Cinema of Anxiety: A Psychoanalysis of Italian Neorealism 9780292745117

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CINEMA

OF

ANXIETY

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CINEMA OF ANXIETY A Psychoanalysis of Italian Neorealism Vincent F. Rocchio

University of Texas Press, Austin

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Copyright © 1999 by the University of Texas Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First edition, 1999 Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to Permissions, University of Texas Press, Box 7819, Austin, TX 78713-7819.

⬁ The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of 䊊 ansi/niso z39.48-1992 (r1997) (Permanence of Paper).

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Rocchio, Vincent F. (Vincent Floyd), 1960 –

Cinema of anxiety : a psycho-

analysis of Italian neorealism / Vincent F. Rocchio. — 1st ed.

p.

Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 0-292-77100-2 (alk. paper)

isbn 0-292-77101-0 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Motion pictures—Italy—History.

2. Lacan, Jacques, 1901–

I. Title. pn1993.5.i88

r59

791.43⬘0945 — dc21

1999 99-6046

cm.

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in memoria di Vincenzo ed Antonia Rocchio e figli Domenico, Maria, ed Anthony, mio padre nobile

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Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction

1

1. Revisiting Psychoanalysis and the Cinema

9

2. Rome: Open City

29

A N X I E T Y, I D E O L O G Y, A N D C U L T U R A L C O N T A I N M E N T

3. Bicycle Thieves

53

IDENTIFICATION, FOCALIZATION, AND RESTORATION

4. La terra trema

79

SUBVERTING AND STRUCTURING MEANING

5. Bitter Rice

105

THE RETURN OF THE REPRESSED (DIVA)

6. Senso

127

DEGENERATE MELODRAMA?

7. Psychoanalysis, Cinematic Representation, and Cultural Studies Notes

159

Bibliography

175

Index

147

181

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Acknowledgments

This project started off, humbly enough, as a research paper while I was a graduate student at New York University. Even though I immediately recognized that the scope of the project could easily be expanded into a dissertation, I was not as quick to pursue it. There were several reasons for that, but the chief one was my last name. It is often difficult for others to understand the onerous problem Italian-Americans face when they write on Italian culture. In the current overly competitive and far too trendy American academic climate, Italian-Americans are by and large looked down upon as being too parochial and somewhat inferior for writing about something they already “know”—rather than expanding their horizons—when they write on Italian culture or history. These days, it is only with some fear and trepidation (or blind ignorance) that any of us pursue anything even remotely Italian. In my own case, however, several scholars whom I respect greatly encouraged me to go forward with this project right from its earliest stages. Laura Mulvey was the first to read my approach to Neorealism and offered strong encouragement while pointing out several theoretical limitations and problems that I had encountered. Bill Simon was next to read an expanded version of the project and also gave encouragement to go forward, even as he challenged my conclusions and demanded more work on Italian culture. In the end, with my dissertation nearing completion, he cleared off his desk to get chapters read. Bob Stam amiably came on at the last minute to see the project through and made several insightful suggestions regarding the integrating function that the main theoretical model served. Steve Barnes, much

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further ahead of me in the program and a role model for being a genial and supportive colleague, kindly pointed up my glaring omission of the role of the Catholic church in the films under investigation—proving once and for all that I was not going to “get away with” ignoring that complex issue (much as I had hoped). Mirto Golo-Stone, another great one that NYU let get away, was the first to stamp “publishable” on this project, allowing me to have confidence in my work. Later, as I pursued the theoretical model into other areas and tried to do comparative studies, Roger Simon became a patient and tested sounding board, with encyclopedic knowledge of American film. As I progressed from dissertation to manuscript in process, several people gave me invaluable insight and support. Frank Tomasulo, who served as an outside reader, always offered support and insight on how to turn a dissertation into a manuscript. He is the model of the generous scholar. Fortunately for the field of cinema studies, he is not alone. Peter Brunette served as an early reader and gave his support for what was at the time only a crude manuscript with potential. Further, he generously revealed his identity as a reader so that I could discuss his critiques more in depth. Most of the important theoretical revisions I made are due to his critiques. Joshua Bellin was my sounding board on literary theory and gave me important culturally based counterexamples of Ferdinand de Saussure’s model of the arbitrary sign. Andrea Casson was my go-to Italianist, assisting me with both language and culture. My colleague Michael Anton Budd gave detailed critique and thoughtful advice on responding to readers, and his support was echoed by Peggy Walsh and Renae Grant. Joanna Hitchcock was the first editor to show interest in the project and took the time to help out an unknown scholar pursue his work. In an age when an individual’s importance is measured by hiding behind message machines and administrative assistants, she was always accessible, kind, and enormously helpful. She obviously runs the University of Texas Press under those same principles, because my editor Jim Burr helped this project along in the same manner: forthrightly and supportively. In terms of intellectual support, this project is thoroughly indebted to Janet Staiger. The first few drafts were so lamentably crude that no one had much interest in working with me—no one except Janet. From the beginning, she showed faith in me and the project, preventing a major derailment of both, I am sure. I do not need to laud Janet’s scholarly and intellectual achievements, which are well known throughout the field. Perhaps what is not so well known is her ability to maintain standards and still treat people as individuals with dignity and respect. She is so fundamentally committed

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Acknowledgments

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to both scholarship and people that she has been a great role model for several scholars, none more than me. In conclusion I would note that it is not really in vogue to acknowledge family in the production of an academic work. This is a book on Italian culture, however, and that norm is very un-Italian—hence my willingness to violate it, especially since people like my sister and my uncle kept me in clothing as I worked on this, and my brother temporarily housed me from time to time. My other brother quietly paid my graduate school fees because I was too broke but wanted to graduate. My parents looked for any excuse they could to find ways to support me, and my sister, separated by a continent, always found ways to encourage me. In the end, however, my ability to finish a manuscript depended on my wife, Margaret, who sacrificed much for me but still got up every day to provide health care to the poor and disenfranchised. Our work was made more meaningful, if not a little more difficult, by the arrival of our daughter, Antonia Therese. To all these people I am deeply indebted, and the quality of this manuscript is largely due to their contributions. Its shortcomings, of course, are attributable only to me. My hope is that it lives up to the generosity bestowed upon me and to the legacy of those who have gone before me with such great courage and sacrifice.

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Introduction

At the end of the summer of 1984, one week before I was to begin graduate school, my sister Lisa and I vacationed in Maine with my oldest brother, A. J., and his family. During that time, my nephew Jason went walking with my sister and accidentally fell off a dock and onto the rocks below. Although the tide was out, the surf—in one of those miraculous coincidences that separate tragedy from normal childhood accidents—surged in just as he landed, cushioning his fall against the rocks and preventing what would have been a skull fracture (as the gash on his forehead testified). Jason was rushed to a hospital by ambulance, where he was joined by my brother and me. Jason’s mother, Cathy, was out at the time with his two-yearold sister, Lindsey. When they returned, my sister informed them of what happened, and they all waited together in the cabin. Cathy kept Lindsey entertained by playing at getting her to speak. The game essentially consisted of Lindsey, who had noticed her brother’s absence, asking, “Where Jason?” From that question, the following ensued. “Jason’s at the hospital.” “Hospital?” “He got a boo-boo on his head.” “Boo-boo?” “He fell down.” When, as children are prone to do, Lindsey repeated the pattern for the thirty-seventh time, her mother turned the tables on her, answering her question with the same question. Lindsey was able to respond successfully: “Jason fall down,” “Got boo-boo on head,” “Go to hospital.”

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Over a month later I went to visit my brother and his family in their apartment in Brooklyn. Kathy, Jason, and Lindsey were playing in the living room when I arrived. I was saying hello to each of them when Lindsey started speaking what I thought were just random combinations of vowels. Her mother, however, understood her discourse and told me that she was saying, “Jason fall down, got boo-boo on head, go to hospital.” Though at the time I thought it remarkable that she clearly remembered me from the cabin, I did not think it a particularly profound occurrence. I was wrong. What I did not understand then was that Lindsey was in fact demonstrating three of the most significant aspects of language for cultural studies: its arbitrariness, its malleability, and its grounding in recognition. Clearly, her intended communication was more along the lines of “Hello, I remember you” than it was an assessment of Jason, but she lacked the mastery of language and its codes to say it “properly.” Despite the lack of such mastery, her statement conveyed meaning more or less along the lines she intended, almost independently of the individual signifiers themselves—note that there is no signifier designating myself in her discourse. The reason for this lies in a fundamental principle of language that Saussure pointed out: there is no inherent relationship between an individual signifier or sign and that which it represents: the signified. Rather, as Saussure demonstrated, the relationship is arbitrary. Thus, Christopher Norris summarizes this principle by arguing: There is no self-evident or one-to-one link between “signifier” and “signified,” the word as (spoken or written) vehicle and the concept it serves to evoke. Both are caught up in a play of distinctive features where differences of sound and sense are the only markers of meaning . . . Language is in this sense diacritical, or dependent on a structured economy of differences which allow a relatively small range of linguistic elements to signify a vast repertoire of negotiable meanings.1

The radical implication of the arbitrary nature of language, and its dependence on structure rather than grounding in external reality for meaning, is the eradication of truth anchored to a claim of inherent meaning. The arbitrary relationship between signifier and signified means that there is no inherent meaning, which then inaugurates a search for what ensures the meaning of the sign and the communications act. Karl Marx, M. M. Bakhtin, and Antonio Gramsci saw in the process of fixing and ensuring the meaning of the sign an inherently political process: a means by which the world (or, more accurately, social reality) is ordered, organized, and fixed (in the sense of stabilizing social relations). In this sense,

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language becomes malleable, subject to the needs of the dominant mode of social relations. As Terry Eagleton argues, it is not simply a matter of asking “what the sign . . . [means] but of investigating its varied history, as conflicting social groups, classes, individuals and discourses . . . [seek] to appropriate it and imbue it with their own meanings.” Language, in short . . . [is] a field of ideological contention, not a monolithic system; indeed, signs . . . [are] the very material medium of ideology, since without them, no values or ideas could exist.2

Furthermore, what Eagleton makes clear with respect to Bakhtin is that ideology shapes and determines language, not vice versa, even in the specific speech act. Thus he argues that for Bakhtin, “words were ‘multi-accentual’ rather than frozen in meaning: they were always the words of one particular human subject for another, and this practical context would shape and shift their meaning.” 3 This malleability of language, determined as it is by the word’s arbitrary relationship to its referent, is a significant site for cultural studies, especially as it relates to analyzing cultures of inequity such as those structured upon capitalism. Systems of inequity continue to maintain and perpetuate themselves through hegemonic processes and ideological discourses that function to justify, legitimize, and naturalize such inequity, despite the illegitimacy of their claims. Indeed, the truth claims that are made through ideology must be continually reinforced and rearticulated, as well as adapted and restructured. This instability is the direct result of having their foundation in the arbitrary nature of the sign. The cinema, born and developed under industrial capitalism, actively participates in this process, and the timing is not a coincidence. At a fundamental level, the cinema’s production and representation of images at a rate of thirty frames per second (or fourteen to twenty-four, depending on the time period) belies an industrial process long before the sheer volume of cinematic texts and their consumption are examined. In this respect, however, it is important to note that the cinema depends on advanced and complex distribution systems that are also grounded in highly advanced modes of exchange engendered in the later stages of capitalism (industrial and consumer more so than, for example, mercantile capitalism). The cinema’s relationship to industrial capitalism has been examined in several different aspects, as in the work of Jean-Louis Baudry, Jean-Louis Comolli, Janet Staiger, David Bordwell, and others.4 As Thomas Elsaesser has pointed out, these were very important studies with respect to the insti-

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tution cinema, and more such studies are certainly warranted. Elsaesser further argues, however, that the other side of the paradigm is also in need of close examination: the audience which consumes, as it were, the cinematic texts produced in such volume.5 Here, too, several approaches have been taken, including reception studies, cognitive psychology, and psychoanalysis, particularly Lacanian psychoanalysis starting in the mid 1970’s. Herein lies the significance of the third aspect of Lindsey’s discourse—its grounding in recognition. Early appropriations of Lacanian psychoanalysis in the mid 1970’s, as discussed more fully in the following chapters, were extremely important for bringing into cinema studies the concept of a desiring spectator, whose specific desire for the cinematic experience (or texts) forms the basis of the means of exchange which makes the institution of cinema possible. At least one limitation of these early appropriations, however, was a tendency to oversimplify the text-subject relationship as it relates to the subject, especially as it relates to the concept of the unified subject. Jacques Lacan’s rather difficult writings, if nothing else, sound a warning that the dialectic of recognition that grounds human discourse is a complex affair. What Lacan’s work demonstrates is that the fictive structure of identity, engendering as it does several layers of alienation, requires a continuous process of reaffirmation and recognition of the specific fictions that comprise individual identity. Thus it is that Lacan argues: The signifier, producing itself in the field of the Other, makes manifest the subject of its signification. But it functions as a signifier only to reduce the subject in question to being no more than a signifier, to petrify the subject in the same movement in which it calls the subject to function, to speak, as subject.6

Lacan’s description of the relationship between the signifier and identity demonstrates the complex interrelationships at stake in the individual subject: the subject of being introjects the signifier, which in turn shapes and determines individual identity, but only in relationship to prelinguistic identifications (themselves a response to Real conditions and effects). The complex interplay between signification and being creates a demand (in the economic sense) for discourse. The cinema and television are significant sites for ideological study precisely because they provide not only the discourses necessary for Symbolic recognition, but also images— establishing the means for Imaginary (mis)recognition. This study attempts to show that the necessity of Lacanian psychoanalysis for the study of film lies in its ability to examine both these operations as they are conducted in and through the cinematic text.

