead Rossellini and others to try and forge a new approach to the filmic image, in order to "start again" and attempt to rethink their relationship to the world through cinema. The first of the Neo-realist films to gain widespread local and international attention was Rossellini's Rome, Open Ciry, released just months after the end of the war in Europe. The film topped box-office receipts in Italy for the 1945-46 season, and in the United States a sub-titled print played continually at the World Theatre in New York for twenty-one months during 1946-47.15 Rossellini's work was immediately seized upon by certain members of the European intelligentsia as an example of a new "Liberation culture", unshackled from the censorship and moral degradation of Fascism. Italian writer Carlo Lizzani, for example, proclaimed in November 1945 that Rossellini's film "could be just the thing to start off our new rebirth."16 13 Italo Calvino quoted in Roy Armes, Patterns of Realism (South Brunswick and New York: A.S. Barnes and Company, 1971), p. 64. 14 Roberto Rossellini, "Ten Years of Cinema" in Overbey (ed.), Springtime in Ita!J, p. 93 (article originally published in three parts 1955-56). 15 Forgacs, Rome, Open City, pp. 9-10. 16 Carlo Lizzani quoted in Brunette, Roberto Rossellini, p. 52. 54 Neo-realism's Image of History/ 55 Even at the time of its release, however, Rome, Open Ciry was regarded as more than just a positive sign that cinema production free of Fascist ideology was resuming in post-war Europe. Many critics perceived in Rome, Open Ciry the beginnings of a new style of cinematic realism. This impression was reinforced in France by the concurrent release of Rossellini's follow-up film, Paisa. Reviewing the two films after preview screenings in Paris, Georges Sadoul wrote of Rome, Open Ci(y. This work, made with almost no money and no means, brings more to the cinema than two hundred recent Hollywood films ... A new realism is born, which owes much to newsreels, the journalist's investigations, the work of documentary film-makers. 17 Contemporary reviews, especially in America, repeatedly stressed Rome, Open Ciry's 'documentary-like' quality. In The Saturdqy Review, John Mason Brown claimed that while the film was not a documentary, "it gives the illusion of being one", while Lift assured its readers that the film's earthy verisimilitude "will make many American audiences think of it as a documentary film." 18 Writers since the 1940s have often been at pains to point out that many of the Neo-realist films, especially Rome, Open Ciry, retain certain melodramatic conventions. Yet it seems clear from contemporary reactions that these films also contained strong elements of a new approach to the image, and a new kind of realism, which forcefully struck critics at the time of these films' release. One of the most incisive contemporaneous accounts of N ea-realism comes from Andre Bazin. To understand how Bazin conceived of Neo-realism as breaking with previous filmmaking conventions, it is useful to examine his retrospective assessment of Neo-realism's relationship to previous filmmaking styles in a series of pieces he wrote in the 1950s, which were later edited together to form "The Evolution of the Language of Cinema" essay in What is Cinema?. 19 In this essay, 17 Georges Sadoul quoted in Forgacs, Rome, Open City, p. 9. 18 John Mason Brown, "Seeing Things: A Tale of One City", The Saturday Review, 6th of April 1946, p. 16; (uncredited writer), "Movie of the Week: Open City", Life, 3rd of April 1946, p. 111. 19 Andre Bazin, "The Evolution of the Language of Cinema" in What is Cinema?, pp. 23-40 (essay compiled from three articles originally published 1950, 1952 and 1955 respectively). 55 Neo-realism's Image of History/ 56 Bazin describes the typical pre-war approach to narrative filmmaking in terms of a system of analytical continuity editing, designed to render each shot a part of an ongoing dramatic narrative, based around the actions of one or more central protagonists. The content of each shot is strictly informed by the advancement of the narrative, and as such is designed to maximise the viewer's emotional involvement and identification with the characters and their actions.20 Scenes are broken down according to the psychological drives or dramatic actions of the main protagonists. To illustrate his claim, Bazin considers how a scene depicting a hungry man coming across a table of food might be broken down according to this approach. The scene would probably open with an establishing long shot showing the character and the food. There would then follow a close-up of the actor's face looking with longing, a close up of the food, a shot of the man advancing, and finally a mid-shot of the character grabbing an item from the table.21 Drawing on Bazin's work, Gilberto Perez describes such an approach to film form in these terms: "Dramatic film technique aims for a perfect fit between action and picture, between what is happening in the scene ... and the views rendering it on the screen."22 This particular manner of breaking down each scene functions within a general dramatic narrative ideal in which any ambiguity in terms of plot is introduced only in the interests of suspense, with the expectation that this ambiguity will be resolved for the viewer before the film's conclusion. In this way, viewers are provided with a sense of narrative closure. Bazin regards this "classical" dramatic narrative economy as being perfected in the Hollywood cinema of the 1930s and early 40s.23 By 1946, Bazin detects a shift away from this "classical" ideal in narrative filmmaking. In the United States, this change finds expression as early as 1941 in the fragmented narrative structure and deep-focus cinematography of Orson 20 Ibid., p. 32. 21 Ibid., p. 31. 22 Gilberto Perez, The Material Ghost: Films and Their Medium (Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press, 1998), p. 72. 23 Bazin, "Evolution", p. 30. 56 Neo-realism's Image of History/ 57 Welles' Citizen Kane (1941).24 However, it is in Italy's Neo-realist cinema that Bazin most clearly perceives a new concern with the ambiguous possibilities of the image, over and above a concern with the effects of montage.25 Time in the Neo-realist films is no longer atomised and abstracted through shot breakdowns, to be reassembled strictly in the service of an on-going dramatic narrative. Instead, Bazin regards the Neo-realist approach to the image as being "capable once more of bringing together real time, in which things exist, along with the duration of the action, for which classical editing had insidiously substituted mental and abstract time."26 Rather than breaking scenes down into multiple shots in the manner described above, the Neo-realists tend to rely on long-shots in which the action is allowed to play out in single extended takes. Bazin argues that such an approach is inherently more ambiguous, since the viewer must deduce what is significant from the image, rather than being led to infer certain meanings through the use of classical montage techniques. Bazin illustrates his claim by contrasting Rossellini's use of an actor's face in Germaf!)I, Year Zero with Lev K.uleshov's in his famous experiment of the 1920s. Kuleshov alternated the expressionless features of the actor Mozhukhin with shots depicting a range of objects, such as food and a child crying. K.uleshov claimed that the audience always read the actor's expression in terms of the shot that had preceded it. In other words, the shot's objective denotative meaning did not change (it was always the same shot of the actor's face), but the connotative meanings the viewer associated with the actor's unchanging expression changed in relation to the shots around it. In contrast, in Germaf!J, Year Zero Rossellini relentlessly focuses on a child as he moves through the ruins of Berlin, encouraging the viewer to see the child's face in this context rather than relative to it. The result is an ambiguity in the character's inner thoughts and motivations, and his relationship to his environment: 24 Ibid., pp. 33-36. 25 Ibid., p. 37. 26 Ibid., p. 39. 57 Neo-realism's Image of History / 58 The preoccupation of Rossellini when dealing with the face of the child in Aliemania Anno Zero [Germa,ry, Year Zero] is the exact opposite of that of Kuleshov with the close-up of Mozhukhin. Rossellini is concerned to preserve its mystery.27 It is Bazin's contention that the Neo-realist approach requires the viewer to read meaning into the image, rather than being carefully guided through a series of images following a clear path of narrative development. This ambiguity is furthered by the use of episodic, elliptical narrative structures in which the dramatic and thematic links between events are not always obvious. In one of Bazin's key contemporaneous essays on Neo-realism entitled "An Aesthetic of Reality", he describes Rossellini's narrative style in Paisa in these terms: Rossellini undoubtedly maintains an intelligible succession of events, but these do not mesh like a chain with the sprockets of a wheel. The mind has to leap from one event to the other as one leaps from stone to stone in crossing a river. It may happen that one's foot hesitates between two rocks, or that one misses one's footing and slips. The mind does likewise.28 The degree of mental activity demanded of the viewer to draw meaning from the Neo-realist image is, for Bazin, the heart of the movement's particular form of realism. He concludes his review of Germa,ry, Year Zero with a clear statement of this position: "Isn't this, then, a sound definition of realism in art: to force the mind to draw its own conclusions about people and events, instead of manipulating it into accepting someone else's interpretation?"29 To summarise, Neo-realism represented for Bazin an approach to narrative cinema that broke with the conventions of classical continuity editing as exemplified in Hollywood features of the late 1930s and early 40s. Rather than 27 Ibid., 3 7. 28 Bazin, ":\n Aesthetic of Reality", p. 35. 29 "Germany, Year Zero" in Andre Bazin, Bazjn at Work: Mqjor Essqys and Reviews from the Forties and Fifiies, translated by Alain Piette and Bert Cardullo, edited by Bert Cardullo (New York and London: Routledge, 1997), p. 124 (review originally published 1949). 