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Ecologies of Love and Toxic Ecosystems: Lessons from the Holocaust in Cavani and Bertolucci

2017; Bowling Green State University; Issue: 31 Linguagem: Inglês

10.20415/rhiz/031.e01

1555-9998

Serena Anderlini-D’Onofrio,

Italian Fascism and Post-war Society

This study analyzes two classics of Italian cinema from an ecosexual perspective. [1]Bertolucci's The Conformist (1970) and Cavani's The Night Porter (1974) share a theme: the 20 th century Holocaust in Europe where circumstances are extreme and the ecosystems that host people's lives are replete with toxicity.The study integrates elements of Deleuzian and film theory, political history, the history of cinema, and cultural discourses about fluid and inclusive practices of love like bisexuality and polyamory.It focuses on the relationship between mise-en-scène, or representation of the physical, emotional, interpersonal, and political ecosystems where characters' lives unfold, and the styles of sexual and amorous expression they deploy in their intimate scenes.Its approach is unique.It empowers a vision of how the energy of love behaves in toxic ecosystems, surviving as love for love or erotophilia.When the auteurs explore the inner landscapes of the films' protagonists via Deleuzian time-image sequences, the sexual fluidity and amorous inclusiveness present therein become visible as a way to save love for love in the midst of extreme ecological toxicity.In Bertolucci the fear of love prevails: Marcello kills the woman who inspired love in him.In Cavani this expansive sense of love manifests the imagination of a world where "it is safe to live because it is safe to love."The author claims that Cavani succeeds because her diegetic structure is organized rhizomatically.The inner landscapes of multiple interconnected consciousnesses are made visible in the interlocked time-image sequences of her dyad Max and Lucia. Overview[1] This station in the circle is a visit to two ecosexual classics of new-wave auteur cinema where the time-image is used as a research tool about the recent past of Italy and its planetary significance.The Conformist, released in 1970, and The Night Porter, released in 1974, are cinematic renditions of "sheets of the past" from recent Italian and European history that share the wider horizon of the 20 th century Holocaust as a theme.Each classic combines the cinematic modes of "movement-image" and "timeimage" identified in Deleuze's philosophy of cinema to tell a story about the energy of love and its behavior in toxic ecosystems. [2]This article offers an analytical observation of how these modalities are organized in the diegetic structure of each film.We will observe how, when threatened with pervasive toxicity, the energy of love can survive as love for love or erotophilia.[2] The Conformist is about the killing of Guistizia e Libertà leader Carlo Rosselli, a secular Jew slain as a French exile in 1937.It is based on the interpretation of Alberto Moravia's novel of 1951 by Bernardo Bertolucci and his filmmaking team. [3]The Night Porter is about internment and interpersonal intimacies between officers and prisoners in a deportation camp during World War II.In The Night Porter, auteur Liliana Cavani is also the main researcher, with her series of intimate interviews with Holocaust survivors informing the work of the filmmaking team. [4] [3] Both auteurs invent a truth worth believing based on the Deleuzian principle that "the artist is creator of truth, because truth has to be created" (Cinema II, 146).They celebrate amorous inclusiveness and sexual fluidity as practices that make the energy of love more expansive and abundant.