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My niece Lindsey is now a long way from her first forays into the world of language. As I finish this manuscript, however, my nephews James and Pete wait for me to rejoin them in the surf of the Atlantic Ocean off the beaches of Avalon. Across the continent, my other niece, Jessica, and my nephew Forrest wait with anticipation for me, my wife, and our baby, Antonia, to arrive (and go play with them in the surf off Point Reyes), while another nephew, Andrew, and his sister Elise take pleasure in caring for our dog Pasquale (much of which is rooted in giving him commands). The significance of these situations for cultural studies is admittedly more personal than theoretical, but only marginally so. For years now, despite being a fairly competent interpreter of Lacan, I have never been able to give a clear answer to the question, “Why Lacanian psychoanalysis?” Now, however, the answer is to be found in the joyous sense of wonder and awe that I see in the faces of my nieces and nephews as they negotiate their existence in a complex world that is ofttimes foreboding, frequently enticing, and almost always mysterious. Socialization into consumer-capitalist societies is a process of effectively draining out that mystery and sacredness of the world, replacing it with an empty materialism, and persuading us of the “inevitability” of this process. The necessity of Lacanian psychoanalysis lies in its ability to effectively confront that process in a manner that Marxist critical theory cannot do on its own. In its essence, the Lacanian framework is a fundamental commitment to a dialectical model of the individual that can take full account of the social /cultural realm and its relationship to the individual. The key term here is dialectical. Lacan’s theories transcend overly simplistic binary oppositions like nature/nurture and individual /social, insisting that, in terms of the psyche, not only is it both, but in such a complex manner that the balance cannot be isolated. The result is that audiences and individuals can never (or should never) be reduced to either biology or culture, but likewise should not be limited to their own “individuality” either, since the concept is fictive. Lacan’s work demonstrates that theories which line up at either pole in binary oppositions not only are grossly inaccurate, but also have grave consequences in terms of their social implications. Lacan’s return to Sigmund Freud focused on The Interpretations of Dreams, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Jokes and Their Relationship to the Unconscious, and The Ego and the Id, finding continuity there where others did not. This was especially the case in terms of the field of psychoanalysis overemphasizing the synthesizing function of the ego. Lacan saw in ego psychology the dissolution of the dialectic of identity, and with it the en-

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thronement of the ego. As Theresa Brennan points out, this can have disastrous results for a social system and the very environment it exists within.7 The fundamental Freudian text that these conclusions point to is, of course, Civilization and Its Discontents. Here Freud sounds a grave warning that few heard clearly enough: repression is a necessary part and function of human identity, but can become too much a part of social systems. Lacan was one of the few who took up these pronouncements of Freud and advanced them further, making clear that failure to introject the “No” of the father leads to the prison house of psychosis. As Ellie Ragland-Sullivan demonstrates, the ego itself has no limits; rather, it is structured around a “propensity for grandiosity, narcissism, and aggressiveness. In this sense, the phallic super-ego saves the individual from psychosis, and society from genocide, while also imposing tyranny and alienation on being.” 8 The fundamentally dialectal structure of the individual that Ragland-Sullivan discusses is extremely important for social transformation. This is particularly the case for a social system as complex, cunning, and (seemingly) complete as capitalism, which depends on the exploitation of individuals for its very existence. The implications of the Lacanian model are such that overly simplistic demands to eliminate repression and revolutionary programs that cannot meaningfully address issues of authority and limits are ultimately bound for failure. In the mainstream discourses of the 1990’s, cultural commentators are quick to denigrate the 1960’s in just such a manner: focusing in on its excesses and characterizing its revolutionary movements as naïve (ignoring, as they do, the incredibly reactionary effects of 1970’s stagnation). At least one lasting, positive effect of the 1960’s for contemporary American culture, however, is a quick suspicion of illegitimate authority, if not a ready cynicism toward all authority. The problem for contemporary American society, though, is that no other kind of social model has found wide acceptance as a viable replacement for reverence and obedience to authority. In this respect, there are very strong parallels between contemporary American culture and postwar Italian culture. The critical difference between the two is that for postwar Italian culture there were visible other models competing with patriarchal capitalism: the cooperation and unity of the Resistance became the most hallowed example. Despite the dissolution of its government and the resulting social upheaval, postwar Italy did not become a revolutionary society. Patriarchal capitalism, while battered, nonetheless maintained itself, with not a little help from American intervention in the economic and political life of

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postwar Italy. Bald economic and political acts do not occur in a vacuum, however; Gramsci’s concept of hegemony demonstrates that they operate through and with ideological discourse. In postwar Italy patriarchal capitalism was made to seem “inevitable,” even by those discourses which hoped for a more enlightened transformation of Italian society. In the end, not even the legacy of the Resistance or its revolutionary potential could stand against this “inevitability.” This study of Lacanian psychoanalysis and film looks at Neorealism precisely because a period with such potential for social transformation was effectively contained. What this study attempts to demonstrate is the manner in which ideological containment is— or can be— conducted through narrative. Indeed, as the following chapters demonstrate, narrative itself engenders containment, but does not inherently exercise ideological containment. Lacanian psychoanalysis provides the study of film with the means by which to analyze the ideological functioning of narrative as it intersects the spectator through the dynamics of desire and pleasure (though, admittedly, it has not always done this successfully). In this respect, it offers a valuable tool— especially as a beginning—for confronting the hegemonic processes that conduct themselves through ideology in order to maintain and perpetuate systems of inequity that, in addition to their human toll, are devouring the means of our very existence.

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1 Revisiting Psychoanalysis and the Cinema

The American Frenchspeak ghetto has complicated things by maintaining an elitist, separationist policy: initiation rites no longer are limited to a reading of Freud, Marx, and Saussure; now one must know Lacan, Althusser, and Derrida as well. Faced with such demands, traditional critics have naturally run to more familiar ground: rhetorical criticism, genre study, film history. The holier-than-thou attitude often adopted by both sides has served only to deepen the schism. Charles F. Altman 1

For the emerging field of cinema studies, the discovery of Lacanian psychoanalysis in the early and mid 1970’s marked a watershed period, filled with contentiousness, power politicking, and not a little guruism. Indeed, Altman’s use of the term “schism” is not purely figurative; Lacanian psychoanalytic film theory, or, more properly, the politics of Lacanian psychoanalytic film theory, is cited as the primary reason for the resignations from the Screen editorial board by Edward Buscombe, Christine Gledhill, Allan Lovell, and Christopher Williams.2 For all the intensity of these debates and schisms, however, Lacanian psychoanalytic film theory seems by and large eclipsed; the attitude of the field in general is one of “been there, done that.” This movement away from Lacanian psychoanalytic film theory can be seen, at least in part, hegemonically: as the result of shifts and balances in an evolving process, both within the field (among those who would lead it) and outside it (as an academic dis-

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cipline seeking to establish itself through new discourses and paradigms). Such a reading, while important to understanding the field as part of a larger social-hegemonic process, is not prepared to focus on the viability of Lacanian psychoanalysis for the study of film. The movement away from the Lacanian framework, while part of a hegemonic process which moved into other venues, is also rooted in several limitations and inconsistencies with the specific appropriations of the 1970’s and their subsequent theoretical outcomes: the concept of subject positioning, suture theory, and a tendency toward a certain ahistoricism. Indeed, for all the excitement and activity that psychoanalysis generated, very few booklength studies were produced from its application. Feminism would be the notable exception to that productive lack. This study, without being a historiography of psychoanalytic film theory, attempts to demonstrate how the problems and limitations of Lacanian psychoanalytic film theory can be transcended through a process of revision that results in the creation of significant theoretical tools. Indeed, this study answers Christian Metz’s classic question—“What contribution can [Lacanian] psychoanalysis make to the study of the cinematic signifier?”—by demonstrating its ability to be a central (if not undergirding) integrating theory that can overcome traditional conceptual limitations within studies of representation: most specifically with respect to delineating the relationships or boundaries between the individual and the social. Detached from its political-hegemonic encumbrances of the 1970’s (which continued on well into the 1980’s with a politically charged cognitive psychology vs. psychoanalysis antagonism), psychoanalytic film theory can provide a framework that facilitates the integration of multiple theories into analytic models for the purpose of ideological critique, an appropriation that has begun not only in and through the study of film and popular culture (as with Slavoj Zizek), but also in other important areas of cultural studies: gender and sexuality (as with Judith Butler), race (as with Homi Bhaba), and ecology (as with Theresa Brennan). In this respect, what is sometimes referred to as the New Psychoanalysis plays a fundamental coordinating role in examining film, culture, and the communications process in general as complex and dialectical phenomena anchored in the domain of representation. Furthermore, representation itself is perhaps the most vital area for cultural studies today, at the very least because of a persistent inability to get the achievements of studies in representation to find acceptance and understanding in mainstream culture. The most radical implication of semiotics (which became a foundation for Marx-

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ist cultural studies and Lacanian psychoanalysis) is that social realities are constructed onto reality, they do not spring forth from reality, a point that Lacan hammered away at in his early seminars when he argued that language cannot be conceived of as the result of a series of shoots, of buds, coming out of each thing. The name is not like the little asparagus tip emerging from the thing. One can only think of language as a network, a net over the entirety of things, over the totality of the real. It inscribes on the plane of the real this other plane, which we here call the plane of the symbolic.3

Expanding on the semiotic framework, Lacan points to the manner in which the Symbolic framework, whose principal function is to order, organize, and fix reality, is—in the final analysis—arbitrary. As such, social reality, however concrete it becomes in the form of buildings and skyscrapers, highways and gardens, is imposed upon and transcended by reality—subjected to and a part of reality—but not reality in and of itself. Studies of representation are of utmost significance since social texts are the means by which social realities are not only articulated but constructed: the vehicle by which they come into being, are maintained and enforced. Hence, before there can be a brick, there must be the categorical distinction between elements which allows for the process of the brick. Before the coercive force of the state can act, there must be a text through which it can perform. Thus it is that prior to cops smashing the heads of Columbia University students there must first be, at the very least, the categories of cop and student. Then individuals can situate themselves within categories, negotiate, accept, and/or defy and resist a series of codes, before a series of actions can be prescribed (again through the Symbolic)—that result in Real effects. The pervasiveness of the Symbolic (Lacan carefully chose his metaphor of a net over the Real) combined with our anxiety over the Real (that which resists symbolization entirely) exercises a significant role in social reality’s tendency to present itself as reality. This is what leads Todd Gitlin, for example, to argue that the function of the mass media is to certify reality as reality.4 Studies of representation, and the analytical frameworks they provide, are thus paramount for deconstructing social realities, for pointing to their dependencies and— especially in the case of systems of inequity— denouncing their arbitrariness and dismissing their necessity. The significance of a psychoanalytic framework is its ability to transcend the boundaries between broader social processes (which create and maintain Symbolic systems) and individual processes (which are the ultimate site of the consumption of social texts). Fredric Jameson refers to this key relation-

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ship as “the insertion of the subject” and discusses the inability of most theory to engage it meaningfully.5 While Marxist critical theory provides expanded conceptions of both culture and subject, it does not so readily provide what Jameson conceives of as “mediations” between the “social phenomena” of texts—their appropriation, inscription, and/or transformation of cultural signifying practices—and the “private facts” of an individual subject—how they are interpreted through the structure of identity and negotiated for the purpose of consent.6 The value of Lacanian psychoanalysis, therefore, lies in its ability to delineate the manner in which discourses, and the texts within which they are situated, engage the specific desires of the spectator in a dialectic of identity for the purpose of ideological containment and hegemonic consent.7 Lacan’s revision of Freud through a semiotic theory focuses directly on the subject’s relationship to signifying practices and the effects of signification on the human subject. It thus provides a more detailed and specific understanding of the subject in relationship to signifying practices. As Lacan argues: “I have shown . . . that one should see in the unconscious the effects of speech on the subject—insofar as these effects are so radically primary that they are properly what determine the subject as subject.” 8 The primacy of signification within the formation of the subject radically undermines the concept of an essential subject (spectator). In what is perhaps its most radical contribution to critical studies, a Lacanian framework forecloses the tidiness of conceptualizing the human subject through either biological essentialism (subjects and identity are determined by being, genetics, or some other biological determination) or cultural essentialism (in which the subjects and their identity are determined by the society and culture they come out of ). Lacan, instead, integrates the two poles of this binary opposition through a dialectical, dynamic, and contingent relationship between identity and being, biology and culture. Thus, in delineating the relationship between signification and meaning, and the role of the subject within that process, a Lacanian analysis can determine how signification engages the desires of its spectators and mobilizes the pleasure in meaning (the ideological and hegemonic consequences of which are alluded to above). Before it can achieve such results in the study of film, however, Lacanian psychoanalysis needs to be extricated from the limitations incurred in its earlier appropriations. The groundbreaking contributions of 1970’s psychoanalytic film theory center around the attempt to make the process of identification explicit and a focus of study, to posit a desiring spectator as a crucial component in that process, and to incorporate the structural processes

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that encompass and regulate the parameters of the text-subject relationship. The liabilities of this work, however, center around an overprivileging of Lacan’s concept of the Imaginary: the cognitive register of images, associations, identifications, and wholeness in being—a cognitive site where intense pleasure in being is realized. The strong corollaries that can be found between film spectatorship and the Imaginary register seduced this period of film theory, occluding several key aspects of Lacanian theory and imposing several important theoretical consequences. The first casualty of this overvaluation, especially with respect to theories of identification, is Lacan’s premirror stage. Frequently overlooked for the more celebrated mirror stage and its relationship to the Imaginary, the premirror stage is nonetheless formative in the structuring of the unconscious (and identity). With this primary stage, Lacan emphasizes the important effects resulting from a disparity between the infant’s advanced perceptual abilities and its physical and psychical helplessness (lack of motor abilities and “self-knowledge”). This disparity creates a gap between the inability to process sensory input meaningfully and the enormous amount of information presented to the infant by its perceptual functioning. Lacan describes this gap as “the original distress resulting from the child’s intra-organic and relational discordance.” 9 The effect of this gap, he argues, is the experience of the body as fragmented—an experience the infant defends against through primary identification with the part-objects and effects that come into its sensorial-perceptual field. In delineating this mode of identification, Lacan stresses the lack of “a specular image, or . . . alterity” that characterizes it.10 Lacking a sense of individuation to separate itself from these effects, the infant does not so much identify with an object, but rather with the effects of what it perceives.11 The structuring process of the premirror stage is that the primordial base of identity is a representational layer of perceptions whose basis rests inside and outside of fragmented parts and effects. As Lacan argues: For these objects, part- or not, but certainly signifying . . . are no doubt won or lost by the subject. He is destroyed by them or he preserves them, but above all he is these objects, according to the place where they function in his fundamental phantasy.12

At the base of identity for Lacan lies not an essential subject, but an essential response: a tendency for and a network of identifications taken on in response to a fundamental lack. A fundamental limitation with traditional psychoanalytic film theory is a tendency to collapse the distinctions between

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different modes of identification into a response to lack. This results in a failure to delineate the manner in which the different modes of identification are set in dynamic relationship to each other. Metz’s primary identification in cinema, for example, where the spectator identifies with the “pure act of perception,” 13 is far more characteristic of the premirror identificatory mode—an identification with effect—than of the Imaginary mode that Metz ascribed it to. With Metz, and in most of traditional psychoanalytic film theory, identification becomes limited to the Imaginary, obscuring the complex processes concurrently operating in the maintenance of identity. Another significant limitation of traditional psychoanalytic film theory is the manner in which it appropriated Lacan’s cognitive model—the framework of the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real—as a model of personality. This misappropriation leads to grave oversights, including the manner in which Lacan differentiated his concept of the ego from Freud’s. The most glaring omission for cinema studies, however, is a general neglect of Lacan’s concept of Symbolic identification. Lacking this concept, the dialectical and historically contingent functioning of the subject that Lacan sought to delineate was lost in the rush to elaborate the operations of the Imaginary in text-subject relations. THE L ACANIAN SUBJECT

The constitution of the subject must therefore be revisited and its dialectical and contingent qualities restored before any meaningful revision or model can go forward. In order to achieve such revision, a short review of Lacan’s developmental model and the formation of the subject is necessary. Indeed, as Jameson notes, the significance of Lacanian theory is its emphasis on the formation of the subject and its “constitutive illusions,” 14 which Jameson sees as a historically specific process. He thus argues that “the forms of human consciousness and the mechanisms of human psychology are not timeless and everywhere essentially the same, but rather situation-specific and historically produced.” 15 The historical specificity of subject formation and the resultant constitutive illusions are inscribed in Lacan’s work through his concept of the Other(A).16 Lacan has defined the Other(A) as “the locus in which is constituted the I who speaks.” 17 In designating a hypothetical “locus” Lacan formulates what can be described as the secondary unconscious, formed by the subject’s subjugation to a historically specific social-Symbolic system. Maintaining a dialectical model, however, he demonstrates that the Other(A) is not limited

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to the secondary unconscious, but rather is that point of continuity between primary and secondary formations (hence the need to consider its locus as a figurative designation). The historical specificity of the formation of the subject and his/her signifying relations is at the base of identity for Lacan. In his theory of personality, identity is not an essential subject but an essential response: a tendency for and a network of identifications taken on in response to a fundamental lack in being. Drawing on Freud’s discussion in The Ego and the Id that the ego is the sum of identifications, Lacan proposes that identity, and, indeed, subjecthood, is a representation: Freud states in a thousand, two thousand places . . . that the ego is the sum of the identifications of the subject, with all that implies as to its radical contingency. If you allow me to give an image of it, the ego is like the superimposition of various coats borrowed from what I would call the bric-a-brac of its props department.18