58 Neo-realism's Image of History / 59 breaking the action down according to the psychological drives of the characters or the dramatic demands of the narrative, Neo-realism sought to leave the film's action in its temporal and spatial context. The result was a style that relied heavily on the ambiguous affective qualities of the image itself, demanding a high level of mental involvement on the part of the viewer in order to draw interpretive meaning from the succession of images on screen. Bazin's writings on Neo-realism have continued to influence and inform interpretations of the movement to the present. In Cinema 2: The Time-Image, Gilles Deleuze begins his discussion of Neo-realism with an outline of Bazin's ideas regarding the new type of realism represented by these films: The real was no longer represented or reproduced but 'aimed at'. Instead of representing an already deciphered real, Neo-realism aimed at an always ambiguous, to be deciphered, real; this is why the sequence shot tended to replace the montage of representations.30 However, Deleuze argues that the question of how to interpret the innovations of Neo-realism should not be posed at the level of the real. He is much more interested in the type of thought generated in the viewer by the temporally affective qualities of the new style. For Deleuze, the war and the advent of Neo realism inaugurated cinema's transition from a "movement-image" to a "time image." That is, an image in which time is subordinated to movement as the prime affective quality of cinema was replaced by an image in which movement is subordinated to time. The sensory-motor linkages between situation and action, action and reaction, excitation and response, that had informed a pre-war cinema based upon protagonistic agency, began to break down in the face of the war's catastrophic level of devastation. According to Deleuze, in the decades following the Second World War and starting with Neo-realism, the cinema is increasingly marked by characters unable to exert influence over the situations in which they find themselves. Rather than transforming their environment through action, they simply look, as they themselves are looked upon by the camera. Deleuze sees this Jo Deleuze, Cinema 2, p. 1. 59 Neo-realism's Image of History/ 60 development as one in which "a cinema of the seer" replaces a cinema "of the agent."31 The audience no longer follows the character's actions, but their gaze, bearing witness to the environment in which the characters move and exist. Bazin describes the manner in which the Neo-realists refrained from breaking a scene down through the use of close-ups and the like, while Deleuze's observations point towards the en-distancing effect of this stylistic approach when combined with the breakdown of a narrative schema based on protagonistic agency. In a film like Germa'!Y, Year Zero, the viewer becomes increasingly aware of the camera not as a conveyor of dramatic meaning, but as a witness, a third consciousness between the characters' gaze and that of the viewer, relentlessly tracking through the environment in which the drama is being performed. This is what Deleuze means when he says reality in these films is "aimed at" by the camera, rather than represented. The ideas of Bazin and Deleuze can help to illuminate the nature of Kracauer's investment in Neo-realism. Like Bazin, Kracauer believes that the episodic nature of the N ea-realist narratives encourages a mentally active viewer. Kracauer argues that the apparently arbitrary chain of events that build in a film like The Birycfe Thieves (Ladri di Bicicfette, Vittorio de Sica, 1948) or Paisa "stirs us to imagine, however confusedly, the circumstances responsible for their succession."32 It is the viewer who must mentally link the images and infer what deeper significance, if any, may be deduced from them. Kracauer writes of the Neo-realists' approach to narrative: "[a] straight line seems unimaginable to them; nothing really dovetails in their films."33 Kracauer also argues that fragmented, de-dramatised narratives foster a slightly en-distanced attitude in the viewer, allowing for a contemplative stance no longer completely submerged by an emotional involvement in the dramatic narrative. This attitude in turn allows the objects rendered on screen to appear to the viewer "in their suggestive indeterminacy."34 31 Ibid., p. 2. 32 Kracauer, Theory of Film, p. 256. 33 Ibid. 34 Ibid., p. 71. 60 Neo-realism's Image of History/ 61 For Kracauer, the crucial potential of this aesthetic arises from the viewer's focus on the image's content, or to use Kracauer's terminology, the material reality recorded in the image. Film's image-making technology means that its pictures are always unique renderings of the contingent flow of life across a particular stretch of time, "[n]othwithstanding their latent or ultimately even manifest bearing on the narrative to which they belong."35 The Neo-realists lend a particular weight to the image's content, filling the frame with quotidian material detail from everyday life, invoking a flow of life firmly bound in the viewer's mind to the time and place in which the images were produced. This effect is hinted at in the appraisal of Rossellini's style contained in a 194 7 review of Germmry, Year Zero in Time magazine: "By concentrating on life as it looks outside theatres, he has discredited the old vocabulary of trained gesture, studio-built set, and self-conscious lighting."36 The review goes on to note Rossellini's penchant for capturing scenes of prosaic material reality, proclaiming his "genius for capturing the spontaneity and worn texture of street scenes and everyday people involved in such everyday activities as dressing, walking, opening doors, chasing streetcars."37 The Neo-realist films memorialise a particular moment in Europe's history not because they tell us "how it was" in any transparent, unmediated sense, but because their images force us to engage with the uniqueness of the moments recorded by the camera, their ephemeral nature, and their passing away in time even as the camera opened its shutter. The images of the Neo-realist cinema hold the trace of a moment before the viewer, inviting the spectator to engage with the past as a contingent material reality which is always in the process of disappearing. In the words of Kracauer: Snatched from transient life ... [their images] ... not only challenge the spectator to penetrate their [allegorical] secret but, perhaps even more insistently, request him to preserve them as the irreplaceable unages· they are. 38 35 Ibid. 36 (uncredited writer), "Germany Year Zero", Time Magazjne, September 26, 1949, p. 36. 37 Ibid. 38 Kracauer, Theory efFilm, p. 257. 61 Neo-realism's Image of History/ 62 The second story in Paisa, for example, opens with footage of hawkers and street performers around the docks in Naples, at a time when the port was teeming with Allied ships and servicemen. There are several minutes of scenes which have no direct bearing on the narrative, but show something of the city's ramshackle, congested appearance at the time, and the physical attitude of the crowds that populated the port area in the aftermath of the Liberation. Later in the same episode, there is an extended sequence in which a drunk African-American Military Policeman is dragged through the streets by a Napalese street urchin, culminating in a long rambling 'conversation' between the English-speaking American and Italian-speaking street kid atop a pile of rubble. Most of this sequence is framed in long or mid-shot, and the actors are continually surrounded by the material reality of the town: its people, buildings and bombed-out structures, all of which attest to the camera's presence in Naples at a very particular historical juncture. The amount of screen time dedicated to these scenes is out of all proportion to their advancement of the plot. Rossellini's circuitous style is also evident in Genna'!Y, Year Zero, which opens with the main character wandering the streets of Berlin after he is rejected from a cemetery work party because of his age. He drifts through various situations, including a crowd cutting up a dead horse for meat, until finally there is a long tracking shot of him simply wandering through the rubble. Once again, these scenes are framed in long shot, filling the frame with the gutted ruins of Berlin's bombed-out landscape. In the background, we see Berliners going about their daily activities amidst the ruin. Although these scenes come at the beginning of the film, it is far from clear where the dramatic action is heading in a narrative sense, and their primary function appears to be the camera's engagement with the material reality of Berlin as it appeared in the immediate post-war years. Extended sequences with similarly minimal narrative advancement are present throughout the film. Scenes such as these illustrate the confluence of the Neo-realists' stylistic approach to filming on location, and the meandering, open-ended narratives that are typical of these films. As already noted, Deleuze writes that Neo-realism is characterised by a "crisis of action" at the level of protagonistic agency. This may 62 Neo-realism's Image of History/ 63 be seen as resulting from an unwillingness or an inability on the part of the Neo realist directors to contain the historical moment through which they were living within the terms of discursive narrative resolution. It is also precisely this crisis of action that allows for the possibility of a new experience of the image. The type of narrative that arises with Neo-realism is one that emerges from the facticity of the flow of life on screen, the movement of everyday material reality in time, held at a distance and rendered strange. As Kracauer puts it in Theory of Film, these fihns are able to evoke for the viewer "a kind of life which is still intimately connected, as if by an umbilical cord, with the material phenomena from which its emotional and intellectual contents emerge."39 In Kracauer's reading of these fihns, the viewer's engagement with this material reality becomes a kind of mourning, or a remembering of the fact that the past is that which can only ever be partially accessed through memory and mediating technologies such as film. This is not to suggest that Neo-realism should be understood as a clear set of stylistic features which suddenly appeared as a coherent formalised approach in 1945. Rather, Neo-realism represents a variety of stylistic approaches whose common element is an attempt to explore the filmic image's ability to critically memorialise a historical period as it unfolded. Rossellini's war trilogy of Rome, Open Ciry, Paisa and Germal'!J, Year Zero provides a useful set of films through which to examine the innovations of the Neo-realist movement, because they each probe the question of depicting contemporary history on screen in a slightly different way. The three films may be read as an ongoing investigation into questions of history in the cinema and a set of responses to the various political and philosophical currents that were passing through European culture in the immediate post-war period. The rest of this chapter will examine these three fihns in detail, in order to trace the development of Rossellini's style and its bearing on Kracauer's ideas in Theory of Film. The work of Bazin and Deleuze will assist in explicating the precise innovations of Rossellini's approach. 39 Kracauer, Theory of Film, p. 71. 