Cinematic Inscriptions of Otherness: Sounding a Critique of Subjectivity.
1998; University of Illinois Press; Volume: 50; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1934-6018
Autores Tópico(s)Italian Literature and Culture
ResumoThe films of Bernardo Bertolucci engage in persistent critique of the essentialist subject. La Luna (1979), for instance, presents an explicit example of the director's analysis of the subject's problematic search for fixed maternal that might guarantee its integrity. This search for fixity of identity is constantly troubled, however, by the inability of the maternal to respond to such demands. That is, the maternal enigma repeatedly frustrates the subject's desire for stable meaning. Like Julia Kristeva, Bertolucci focuses on the lasting effects of tumultuous early fusion between preverbal child and an mother who appears to such child as no fixed or fixing than the piecemeal body that is not yet identified as his/her own (Kristeva, 'Unes Femmes' 110). As we shall come to see, this maternal body, associated in part with instinctual, prelinguistic rhythms irreducible to, and disruptive of, meaning, continually challenges the contours of the fully formed speaking subject. La Luna is not the only film, though, in which Bertolucci explores presumably unitary subject perturbed by the radical otherness of this archaic enigma. An examination of the motifs that recur in his various films makes this clear. A version of the fixed maternal vision that the young Joe imagines as he gazes at the moon appearing above movie theater in La Luna also solicits Port and Kit, the American expatriates in The Sheltering Sky ( 1990). The couple hopes to find an exotic cultural other in North Africa who might be more beautiful than the moon, who might replace the maternal that ultimately founders before Joe's eyes. In Stealing Beauty (1996), Lucy, young American, returns to Italy, the country of her conception, and picks up where Joe left off. Her search for her biological father coincides with an attempt to preserve her dead motherand thus herself-as an arrested image: in moonlit scenes, Lucy fixes on photographs of her mother, poet who appears in the guise of Marilyn Monroe, the very actress who so captivated Joe at the movie theater in La Luna. Bertolucci's diverse explorations of the subject and its relation to an archaic enigma regularly coincide with his self-conscious consideration of the cinema itself, especially its relation to other arts. Yet, although the three aforementioned films each invoke dance, music, sculpture, painting, and photography-Stealing Beauty adds video to the mix-it is the relation of cinema to literary art that preoccupies Bertolucci, director who initially chose poetry as his medium. As T. Jefferson Kline emphasizes, Bertolucci attempts to define the specificities of the especially against those of literary art, and such project is bound up with an exploration of the subject's relation to, and its representations of, maternal enigma. For Kline, Bertolucci offers rich meditation on the relationship of the cinematic act to the maternal (6). Bertolucci's meditation on the maternal figure is, moreover, informed in part by the filmmaker's experience with psychoanalysis, and in some measure by the psychoanalytic film theories of Christian Metz and Jean-Louis Baudry. As Kline reminds us, Metz and Baudry emphasize the strong analogical links between the film medium, the infant, and the dreamer. In short, for Baudry, film viewingthe spectator immobilized and nearly mesmerized in the dark-recalls the states of the pre- and postnatal infant and the similarly immobilized dreamer (9). What is more, in this view, film's reliance on the brings the spectator closer than the reader of words to the work of the unconscious, whose expression in dream appears primarily as an image. As Kline states, the cinema, with its predominance of the image (as opposed to literary art in which the word has priority), has a particular affinity with unconscious processes that are likewise primarily imagistic and, in particular with dreams ( 10). …
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