For Lacan, then, consciousness and identity are not the sign of an essential subject, but, rather, a dynamic process: the putting on of identifications in response to needs, desires, and the demands of an external world. Lacan’s emphasis on identity formation’s dependency on identifications with the object world stresses a contingency that has important implications. The unity that the child assumes—puts on—is an “image” of unity learned from the outside world. What is taken as an identity, then, is an outside or alien image. The significance of what Lacan terms the mirror stage is the structuring of identity as alien and fictive (an important aspect of the Lacanian framework that traditional psychoanalytic film theory has stressed). Lacan describes the identity that is structured through the premirror and mirror stages as the moi to express its function as a primary ego. Furthermore, he defines the characteristics of the moi as alienated, “unified,” and nonindividuated—the result of its specular logic. Lacan argues that it is only through acquiring language, the corollary of the Oedipal stage, that the child learns to differentiate and thus form a separate identity. For Lacan, the experience of the Oedipal crisis is both a learning experience and a traumatic one. The child learns to separate the identity of the mother from itself, but only referentially: by the mother’s relationship to an other— expressed as Other(A) by Lacan—the father. The father thus serves, to use the term of Ragland-Sullivan, as the “representational agent of separation” or “the phallic signifier” in Lacan’s terms.19 By dividing the Imaginary fusion between the child and mother, the phallic signifier (the role of the father) functions to impose boundaries on the child’s identity by imposing “No” on the Imagi-

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nary Desire for unity with the mother. This “No” of the father (termed “theName-of-the-father” by Lacan in a play on words between non and nom) becomes the first symbol for the child: representing difference and law and thereby introducing the order of symbols.20 In learning difference and acquiring language, the child learns how to represent itself and thereby repress the trauma of castration through alienation. By identifying with the father as difference, as a representational agent (i.e., the difference between paternal role and biological being), the child learns to substitute itself (to replace its primary identity constituted by objects of desire) for a representation of itself (an ego, the sense of itself as distinct unity symbolized by its name) and thus distance itself from the pain of castration. Lacan refers to this process as primary repression, which causes the “splitting” of the subject into the moi (the unconscious subject of identifications and narcissism) and the je (the subject who speaks). Lacan sees the division of the subject between moi and je as a complex and dynamic structuration rather than a simple binary operation between conscious and unconscious. Indeed, close readings of Lacan demonstrate that the moi and the je operate in both conscious and unconscious systems.21 He characterizes the moi as the unconscious subject of identifications but also as a primary libido: driving for fusion and recognition. Thus he argues that “the human individual fixes upon himself an image that alienates him from himself . . . [where] the energy and the form on which this organization of the passions that he will call his ego is based.” 22 In addition, Lacan characterizes the moi as paranoid, because it is limited to its specular logic and a dependence on the object world.23 In characterizing the je, Lacan asserts: The je is born through the reference to the you . . . [it] is constituted at first in a linguistic experience, in reference to the you, and . . . this takes place within a relation in which the other shows him, what?— orders, desires, which he must recognize, his father’s mother’s educators’ or his peers’ and mates’.24

Thus, for Lacan, the je is more than a grammatical term, it is a functional representation operating in response to the internal demands of the moi and the external demands of the social world. What Lacan stresses in the function of the je, the “subject determined by language and speech,” is its function of stabilizing moi forces through representation.25 As a result of its paranoiac structure and its spatial logic, the moi drives for fusion with the object world. The je thus operates to displace and temper the drives of the moi through the abstracting and temporalizing properties of language. As Lacan

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argues: “The word doesn’t answer to the spatial distinctiveness of the object, which is always ready to be dissolved in an identification with the subject, but to its temporal dimension.” 26 Thus, subjected to the drive of the moi, but displacing and repressing those desires through language, the je functions as a dynamic representation: the “subject” of consciousness that takes its specific shape from unconscious introjections of the father, the law he represents (cultural norms and values), and the language which conveys it, a discretely specific process engendering the individual’s own personal history as well as the historical specificity of his/her culture. Lacan’s understanding of the effect of a primary void in being and the role language plays to compensate that void and structure an unconscious dynamizes the subject’s relationship to discourse as a continuing chain of substitutions and displacements in the service of recognition and repression. His concept of the human subject, split between conscious and unconscious, and divided between the moi and the je, makes language a dynamic field where repression and the drive for recognition are constituted. At the base of any Lacanian critical method, therefore, must be the concept of a desiring subject, driven toward discourse (of which the film text is but one site) as a means of reconstituting identity through identification. The subjugation to a historically specific social order and the language that conveys it determines that the secondary unconscious constitutes a further alienation of the subject, an alienation that is masked, however, through the functioning of identity. Subjugation to the Symbolic order thus determines that culture itself becomes part of the composite which forms identity and engenders historical specificity (both individual and cultural) at that site.27 Symbolic identification, therefore, becomes the mode through which the subject identifies through culture as a means of repressing alienation and maintaining the continuity between identifications and language. For Lacan, then, identification is not a singular process, but, rather, a dialectical relationship, dominated by two modes, each with their own object—image and language—whose site of continuity is the Other(A). T H E T E X T - S U B J E C T R E L AT I O N S H I P

Lacan’s dialectical framework provides for a more expanded model beyond the desiring subject and toward a more complex construct where cultural texts and ideology play a vital role in maintaining identity— expressed in Lacanian terms as maintaining the continuity of the Other(A). The film text

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inscribes the structure of this continuity through the join between image and the discursive operations which structure the text. Stephen Heath argues that: the match of film and world is a matter of representation, and representation is in turn a matter of discourse, of the organization of the images, the definition of the “views,” their construction. It is the discursive operations that decide the work of a film and ultimately determine the scope of the analogical incidence of the images; in this sense at least, film is a series of languages, a history of codes.28

What Heath’s argument demonstrates is the necessity for the text’s discursive operations to join image identification with language. The text’s ability to obtain Symbolic identification therefore becomes the primary site for maintaining the continuity between identifications and language. Traditional psychoanalytic film theory, influenced by the work of Christian Metz and Jean-Louis Baudry, has neglected this important component of Lacan’s theory of identification.29 In the work of both Metz and Baudry there is an overprivileging of the Imaginary and, subsequently, Imaginary identification. In the process, the concept of Symbolic identification has been excluded from the analysis of the film text. Jane Feur, for example, locates Symbolic identification within the narrative process of television, but not film.30 Even studies which focus directly on theories of identification, such as Ann Friedberg’s “Theories of Cinematic Identification,” ignore Symbolic identification and fail to get past the mirror stage.31 In his critique of Metz’s work, however, Geoffrey Nowell-Smith makes clear that at least one of the implications of overprivileging Imaginary identification in film theory is that the content of the film becomes irrelevant,32 a point that is implied in both Barbara Klinger and Noel Carroll’s criticism of the concept of spectator positioning.33 Furthermore, Nowell-Smith’s argument that secondary (or Symbolic) identifications break down specularity, but displace it “onto relations which are more properly intra-textual,” 34 indicates that the process of Symbolic identification is a significant textual operation within narrative film. This is what leads Thomas Elsaesser to conclude that the process of, and relationship between, Imaginary and Symbolic identification is both simultaneous and dynamic,35 a position more in keeping with Lacan’s own theorizing when he argues: Narcissistic [Symbolic] identification—the word identification, without differentiation, is unusable— . . . is identification with the other which, under normal circumstances, enables man to locate precisely his imaginary and libidinal relation to the world in general.36

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A Lacanian model of text-subject relations, therefore, has to take into account not only the functioning of the Imaginary and libidinal relations, but also the manner in which Symbolic identification regulates that process and the historical specificity under which that regulation occurs. The historical specificity of these operations functions to maintain the continuity between identifications and language, providing pleasure (jouissance) through the Imaginary unity that such a continuity creates.37 Traditional psychoanalytic film theory emphasizes the construction of apparently unified subjects through discourse, but fails to establish the historically specific basis of continuity between identifications and language necessary for maintaining subject unity at the site of the Other(A): the introjection of specific cultural norms and values as a basis of identity which determines the subject’s ability to identify symbolically.38 The primary role that Symbolic identification exercises in securing Imaginary pleasure establishes culture as the fundamental mode of reception in the intersection between text and subject.39 The analysis of textual operations must therefore conduct itself through the prism of the historical spectator: the identity the text addresses—through culture—to construct a unified subject. The text-based Lacanian model developed here therefore conducts itself through the conception of an implied spectator: the Symbolic identity the text constructs as a means of obtaining Imaginary pleasure. This is not an ideal spectator—a kind of “sum total” of all the textual operations—but, rather, as Seymour Chatman illustrates, “the audience presupposed by the narrative itself.” 40 The complex functioning of identity that is at stake in this concept is further articulated by Chatman when he argues that “the real reader may refuse his projected role at some ultimate level—nonbelievers do not become Christians to read The Inferno or Paradise Lost. But such refusal does not contradict the ‘as if ’ acceptance of implied readership.” 41 It is this identity that individual subjects must come to identify with at the expense of what Elsaesser describes as “more differentiated modes of ideological and psychological self-recognition.” 42 Indeed, Lacan’s work emphasizes culture over other modes of “(mis)recognition” since it is the social Symbolic system which assigns meaning to categorical distinctions. Furthermore, it is the subject’s position toward culture vis-à-vis subjugation that determines the degree to which s/he will identify with any categorical distinction. What is significant for a text-based mode of analysis, therefore, is not so much the various categorical distinctions (within culture) that can be brought to bear on the process of reception, but, rather, the ways in which classical texts induce spectators to repress difference, promoting in-

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stead a homogenous cultural identity through Imaginary identification. Within the operations of the classical film text, individual subjects themselves determine whether to identify symbolically; however, rejecting Symbolic identification risks precluding Imaginary pleasure. Textual operations function to deny the collective differences which intersect them and demand the same kind of denial from the individual spectator as a means of obtaining jouissance. Locating the text’s denial of difference and its construction of a Symbolic identity through inducements of Imaginary pleasure engenders difficulties: it appears to replicate the ahistorical mode of investigation of traditional psychoanalytic theory, which has been accurately criticized for eliminating audience particularities and therefore history itself from the field of investigation.43 What is not evident, however, is whether this repression of history is inherent to the method itself or results from the specific object of study. Jameson’s discussion on the insistence of interpretive modes clarifies this point. In discussing theories of expressive causality, for example, he argues that “if interpretation in terms of expressive causality or of allegorical master narratives remains a constant temptation, this is because such master narratives have inscribed themselves in the texts . . .” 44 In a similar manner, theories of subject positioning occlude difference (and keep insisting themselves) precisely because the repression of collective particularities has been consistently inscribed in film texts. Furthermore, criticisms of Lacanian theory based on the denial of difference and repression of history are directed at specific appropriations of the theory and are less accurate for critiquing the theory itself. The dialectical model that Lacan constructs forecloses the possibility of a completely ahistorical theory. Indeed, the historicity of Lacan’s theorizing, alluded to earlier by Jameson and developed more fully by Theresa Brennan,45 is itself evidenced in Lacan’s discussion of sublimation, where he historically distinguishes cognitive processing based on the cultural Symbolic system.46 Rather than characterize all Lacanian theory as ahistorical, a theoretically productive critique would delineate what Jameson describes as the structural limitations of the specific aspects of the theory that are ahistorical. This would be a process of determining the “seam which strategically seals . . . off [interpretive systems] from the social totality of which they are a part . . . [to] constitute their object of study as an apparently closed phenomenon.” 47 Applied to Lacan’s work, Jameson’s argument is nowhere more evident than in the structural account of alienation. In Lacan’s framework, alienation is a

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closed phenomenon, immune to history, an inevitable process precisely because it is inherent in the nature of the subject and the signifier. By conceptualizing alienation structurally, and therefore outside of history, Lacan’s framework elides the historical process which has determined the role that alienation exercises in the social totality: its function and value. In other words, his account keeps invisible the processes whereby a specific mode of production, imposing the logic of the individual, forecloses collective possibilities to transcend alienation. Lacan’s subject is always and utmost alienated from him/herself. The resolution or suspension of alienation is then structured or conceived as a “libidinal Utopia of the individual body,” to use Jameson’s term.48 As a structural limitation, however, this does not reveal an error in Lacan’s thinking as much as it demonstrates conditions under which the theory was formulated. The systematic quantification and rationalization of capitalism attempts to impose the structural limitation of the category of the individual on most, if not all cultural discourse. The result of such a structural limitation is a privileging of a libidinal utopia of the individual body over collective utopias. The structural limitations imposed on Lacan’s theoretical framework are a result of their formulation under late capitalism. This does not, however, prevent its appropriation for conducting historical analysis. Rather, the manner in which Lacanian theory represses its formulation under capitalism can indicate the ways in which textual operations perform the same function.49 Lacanian theory articulates this process in the relationship between identifications and language—Imaginary and Symbolic identification. In describing the relationship between the two modes of identification, Ragland-Sullivan argues that subjects constantly reconstitute their identities within a synchronic, cultural signifying context—a Symbolic order—to secure themselves a fixed value in terms of their Imaginary “self ” . . . When a subject’s Imaginary ideal is confirmed by Symbolic labels and approved by Real events, the accompanying feeling is one of wholeness or jouissance. 50

Thus, subjects must identify symbolically—that is, take their place in culture 51 —to fix Imaginary identification and thereby maintain continuity at the site of the Other(A). Furthermore, what this process leads to, jouissance, is precisely a libidinal utopia of the individual body—the Imaginary wholeness of the subject as monad, as complete entity unto itself, and not, for example, some kind of totalizing integration into the collective.

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A Lacanian framework can thus articulate the manner in which textual operations recapitulate this process. Classical Hollywood narrative, for example, inscribes the structure of this process diegetically, where the figure of a protagonist, by obtaining his goals, achieves a kind of wholeness defined through the structure of the individual.52 Furthermore, textual operations function to promote spectator identification with these structures that realize a libidinal utopia of the individual. The structures and operations of classical narrative function to promote specific Symbolic (cultural) identifications as a means of establishing (fixing) Imaginary objects of desire. This process maintains the continuity between identifications and language at the site of the Other(A) and provides the subject with jouissance—an individual jouissance of the body. In this manner it functions to reify the category of the individual and thus foreclose, repress, or recontain collective logic.53 Furthermore, what becomes significant for a Lacanian framework seeking to elucidate the ideological function of signification is the manner in which cinematic narration maintains—and indeed reifies—the continuity of the Other(A) of its historical spectator by articulating a dialectic that libidinizes the Symbolic itself— conferring Imaginary wholeness in the place of its lack, what Lacan terms the “lack in the Other.” 54 Slavoj Zizek thus argues that the place of a Lacanian criticism of ideology is precisely where fantasy fills the lack in the Symbolic.55 This lack within the Symbolic is the designation of the necessary gap between the signifier and the signified. Despite the fact that language, in Lacan’s words, is “a network, a net over the entirety of things, over the totality of the real,” 56 there is always that which escapes or resists symbolization. This leads Lacan to conclude that “there is no language in existence for which there is any question of its inability to cover the whole field of the signified.” 57 Indeed, his definition of the Real is that which resists symbolization entirely.58 The Real as remainder, as “impossible,” 59 marks the limits of both the Symbolic and Symbolic identification as being incomplete, as inevitable lack. It is for this reason that Zizek argues that “every process of identification conferring on us a fixed socio-symbolic identity is ultimately doomed to fail. The function of ideological fantasy is to mask this inconsistency . . . and thus to compensate us for the failed identification.” 60 A Lacanian criticism of ideology, therefore, must begin with the analysis of the dialectic between identificatory processes: Imaginary and Symbolic. At stake here is the manner in which the spectator’s identification with the assumption of a Symbolic identity—a Symbolic mandate—provides the wholeness of Imaginary pleasure. It is in this dialectic that the structure of