63 Part Two Rome, Open City and the Newsreel Effect In his recent book on Rome, Open Ciry, David Forgacs describes Rossellini's film as "a hybrid, in which cinematic innovation is grafted onto dramatic convention."40 Although it is often cited as the first Neo-realist movie, Rome, Open Ciry retains a narrative structure that owes much to classical notions of dramatic development, tension, and protagonistic agency. Despite these aspects of the film's narrative structure, many critics and filmmakers of the time regarded it as representing an important new stylistic development within the realm of feature filmmaking. While many contemporaneous critics wrote of the film's 'documentary effect', most accounts paid little heed to what was actually meant by this, or how it was created. The effect may be understood as containing two principle elements. First, there is Rome, Open Citfs close physical and temporal proximity to the actual historical events with which the story is concerned. Much more important, however, is the manner in which key sequences of the film are shot. Rossellini's innovation was to film certain sequences in the style of a newsreel, creating the impression for the audience of unexpected events caught as they unfolded before the camera. This impression of a newsreel effect is quite different to the style Rossellini employed in his next two films, but the manner in which he manipulates the audience's investment in different types of filmic images in Rome, Open Ciry indicates a certain self-consciousness regarding the nature of the image itself, which he was to develop further over the course of the war trilogy. In his next two works, this self-consciousness increasingly became a part of the viewer's experience of the film, bringing Rossellini's style closer to the aesthetic that Kracauer describes in Theory of Film. Before discussing these later films, it is necessary to examine Rossellini's approach in Rome, Open Ciry, in order to understand how the film's innovations were incorporated into, and extended by, his later work. This section will first detail the film's relationship to the historical events of Rome's occupation, and then examine the newsreel documentary style Rossellini employs in certain key sequences. 4° Forgacs, Rome, Open City, p. 12. 64 Neo-realism's Image of History / 65 The effect of Rome, Open Ci!Jls proximity to the historical period it depicts cannot be underestimated when analysing the critical reaction provoked by the film at the time of its release. Although the precise era it re-creates had passed by the time shooting commenced, it was very recent history, and the ramifications of Rome's occupation and liberation were still being played out as the film was shot. Sergio Amidei commenced work on the script of Rome, Open Ciry in September 1944, just months after the Allies had entered Rome on the 4th of June.41 When shooting commenced in January 1945, the Germans still occupied northern Italy, and Mussolini still ostensibly ruled the occupied zone from Salo. Post-production begun during the closing stages of the war and Nazi Germany finally surrendered less than five months before the film's premiere in September 1945. According to John Baxter, the actor Aldo Fabrizi was initially reluctant to take the part of the priest Don Pietro partly because he was nervous about the future consequences if the Germans returned to Rome.42 Fabrizi's fears give some indication of the uncertainties that existed as the film was being shot, and the very real shadow the horror of the occupation still cast over the film's cast and crew. Rome, Open Ciry directly references very particular events which occurred during the German occupation of Rome. This was presumably highly affecting for the film's performers and Rome audience, all of whom had lived through these events less than eighteen months before the film's release. For example, scriptwriter Sergio Amidei was closely involved in Rome's Communist-led resistance, and claims to have based the opening scene, in which Communist partisan Giorgio Manfredi (Marcello Pagliero) escapes over Rome's rooftops during a German raid, directly on personal experience. Amidei's real-life landlady plays one of the women who meet the Germans at the door as Manfredi escapes.43 Other writers have detailed the many real-life incidents and characters Amidei and Rossellini drew upon in creating Rome, Open Ciry, but one scene in particular serves as a useful example.44 After Manfredi escapes the raid that opens the film, he hides in 41 All dates regarding Rome, Open City's production are taken from ibid., p. 9. 42 John Baxter, Fellini (London: Fourth Estate, 1994), p. 71. 43 Brunette, Roberto Rossellini, footnote 5, p. 364. 44 Forgacs provides a detailed account of the precise sources of the film's events and characters in Rome, Open City, pp. 14-19. Brunette also describes the historical people and incidents upon which the film is based in his book Roberto Rossellini, footnote 5, p. 364. 65 Neo-realism's Image of History/ 66 the apartment of Francesco (Francesco Grandjacquet), a comrade in the Resistance. Francesco and his fiancee Pina (Anna Magnani) are due to be married the following day by Don Pietro, a priest sympathetic to the partisans. Next morning, as Francesco and Pina prepare for the ceremony, the Germans raid their apartment building. Manfredi again escapes, but Francesco is arrested and piled into a truck with the rest of the building's young men. Pina pushes past a line of German guards and runs after the vehicle, only to be gunned down as Don Pietro and Pina's young son Marcello (Vito Annicchiarico) look on. Pina's death is one of the most memorable scenes in Rome, Open Ci(Y, and is based upon an incident well-known in Rome at the time of the film's release. Following one of the many round-ups of men for forced labour that took place in early 1944, a group of women staged a two-day protest outside the barracks in which their husbands, boyfriends, and male relations were incarcerated. According to underground press reports of the time, a pregnant protestor named Teresa Gullace was shot dead by a German soldier as she attempted to reach her husband as he leaned out of the barracks window.45 In Rome, Open Ci(Y, the pregnant Pina character is similarly mown down while reaching out for her fiance. Rossellini moves the site of the shooting to the Via Montecuccoli, a street in inner city working class Rome which was the scene of numerous raids during the occupation. The other women seen in the shooting sequence, herded against the building by German soldiers, were locals from the area. The troops were played by German prisoners of war. Years later actress Anna Magnani recalled Rossellini's skill at blending the present of shooting with the emotion and physicality of very recent events: During the roundup ... I was taken back to the time when they took away the young men. Boys. Because these were real people standing against the walls. The Germans were real Germans from a P.O.W. camp. Suddenly, I wasn't me any more. I was the character. And Rossellini had prepared the street in an incredible way. Do you know the women were white when they heard the Nazis talking 45 Forgacs, Rome, Open City, p. 16. 66 Neo-realism's Image of History / 67 among themselves? This made me understand the anxiety I projected on the screen. Terrible. Who would have expected an emotion like that?46 Magnani's comments provide a useful insight into how Rossellini invoked the recent past during the shoot in order to help provoke particular emotional reactions in his performers. The references to incidents such as the murder of Teresa Gullace also go some way to explaining the "realist effect" that so struck audiences at the time of Rome, Open Ciry's release. Of course it is unlikely that viewers outside Italy would have recognised the explicit references to particular historical incidents, but presumably viewers throughout Europe and the United States would have been generally familiar with the kinds of atrocities that had recently been perpetuated by German forces in most of the cities they occupied during the war. Rossellini's use of Rome locations also seems to have been particularly striking for American critics used to the set-bound productions of Hollywood. As Forgacs notes, alongside its fairly classically-constructed narrative, Rome, Open Ciry "includes photographic evidence of Rome at the end of the Second World War. It shows what the city and its inhabitants looked like in 1945 and it shows something of what the war did to the city, notably in the various shots of bomb damaged buildings."47 Contemporaneous discussions of Rome, Open Ciry's particular style of realism rarely went beyond references to the film's re-creation of recent events and the use of Rome locations. These aspects, however, do not explain why the film continues to display a certain immediacy for present-day audiences who are often not aware of the details of Italy's wartime history, and would certainly be largely unfamiliar with the particular incidents the film invokes. The key to Rome, Open Ciry's documentary effect is not the film's employment of locations and re-enactment of contemporary history, but the manner in which these locations and events are filmed. 46 Anna Magnani quoted in Brunette, Roberto Rossellini, footnote 8, p. 365. Forgacs quotes the same interview, but gives a slightly different translation in Rome, Open City, p. 54. He gives the year of the interview as 1970. 47 Forgacs, Rome, Open City, p. 22. 67 Neo-realism's Image of History/ 68 For the most part, Rome, Open Ciry follows a fairly classical approach, in which events and performances are moulded into a linear narrative and fairly unequivocal thematic content. The long takes which characterise Rossellini's later work are largely absent, and conversations are mostly depicted in a traditional shot-reverse-shot pattern. Locations and sets are employed to assist in depicting the Nazis, and to a lesser extent the Italian Fascists, as an irredeemably morally corrupt and malignant force which must be overcome. However, there are several crucial instances in the film in which this traditional continuity editing pattern and dramatic schema is abandoned and the camera instead adopts a position slightly removed from the drama. In these moments, events are witnessed from a detached standpoint unable to reveal anything more than a partial and imprecise view of the action. Gilberto Perez describes Rossellini's approach in the film as one in which the camera "declines a position of interpretive advantage and registers with astonished reticence the outward particularity of things."48 Once again, Pina's death sequence provides a useful example of this effect. When viewed in detail, the sequence can be seen to comprise several shots and perspectives, carefully edited together to convey the scene's overall effect. When watched in the context of the film, however, Pina's death seems to play out with a startling immediacy which even the camera operator does not seem to expect. Before Pina runs into the street, we see her struggling with a number of German guards, while the priest Don Pietro also attempts to restrain her. The scene is shot from a slight distance, and the action spills outside the frame, imperfectly filmed in the manner of a newsreel cameraperson trying to hold an unplanned event in his or her field of camera vision. As Pina runs after the truck holding her fiance, the camera actually pulls away from her, witnessing her run and fall under a hail of bullets from an ever-increasing distance such that we cannot see where the shots are coming from. Perez describes the resulting effect: "The tragedy bursts upon us unexpectedly, with the force of something real that the camera itself had not anticipated and photographed as best it could in the rough manner of a newsreel. "49 48 Perez, Material Ghost, p. 402. 49 Ibid., p. 35. 