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the classical text seeks to eradicate difference through the libidinizing of a Symbolic mandate. In addition, however, a Lacanian criticism of ideology must be able to determine the manner in which the lack in the Other is repressed by the text through the structure of fantasy. As Zizek argues, “fantasy is a construction whose function is to hide this void, this ‘nothing,’ that is the lack in the Other.” 61 The structure of fantasy in the text, therefore, is not on the side of the Imaginary, but, rather, is that point where the impossible is made present—indeed becomes the means by which symbolization is possible. Lacanian analysis of texts is thus not so much a searching for master narratives, but, rather, determining the basis by which signification constructs itself and the ideological and hegemonic functions engendered in that process. Semiotics insists that signification and meaning do not spring forth from external reality, but, instead, are imposed on reality as a result of pacts and agreements. What a Lacanian ideological critique provides is the ability to integrate the social consequences (ideological and hegemonic) of the signifying pact and its resultant meaning with the role of the individual inscribed within that process. A P P LY I N G L A C A N

Restoring some of the lesser-known aspects of Lacan’s theory does not itself create a model. The three chapters that follow all contribute to the construction of such a model by examining an individual text for its signifying structures, the spectator they address, and the particular aspect of Lacanian theory that can elucidate their operation. The texts chosen for such examination, Rome: Open City, Bicycle Thieves, and La terra trema, all come from a period of Italian film known as Neorealism. The choice of Neorealism and these specific texts is motivated by several factors. To begin with, studies of psychoanalysis and film have been dominated by either classical Hollywood or German cinema as the domain of investigation, including recent revisionist work.62 There comes a point, and the field has probably reached it, where the strength of revisionist approaches is compromised by their application to an already saturated domain of investigation. For this reason, it is far more necessary to expand psychoanalytic film theory to new areas than to reexamine past ones. Second, this Lacanian approach emphasizes the role of Symbolic identification and classical narrative’s tendency toward the denial of difference and homogenized Symbolic identification. This places a significance on film’s

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role of exercising cultural containment and unanimity. Placing such an investigation within more divided or fragmented societies can provide vivid insight into the operations of culture as it seeks to exercise containment and the role that narrative film can play in that process. Such fragmentation and division profoundly characterizes postwar Italian society. Even before the collapse of the state through the war, Italian culture was marked by its segmentation and regionalism. Indeed, regionalism traditionally defined identity in the Italian subject much more than nationality did, a symptom or a result of a culture that did not become a unified political entity until the 1860’s.63 In addition to this tradition, however, James Hay points out that Italian culture in the 1920’s and 1930’s, under the influence of increased modernization, became much more unstable and atomized.64 Hay situates Fascism within this context, conceiving of Fascism beyond its political definitions and more as a cultural response to the divisions and disunifying forces within the social system. In this respect, Fascism in its attempts to unify disparate forces within culture—however political in effect and intent— nonetheless constituted and conducted itself through the process and domain of signification (a fundamental aspect of the structure of Fascism that sociological and political perspectives largely ignore). An analysis of Italian narrative film, therefore, cannot overlook the highly fragmented cultural arena in which the films were produced and consumed as a fundamental aspect in the historical specificity of their signification.

P O S T WA R I TA L I A N C U LT U R E A N D N E O R E A L I S M

The collapse of the Fascist state (as a result of the Allied invasion and partisan activities) resulted in further divisions within Italian culture. The effect of Fascism’s failure was to further define (and divide) identity within culture into three general groups via their relationship to Fascism: anti-Fascists, exFascists, and the complicit. Indeed, Paul Ginsborg argues that with the dissolution of the state two occupying armies, as well as three Italian governments (Benito Mussolini’s Republic, the CLNAI , and the Kingdom of the South), claimed the obedience and allegiance of Italian citizens, forcing political and moral choices upon which lives could depend.65 The postwar culture that Neorealism found itself situated within can thus be characterized by its deep-rooted, traditional divisions, based on region (with its own sep-

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arate language[s]) and class, and more immediate segmentation from the effects of Fascism and its failure. The psychoanalytic framework constructed here seeks to determine the degree to which these films attempted to eradicate, deny, or mediate cultural difference and segmentation. In this respect, this study attempts to determine the degree to which the construction of specific Symbolic identities provided or failed to provide meaning which Italian subjects could “misrecognize” as their own Other(A) —their own unconscious meaning system. Furthermore, to the extent that Neorealist films did provide pleasure through this kind of “misrecognition,” analyzing their relationship to the historical spectator should determine the ideological function of Imaginary pleasure or its absence. What needs to be determined, therefore, is whether the construction of pleasure is defined in terms of individual wholeness or whether unpleasure is defined as individual alienation. To the degree that the texts’ construction of Imaginary pleasure (or lack thereof ) serves an ideological function, it simultaneously articulates what Jameson describes as the “Utopian impulse,” the expression of the unity of a collectivity.66 As Jameson argues: The achieved collectivity or organic group of whatever kind— oppressors fully as much as oppressed—is Utopian not in itself, but only insofar as all such collectivities are themselves figures for the ultimate concrete collective life of an achieved Utopian or classless society.67

This argument leads him to conclude that any class discourse takes on historical specificity by the manner in which it projects its form of collective unity. Given the amount of upheaval and competing impulses within the social system under which Neorealist films were produced, it is not difficult to conceive of stylistic differences—and difference in general—among Neorealist films as symptomatic of different ideological impulses: the projection of different forms of collective unity as an attempt to mediate an unstable social domain. Indeed, to the degree that the social domain can be perceived as unstable, it is possible to determine a failure in the uniformity of cultural signifying practices: an inability to contain through symbolization the fundamental contradictions and antagonisms that structure the social domain as a response to the impossible Real. Cultural instability is precisely those moments when a historical balance toward uniformity in signifying practices breaks down, replaced with competing attempts to symbolize the social domain. In this respect, the histori-

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cal point at which the demise of Fascism within Italian culture can be identified signifies precisely a point at which Italian culture fails in a certain level of uniformity in signifying practice. This failure leads to a far more visible struggle between competing attempts to structure signifying practices. It is within a domain of such instability and competing attempts for dominance in cultural signifying practice that Neorealist films were constituted. What is significant for a study of Neorealism, however, is not just the manner in which stylistic differences between individual films can be considered symptomatic of cultural instability, but also the manner in which this same instability might constitute a basis of similarity and difference between signifying practices. What Lacan’s work makes clear is that the impossibility of the Real, its residue and irruption into the Symbolic, is the site of anxiety for the individual subject: the affective state of an inability to symbolize the Real. Instability of culture—the demise of a cultural signifying practice in dominance—thus brings the threat of anxiety insofar as the Real protrudes and invades, lacks containment through symbolization. Constituted within an unstable culture, Italian Neorealist films may lack stylistic uniformity; however, each may constitute an attempt at containment. In this respect, individual texts become significant sites of projection, negotiation, and identification of figures of collective unity. The structural limitations imposed on that process, and the ability to provide pleasure through and beyond the dialectic of identification, indicate the manner in which ideological containment symbolized and conducted itself. In attempting such analysis of select films of Neorealism, this study (drawing as it does on Marxist critical theory) seeks to demonstrate the central place psychoanalysis can play in ideological criticism. The level of analysis required to make an investigation of each Neorealist film being beyond the scope of a single project, this study analyzes five films within the Neorealist period, three of which constitute a kind of locus classicus of Neorealism: Roma, città aperta (Rome: Open City), Ladri di biciclette (Bicycle Thieves), and La terra trema (The Earth Trembles). Each of these three films is considered by traditional scholarship the (Neorealist) “masterwork” of the most prominent Neorealist directors (Roberto Rossellini, Vittorio De Sica, and Luchino Visconti). In this sense, these films form (at least part of ) the canon of Neorealism, even though scholars disagree as to what constitutes Neorealism: when it began and ended and what the limits of its scope are. Despite the many differences on a variety of issues on the subject, however, there is little disagreement that all three of the above films are Neo-

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realist. The effect of auteurist perspectives can be seen in the constitution of this Neorealist core. Without stylistic similarity, the basis for comparison becomes the relationship between the authors and their historical-cultural context. A detailed analysis of each film through the Lacanian critical method developed within this study might determine whether there is a nonauteurist basis for such a grouping and what the basis for such a grouping might be.68 If, for example, box-office success can be an indicator for pleasure, then these films can also be seen in some respects as a cross-section of the relationship between Neorealism and pleasure. Rome: Open City achieved both box-office popularity and critical acclaim. As P. Adams Sitney notes, it received support from “nearly all sides of the political spectrum . . .” 69 Bicycle Thieves was less popular at the box office, received much less critical support, and instead generated much consternation.70 La terra trema failed at the box office, won a minor award at the Venice film festival, and was assailed by most critics.71 The apparent difference with respect to pleasure thus needs to be analyzed through a Lacanian framework to determine the relationship between text, meaning, and subject. Furthermore, if such differences do exist between pleasure and historical spectators, another basis for categorizing films as Neorealist needs to be found. The last two chapters of this study analyze two of the classic “transitional” texts, Riso Amaro (Bitter Rice) and Senso, in order to examine the issues surrounding that search. Here it is important to determine the degree to which, if there is any element that defines Neorealism, it is absent or otherwise degraded in films which traditional scholarship considers either lesser Neorealist texts (in the case of Bitter Rice) or points of departure (in the case of Senso). The first three chapters develop a model through their application of theory to film. The last two chapters then apply the model, freed—as they are— of having to explicate as they go along. The Lacanian critical methods developed in this investigation take as their object the functioning of desire in signification. Rather than being viewed as a unified and expressive field of stable meaning, human discourse is understood instead as an unstable and dialectical domain: the site of the moi’s demand for recognition and drive for fusion, repressed and displaced by the je. The Lacanian critical methods developed here are thus organized around analyzing the structure of this dialectical relationship as it functions within discourse. As Lacan argues: “It is therefore always in the relation between the subject’s ego (moi) and the ‘I’ (je) of his discourse that you must understand the meaning of the discourse . . .” 72 In the Lacanian framework, the functioning of desire within discourse

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operates through the structure of the moi: its drive for fusion and demands for recognition. Thus, determining the site of moi operations as they are inscribed within discourse is fundamental. In this respect Lacan argues: “There is an inertia in the imaginary which we find making itself felt in the discourse of the subject, sowing discord in the discourse . . .” 73 RaglandSullivan expands on this when she asserts: “The moi can be fathomed as a structure of disruption in the je’s unified discourse, as it positions itself in relation to authority (the phallic signifier) and recognition requisites.” 74 Ragland-Sullivan’s argument thus provides a conceptual paradigm that organizes a Lacanian critical method around the analysis of three interrelated structures: unity of discourse, relations to authority, and recognition requests. Analyzing discourse for these three structures can determine the functioning of desire as it operates through the fundamental relationship between the moi and the je. The goal here is to delineate the manner in which the signifying subject intersects the specific and material signifying practice of the film text. Within this framework, then, the text is not so much determined as it is an encounter—an appropriation, articulation, translation, and (at times) transformation of cultural signifying practices within the text’s symbolic praxis. This framework thus mediates between the historical-cultural context within which Neorealist films were produced, the transformation of those “social phenomena” into the operations of the text, and the place of the historical spectator within those operations. Indeed, as detailed analysis of these films shows, the anxiety within postwar Italian culture—the destabilizing effects of the collapse of the Italian state under Fascism—becomes inscribed within the textual operations of each film. In this respect, it is possible to determine Neorealism’s encounter with the Real and the anxiety of postwar Italian culture as they are translated into the very structure of plot, problematizing the traditional relationships of pleasure and creating, as it were, a “cinema of anxiety” whose complex identificatory relationships must be located beyond the Imaginary.

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2 Rome: Open City Anxiety, Ideology, and Cultural Containment

Rome: Open City is a film about fear, everyone’s fear, but above all my own. R oberto R ossellini 1

In his discussion of Neorealism, Geoffrey Nowell-Smith argues that “the real heart of the Neorealist movement was the Resistance film,” 2 a statement that (implicitly or otherwise) concurs with much of traditional scholarship.3 Although the intersection of “Resistance” and “film” has been written about extensively, a Lacanian framework can make a unique ideological contribution in its investigation of culture and film by its unwillingness to accept social phenomena (institutions, associations, groups) as part of the Real or, in Kantian terms, as things-in-themselves. Rather, a Lacanian framework insists on such social phenomena as part of the Symbolic, as a representation, a signifier in need of further analysis. In this respect, the Resistance, both in Italian culture itself and as signifier within the material signifying practice of film, is a Symbolic construction—the site of a pact (or agreement) that will govern behaviors and actions within a specific social domain.4 Lacan’s concept of the totalizing function of the signifier, its ability to present itself as a thing-in-itself (as something real), is demonstrated in the signifier of the Resistance. As a social pact that governs actions, the Resistance not only directs the actions and behaviors of those who participate as members of the group (or association), but comes to envelop the entire social domain. Even those who oppose the Resistance, who in some sense dis-

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agree with the pact, nonetheless recognize its existence and in their attempt to destroy it come to have their actions defined by it. The appropriation of the signifier of the Resistance within the material signifying practice of film, however, marks a site where (as with any cultural signifier that is appropriated) the pact that defines the meaning of the signifier can be renegotiated—the signifier redefined. The meanings constructed around and through the Resistance as signifier are thus an important site for analysis. The status of the Resistance as a signifier-in-dominance within Italian culture and the early practice of Neorealism is thus not the result of its status as political reality (being a thing-in-itself ), but, rather, rests within the degree to which its function as signifier serves as a site of organizing and determining struggles and conflicts between social forces. The Resistance functioned as a signifier-in-dominance within a culture that experienced itself as fragmented through and by several arenas of identification, as discussed earlier. The pact which structures the meaning and function of (the Italian) Resistance is itself a site where a fragmented culture attempted to image social unity. The structure of a pact which seeks to establish social unity also determines the signifying function of the Resistance-as-signifier in Rome: Open City. The film’s appropriation of the Resistance stresses the cooperation between diverse and even antagonistic segments within Italian culture. Indeed, the Resistance as a site of unity—a popular movement—becomes the site of utopian ideals figured at the end of the film. What is critical for a Lacanian ideological analysis is the manner in which the struggle for and image of social unity at the site of the Resistance is situated within a text whose unity of discourse is undermined by disruptions of plot. The classical film text’s ability to inscribe a multiplicity of signifying practices and organize them into the semblance of a solitary discourse is a significant site for early appropriations of Lacanian theory. The film text is a particularly rich field for such an analysis since (in its narrative form) the goal of unity is the principle that determines the relationship among what are otherwise several distinct formal elements. Indeed, Heath argues that film “is potentially a veritable flux of affects, a plurality of intensities, and narrative functions to contain that affectivity . . .” 5 Furthermore, he asserts that narrative achieves this function because “narrative in cinema is first and foremost the organization of a point of view through an image-flow . . .” 6 Heath’s argument stresses the unifying role that narrative exercises on what is otherwise a fundamental potential for disruption within the film text: editing. Narrative construction combines a multiplicity of separate shots,