68 Neo-realism's Image of History/ 69 The effect is again evident in the scene immediately following Pina's murder, depicting the partisans' ambush of the convoy of prisoners coming from the raided apartment block. We see the convoy of trucks from an overpass on which the partisans are hiding, but the camera does not take up any particular character's point-of-view. Once the ambush begins, characters we may recognise are lost in the crowd as prisoners leap from the trucks and confused fighting breaks out between partisans and the German guards. The fate of individuals is lost in the camera's broad view of events. It is useful to consider how the construction of this ambush might contrast with a more classical approach to the same scene. If we refer back to the system Bazin describes in the scene of the hungry man and the food, we might assume that the opening establishing shot from the overpass would probably be identified with Manfred.i's point-of-view, since he is presumably amongst the attacking partisans. Once the ambush commenced, the camera would most likely hone in on Pina's fiance Francesco, who we know from the previous scene is somewhere amongst the prisoners. We might see his reaction to the fighting through close-ups of his face, and would probably follow him out of the melee as he made contact with Manfredi. Rossellini's approach ensures that we know nothing of the fate of individual characters, as they are lost in the broad sweep of events playing out in long shot before the camera. For Perez, the resultant sense of a witnessing newsreel camera is the essential innovation of Rome, Open City's style of realism: The novelty of Rossellini's neorealism .. .lay not in his letting reality speak for itself-for reality doesn't speak unless interpreted-but in his letting it not speak by presenting it from the viewpoint of an outsider able to grasp the unfolding situation no better than para.a. 11y. 50 Perez's claim needs to be qualified, however, in order to differentiate the effect created by Rossellini's en-distanced camera in Rome, Open Ciry from the quite different effect created in Germatry, Year Zero. Rome, Open Ciijs realism is a 50 Ibid., p. 402. 69 Neo-realism's Image of History / 70 documentary-sryle realism: that is, a style which invokes the appearance of a common form of documentary film of the time, namely wartime newsreels. If we accept Kracauer's claim that our response to the fihnic image is crucially determined by context, it can be argued that our response to newsreel-type documentaries is generally differentiated from fictional feature films by a much greater investment in the image's temporal and spatial indexical 'charge.' Perez addresses this point: [f]he urgency of a newsreel is the urgency of the right then and there, not the right here and now: the camera may speak in the present, but it is a present now past when we watch it on the screen. The poignancy of such a scene-even if it is not a death scene it is always the poignancy of death-is the poignancy of what reaches us from the past with the urgency of the present.51 A newsreel is lent its primary force by the camera's assumed proximity to uncontrolled historical events, and Rossellini's approach in certain sequences of Rome, Open Ciry actively works to provoke this kind of response to the image in the viewer, memorialising the events of the occupation through the activation of an experiential immediacy derived from the kinds of investments we normally place in newsreels. This creates the impression of a unique, uncontrolled historical event captured by the camera as it happened, invoking the poignancy of watching a scene from the past, the 'pastness' of which is all the more apparent for its obviously unique and contingent nature. As Perez notes in the quote above, in a comment that harks back to Kracauer's remark on the "death's-head beneath", this poignancy is essentially the poignancy of death, or the consciousness of being witness to a moment which is always already irrefutably past. While the innovative elements in Rossellini's employment of the image struck many critics and viewers quite forcefully at the time of Rome, Open Ciry's release, the film is differentiated in certain key aspects from the aesthetic Kracauer describes in Theory of Film. Rome, Open Ciry essentially relies upon eliciting an 51 Ibid., p. 35. 70 Neo-realism's Image of History/ 71 emotional response in the audience by reproducing the "look" of a particular type of documentary; its effect relies on the audience not reflecting upon the actual nature of the images, but emotionally responding to what the images resemble. The important point in terms of the development of Rossellini's style, however, is that the director recognised and played upon the investments we have in different types of images. In his next two fihns, rather than using this technique to emotionally manipulate the audience, Rossellini increasingly moves towards an approach which encourages the audience to reflect upon the different registers of meaning elicited by different images, and the various registers of meanings even within the same image. Thus, while Rome, Open Ci!J cannot be regarded as a realisation of the film form that Kracauer champions in Theory of Film, it nonetheless represents an important step in the development of the kind of approach he describes. 71 Part Three Paisa and the Interplay of Images The success of Rome, Open Ciry in Italy allowed Rossellini to immediately move on to his next film, Paisd. 52 Although both films deal directly with what were recent historical events, Rossellini's approach in Paisd is quite different to that of the previous work. Rather than invoking a newsreel effect to lend a particular immediacy to the drama, Paisd employs actual newsreel footage, which is contrasted with the images of the fictional drama. In this way, Paisd encourages the viewer to take a much more critical attitude than Rome, Open Ciry vis-a-vis the nature of the filmic image itself. Rather than memorialising the historical moment through a newsreel effect, Paisd functions partly as a reflection on the always partial access filmic images offer us to the past. While Rossellini was not a filmmaker who engaged in the kind of self-conscious theoretical speculation evident in the films and writings of a director like Jean-Luc Godard, his self conscious employment of different types of images led to an element of reflexivity in the way his films address their audience, a development that was to become an increasingly important aspect of European feature filmmaking in the decades following Paisd's release. As in Rome, Open Ciry, Rossellini's subject matter in Paisd is the occupation period, but this time the work comprises six discrete episodes, which geographically and temporally correspond to the advance of Allied forces up the Italian peninsular between mid-1943 and mid-1945. All the episodes involve contact between American, and in some cases British, personnel and the Italian people. The first episode takes place in Sicily shortly after the first Allied landings, while the second story is set in Naples on the southern Italian mainland, just after the city's liberation. The settings of the remaining episodes are: Rome six months 52 Paisas title was taken from the greeting American troops commonly used when meeting Italians during the war. The term is a corruption of the Italian-American word paesano, meaning countryman or buddy. Paisa was renamed Paisan in the United States by the film's US distributor Joseph Burstyn, so as to more closely resemble the phonetic American pronunciation of the word. (Gallagher, Adventures 72 Neo-realism's Image of History / 73 after the Americans arrive in the city; Florence during the northern partisan uprising of late 1944; a monastery in the remote Apennines region of northern Italy, shortly after the Germans have withdrawn from the area; and the Po River Delta south of Venice, where partisans and American OSS commandos are hunted down by Germans forces during the winter of 1944-45. Rossellini's strategy in Paisa is apparent right from the opening moments. The first thing the audience sees after the credits is shaky newsreel footage of a naval bombardment, combined with the kind of authoritative, objective-sounding voice-over common to newsreels of the time. The narrator intones: "On July 10th the Allied fleet bombarded Sicily. Twelve hours later the Allied landing in Europe had begun." We then see newsreel footage of American G.I.s filing onto a beachhead as the voice-over continues: "The first Allied patrols began to advance in Italian territory." There is then a cut to footage of a quite different quality, and the sudden appearance of non-diegetic music on the soundtrack signals that we have entered the fictional drama. Each episode is preceded by newsreel footage in this way, with the exception of the final one, which is introduced only by a voiceover. Rossellini was not the first filmmaker to insert documentary footage into a fictional drama; the technique had already appeared in Hollywood war films such as F/ying Tigers (David Miller), made in 1942. In F/ying Tigers, and other post-war Hollywood films such as Sands oflwo Jima (Allan Dwan, 1949), documentary footage is cut into the drama so as to maintain a slightly awkward illusion of dramatic continuity with the surrounding shots. Rossellini's approach to the newsreel footage in Paisa is quite different. He makes no attempt to match the newsreel footage with the action of the constructed drama; in fact the two types of image are quite clearly demarcated. The newsreel material clearly has a different look to the rest of the film, and is separated from the individual fictional dramas by appearing at the beginning of each episode, with a voice-over narrating the broad historical context in which each episode takes place. After each story concludes, the screen blacks out for several seconds before the newsreel footage and voice-over reappear to introduce the next episode. In the first section, the sudden appearance of non-diegetic music on the soundtrack signals the transition 73 Neo-realism's Image of History/ 74 between newsreel footage and fictional drama. In the Rome episode, footage of the Germans leaving the city and the Americans arriving is separated from the drama by an inter-title that reads "Six Months Later." In every episode, the newsreel footage is followed by a broad establishing shot or a crowd scene, before we gradually move in on the individual characters to be featured in each story. Furthermore, there is no explicit attempt to thematically link the broad historical events related in the voice-over to the events portrayed in the individual dramas. As K.racauer says of Neo-realist dramas generally, the various elements comprising Paisa do not dovetail into a single, obvious narrative or thematic mearung. Rather than anchoring the authenticity of the various dramas in Paisa, the documentary images interspersed throughout the film actually undermine the notion of photographic transparency at the level of connotative meaning. In several instances, the voice-over tells us of battles that took place, but the film is unable to supply footage of the events it describes. When the voice-over relates the fighting around Monte Cassino, for example, we only see footage of the scarred landscape left in the wake of the battle. Several of the shots of German troops moving around Rome before the third episode are shaky, taken from behind obstructions which partially block the view, and nearly all are shot at a considerable distance from the troops. The last episode is set far behind German lines in the Po River Delta. Presumably no newsreel footage of the partisan activity in this area exists, and none appears before the story. The impression of an ambiguous, partial filmic record is enhanced by Rossellini's intentional lack of clarity during several scenes in the drama, such as the ammunition drop that takes place in the Po River story. The drop takes place at night, and no attempt is made to light the scene for the viewer. Instead, the audience has to piece together what happens from snatches of dialogue heard on the soundtrack. Instead of blending the various elements that make up the representational discourse in Paisa, Rossellini demarcates the historical events as interpreted and related in the voice-over, the footage shot at the time of the Allied advance (clearly marked off as newsreel material), and the fictional dramas constructed by the performers and the camera within the framework of recent historical events. 74 Neo-realism's Image of History/ 75 The stories are subtly marked off as representations, which nonetheless bear a certain relation to a set of real historical circumstances. It is only through representational discourse, be it a voice-over or constructed dramatic narrative, that discursive meaning is added to the denotative force of the documentary images. The viewer is encouraged to register the different investments we have in various types of filmic images, and the differing responses they provoke. At the same time, the incomplete nature of the photographic record offered in Paisa means that the historical moment is always ambiguous and held at a certain distance. Newsreel footage and dramatic discourse each offer a particular access to the historical moment, but it is always a partial, mediated access. The interplay between the film's various representational registers also informs Rossellini's use of locations in Paisa. In the documentary footage that appears before the Rome episode there are shots of a German troop column marching past the Colosseum, and a German tank passing the same spot. At the end of the episode, we see a group of actors playing American troops climb aboard a truck parked before the same famous landmark. The shots assert the presence of the newsreel camera and Rossellini's camera in the same physical setting, separated by only a short span of time, illustrating the denotative "facticity" of the filmic image in both instances, since both shots contain documentary evidence of people moving around the Colosseum. But the two shots also draw attention to the fact that we respond differently to each: we are encouraged to read one as a documentary image since it appears during the newsreel section that introduces the episode, while Rossellini's shot appears at the end of the Rome story, encouraging the viewer to read a connotative dramatic meaning into the material reality recorded by the camera. The other aspect of Paisa which contrasts strongly with Rome, Open Ciry is the ambiguity of the stories themselves. As noted earlier, both Kracauer and Bazin cite Paisa's episodic structure and elliptical narrative style as a prime example of the new approach to dramatic storytelling represented by the Neo-realist cinema. The ambiguity of Paisds narrative approach is not just evident in its elliptical portrayal of particular incidents in the drama. The film also exhibits a much more ambiguous attitude than Rome, Open Ciry towards the entire Liberation period, 75 Neo-realism's Image of History/ 76 although it does retain some thematic features of the earlier film, particularly in its one-dimensional depiction of the German occupiers. When a German patrol comes across a lone Sicilian girl (Carmela Sazio) in the first episode, for example, the troops make sexually threatening comments and nonchalantly attempt to molest her as she passes. When she shoots one of their number with the rifle of a dead G.I., they throw her off a cliff. The film concludes with German troops drowning bound partisans in the Po River. When the partisan's American OSS comrade (Dale Edmonds) tries to intervene, he is casually shot dead. As in Rome, Open Ciry, the Germans are shown to be utterly corrupt, bringing only destruction and death in their wake. Despite these similarities, Paisas depiction of the Liberation struggle is differentiated from Rome, Open Ci(js by the lack of any explication of a philosophy or ideal to justify the sacrifices and destruction we witness. Only the fifth episode, set in a monastery, concludes on a positive note. An American Catholic military chaplain (Bill Tubbs) is overwhelmed by the sincerity of the monk's hermetic faith while spending a night in the isolated monastery. It is precisely this kind of simple, clear-cut belief system which is significantly absent from the stories more directly concerned with the struggle for liberation. Every other episode ends in disappointment, a realisation of hopelessness, or death. Despite the generally pessimistic tone of Paisa, Peter Bondanella detects a hopeful message behind the slaughter of the struggle. He compares the death of an American soldier by unseen sniper fire in the Sicilian episode with the death of Dale, the American OSS officer in the final story: In the beginning of the film, Joe from Jersey dies on Sicilian soil almost by accident, unable to comprehend the people he came to liberate. At the conclusion of the film, Dale sacrifices his own life for his Italian comrades in a gesture that signifies the equality of all people fighting for liberty. He becomes a paisa, a kinsman to everyone struggling for a better world. 53 53 Bondanella, Films of Roberto Rossel/ini, pp. 81-82. 76 Neo-realism's Image of History/ 77 It should be noted, however, that Bondanella's reading is based on the American cut of Paisa, which differs significantly from the Italian version. One of the problems in analysing European films of this time is the difficulty of identifying a definitive version of any given work. Films were frequently shot, and/ or dubbed in different languages, often with quite different scenes, running times and titles. In the case of Rossellini, the problem is particularly acute with his work of the early 1950s. Tag Gallagher cites the extreme case of the director's 1952 feature Europe '51 (Europa '51, a.k.a The Greatest Love), of which there are ten versions known to exist. 54 The problem is not quite as severe with Rossellini's earlier films, but there are at least minor differences between the prints released in Italy, America and Britain of all three films in the war-trilogy (British versions of Rome, Open City, for example, omit a shot looking up the dresses of a group of women during the search of Pina and Francesco's apartment block). In the case of Paisa, there was only one version produced in Italy by Rossellini himself, making the director's intentions somewhat easier to discern. The American version of the film was created by Paisa's American distributor, Joseph Burstyn, without Rossellini's consent (Burstyn also changed the title to Paisan). 55 Burstyn's changes essentially serve to clarify certain narrative points, and are quite revealing in that they demonstrate the ways in which Rossellini's approach was perceived as diverging from American narrative filmmaking conventions of the time.56 Relatively minor changes made by Burstyn include a slight recut of the scene in which an American soldier, Joe (Robert Van Loon), is killed by German sniper fire in the film's first episode (rendering the sequence of events slightly clearer), and the expunging of a brief sequence in the Rome story, in which a prostitute (Maria Michi) hides in a cinema after military police raid a local bar in which she is plying her trade. This cut was presumably intended to minimise the episode's introductory scenes and allow a faster move to the main narrative focus, which is an encounter between the prostitute and an American soldier. More importantly, Paisa's overall narrative is also rendered less fragmented in the American version, 54 Gallagher, Adventures of Roberto Rosse//ini, pp. 694-95. Gallagher provides detailed notes about the precise content of each version. 55 Ibid., p. 256. 56 The comparative discussion of the Italian and American prints of Paisa is based on my viewing of both versions. 77 Neo-realism's Image of History / 78 primarily through a much more seamless incorporation of the newsreel material into the drama. The film begins with different newsreel footage to that seen in Italian prints, and the English-language voice-over assists in creating a smoother transition to the drama. While the Italian voice-over simply states "the first Allied patrols began to advance in Italian territory", the more extensive English language American commentary concludes with: "American and British troops landed successfully in Sicily and began moving inland under the cover of darkness." Documentary footage of American soldiers filing onto a beachhead is then matched quite closely with Rossellini's fictional G.I.s approaching a Sicilian village at night. As in the first episode, there is additional newsreel footage before each of the stories in the American version of Paisa. There are also maps of Italy, with markers indicating where each story is set, and the extent of the Allied advance at the time of the story. In contrast to Rossellini's separation of his own footage and the newsreel material, American prints of Paisa also feature various snippets of documentary material actually cut into the first episode, so as to appear as part of the drama. Thus, Bondanella, working from the American version, is able to claim that the newsreel material and the drama "blend together in a seamless whole, and the editing is performed in such a manner that it is extremely difficult at first glance to distinguish between the two kinds of footage."57 The overall effect of Burstyn's changes is to de-emphasise the interplay Rossellini subtly invokes between the film's various forms of representation. The American version instead emphasises the dramatic narrative by blending the newsreel footage with the drama, clarifying certain narrative developments within individual episodes, and more explicitly placing the individual dramas within the broader context of the Allies' advance up the Italian peninsula. When compared to the almost relentlessly pessimistic tone of the Italian version, the American cut also leaves a more positive impression of the overall struggle, by placing Paisa's stories clearly within the context of the Allies' victorious campaign in Europe. It ends with a voice-over which mitigates somewhat the final image of bound 57 Bondanella, Films of&berto &sse//ini, p. 65. 