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each of which inscribes a different point of viewing or perspective. The structure of narrative works to organize these separate points of view into a coherent and unified point of intelligibility for the spectator. While Neorealist films in some respects challenged certain narrative conventions (among them tight, linear, goal-oriented causality), an adherence to intelligibility is nonetheless uniform. Analysis of Rome: Open City demonstrates that, despite threats to character and other manipulations of plot that function (however temporarily) disruptively, the film conforms to Heath’s argument that “it is narrative significance that at any moment sets the space of the frame to be followed and read . . . Narrative contains the mobility that could threaten the clarity of vision in a constant renewal of perspective.” 7 Rome: Open City prepares its audience for a disruptive style and the renewing of perspective in its very opening. The first two shots of the film function to establish the time and space of the narrative. The German patrol marching through the Piazza di Spagna sets a specific space (Rome) and a fairly specific time (the German occupation of World War II ). Actions are more habitual than specific: synchronized marching and harmonious singing contribute to a sense of a routine. In this manner, the first two shots begin to establish the story world. The third shot, however, abruptly shifts into action, thrusting the spectator in medias res. The Germans on patrol are replaced by a shot of a military truck. After the truck comes to a quick stop, German soldiers jump out, run over to a building, and pound on the door. The action here shifts from the habitual or recurring to specific and directed. Haste and lack of ceremony in the third shot distinguish it from the previous shots. The shift from establishing the story to specific action occurs without any clear causal, spatial, or temporal relationship between the shots, pronounced by the absence of any motivation for the change between the two shots. This functions to create a gap in the plot that foregrounds the disruption of narrative flow.8 The function of such an early disruption is to establish narrative disruption as a stylistic norm. Moreover, the significance of disruption for a Lacanian analysis is the way it actively draws attention to breaks in the unity of discourse, working against what Stephen Heath described earlier as narrative containment: the leveling off of the plurality of affects within the film text. In this respect, Luigi Chiarini’s argument that “the film lacks the usual structure” does not describe the absence of specific plot structures,9 which many scholars find abundantly,10 but, rather, the frequent lack of traditional narrative effect: the unifying and organizing function of containment. Conceptualizing narrative as a process of containment—a transforming

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of the primary disruptions of the text into a continuous maintenance of an intelligible point of viewing—is a fundamental contribution of early appropriations of Lacanian psychoanalysis within film theory. The strength of these approaches rests in their explication of textual encoding: delineating the historical specificity of the text’s appropriation, transformation, and repression of cultural signifiers and signifying practices. The limitation to these approaches, however, is an inability to provide the same level of historical specificity to textual decoding. Narrative’s ability to provide unified discourse became the means in itself toward providing pleasure to the spectator. This reduces both the specificity of the text (the precise elements of the text that narrative imposes unity upon) and the specificity of spectatorship (the historical contingencies regulating the text-subject interaction) to ancillary components of narrative analysis. This chapter demonstrates how Lacan’s theory of personality can restore to narrative analysis the historical specificity at stake in decoding the disparate signifiers that narrative structure functions to unify. Within the narrative function—the unifying structure that organizes the multiple points of view and affects of the film text—is a relationship between signifiers whose specific structure determines the avenues through which different modes of identification can be engaged. The function of this revisionism is not so much to ignore earlier contributions to narrative analysis as to integrate them with the historical dimension of spectatorship. This is a particularly important realignment for Rome: Open City, since traditional scholarship has discussed the film’s stylistic departure from classical Hollywood and Fascist cinema but overlooked the historical dimension of spectatorship in that process. The prevalence of heightened shifts between recurring and specific action and information gaps within the narrative makes Rome: Open City well suited for Meir Sternberg’s narratological work on temporal structures and expositional modes. Furthermore, integrating Sternberg’s work with Lacanian ideological criticism can provide the historical dimension of spectatorship lacking both in traditional scholarship on the film and in Sternberg’s own narratology (since ultimately he offers a model of the text, not of spectatorship). The site of such an integration can be situated at the concept of unity of discourse. Sternberg’s work on temporal structures and expositional modes demonstrates that narrative itself is not so much a single unified structure as it is a system of relations characterized by gaps and substitutions. By distin-

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guishing between expositional modes (characterized by their general, deconcretized, and static discourse) and actional dynamics (distinguished by its specificity and concreteness) within narrative, Sternberg’s analysis permeates the apparent unity of the structure of narrative, delineating instead a dynamic system of relations between discourses. In Sternberg’s narrative theory, the function of exposition is to regulate, delay, and stabilize the forward movement of narrative, itself articulated as actional dynamics. The regulating and stabilizing function of exposition makes it a primary site in the process of narrative containment.11 As further analysis demonstrates, however, the plot structure of Rome: Open City frequently subverts the role of the exposition, working against narrative containment and creating narrative confusion rather than stability. Within the first half of the film, three disruptions in particular are grounded in this expositional subversion: the previously discussed opening, Marina’s “entrance” during the search of Manfredi’s apartment (via her phone call), and Laura’s intrusion into Francesco’s apartment during Pina and Manfredi’s conversation. Neither of these scenes plays a significant role in the ongoing action of the plot. Indeed, each could be characterized as a minor scene in that respect. These scenes do contribute to important definitions of character, however, and, even more significantly, function to create the subversion of exposition and the subsequent lack of narrative containment as a normative system of the text. The search of Manfredi’s apartment illustrates this point. Here the actional dynamics takes on the form of the Germans’ pursuit of Manfredi, the narrative drive defined as their goal to catch him. While searching the apartment, the German officer’s interrogation of Manfredi’s landlady is interrupted by a phone call, which the officer answers in hopes of obtaining more information. Upon his answering, the film shifts to Marina in her bedroom (it is she who initiates the call). Asking for Giorgio Manfredi, Marina repeats the name used previously by the German officer. She is thereby linked to the subject of the Germans’ pursuit, and her call creates the possibility of contributing to Manfredi’s capture. The conflict that is created stems from Marina’s lack of knowledge and subsequent confusion, when her habitual action (calling Manfredi) interrupts the specific action of the search. As exposition, the sequence functions to introduce a new character and links that character to Manfredi, subject of the action. Rather than stabilize and regulate, however, Marina’s exposition amplifies the action by creating more possibilities for its direction.12 This expositional misappro-

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priation destabilizes the narrative, contributing to confusion rather than containment. This sense of confusion is then displaced diegetically as Marina’s confusion. In a negative fashion, therefore, the scene demonstrates the structural relationship between the exposition and actional dynamics, articulating through its absence the kind of containment that is at stake in the function of the exposition. Further, the scene also evidences that the exposition’s function of regulating, stabilizing, and delaying is bound to the actional dynamics as source of narrative drive.13 It is at the site of narrative drive that the relationship of exposition to actional dynamics can be seen to correspond to the structure and logic of Lacan’s theory of personality: the relationship between what he terms the moi and the je. 14 It is frequently overlooked in English translations that Lacan’s terms are an attempt to replace the concept of the ego with a more dialectical model. In attempting to return to Freud’s contention that the ego is not so much an entity in itself as it is the organized portion of the id, Lacan develops a theory of personality that is split between conscious and unconscious and then further divided between the moi and the je. For Lacan, then, the moi is a kind of primary ego, a site where “the energy and form on which this organization of the passions . . . is based.” 15 This leads him to further argue that “libido and the moi are on the same side.” 16 These three crucial components to the structure of the moi— energy, form, and organization— correspond to what have become essential components of narrative for several different schools of literary theory (though not explicitly). Arguing that there is a correspondence between the structure of narrative and aspects of the human psyche is not to argue for an implied determinism: that the structure of the psyche determines the structure of narrative or vice versa. Moreover, to argue that the structures correspond is not to imply that narrative is a kind of simulacrum of the psyche: a concept that intrigues Roland Barthes with respect to the Oedipus complex,17 but which Jameson warns against in terms of the trajectory from the Imaginary to the Symbolic as a master narrative determining the structure of all narrative.18 Thus, to examine the manner in which both the structure of the moi and the structure of narrative have form is not to posit that they have the same form, but, rather, to identify the manner in which they share the logic of form and the structure of form and that, furthermore, the correspondence on the level of structure and logic may be the elementary basis upon which a structural identification begins. Thus, from liberal humanism through postmodernism, narrative has

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been seen as a mode of organization, a position clearly articulated with respect to film by Edward Branigan.19 While some narratologists, like Barthes, and even to a degree Peter Brooks, would argue that this mode of organization is based on the organization of desire (or the passions), such similarity is not a necessary and fundamental position for a Lacanian model. What is primary for Lacan in discourse is recognition, not desire, and spectatorial engagement with non-narrative modes of organization would confirm such a position. Thus, prior to the organization of the trajectory of a desire, what narrative first offers to a spectator is a mode of organization. Further, and in some respects as a result of its organization, narrative is said to have form, which, for example, became the basis for American New Criticism and Formalism to distinguish it from poetry. Here, too, the correspondence between structures is not identical, but structural. For Lacan, the form of the ego is complexly associated with the body. Thus he argues: “Freud underlines that it [the moi] must have an intimate connection with the surface of the body . . . this surface in so far as it is reflected in a form.” 20 It is through this structural logic that the moi and narrative correspond. Narrative offers itself as form, even though different narratologies argue what that form is. The recognition of form thus provides a basis for spectator identification with the narrative and narrative operations (including the discourse of narrative). The correspondence between the energy that defines the moi and narrative structure can be determined in the concept of narrative movement, which is frequently characterized as narrative drive. This can clearly be seen in the work of a structuralist like Barthes, who argues that “Sarrasine . . . is the story of a force (the narrative) and the action of this force . . .” 21 In addition, however, the characterization of narrative as drive, force, or energy can also be seen in work of several Formalists like Vladimir Propp,22 with his emphasis on the horizontal structuring of plot and the reduction of character to the movement of action and plot functioning, and R. S. Crane, who discusses the power engendered in plot.23 Indeed, even Neo-formalists Kristen Thompson and David Bordwell recognize the centrality of desire— the correlative of drive—to the structure of narrative.24 Furthermore, narrative drive or movement is frequently defined as the drive for resolution and the restabilization of events. This drive for restabilization as the object of the drive also corresponds to the structure of the moi, which, as Lacan argues, attempts to “neutralize” as much as possible.25 This neutralizing function of the moi results from its drive to impose homogeneity through narcissistic identification. As Lacan argues, “the ego ex-

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periences reality not only in so far as it lives it, but in so far as it neutralizes it as much as possible.” 26 Lacan’s discussion of the characteristics of the moi establishes another site of correspondence between the moi and narrative drive: their reliance on—but irreducibility to—representation. This principle is also clearly evidenced in Rome: Open City, where narrative drive first takes on the form of the Germans’ desire for control and then gets transferred to the characters of the Resistance and their desire for freedom and control. At each point in the narrative, however, this drive is necessarily linked to the signifier of character. This irreducibility of narrative drive corresponds to the moi insofar as Lacan conceives of this psychical structure as a site of form and organization of drive and Imaginary tension, but (like narrative) it is also, he maintains, “an object.” 27 Furthermore, Lacan’s frequent stress that the moi is the sum of identifications determines that it is representation which gives form to the moi. 28 Despite its status as object, however, Lacan argues that the moi is not limited to its representations, which give specificity to its form. Rather, he insists upon the irreducible character of the narcissistic structure that characterizes the moi and its formation.29 Thus, a status as object, irreducibility, form, and organization of drive is characteristic of both narrative and Lacan’s concept of the moi. What textual analysis objectifies and localizes as narrative drive is ultimately inseparable from the signifiers that give it form. In this respect, it is possible to isolate the key operational functions of the signifier: giving form to a drive or desire. This key function is what Jameson argues for in his discussion of Freud’s term Vorstellungsrepräsentanz (ideational representative) in order “to underscore the indissociable link” between drive (Trieb) and its representation.30 Insofar as narrative movement or drive can be localized or objectified within the text, it is the result of isolating a signifier giving it form, a structure which finds its organizing function at the site of the moi. This irreducibility of narrative movement to the signifier determines the operation which Sternberg defines as actional dynamics, where the function of the signifier is to give form and specificity to drive or desire. In delineating a second function of signification, the delay and regulation of narrative movement, Sternberg’s model corresponds to the structure and logic of what Lacan termed the je and its exercise of the Symbolic function. As Lacan argues: The symbolic function presents itself as a double movement within the subject: man makes an object of his action, but only in order to restore to this action in

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due time its place as grounding. In this equivocation, operating at every instant, lies the whole process of a function in which action and knowledge alternate.31

The equivocation Lacan describes—the alternation of an action (already at the level of the signifier) and its objectification through signification— delineates the process by which the je (the site of Symbolic organization through the structure of identity) functions to regulate and displace the drives and desires organized at the site of the moi. The process of substitution between actional dynamics and exposition thus can be said to correspond to the continual displacement of moi desire through the functioning of the je. The term limit of narrative is not the master narrative of an acceptance or accession into the Symbolic order (hence the much noted Jameson warning),32 but rather a process of recoupment of the moi’s Imaginary jouissance. The drive of classical narrative is thus constituted as the circular movement of moi desire and recognition requests. Linearity comes into the structure where it corresponds to the je, which anchors meaning and displaces desire into the linearity of representation. Rome: Open City’s subversion of that classical structure can not only be read in terms of its destabilizing of narrative, but can also become the site for analyzing the historical specificity of the signifying practice of the film and the spectator it addresses. The film’s subversion of the expositional function, as mentioned, creates narrative confusion that becomes displaced onto character. This expositional confusion within the structure of plot can be read as the text’s appropriation and transformation of the confusion within Italian culture over their role in the war, culpability for Fascism, and the future direction of the Italian state. Further analysis can further establish this correspondence, in addition to demonstrating the historical dimension of negotiating the meaning of that appropriation and transformation. The confusion over the substitution of exposition for action frequently becomes displaced by diegetic confusion (or conflict) between habitual (or recurring) and specific (or concrete) actions. The first site of this diegetic confusion or conflict between habitual and specific action occurs with Marina’s call to Manfredi’s apartment, as discussed previously. The repetition of this structure can be determined at the introduction of the character most similar to Marina: Laura. The scene which introduces Laura begins with Pina opening Francesco’s apartment for Manfredi. Through her conversation with Manfredi, Pina introduces expositional information by discussing the bakery riot of the previous scene, thereby clarifying prior narrative action. During this relatively

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calm discussion, however, a loud, angry voice is suddenly heard off-screen. Individual close-ups of the characters reveal their reaction to the voice. To Pina, who is talking, the voice is familiar and only a minor distraction: the stuff of everyday life. To Manfredi, who does not know the source, the voice is a potential threat to his safety and is therefore a specific and immediate kind of danger. Just as Pina excuses herself to take care of the distraction, Laura, her sister, bursts into the room, almost immediately recognizing Manfredi. Her entrance into the room serves an expositional function: it introduces a new character to the narrative. In addition, it confirms Pina’s understanding of the interruption as a generalized and recurring action. The disruptive nature of Laura’s intrusion, however, is evidenced by the confusion she generates among the characters. Previous to her entrance the narrative is stable and character relationships are clearly defined. Upon entering the room and recognizing Manfredi, Laura creates doubt and confusion about character relationships. Unclear about the situation, Laura mistakenly believes that Manfredi is there to see her. He confirms this assumption (to protect himself ), which makes Pina doubt the previous exposition of the narrative. Laura then turns on Pina for not telling her sooner that Manfredi was there to see her. For his part, Manfredi is anxious to keep Laura from knowing why he is really there. Laura’s exposition is therefore similar in function to Marina’s earlier exposition. She introduces a new character (herself ) and even establishes character relationships (herself and Manfredi, Pina, and Marina, respectively). Like Marina’s exposition, however, Laura’s is also confusing and disruptive to the narrative rather than being a clarification of it. That the narrative stabilizes through exposition as soon as Laura leaves the scene underscores the difference between the two sets of characters and begins to indicate the function of narrative disruption and stability. In Laura and Marina’s exposition and in the opening, disruption brings both confusion and a threat of danger. These characteristics are symptomatic of the specific manner in which the structure of plot and its narrative disruptions inscribe the structure of anxiety. An elaboration of this concept clarifies the point. Freud defines anxiety as an “intentional reproduction” of an affective state whose function is to safeguard the ego from psychical helplessness in the face of unmet need.33 As a complex ego function, it prevents psychical danger by reproducing an affective state (anxiety) in order to redirect desire away from situations or objects that can lead to unmet need.

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Fig ur e 1 . The introduction of Laura to the story creates confusion among all the characters, temporarily destabilizing the narrative as they try to determine their relationships. courtesy of the museum of modern art , film s tills archive.