78 Neo-realism's Image of History / 79 partisans disappearing beneath the surface of the Po River. The English-language voice-over states in a warm tone: "This happened in the winter of 1944. A few weeks later spring came to Italy and the war in Europe was declared over." The partisans' deaths are explicitly linked to a better future in the wake of the Nazis' defeat, inflecting the German army's atrocities with the optimism of Allied victory. In the Italian version, there is no mention of final victory, nor is there any implicit affirmation of the worthwhile nature of the sacrifices made in the struggle. After the bound partisans have disappeared beneath the river's implacable surface, the voice-over simply intones: "That was the winter of 1944. In the spring of 1945, the war was over." There is no mention of final victory or sense of a new beginning that might justify the cost of the struggle. As Roy Armes notes, although Paisa traces the course of a war eventually won by the Allied and anti-Fascist forces in Italy, "there is no epic sweep of victory, indeed all the individual stories end in defeat of some kind-death or horror, corruption or incomprehension."58 Paisa leaves the impression of individuals constantly overwhelmed by events over which they are able to exert little or no control. Given Deleuze's argument that there is a link between the war and the crisis of protagonistic agency in European cinema after 1945, it is significant that this element of Paisa was downplayed in the version shown in the United States, where the flush of victory was not inflected with the material devastation inflicted on Europe. The ambivalent attitude to the war in Paisa is perhaps indicative of a certain distance from the utopian idealism that was prevalent during and immediately after the Liberation, which lent such force to Rome, Open Ciijs anti-Fascist message. Yet it is also this loss of faith in a clear coherence of meaning that Bazin embraced in his enthusiastic support for Paisa when it was released in France. For Bazin, Rossellini's fragmented narrative style constituted an elliptical approach to cinematic storytelling that allowed each shot to appear as an "image fact", whose material content preceded precise narrative meaning in the viewer's mind.59 Rossellini's camera "shows" the action, rather than taking up a psychologically sx Armes, Patterns ,if Realism, p. 80. 59 Bazin, "An Aesthetic of Reality", p. 37. 79 Nee-realism's Image of History / 80 subjective position relative to it, while the fragmented nature of the narrative encourages a mentally active viewer with a critical relationship to the film. In Theory of Film, Kracauer extols Rossellini's approach in Paisa for similar reasons. The film's episodic narrative encourages the kind of emotional distance from the drama that Kracauer regards as essential in encouraging the audience's engagement with the ambiguous denotative aspects of the image's material content. When combined with a shooting style heavily reliant on long shots, the effect is an emphasis on the material environments in which the dramas are enacted, environments which are referred to via the newsreel footage as sites of the recent conflict. The rubble recorded by the camera in the streets of Florence, the child street-performers around the harbour in Naples, and the American trucks around the Colosseum, all attest to the camera's presence in Italy during the immediate post-war period. This dramatic and formal engagement with the material appearance of things is central to Kracauer's conception of a film form that encourages the viewer to reflect upon the unique, contingent nature of the material reality rendered on screen. Like Rome, Open Ciry, Paisa shows the viewer something of Italy's appearance in the period immediately following the war, but unlike the earlier film, Paisa also encourages reflection on the transient nature of these scenes, and the always partial access the filmic medium offers to the past. In the particular narrative structure and formal approach of Paisa we can see the beginnings of an approach to feature filmmaking in which the viewer is encouraged to engage not only with the drama, but also with the nature of the filmic image itself, and its particular rendering of material reality. For Kracauer, this reflective engagement with the image's material content is also an engagement with that content's transient nature. In the interplay between the didactic and authoritative voice-over, the ambiguous denotative charge of the documentary images, and the open-ended nature of the fictional dramas, Paisa represents an important move towards a critical dramatic film form in which the viewer is encouraged to reflect upon the always partial access film gives to the past. 80 Part Four G e r m a ny, Ye a r Z e r o a n d t h e R u i n s o f H i s t o r y For the third film of his war trilogy, Rossellini moved to what had been the epicentre of the European conflict, where the material and psychological devastation of the Second World War was directly manifested in the almost total ruination of an entire city. Genna'!}, Year Zero was shot mostly in Berlin during the summer of 1947, at a time when the city was largely still in ruins as a result of several years of Allied bombing and street fighting between German and Soviet forces in the final days of the war. In Rome, Open City and Paisa, Rossellini invoked the various investments we have in different forms of filmic images, in order to provoke certain responses and reflections in the viewer. In his third post-war feature, Rossellini drew on the innovations of the earlier films, particularly the episodic narrative structure and detached shooting style of Paisa, extending these stylistic tendencies to forge an altogether new aesthetic. Genna'!}, Year Zero's prime distinguishing stylistic feature is a marked concern with the impression of temporal duration on screen. Rather than playing upon the investments the viewer may have in different types of footage in the manner of Paisa, in Genna'!}, Year Zero Rossellini plays upon a certain tension within the filmic image. This tension is between film's status as a literal trace of people and objects in time, and its simultaneous status as a discursive unit in an ongoing fictional discourse. Genna'!}, Year Zero announces itself stylistically from the opening shots beneath the credits. The film begins with the camera tilting upwards to frame a gutted building. There follows a series of long tracks through an utterly devastated urban landscape, in which virtually every building has been reduced to rubble or stands as a burnt-out shell. These opening shots are indicative of the sheer weight Rossellini gives to Berlin's ruined landscape throughout the film. Much of the exterior dramatic action is framed in mid or long shot, using long takes in which the camera tracks through the streets, following the action through time and space. The sense of physical devastation is overwhelming. The impression of ruin is further reinforced by the primitive conditions in which the film's characters live, as they are depicted engaging in a constant struggle for basic necessities such 81 Neo-realism's Image of History/ 82 as food, heating and shelter. Rossellini gives great weight to the film's physical location, conveying a powerful sense of the camera's presence in Berlin's ruined streets. The weight of the spatial and temporal location is not simply a matter of Rossellini's framing. I noted earlier that Deleuze describes the post-war cinema, beginning with Neo-realism, as "a cinema of the seer and no longer of the agent."60 The previous section charted the way protagonistic agency can be seen breaking down in Paisd as the characters in all six episodes are faced with situations which overwhelm them. Germa'!)I, Year Zero takes this trend a step further. The camera picks up the main character, a small boy named Edmund (Edmund Meschke), just after the opening credits, and tracks beside him throughout most of the film. He continually moves through a landscape of overwhelming ruination, over which he is unable to exert any influence. Peter Brunette notes that Edmund is forever jumping on and off trams, "suggesting the absolute aimlessness of his life, in constant motion but never getting anywhere."61 Brunette's observation is true in a double sense. Firstly, Edmund quite literally never seems to arrive at a different location because every site in the city looks the same. Every structure bears the same gutted, bombed-out appearance. Secondly, the material devastation and meandering narrative also suggest Edmund's inability to "get anywhere" in a narrative sense, as he is simply unable to act as an active protagonistic force of change within the given situation. Berlin is emblematic of what Deleuze describes as "any spaces whatever": undifferentiated spaces of waste ground, demolition and reconstruction that characterise the cinema of the time-image.62 Edmund is constantly moving through this de-centred space without ever being able to make his actions have any bearing on his situation. Although he does directly bring about his father's death by poisoning towards the end of the film, even this crucial narrative turning point is not properly thought through by Edmund: afterwards he seems horrified and confused by the consequences of his own actions. This act also fails to resolve the character's situation in any traditional dramatic sense. In the end, 60 Deleuze, Cinema 2, p. 2. 61 Brunette, Roberto Rosse/lini, p. 82. 62 Deleuze, Cinema 2, p. xi. 82 Neo-realism's Image of History / 83 Edmund is only able to halt the narrative through his own suicide, which is enacted arbitrarily and lends no resolution to the broader historical situation or the problems faced by Edmund's family. Rather than acting as a force of change, Edmund is reduced to primarily being an observer. His actions are vague, indecisive and ineffectual, but he is always looking, just as he himself is looked upon by the camera that continually tracks beside him. In the preface to the English-language edition of Cinema 2, Deleuze explicitly cites Edmund as emblematic of the sensory-motor breakdown he believes characterises the post-war European cinema.63 It is this crisis of action, in which the central character is reduced to the status of an observer who is himself observed by the camera, that encourages a particular pensiveness in the viewing subject, a focus on the image's material content that runs simultaneously with the viewer's reading of the image as a unit in an ongoing fictional discourse. The character's actions no longer act upon and transform a situation, as in the pre-war narrative schema described by Bazin and Deleuze, but rather take place within a situation manifested in a material setting whose presence constantly overwhelms the protagonist's ability to act as an agent of change. The weight given to the material reality rendered on screen is central to the viewer's dual experience of the image as both a documentary rendering of a past material reality and part of a larger dramatic discourse. This dual experience also plays out in the particular rupture opened up by Rossellini's use of locations. As well as the weight he gives to the record of Berlin's landscape, he also films the city's people going about their daily business as the fictional drama is enacted in their midst. Many movies employ extras on location in order to create this impression, but Rossellini simply filmed the city's population as they passed by, making no attempt to naturalise their presence in and around the drama by having them avert their gaze and enact the fiction of the camera's invisibility. In Genna'!Y, Year Zero, pedestrians can frequently be seen pausing to look directly into the camera. One of the most notable of these incidents occurs as Edmund and his former school teacher (Erich Gi.ihne) board 63 Ibid. 83 Neo-realism's Image of History/ 84 a tram. As the tram pulls to a stop, passengers step down to the street and curiously look at the camera as it observes Edmund and his teacher boarding. Several of these passengers are in the foreground of frame and the effect is quite striking. Suddenly the comfortable distance we generally feel from the reality projected on screen is ruptured. The faces of the past rendered in the image unexpectantly look back at us, directing a gaze via the camera across time and space to the audience. This is the kind of "un-staged" reality that Kracauer argues should be incorporated into feature films throughout Theory oJFilm. 64 Un-staged reality does not imply an essentialist notion of filming reality "as it is", but rather an emphasis on incorporating those uncontrolled, contingent movements and events that are recorded by the camera at the moment of shooting into the viewer's experience of the finished film. The camera itself becomes a presence in our experience of the film, partly through its relentless tracking movements, but also through its acknowledged presence in the looks of passers-by. These uncontrolled gazes in Germmry, Year Zero seem to call upon the viewer to witness a reality that was once that of those on screen, but now exists only as a trace in the filmic image. Their looks poignantly assert the pastness of the moments we are witnessing by forcing a realisation of the camera's one-time presence before the scenes playing out before us. Thus the audience is made conscious of the camera's role as a photographic relay between the streets of Berlin in 1947, and the images of material reality we see playing out on the screen in the present of v1ew1ng. There are two points in Germaf!J, Year Zero in which the film's formal reflexivity comes together most effectively with the drama's thematic examination of the fallout of the Second World War. When Edmund indulges in one of his brief episodes of play on a dry, pock-marked fountain, he is recognised by his former school teacher, who is now out of work due to his Nazi leanings. The teacher takes Edmund to his quarters in a house full of shadowy figures, implied to be Nazi sympathisers in hiding. In a scene loaded with overt paedophilic overtones, the teacher caresses Edmund and gives him a record of one of Hitler's speeches to sell as a souvenir to Allied servicemen. Edmund takes the record to the 64 The term "un-staged" reality appears throughout Kracauer's discussion of film's "inherent affinities." Theory of Film, pp. 60-73. 84 Neo-realism's Image of History/ 85 remains of the Fiihrer's Chancellery, where British soldiers wander through the rubble and take tourist snapshots of themselves amongst the debris. Edmund plays the record for two of the soldiers, and as Hitler's abrasive tones boom across the wasteland, the camera pans around the hollowed-out remains of the Nazis' seat of power. An old man and a child stop and look about them in amazement, unsure where the disembodied voice is coming from. Hitler's voice continues to play amongst the ruins of his own passing, but the record serves to invoke the gap between the time of the recording and the time of the playing, rather than reconstituting the past in any positivist sense. Rossellini uses the events of the drama in this sequence to reflect upon the status of his own filmic images, which like the sound recording of Hitler's voice, continue to haunt the present as a material trace of the past without offering a reconstruction of the "truth" of Hitler's Germany or post-war Berlin. The second point at which Germmry, Year Zero's thematics and formal reflexiveness come together most effectively is in the film's final eight minutes. Rossellini himself spoke of this sequence's importance in an interview with Mario Verdone in 19 52: [E]very film I make interests me for a particular scene, perhaps for a finale I already have in mind ... Germaf!)I, Year Zero, to tell the truth, was conceived specifically for the scene with the child wandering on his own through the ruins. The whole of the preceding part held no interest at all for me.65 Even allowing for a certain amount of exaggeration on Rossellini's part, it seems clear that he regarded Germaf!)I, Year Zero's last few minutes as the most important part of the film. Before discussing this sequence, it is worth contextualising it with a brief sketch of the film's first hour. Throughout the early part of Germaf!)I, Year Zero, the pressures on Edmund slowly mount, as he tries desperately to obtain food for his family. The resentment of the building's other tenants grows 65 Roberto Rossellini quoted in Mario Verdone, "A Discussion ofNeo-realism" in Roberto Rossellini, My Method: Writings and Interoiews, edited by Adriano Apra, translated by Annapaola Cancogni (Marsilio Publishers: New York, 1992), p. 38 (article originally published 1952). 85 Neo-realism's Image of History/ 86 towards Edmund's bedridden father and fugitive brother, who is in hiding for fear of reprisals because of his army service. A sympathetic doctor is able to get the father into hospital for a few days, and it is at this point that Edmund turns to his former teacher for advice. Interrupted accompanying another young boy into his home, the teacher, in a distracted state, tells Edmund to allow nature to run its course: "Find the courage to let the weak perish." Visiting his father in hospital, Edmund steals a bottle of poison, and upon his father's return home, enacts what he interprets as the teacher's advice. He pours the poison into his father's tea and his father dies within minutes. Distraught at the result of his actions, Edmund flees the apartment and spends a night on the street. Next morning he visits the teacher, who berates him for the murder and denies any responsibility. Edmund again flees, and the final sequence of the film sees him wandering despondently through the devastated city, accompanied by the camera in a series of long tracks, passing through a series of situations with no definite narrative connection or through-line. The innovative use of tracking shots is apparent throughout Germa,ry, Year Zero, but it is in this final sequence that the camera exclusively tracks beside Edmund as he embarks on his final aimless wander through his ruined neighbourhood. Eventually Edmund reaches his own street, but the boy shows no signs of recognition. He enters a deserted building opposite his home and picks up a piece of debris, shaped vaguely like a pistol. He places the 'gun' to his head, before beginning an ascent to the top floor. His climb is observed in a series of shots following his every step, increasing the already pronounced impression of distended temporal duration on screen, and increasingly bringing time to bear on the viewer's experience of the image. On the top floor, Edmund gazes out at the city's ruins through massive holes in the wall. He begins to shoot through the gaps with his pretend weapon in a childish re-enactment of Berlin's horrific street fighting, alluded to by his brother earlier in the film. As in the Chancellery sequence, history here is re-played in a mediated form amongst the ruins of its own passing. The ruins of Berlin surround Edmund and increasingly weigh upon the viewer's experience of the image as the narrative seems to meander without direction. It is the minimal action content which renders this sequence the film's most important, as time builds in an endless flow that renders narrative resolution 86 Neo-realism's Image of History/ 87 impossible. In a city without future, there can be nothing but the duration of the camera's presence among the ruins of history. Dramatic resolution and closure are not possible under such conditions, and Edmund's death is the only way to bring the narrative to an end. The horror of his suicide is its inevitability, and the arbitrary manner in which it is enacted. Jose Luis Guarner points out in his book on Rossellini that Edmund's death-drop "defies the conventions of naturalistic cinema, which try to explain everything by the dramatic stringing together of a number of calculated events."66 It is precisely the stringing together of events in an explicable chain of causation that has broken down in Genna'!Y, Year Zero. Edmund's death-leap is not constructed as a transparent, psychologically-motivated outcome, but rather as a function of the film's physical and thematic portrayal of a particular moment in European history. As such, Genna'!Y, Year Zero may be regarded as cinema's confrontation with, and memorialisation of, the overwhelming physical and psychological destruction that was the aftermath of Fascism and war in Europe. Unlike its depiction in Rome, Open City, the war no longer appears as a site of contestation regarding Europe's political future, but rather the end-point of history as a process of progressive dialectical change. All notions of progress have been destroyed in a literal reduction to ground zero. When the dialectic of history has ceased, all that is left is material ruins from which human subjectivity, as an agent of change, must withdraw. History as a site of progress has been replaced by history as an endless flow of time which never fundamentally breaks with the past moments that forever accumulate in the form of recorded images and sounds. It is through Rossellini's formal and thematic approach in Genna'!Y, Year Zero that we can begin to fully understand Kracauer's investment in the Neo-realist cinema in Theory of Film. After the war and the Holocaust, film for Kracauer no longer formed part of a larger dialectical struggle over modernity's future direction, as it had in his Weimar writings. The more utopian hopes he had invested in the Enlightenment's project of rationality during the 1920s were well and truly destroyed by the war and the Nazis' program of genocide, with its horrific 66 Jose Luis Guarner, Roberto Rossellini, translated by Elisabeth Cameron (London: Studio Vista, 1970), p. 32. 87 Neo-realism's Image of History/ 88 demonstration of the ends to which instrumental reason could be put. Furthermore, the stabilisation and normalisation of Western economies in the post-war era meant that, as a system of social organisation, capitalism no longer seemed the transient stage it had appeared to be during the Weimar era. The fundamental shifts in the societal context in which Kracauer was working also meant that he conceived of film's viewing subject quite differently after the war. Miriam Hansen describes Kracauer's post-war film viewer thus: "The subject that seeks refuge in the movie theatre no longer acts out the crisis of the Subject but has become the stoically cool, postapocalyptic 'subject of survival'."67 For Kracauer, survival is only worthwhile if we retain a memory of, and critical relationship to, the experiences we have collectively emerged from as subjects in the post-war era. In the face of the kind of devastation depicted in a film like Germatry, Year Zero, Kracauer's post-war investment in film rests not on the medium's ability to help effect change, but rather in its potential to remind us of the past, and more generally of pastness itself. In his 1927 "Photography" essay, Kracauer had hoped that the photographic medium might assist in conveying the changeability of present conditions through the image's revelation of material reality's contingent nature. The revolutionary changes that Kracauer hoped for in the 1920s never came to pass; instead the Holocaust represented the unthinkable apocalyptic outcome of the Weimar Republic's failure to create a society based on the needs of its subjects. In the post-war era, Kracauer simply hoped that film might function as a reminder of time's passing and a memorialisation of the people and times that have already been lost to history. In this way, the medium might allow us to continue to maintain an awareness of time, duration and death as a rejoinder to a prevailing system of social and economic organisation which seeks to reduce all experience to an eternal, uncritical present. Kracauer's investment in the filmic medium in Theory of Film continues to rest upon its ability to undermine essentialist notions of history and progress, by encouraging a detached viewer to engage with the filmic image as a rendering of a 67 Hansen, introduction to Kracauer, Theory of Film, p. xiii. 88 Neo-realism's Image of History / 89 unique, contingent material reality which is always in the process of passing away. Rossellini's approach in Germmry, Year Zero asserts the 'pastness' of the film's images, and their status, to borrow a phrase from Barthes, as a "certain but fugitive testimony" of a very particular moment in history.68 Germaf!)I, Year Zero, and the films of the Neo-realist movement in general, encourage the viewer to engage with the image as a unique trace of a past we are unable to ever reconstitute as a whole. Through films such as these Kracauer hoped the cinema might function as a realm where mourning and memory are allowed to play out in the public arena of a rationalised, secular society largely evacuated of traditional forms of collective memory and ritualised memorialisation. 