Anxiety thus acts as a signal which engages the mechanism of repression to redirect desire. Lacan’s conception of anxiety aligns itself with Freud’s definition. To begin with, Lacan also sees object-loss as central to its structure, arguing that (psychical) castration inaugurates anxiety.34 In addition, his characterization of anxiety as a temporal dimension corresponds with Freud’s delineation of an ego function.35 Finally, both Lacan and Freud conceive of anxiety as a symptom of danger in relationship to the libido. What is of particular significance for a narrative analysis, however, is Lacan’s conception of the aspect of danger within the structure of anxiety. For Lacan, danger results from the subject’s inability to symbolize an encounter with the Real.36 Within a psychoanalytic framework, the structure of anxiety could thus be characterized by four important elements: its temporal dimension, its relationship to object loss, its displacement of danger, and its redirection of desire. Narrative disruptions are by no means unique to Rome: Open City; however, what is significant for this analysis is the manner in which all four of these characteristics are inscribed within the film’s narrative disruptions. To

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begin with, narrative disruptions are constructed as temporal dimensions— suspending or disrupting the forward movement of narrative. Thus, in the opening, narrative disruption occurs as a function of a temporal advance, situating the spectator in medias res before an opening can be fully established.37 Marina and Laura’s respective disruptions also perform this temporal function. Each of their disruptions functions as exposition: introducing new characters in the story world. As exposition, their disruptions perform what Sternberg describes as the expositional function of delaying or retarding the forward movement of narrative.38 Finally, another significant disruption in the film—Pina’s assassination—also evidences this temporal dimension. Here the film’s editing style shifts dramatically in a manner that violates continuity in order to extract the moment from the real time of the narrative and, in the process, place dramatic emphasis on it. In addition to the temporal dimension, however, narrative disruptions within the film construct themselves around the second characteristic: (object) loss. The opening’s gap, which results from a jump in medias res, creates a lack of information from the loss of exposition. This undermines the spectator’s ability to make conclusions about the narrative action, and thus the effect of narrative containment is lost. Narrative ambiguity can be common in the early part of films, especially through the creation of what Sternberg would describe as temporary gaps. What makes this loss so distinctive in Rome: Open City, however (as the discussion below indicates), is the manner in which it functions to direct spectatorial identification—which is most evidenced with the loss of Pina. In the disruption structured around her assassination, the character herself (the object through which narrative has come to be organized) is lost to the narrative. The respective disruptions of Marina and Laura are also constructed around loss. By creating narrative confusion with their exposition rather than clarifying narrative action, Marina and Laura introduce a plurality of affects to ongoing action. Their disruptions therefore cause a loss of narrative containment, interrupting its organized flow. Furthermore, their association with the loss of narrative effect plays an important role in the overall function of inscribing the structure of anxiety and begins to indicate the historical dimension of this structure. Indeed, each of these disruptions must be read through the signifiers of occupation (the opening and Pina’s assassination) and collaboration (Marina and Laura). The negotiation of meaning at stake in this process is conducted through the position, with respect to identity, that the spectators have already defined for themselves with respect

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to the social reality of occupation and collaboration (and their own individual history within that social reality). What an analysis of the structure of anxiety in Rome: Open City demonstrates is the historical dimension of this structure with respect to the spectator. The structure of anxiety inscribed in the text, and its association with the signifiers of occupation and collaboration, is negotiated by a spectator with a distinctive relationship to the social reality of occupation and collaboration (as cultural signifying practices). That is, the spectator’s own lived experience of the social dimensions of occupation and collaboration determines that their meaning within the text—far from being overdetermined by the text—is a site where the spectator seeks to recognize, and negotiates with the text to confirm, the meaning s/he has invested (through the structure of identity) in those signifiers. This negotiation of meaning is evidenced at the site of another characteristic of anxiety, the displacement of danger, which operates both in the appropriation of cultural signifying practices and in the transformation of social phenomena into the structure of the individual. The first operation occurs at the site of the signifier of occupation. Itself constructed around the structures of repression, danger, and threat, the signifier of occupation functions as a displacement for Fascism itself. The social reality of Fascist excesses is transformed within the text into the repressive excesses of German occupation. The film thus displaces the effects of Fascist excesses and cultural repression onto the external image of an Other: the German forces of occupation. This displacement constructs occupation as the Other which “controls” culture and thus “causes” repression—a significant textual operation for structuring identification. Indeed, as a result of this displacement, the historical spectator does not have to negotiate Fascism as the site of cultural repression and excess (thus becoming a crucial site for allowing the audience’s particularities—their own relationship to Fascism—to be suspended). This operation is facilitated in the text’s transformation of social phenomena into the structure of the individual, also determined at the site of the text’s displacement of danger. In each of the narrative disruptions—the opening, Marina’s and Laura’s interruption, and Pina’s assassination—there is either a direct or indirect threat of danger to physical survival. By structuring this danger as an individual phenomenon, however, the text transforms social phenomena through a process of displacement: displacing the underlying structure of psychical helplessness that occupation as signifier comes to engender.39

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This process is articulated by the text in the scene where Francesco comforts Pina on the eve of their wedding. Francesco justifies the risks and the hardships they undertake with promises of freedom and a better world. By defining their situation within these terms, the text indicates that the necessity of the Resistance struggle, and its physical danger, lies in avoiding a more serious danger—the lack of freedom that occupation represents. What is therefore a historically specific social phenomenon— German occupation—is transformed through the text into the structure of the individual.40 The text defines the danger of occupation and the lack of freedom it imposes through the structure of ego mastery and control, what Lacan describes as the structure of the narcissistic moi. As the source of intentionality, the narcissistic moi is threatened when subjected to lack of control and repression of desire. Precisely what occupation comes to represent within the text is a threat to this psychical structure. The lack of freedom it imposes is a lack of individual control. The specifically historical dimension of this displacement is the manner in which it functions to contain the anxiety of a specific lack of symbolization in the Real. The dissolution of Fascism, and with it the Italian state, created a void in signification through which the Real could irrupt and impose itself on the lived experience of the Italian subject. The effect of Fascism’s prolonged death throes and the accompanying instability was to render visible an aspect of the Real that is frequently disguised and hidden: that social reality—Fascism, the Italian state—is only an effect of signification. The disintegration of the signifier and its effects— ordering, structuring, and regulating through signification—allowed the Real (that which resists symbolization entirely) to surface. Conditions in social reality—the violence of the war and occupation, the desperate conditions of acquiring basic necessities—thus threatened not only as physical danger, but as a psychological danger as well: the inability to symbolize these encounters and as a result being subjected to them as meaninglessness. In this respect, Lacan’s argument that anxiety is “framed” clarifies the function that Rome: Open City performs for its historical spectators: literally providing a frame where the anxiety of symbolizing the Real effects of the war, the legacy and fall of Fascism, occupation, and collaboration, is displaced through the structure—and the trajectory— of identification. The trajectory of identification is significant in the final characteristic of anxiety, the redirection of desire. This redirection can be readily seen within the opening. The narrative’s association of narrative disruption with the sig-

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nifiers of occupation and collaboration functions to direct spectatorial identification away from those sites and toward the characters associated with narrative stability. In the first half of the film, the characters whose exposition clarifies and stabilizes narrative action are Manfredi, Pina, Don Pietro, and Francesco.41 Their association with containment functions to help secure identification with their characters. As the narrative progresses, however, the film directs this identification toward the death and suffering of these characters. The unpleasure of identifying with the death of first Pina, then Manfredi, and finally Don Pietro helps redirect identification from one character to another, but not before encouraging identification with suffering and death. Thus, after Pina dies, spectatorial identification is directed toward Manfredi and his goals of escape. After Manfredi is tortured and dies, identification is transferred to Don Pietro. Finally, after Don Pietro’s death, identification is transferred to Marcello and the boys’ Resistance group.42 The specificity of this redirection is important for determining both how the text manages a subversive utopian impulse and the place of the historical spectator within that operation. To begin with, the first site of redirection occurs at the death of Pina. The narrative logic that assigns the necessity of her death determines that Pina (a historical distortion through condensation of female participation in the Resistance) is a subversive utopian threat to patriarchal-capitalist culture.43 This threat is distinctly articulated in the film at several points: the first is the image of the bakery riot, which the text makes clear was organized by Pina and the neighborhood women. Another significant site in the film, while far more subtle in its point, is nonetheless indicative of the potential threat that Pina constitutes. This occurs in the scene in Francesco’s apartment where Manfredi asks Pina about her upcoming wedding. When she responds that it is only a wartime wedding, a moment with Don Pietro, Manfredi expresses surprise and politely (but critically) questions her about getting married in the church. Pina’s reply, noted frequently by traditional scholarship, is that it is better to be married by a partisan priest than by a Fascist at city hall, to which Manfredi must reluctantly agree. What traditional scholarship has overlooked, however, is how Pina’s response both affects and defines relationships among characters. Her reasoning produces similar effects on both Francesco (he agrees to the ceremony) and Manfredi (it silences any objection that he has). The significance of Pina’s response, and what it accomplishes, is underscored by the differences

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between the characters. Pina, a working-class woman who admits to believing in God, outmaneuvers both Francesco, a working-class Socialist, and, most importantly, Manfredi, an educated, bourgeois Communist. The ease with which she appropriates the moral authority of the Resistance and uses it to overcome male prohibitions further constitutes a threat to the operations of patriarchy. Pina thus functions to represent an ideological peril that the film contains: future subversive collective action against patriarchal capitalism’s attempt to represent a new Italian state.44 In this respect, Pina, and the threat she embodies, must be killed off.45 Pina’s death causes narrative desire to be redirected toward Manfredi and his attempt at escape. Here, too, however, the film directs desire to an ideological threat that ends with the death of a character. Manfredi is a Communist who, as the film all too clearly points out, will begin working against Monarchists and his sworn enemy, the church, as soon as the Germans are gone. Carrying out the same narrative logic, the threat that Manfredi constitutes is contained by his death. The death of Manfredi, and the subversive utopian impulse he represents, functions to redirect narrative desire again. This time, however, desire is directed to a different utopian impulse— one that has been severely detached from its originally subversive role— Christianity.46 With the death of Manfredi, spectator identification is directed to Don Pietro—the partisan priest. The function of this redirection, as further analysis demonstrates, is ideological recontainment. The utopian impulse embodied in Don Pietro’s character is defined not through what Fredric Jameson describes as the logic of the collective, but rather through the logic of the individual. As a Roman Catholic priest, Don Pietro’s character is defined through the structure of individual renunciation. He himself states that he puts his life in the service of others. Furthermore, as a priest he bears the signifier of celibacy—the individual renunciation of sexual intercourse. The redirection of narrative desire from Manfredi to Don Pietro therefore redirects identification from a utopian impulse defined through the logic of the collective and toward a utopia defined through the logic of the individual— a utopia based on individual renunciation. The ideological overdetermination of the logic of the individual even defines the social or group dynamics within the film. The construction of an “open city” that accommodates a plurality of perspectives occurs only through the structure of renunciation. The Marxists must renounce their opposition to the church, as Manfredi does in his discussion with Pina and

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his acceptance of Don Pietro. Likewise, the church must renounce its claim for political authority (as it did in the Lateran Pacts), which is demonstrated in Don Pietro’s refusal to look upon Manfredi in political terms during his interrogation with Bergmann. The specific historical dimension of the text’s redirection of desire can be determined at the site of its inscription of the structure of Roman Catholicism’s rite of penance. This structure is most clearly evidenced in Manfredi’s torture sequence, where, as Peter Bondanella notes, the film employs traditional Christian iconography to associate Manfredi with the crucified Christ.47 The articulation of this structure, however, occurs in relationship to the redirection of narrative desire. As the narrative progresses, the spectator comes to identify with Manfredi’s suffering as a result of the death of Pina and the subsequent need to redirect identification to another character. The identification with Manfredi’s suffering therefore occurs after the narrative has shifted its attention from Pina and after a significant scene where Pina talks to Don Pietro. In that scene the two characters walk together down Via Casilina. Reflecting on her past transgressions and on the suffering and anxiety the war has caused, Pina asks: “How will we be able to forget all the suffering, all the anxiety, the fear? Doesn’t Christ see us?” Don Pietro responds: Many ask me this question, Pina. Doesn’t Christ see us? But are we sure we have not deserved this plague? Are we sure we have always lived according to the law of God? And no one thinks of changing his life, of repenting his ways. Then, when things get bad, everyone is desperate, everyone asks: doesn’t God see us, doesn’t God pity us? Yes, God has pity for us. But we have much to be forgiven for, and for this we have to pray and forgive much.

Don Pietro’s response to Pina, however, runs counter to the compassion and understanding earlier established in his character. The effect of placing Don Pietro’s response within the context of an inconsistency of character is to draw attention to, and thus emphasize, the content of the discourse: anxiety, sin, and forgiveness. This emphasis on Don Pietro’s discourse assigns meaning to the text’s redirection of desire, where sin will ultimately be forgiven through suffering. Identification with the “innocent” Manfredi becomes the site where the sins of the Italian subject— collaboration and passive complicity as a cause of Fascism and the war—achieve their forgiveness through suffering.48 The redirection of desire allows the film to manage a multiplicity of spectator anx-

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iety. In negotiating the meaning of the text, Italian spectators could contain their own superego anxiety through Symbolic identification with structures that allowed the spectators to see themselves in morally acceptable terms. Indeed, at the site of Marina and Laura’s characters the text defines collaboration as a form of psychological weakness and immaturity, thus transforming a social phenomenon into morally acceptable individual structures.49 Millicent Marcus, for instance, argues that Marina’s collaboration is a “personality weakness” rather than the result of broader social causes.50 By defining collaboration as a personal and moral weakness, the film places it within the framework of that which needs to be “forgiven.” It thus seeks to absolve individual subjects of collaboration (and thus contain punishment by the superego) and direct their identification toward the final site of Symbolic identification: the structure of individual renunciation. In addition to containing the anxiety and guilt of collaboration, the structure of penance in Rome: Open City functions to contain the anxiety and guilt for Fascism and the war as a result of passive complicity.51 The site for such an identification is in the characters of Pina and Francesco. In the scene where Pina and Francesco reminisce about the early days of their romance, Pina recalls: How mean you were. You’d been living here for two months, and when you passed on the stairs you never greeted me. That was two years ago. How long that’s been . . . and how much has changed. Yet, the war was already begun.

Francesco responds: Yes; everyone was deluded that it would end soon, and that we would see it only in the cinema . . .