68 Barthes, Camera Lucida, p. 93. 89 Neo-realism's Image of History/ 90 This chapter has outlined why the Neo-realist movement that occurred in Italy in the 1940s had a special significance for Kracauer in terms of the film aesthetic he conceptualises in Theory of Film. The Neo-realist films appealed to Kracauer because they sought to forge a new kind of relationship between the spectator and the image, relying on a certain pensiveness and state of reflection in a viewer no longer completely consumed by an emotional involvement in the drama. This effect was achieved through a specific approach to narrative enacted in conjunction with a particular style of shooting, using long shots and long takes, creating the impression of a witnessing camera, slightly en-distanced from the dramatic action. The development of this approach to film form can be seen across the three films of Rossellini's war-trilogy. I have discussed Rossellini's move from a certain "reality effect" in Rome, Open Ciry through the invoking of a newsreel style of shooting, to a more self-conscious employment of different forms of images and verbal discourse to memorialise a particular historical moment in Paisa. In Germa,ry, Year Zero, I charted the filmmaker's approach to framing his action on location in such a way as to encourage the viewer's engagement with several simultaneous registers of meaning in the image. Rossellini employs his camera as an observer of the devastation in post-war Berlin, continually tracking beside his central character as the boy moves through, and gazes upon, the ruins of the city. Passers-by can be seen looking curiously at the camera as the boy moves amongst them, rupturing the 'presentness' of the dramatic discourse at the moment of viewing by asserting the camera's undisguised presence before the people and places captured in the image in 1947. Across Rossellini's three films, we can see the beginnings of what Deleuze calls the "cinema of the seer", as the camera becomes subtly divorced from the fluctuations of the drama and instead becomes a witness to the actions and environment recorded in the image. The central characters cease to act primarily as protagonistic agents of change and instead become witnesses to the material reality recorded by the camera. The clearly defined relationship between protagonistic action and the film's temporal and spatial milieu begins to break 90 Neo-realism's Image of History/ 91 down and the image is increasingly comprised of material detail which seems to weigh upon and overwhelm the action. At one level, this break down in protagonistic agency seems to declare the inability of the individual to properly respond to an event as immense as the Second World War. But at the same time, Rossellini's relentless tracking through the ruins of Berlin in Genna'!)', Year Zero implores the viewer never to forget this scene of devastation which will soon disappear into history. The camera's rendering of an estranged image of reality pulls at our experience of the drama, which itself is partly a reflection upon the nature of remembering and the way the past continually haunts the present. Thus, in Rossellini's style, we see an approach to film form that can at once tell a story while also revealing the "death's-head beneath" the images on screen. 91 Conclusion This thesis has provided an account of how the viewing subject's psychological relationship to the photographic image might be incorporated into our experience of film. Drawing on the work of scholars such as Miriam Hansen and Gertrud Koch, I have shown how a reading of Kracauer's Theory of Film through his "Photography" essay and Marseille notebooks reveals an investment in film's ability to confront the viewing subject with an estranged image of material reality which is bound, in the viewer's mind, to the moment of the image's production a moment that is always already past. Chapter One examined Kracauer's investment in photography during the Weimar era, showing how his "Photography" essay forms part of his wide-ranging analysis of the surface manifestations of modernity in Germany during the 1920s. Kracauer's work in this period is informed by a Marxist-influenced belief that capitalism represents a transitory stage in humankind's historical development. Unlike orthodox Marxists however, Kracauer regards the outcome of this historical process as open, a "go-for-broke game of history"1 in which the contradictions of capitalism might equally be resolved by an increasingly repressive and apocalyptic irrationality, or a reorganisation of modernity's productive forces around human need. For Kracauer, the photographic medium reflects this dual potential of the modern age. While the use of photography in the print media is symptomatic of an era in which time and distance ~ disavowed in order to maintain an eternal, a-historical present, the medium can equally provoke a powerful sense of temporal disjunction in the viewer. In confronting us with an image that indiscriminately records the material detritus of history, photography reveals the arbitrary nature of past realities, and by implication the arbitrariness of a contemporary reality we generally take for granted. The second part of Chapter One identified a shift in Kracauer's post-war writings, from the idealist hopes underlying his essays of the late 1920s, to an investment in film as a kind of memorial to lost time. The historical gamble of the Weimar era 1 Kracauer, "Photography", p. 61. 92 Conclusion / 93 was unequivocally lost in the gas chambers of Auschwitz. All film can do in the wake of Nazism, world war and genocide is assist in restoring a sense of pastness to a society in which the uncritical consumption of images increasingly erodes our ability to conceive of time as duration, and history as that which is forever lost to time. In such an environment, maintaining an awareness of the past is no longer a prerequisite for change, but an ethical responsibility to the dead who were literally and metaphorically left lying beneath the ruins of history's 'progress' at the end of the Second World War. Neo-realism is central to Kracauer's post-war conception of cinema because it represents an attempt to memorialise the fallout of Fascism and war, not through the construction of a grand historical narrative, but through an approach to film form in which the viewer is encouraged to engage with, and reflect upon, the trace of a transitory, ephemeral material reality rendered on screen. As was noted in Chapter One, although Neo-realism and Theory ofFilm can both be read as responses to the experience of Fascism and war, Koch detects a blind spot in Kracauer's emphasis on the visual and desire for film to play a memorialising function in the contemporary world. She argues that a visual medium is incompatible with the representation of mass absence that is central to the experience of genocide. I would argue, however, that Neo-realism represents an implicit philosophical response not only to the Holocaust but also the paradox that Koch detects in the representation of mass death. As the immediate optimism of Allied victory fades, Neo-realism becomes increasingly concerned with showing the human subject existing in an environment where human agency has ceased to have meaning. Edmund's suicide at the end of Germmry, Year Zero evokes the shadow of Nazism and the Holocaust, not through a direct representation of the dead, but through a depiction of the breakdown of human agency in the face of a such overwhelming ruination and death. This breakdown of agency can be read as a broader thematic reflection upon the loss of faith in history as a process of progressive dialectical change. In this sense, the absence of a belief in agency and change in the Neo-realist cinema is shadowed by the literal absence of millions of lives following the war and Nazi genocide. It is worth noting in this regard that all three films in Rossellini's war trilogy end with the death of one or more of the central protagonists. Concurrent with the thematic 93 Conclusion / 94 rumination on absence in Genna'!}, Year Zero, Rossellini invokes the paradox of photographic images by presenting us with a seemingly irrefutable assertion of a past existent existing in the present. But it is an existent that continues to exist only as a ghostly impression: a shadow of a past that can never be reconstituted as a whole. In a secular age of rationalist, instrumental thought, film provides one of the few arenas in which we might engage with, and productively reflect upon, the "haunting" of the present by the past without lapsing into a pre-modern, religiously-informed understanding of death. It is only through an understanding of history based on a sense of responsibility to the dead that we might avert such apocalyptic catastrophes as the Second World War in the future. Although the analysis presented in this thesis is historical to the extent that it focuses on films and texts that are now more that half a century old, the "blizzard of photographs" that Kracauer described in 1927 has become almost impenetrable in our own time, rendering the insights and critique he offers all the more pertinent. The revival of interest in Kracauer's writings in the past fifteen years provides the most tangible evidence that the questions with which he dealt continue to haunt our current age. In a world ever more saturated with moving images of all kinds, it is increasingly important to interrogate the way "reality" is represented on screen. Kracauer's work shows us that this is not merely a question of narrative form and content, but a question of how we respond to the material content of the images themselves. As Kracauer notes in 1927, this response can form part of a broader loss of critical consciousness and uncritical acceptance of the image's "truth" value. Or, as in the Neo-realist cinema, our response to the filmic image can inform a reflective understanding of history that is imbued with a sense of mourning for the past lives rendered as material traces on screen. 94 Filmography de Sica, Vittorio, The Birycle Thieves (Ladri di Bicic/ette), Italy, 1948. 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