By describing themselves in this manner, Pina and Francesco characterize themselves as part of the passive public who found themselves plunged into the war.52 In comparison to Laura and Marina, they are neither collaborators nor Fascist supporters. However, they are not constructed as prewar antiFascists. The everyday nature of their prewar conditions aligns them more with the general public, whose prewar positions with respect to Fascism were largely passive. Their identities—in relationship to culture— correspond to the identity of the Italian general public, who neither actively supported nor opposed the Fascist government. The active stance that Pina and Francesco take against German occupation therefore functions as a displacement of desire: the desire to have taken an earlier active stance against Fascism. This displacement

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functions to exonerate them for their complicity, while at the same time constructing them as innocent victims (like children, they were “deluded”) of Fascism. By providing Symbolic identification within these terms, the film “manages” the superego anxiety that its historical spectators bring to the text.53 It “translates” the effects of the Fascist legacy in terms that allow the film’s Italian spectators to “misrecognize” themselves in morally acceptable terms. In addition to collaboration and passive complicity, the film’s containment of anxiety in the negotiation of meaning extends to Fascism itself. The film’s moral and ideological structure does not condemn the Italian Fascist regime or the repressive role of national culture itself. Rather, as discussed earlier, it displaces this onto the Germans, a process dramatically articulated by Don Pietro at the death of Manfredi. The film’s refusal to condemn the Fascists is most clearly constructed, however, in Don Pietro’s execution. In this scene, the Fascist firing squad is disrupted in its task by the whistling of the children’s Resistance group (who gather at a fence nearby). The whistling draws the attention of both Don Pietro and the firing squad. As the soldiers take aim, the film cuts to a medium-shot of three Italian soldiers pointing their rifles low. This is followed by a long shot, showing the rest of the soldiers aiming low. When the fire order is given, all the guns report, but miss Don Pietro. The priest painfully recognizes that he has been spared, while Hartmann, the German officer in charge of the firing squad, reorders the soldiers to fire. When they fail to do so, he removes his own pistol from its holster, walks up to Don Pietro, and discharges the weapon into the priest’s head.54 The sequence makes clear that the soldiers not only intentionally miss but also refuse to fire again. The Fascist firing squad is therefore innocent of his death, with the guilt resting instead on the Germans. The film thus allows its Fascist subjects to identify with an image of Fascism free from guilt and condemnation, fulfilling their desire to see themselves in morally acceptable terms. By constructing a Fascist identity free from guilt and condemnation, and an identity of collaboration as needing forgiveness, the film exonerates those Italian subjects who, through either complacency or direct approval and participation, made up the consensus of the Fascist state. The film thus “forgives much” and in doing so offers a process of identification that frames the anxieties of its spectators. Textual operations are therefore organized around framing this superego anxiety as a means of symbolizing the historical subject’s encounter with the Real effects of Fascism—symbolizing it through the structure of Roman

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Figure 2 . The Resistance youth demonstrate their solidarity by gathering at the fence and making their presence known through whistling collectively. The film ends with the narrative being transferred to them. courtesy of the museum o f modern art, film stills archive.

Catholicism’s penitential rite. The ideological function this operation performs can be located within the final redirection of narrative desire. Significantly, it is not the “crucified” Manfredi who achieves resurrection, but rather Don Pietro, who lives on in the figure of the Resistance youth. Their solidarity with the priest is demonstrated at his execution, where the boys amass to bear witness and to indicate their alliance with the priest through their whistling. Their actions indicate their will to take up Don Pietro’s ideals after he is gone. Even prior to this demonstration of solidarity, however, the text defines the Resistance youth through the model of Don Pietro—that is, through the structure of individual renunciation. For example, they renounce their own childhood and the pleasures of childhood to take up armed struggle. The film clearly separates Marcello and Romoletto—the leaders of the Resistance youth—from the other boys in the film who play at soccer in the church courtyard. Furthermore, as children, the Resistance youth also bear

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the signifier of celibacy—through culture’s prohibition on childhood sexual activity. By directing spectatorial identification toward the Resistance youth, the film’s ending provides for a Symbolic identification with the kind of spiritual rebirth that is the legacy of resurrection. Thus, in the final shot of the film, the boys of the Resistance youth who have demonstrated their solidarity with Don Pietro return toward the city in a long shot. The camera pans with them, revealing Rome, with the dome of St. Peter’s in the background. Trailing slightly behind the group are Marcello and an older boy, who comforts Marcello by putting his arm around him. Their solidarity with the priest and movement toward the church of St. Peter suggest their “apostolic” mission of taking up the ideals of the priest: the ideals of renunciation and duty. The vision of a new society the boys represent—structured around individual duty and renunciation— defines itself through the logic of the individual. The utopian impulse engendered in the character of Don Pietro— a utopia based on individual renunciation—becomes the means by which the Italian subjects can symbolize their encounter with the Fascist legacy. Through Symbolic identification with Don Pietro, the text contains the subversive threat of a utopian impulse by defining it through the logic of the individual. The framework of the text reestablishes the necessity of culture as a repressive mechanism for individual desire—the site of organization for individual renunciation. The text thus reworks what is otherwise a subversive utopian impulse into a structure consistent with the patriarchalcapitalist culture of postwar Italy. The threat of a subversive utopian impulse which aims to dissolve patriarchal-capitalist culture constitutes more than a political threat: it also constitutes a psychical threat at the level of the individual by threatening to sever the relationship between identifications and language at the site of the Other(A). This separation is inscribed in the text in Marcello’s separation from the maternal bond. Marcello’s hysterical grief finds its source in the structure of internal splitting—the forced decathexis from the object of desire. Marcello’s character thus functions as the site for the historical Italian subject, who faces the threat of decathexis should a subversive utopian impulse dissolve the structure of patriarchal-capitalist Law and force a separation from the Law as it has been introjected into identity at the site of the Other(A). The “necessity” of a Rome: Open City therefore lies in its ability to contain— or frame—this anxiety by redirecting the subversive threat to the

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Other(A) into the structure of individual renunciation, the very structure of the Other(A) itself under patriarchal-capitalist culture. This attempt to recontain a subversive utopian threat makes clear the ideological function of the film’s exoneration of both collaborators and Fascists. The film manages the threat of superego anxiety resulting from collaboration and Fascist participation in order to direct identification toward the spiritual rebirth of the film’s ending—a rebirth determined through the structure of individual renunciation. The film thus seeks to organize the identities of Fascism and collaboration away from history and toward an identification with a society structured through individual renunciation and subjugation. Indeed, Sitney recounts the numerous deviations from history the film commits in order to refrain from indicting Fascism.55 The ideological function of such operations is to contain the subversive utopian impulse of the Resistance by reorganizing repressive patriarchal-capitalist culture and retranslating it symbolically. The spiritual rebirth that will establish an “Open City” occurs only through the death of individuals—Pina, Manfredi, and Don Pietro. It thus reestablishes the primacy of the demands of culture over individuals, and their necessary subjugation to ensure that order. In this respect, the signifying practice of the film corresponds to the political praxis of the Christian Democratic Party, which sought to contain the effects of the Fascist past in order to reorganize patriarchal culture and gain ascendancy over the Communist Party, by co-opting the hegemony of the former Fascist consensus. The principal means of accomplishing this, as many historians have noted, was by obstructing a Fascist purge. Thus, Giuseppe Mammarella argues: The DC and Liberals were strongly opposed to . . . [extensive Fascist purges] . . . since a purge to this extent would hit mainly the social classes from which they expected to draw their electoral support. To give a free hand to the extreme left . . . [would] for both the DC and Liberal Party . . . undermine their own political power and future possibilities of taking over the government. Both the DC and the Liberals needed the help of the former governing class. But the political future of the Left in the government depended upon the substitution of the former governing class.56

In their unwillingness to confront the Fascist past, both the film and the political praxis of the Christian Democrats reveal the ideological necessity of “retranslating” patriarchal-capitalist culture to reestablish its consensus and, thus, contain the subversive utopian threat which the Resistance had evolved

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into. Thus, far beyond embodying a style that announced a “new” realism in the cinema, Rome: Open City dramatically demonstrated the power of narrative trajectory to negotiate and contain the ideological threats destabilizing a culture in crisis and the enormous role the operation of identification can exercise in that process.

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3 Bicycle Thieves Identification, Focalization, and Restoration

Disappearance of the actor, disappearance of mise en scène? Unquestionably, but because the very principle of Ladri di Biciclette is the disappearance of a story. Andre´ Bazin 1

The previous analysis of Rome: Open City demonstrates that as a theoretical framework Lacanian psychoanalysis can contribute several dimensions to ideological analysis. In joining the radical contributions of psychoanalysis and linguistics, Lacan’s work stresses that meaning is inextricably within the signified (linguistics) and, furthermore, is overdetermined by the unconscious (psychoanalysis). This chapter analyzes Bicycle Thieves to demonstrate the necessity of a concept of Symbolic identification as precisely that site where the mediation between the social and the individual occurs through the structure of identity. Beginning with an analysis similar to that in the previous chapter, this discussion links the results of analyzing disruptions in discourse with an analysis of Symbolic identification and the textual processes mobilized to secure it—again integrating established narratological frameworks into a Lacanian method. For André Bazin, and for many historians, Bicycle Thieves represents a break with earlier Neorealism in that postwar society, rather than the war, is the object of the film’s narrative. In the eyes of contemporary critics like Bazin, then, the “New Realism” of the Italian cinema lived on because it was able to “reaffirm anew the entire aesthetic of neorealism.” 2 At least part of

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this aesthetic for Bazin was the “lack of story,” a critical judgment that is fraught with difficulties.3 What an analysis of the relationship between exposition and actional dynamics demonstrates, however, is that the lack of story Bazin alludes to is not an absence of narrative structure, but, rather, an undermining of narrative effect. Furthermore, this undermining results in an inscription of the structure of anxiety within the signifying process of this specific text, thus creating for the historical spectator a proximity between the anxiety of postwar culture and the text. The reduction of narrative effect in Bicycle Thieves is achieved by several means. David Bordwell, for example, notes that “in the name of verisimilitude, the tight causality of classical Hollywood construction is replaced by a more tenuous linking of events.” 4 Certainly the deemphasis on causality is notably present in Bicycle Thieves, as many other scholars have also noted. Investigating the relationship between the film’s exposition and its actional dynamics, however, reveals another significant textual operation which functions to reduce narrative effect: temporary subordination of narrative progression to exposition of social conditions. Indeed, the temporary although frequent subordination of narrative progression to social exposition becomes the preeminent stylistic norm in Bicycle Thieves, functioning to articulate what Frank Tomasulo describes as an “individual /collective antinomy.” 5 The effect of this narrative subordination, as this analysis demonstrates, is to produce disruptions in the film as discourse— disruptions that narration must work to mask over. Furthermore, the disruption of social exposition into narrative progression inscribes the structure of anxiety, temporarily displacing Imaginary identification with the movement of desire onto Symbolic identification with the film’s discourse on social conditions. This structure is inscribed within the plot by suspending attention from characters advancing the narrative in order to focus instead on social conditions: mass unemployment, the competition for jobs, the desperation of the unemployed, and the sterile bureaucratic treatment of the situation by the government. These suspensions function as a retardatory device, disrupting the continuousness of narrative drive.6 Other elements within the narration— point of view, long-take, sound bridges, and music— operate through continuity to contain the severity of disrupting narrative drive and thus prevent radical breaks. This structure is evidenced when Antonio retrieves his bicycle from the pawnshop. While one employee unenthusiastically searches for the bicycle amidst the rows within the shop, another employee walks across the frame

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carrying the sheets Antonio and his wife pawned. As the character walks out of frame, the film briefly returns to the medium shot of Antonio looking through the opening at the counter. It then cuts back to the character walking with the sheets, suspending attention to the activity of obtaining the bicycle. Framed exclusively within the shot, the employee with the bundle approaches a massive set of shelves where pawned sheets are stored. He slowly but deftly climbs the shelves, as Antonio looks on. The suspension of narrative drive, the gap in its continuity, is contained through the structure of point of view. The editing defines the sequence through Antonio’s point of view: as his passing interest. Subordination of narrative drive to expositional function (describing social conditions— widespread poverty due to a collapsed postwar economy) is concealed by inscribing the exposition within the actions (the gaze) of the most obvious agent of narrative drive (Antonio). As the film progresses, however, it ceases to contain breaks in the continuity of narrative drive through the structure of point of view, shifting instead to more self-conscious, external narration. This occurs during Antonio’s first day on the job. While at his first job-site, Antonio receives instructions from a co-worker on the procedures for pasting up movie posters. In the foreground are two young boys, one of whom plays the accordion. The co-worker, annoyed with the music, eventually reaches out and kicks the accordion player in the rump. Without missing a beat, the boy lets out a yelp and moves away. As he does so, a well-dressed man walks into frame with his back to the camera. As he crosses the frame, he is followed by the other youth, who begs him for money; the camera pans with their movement. This camera movement leaves Antonio and his co-worker off-screen, abandoning them for the exposition on social conditions articulated in the interaction between the youths and the well-dressed gentleman. Although the voice of the co-worker can be heard off-screen continuing with his instruction, the camera has clearly subordinated their activities to the investigation of widespread economic needs. The disruptive quality in this expositional shift is marked by a distinct lack of containment of affects within the sequence. The kick that the young accordion player receives has the effect of disruption since there is little cueing to expect such action. It therefore surfaces as an outburst which inaugurates the movement away from Antonio and his co-worker. This outburst is marked diegetically first by the boy who receives the kick (he yelps) and then by the accordion (which changes pitch at impact). Furthermore, the movement away from Antonio and his activities fails to inscribe any point of view

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to regulate, and thereby contain, the effect of abandoning narrative progression for social exposition. The relative lack of narrative motivation in this sequence indicates the function of the film’s breaks in the continuity of narrative drive: the loss of narrative. The film frequently structures the alternation between exposition and actional dynamics as a break in the continuity of narrative drive that subordinates narrative progression to social exposition—a break that the narration works to recontain, making the film disruptive, but preventing it from constituting a radical assault on the structure of classical style. Narrative progression thus becomes a presence made of absence: relegated to and suspended in off-screen space through overt narration (camera pans, tracking, or cutting) while the plot temporarily moves its attention to commentary on postwar conditions in Italy. This alternation between narrative progression and its subordination to exposition on social conditions functions to inscribe the structure of anxiety. Each subordination of narrative drive to social exposition in Bicycle Thieves can be characterized by a temporal dimension, object loss, the displacement of danger, and, finally, the redirection of desire.7 Furthermore, inscribing the structure of anxiety and its redirection of Imaginary desire allows the spectator to empathize with the main character and judge the social conditions which prevent his individual fulfillment, rather than identify with the anxiety of his alienation and lack of control. Thus, in the first such subordination, occurring in the pawnshop, the movement toward obtaining the bike is temporarily suspended for the exposition of storing the pawned sheets. Temporally, the alternation functions to retard the forward movement: delaying procurement of the bike by shifting attention elsewhere. This temporal function is underscored by the offscreen space the camera leaves behind. The plot has already established the magnitude of social conditions by the number of bikes and the pawnshop worker’s difficulty in singling out Antonio’s bike from all the others. Focusing in on the worker’s search for Antonio’s bike would have yielded the same kind of social exposition: nearly everyone is pawning possessions to survive. Instead, the narration leaves the space of the bicycles in order to accomplish a temporal delay, opening up an entirely new narrative space in the process. In addition to its temporal function, this subordination inscribes the structure of object loss. The plot itself, clearly, is constructed around object loss: the desire which moves the narrative forward is the desire to repossess the lost object. Indeed, a conventional psychoanalytic thematic analysis would identify the bicycle as the phallus and the manner in which the nar-

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rative is constructed around lack. More than constructing itself around object loss, however, the very structure of the plot inscribes object loss. The subordination of narrative progression to exposition of social conditions— marked by overt narrational cues—signals the plot’s suspension of the narrative. The presence of narrative is marked through its absence, as that which is suspended and returned to—taken up again after its temporary loss. In this manner the narrative itself becomes constituted as object—as that which functions as the trajectory of and for desire. Its subordination to social exposition threatens its forward movement, manifesting the potential of the narrative being subsumed into the overwhelming social conditions that are the object of the exposition (the threat is then realized in the film’s ending). The consistent replacement of narrative with the exposition of social conditions allows the film to more readily establish narrative as object and inscribe the threat of object loss within the structure of the plot. Furthermore, the plot’s structuring of object loss functions as a displacement of danger. Freud’s argument that anxiety about object loss displaces the psychical danger of an economic situation onto the loss of the desired object itself clarifies this function.8 The object loss centered around narrative displaces the psychical danger of an economic situation. Spectator identification with Antonio and his family constitutes identification with psychical helplessness through unmet need (the poverty and helplessness that Antonio and his family face). The loss of narrative displaces identification with psychical helplessness onto the anxiety of object loss: the temporary loss of narrative as a trajectory of desire and as desired object. It is precisely this displacement which inhibits identification with Antonio, allowing Mira Liehm to argue that “the filmmakers . . . engender . . . in the audience a feeling of great empathy, which replaces the usual identification with the characters.” 9 For the spectator, the movement away from individual actions to social conditions is the movement away from Imaginary identification with unpleasure and toward Symbolic identification with judgments on social conditions. The anxiety that results from the loss of the object for Imaginary identification displaces the anxiety that would occur through identifying with Antonio and the unpleasure of his helplessness. Such a displacement is clearly articulated in the scene at the police station. As soon as Antonio indicates that there were no witnesses, making the situation hopeless for the police to help, the narrative abandons him. The police officer to whom Antonio is speaking is called from out of frame. The officer rises and walks to a door. The film cuts to a medium shot of the door (in a match on action) and tracks with the officer as he approaches a win-

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dow. Antonio, meanwhile, has been abandoned as the officer converses with a colleague about changes in job assignments to quell a riot. The plot thus shifts its attention away from Antonio and onto the role of the police within the story world. Marcus notes that this digression demonstrates that “the law is less interested in protecting the property rights of the citizens than in suppressing their civil liberties.” 10 By separating the actional dynamics so distinctly from the exposition, however, the plot encourages the spectator to make judgments and construct conclusions about social conditions at the expense of identifying with the main character. In this separation, Imaginary identification is suspended, with the object (Antonio) relegated to offscreen space as soon as it becomes apparent that his situation is helpless. The exposition of social conditions therefore does not fulfill the traditional function of exposition. Rather than stabilize and “translate” Antonio’s actions, exposition functions to displace them. The lack of analysis given to social conditions, their construction as antinomy to character identification, demonstrates the displacing function they exercise. Frank Tomasulo therefore argues: “Bicycle Thieves . . . seem[s] unable to deal with the real forces at work within the society, so [it] displaces them and attempt[s] to close the discourse around these displacements.” 11 David Overby concurs when he notes: Although social problems form the basis of content in many neo-realist films, few are dealt with in any depth . . . for example, De Sica’s Ladri di biciclette has the problem of unemployment in the city as its pivot . . . yet, instead of treating the “total reality” of the problem the film degenerates into a sentimental, albeit often effective, tale of grace lost and restored . . .12

Overby’s argument thus emphasizes the separation between social conditions, which are not investigated in any depth, and the narrative or “tale” of Antonio and his lost and restored grace. The function that this displacement exercises inscribes the structure of anxiety in its redirection of desire. The plot’s retardation of narrative suspends and suppresses Imaginary identification, displacing it through Symbolic identification with the film’s discourse on social conditions. This redirects Imaginary desire toward Symbolic differentiation, allowing the spectator to empathize with Antonio and condemn the social conditions which antagonize him, rather than identify with his anxiety. The disruptions caused by the separation between exposition and action thus undermine the usual narrative containment achieved through identification and Imaginary desire. Disruptions continue throughout the film,

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functioning to threaten the narrative by undermining its containment of effects. This lack of narrative containment can be seen in the film’s use of framing and off-screen space. The frame does not function as a boundary within the film: the diegetic world is never contained within its limits. Rather, the narrative world consistently erupts from off-screen space into the frame, destabilizing the space of action. Thus, while Antonio and his friends pressure a vendor in the market to see the serial number of a bicycle, the wife of the vendor suddenly emerges from off-screen space, forcefully chastising the inquiry in an attempt to prevent it. Her sudden appearance, much like Laura’s in Rome: Open City, functions to complicate rather than clarify narrative action. Likewise, in his search for one of the thief ’s contacts, Bruno peers into the confessional in a church the old man has taken refuge in. As Bruno peers in, a priest appears abruptly from the confessional and slaps Bruno’s head, punishing him for the invasion. When Antonio continues the search for the old man outside of the church, he is interrupted by a disruption off-screen: people shouting for help because a boy is drowning in the river. Fearing that the boy could be Bruno, Antonio suspends the search and rushes toward the bridge where he left him. This interruption from off-screen functions to complicate the plot. It suspends the search for the bicycle and introduces Antonio’s tension and concern over Bruno. Off-screen space thus continually undermines narrative effect, threatening to subsume narrative progression by its intrusion into and suspension of Antonio’s actions. The final instance of such intrusions occurs in Antonio’s unsuccessful attempt to steal a bicycle. Almost immediately after Antonio takes a bike, the owner appears from out of frame, chasing the stolen object and calling out for help. In response to the owner’s cries, men come from out of frame to assist in the chase, catching Antonio and thwarting his attempt to take control of his situation. The effect of the frequent loss of narrative containment, combined with Antonio’s inability to control narrative events, is a consistent threat that narrative will be subsumed by the overwhelming conditions within the diegesis—indistinguishable from the masses. Indeed, both Marcus and Bondanella observe that narrative movement is inscribed within Antonio’s attempt to distinguish himself from the crowd.13 His attempt to distinguish himself from the crowd, however, is precisely the attempt to order, control, and thus contain the story world: achieving, as it were, a narrative. Temporarily achieving this control inaugurates narrative and allows Antonio to be distinguished from the social exposition—the space of the crowd.

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Indeed, narrative itself, under the structural limitations imposed on it by patriarchal capitalism, could not be achieved otherwise: including the individual desires of each member of the crowd and the personal effects of social conditions on all of them, in addition to Antonio, would produce precisely the plurality of affects that narrative containment seeks to organize and control. Thus, when Antonio’s desires and actions do move the plot forward, the narrative achieves containment. When intrusions from off-screen space suspend and obstruct his actions, however, both his ability to control events and narrative containment itself become destabilized. Off-screen space is therefore constructed as a threat to narrative containment: it is the space of overwhelming social conditions, of the undifferentiated crowd. Its intrusion into and obstruction of Antonio’s actions thus function as a threat: as that which will subsume Antonio into its affects, removing any distinction between itself and Antonio. The film ends in just such a manner—with Antonio and Bruno subsumed into the crowd: Antonio no longer possesses any ability to control and order narrative events. The specific desire for the bicycle functions to order narrative events and distinguishes Antonio as main character—separating him from the crowd and from the exposition. With the renunciation of the desire for the object comes lack of order: Antonio subsumed into the crowd, the basis of differentiation eliminated. The end of the film is thus constituted by the term limit of narrative containment. Undermining of narrative effect through specific plot alternations is not the only method the film uses to displace Imaginary identification, as an analysis of the relations to authority demonstrates. Although the text establishes the basis for Imaginary identification by inscribing the actional dynamics of the plot within the identity of Antonio, the text’s focalization—its ideological orientation— often judges him negatively. This prevents continuity between Imaginary identification with the main character and Symbolic identification with the authoritative norms that the text constructs— norms which reject aspects of the main character. The manner in which the text constructs a normative system—the values and ideological premises it establishes to evaluate the narrative world— is a critical site (if not the primary site) for delineating the operations of Symbolic identification. This chapter illustrates the manner in which textual signification works to procure the spectator’s Symbolic identification with a specific set of abstract norms, values, and commands that authorize and validate specific trajectories of desire. Lacan’s work, focusing as it does on the

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effects of signification on subject formation, is oriented toward such an analysis, but offers no specific model for textual operations. Integrating Lacan’s theory with the work of narratologists Gérard Genette and Shlomith Rimmon-Kennan provides a model for analyzing specific textual operations as a means of obtaining the spectator’s Symbolic identification. Rimmon-Kennan’s elaboration of Genette’s distinction between narration and focalization makes clear that the articulation of the text occurs under the rubric of an ideological orientation when she argues: “The story is presented in the text through the mediation of some ‘prism,’ ‘perspective,’ ‘angle of vision’ verbalized by the narrator, though not necessarily his.” 14 Since the mediation verbalized by the narrator is not necessarily his/her own, Rimmon-Kennan concludes that “speaking and seeing, narration and focalization, may, but need not be, attributed to the same agent.” 15 The significance of the distinction between narration as “speaking” and focalization as “seeing” is that film analysis of the story’s mediation through its textual construction does not need to engage the questionable status of a narrator in the film text.16 It is this sense of mediation as a textual construct that Mieke Bal illustrates when she argues: Whenever events are presented, they are always presented from within a certain vision . . . Perception depends on so many factors that striving for objectivity is pointless. To mention only a few factors: one’s position with respect to the perceived object, the fall of the light, the distance, previous knowledge, psychological attitude towards the object; all this and more affects the picture one forms and passes on to others. In a story, elements of the fabula are presented in a certain way. We are confronted with a vision of the fabula. What is this vision and where does it come from? 17

The understanding that narrative information is thus presented in “a certain way” is shared by Branigan, who defines narrative as “a series of episodes collected as a focused causal chain.” 18 The value of Rimmon-Kennan’s approach to focalization for the study of cinematic narration is her independence from the construct of character for discussing the story’s mediation. This distinction is particularly important to a film like Bicycle Thieves which alternates between validating the main character at certain points within the text and evaluating him negatively at others. A concept of focalization locates this mediation of the story internal or external to the diegesis (as with Bicycle Thieves), as a textual construct, allowing an analysis that delineates the perceptual, psychological, and ideological facets operat-

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ing within this process. What is particularly relevant to a Lacanian analysis is the ideological facet of focalization, what Rimmon-Kennan describes as the “norms” of the text, the “general system of viewing the [narrative] world conceptually.” 19 It is at this site that the organization of signification and its articulation function to validate (or disallow) trajectories of desire through the operation of Symbolic identification. This process can be determined in Bicycle Thieves by the plot’s alternating validation of the desire to find the bicycle. P. Adams Sitney reviews several of the criticisms that surround the narrative premise of searching for a stolen bicycle in Rome, pointing out that all the efforts that are mobilized become more than it would take to arrange for the loan of a bicycle to Antonio.20 Certainly, the film must work at the credibility of the search, which its pointed criticism of the church, unions, and the PCI (Communist Party) for not helping Antonio attempts to accomplish. What is not so evident, however, is that the film’s work at validating an impossible search is sometimes withdrawn. Furthermore, as the ensuing analysis demonstrates, there is much more at stake in this process of validation than the traditional concept of “willing suspension of disbelief ” can address. Rather, as a discussion of focalization through a Lacanian framework indicates, the validation of trajectories of desire is intricately involved in the film’s ideological focalization that it is simultaneously involved in constructing and articulating. This construction and articulation of a mediating framework within the text is a significant site for coordinating this particular narratological approach with Lacanian psychoanalysis. Indeed, as Rimmon-Kennan indicates, the ideological facet of focalization engenders not only an evaluative process within the text, but the site of authority, asserting that “the ideology of the narrator-focalizer [or in film the external and implied focalizer] is usually taken as authoritative, and all other ideologies in the text are evaluated from this ‘higher’ position.” 21 Rimmon-Kennan’s discussion of classical narration indicates that textual focalization is that process of signification which constructs, establishes, and articulates the relations of authority within the text. Further, she demonstrates that the process of narration stems from a specific source that authorizes the textual information imparted to the reader (or in film the spectator). These “relations” of authority can be clearly seen within Bicycle Thieves, at that point in the film when Antonio prepares for his first day of work. Up to this point in the text, the narrative has been constructed around Antonio, authorizing his quest to provide for his family. As he playfully tussles with his wife, Maria, however, Antonio becomes too rough, to the point where she

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Fig ur e 3. Antonio’s search for help interrupts a party meeting in the union hall. The film makes pointed criticisms of the unwillingness of collective organizations to help individuals in need. courtesy of the museum o f modern art , film s tills archive.

has to call out that he is hurting her. The moment can no longer be contained through the signifier of “playful affection,” and the text has ambiguously withdrawn its validation of Antonio, however briefly. This temporary withdrawal of validation from Antonio marks off the external position of a mediating factor that attempts to persuade the audience to see or—more accurately— evaluate the narrative world from the same perspective. What a Lacanian framework contributes to the analysis of such a process is an understanding of the logic that organizes the discourses and codes which comprise the authoritative norms of the text. The complex array of textual processes, which together construct the story’s mediation, is organized through the logic of identity—however external to the diegetic world the mediation may be. As a result, Rimmon-Kennan argues that “even . . . an unpersonified stance tends to be endowed by readers with the qualities of character.” 22 Her discussion indicates that, through a process of projection or otherwise, readers (subjects) interpret these textual operations through the logic of identity.

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To begin with, Rimmon-Kennan argues that “focalization has both a subject and an object. The subject (the focalizer) is the agent whose perception orients the presentation, whereas the object (the focalized) is what the focalizer perceives.” 23 Her argument that the story’s mediation—its focalization—has a subject, an agent whose perception orients the presentation, demonstrates the degree to which the process is organized around the logic and structure of identity. Furthermore, as an analysis of Bicycle Thieves demonstrates, it establishes the basis to distinguish between the norms and values attributed to main character and the story’s mediation. A concept of focalization allows narrative analysis to establish the degree to which main character (the norms and values attributed there) is the object which is being judged by the evaluative system of the text rather than orienting that system. Thus, although main character may orient narrative action and trajectory, a concept of focalization demonstrates that main character does not necessarily orient the evaluative system of the text. This would accurately characterize the relationship between Antonio and the evaluative system of Bicycle Thieves, where at several points in the narrative the text’s focalization—its ideological orientation—judges Antonio negatively. The first such site in the text occurs when Antonio tells Maria of his inability to take a job. Maria’s struggle to get information out of an uncommunicative Antonio and to keep up with him as she carries the water for the family contributes to articulating his insensitivity. As if to emphasize that this insensitivity is not due to his employment anxieties alone, the film rearticulates this trait after Antonio obtains the job, as discussed previously: Antonio hurts Maria when he playfully wrestles with her. Antonio’s self-absorption and insensitivity are even further articulated in his relationship with Bruno. In her discussion of the film, Millicent Marcus outlines several sites where Antonio displays an insensitivity to Bruno. Thus, she notes: He often walks well ahead of Bruno . . . that at times endangers his son’s very well being . . . [He] fails to notice that Bruno has fallen in the rain, and . . . Bruno is twice nearly run over in the traffic of Rome as Antonio heedlessly forges ahead.24

In addition to the incidents Marcus notes, Antonio also demonstrates his insensitivity when, as a result of his own frustration, he leaves Bruno behind with a hostile crowd, letting go of the boy’s hand as he walks away. These negative traits assigned to Antonio’s character create two distinct perspectives within the text: Antonio’s own perspective, which consistently fails to register his insensitivity, and the normative system external to his

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character, which evaluates his insensitivity negatively. What becomes crucial for analysis, then, is to delineate the process by which the spectator comes to identify with any of these positions, and what is at stake when such a Symbolic identification is separate from main character. This process can be demonstrated by recontextualizing focalization through a Lacanian framework: delineating a correspondence between the process of focalization and the structure and logic of the je. Indeed, the specific logic of the je identity can be determined within the formal characteristics of focalization. As Rimmon-Kennan argues, the identity of the focalizer can be implied or incomplete. In this respect, it can be without the representation of a corporal unity, leading Rimmon-Kennan to conclude that “focalization is sometimes no more than a textual stance.” 25 The complexity and problematic nature of this identity, while contradicting traditional conceptions of a corporal identity, nonetheless correspond to the formation and structure of the je. As the subject of language and meaning, the je mistakenly presents itself as an autonomous unity, denying its collective origins (secondary introjections of cultural norms and values). This allows the je to take itself as an identity, rather than the social construct it is. Lacan argues: If the subject is what I say it is, namely the subject determined by language and speech, it follows that the subject, in initio, begins in the locus of the Other, in so far as it is there that the first signifier emerges.26

Lacan thus tries to establish that the identity of the je occurs through an introjection of cultural signifiers. The formation and structure of the je is characterized by its collective nature and its signifying function in relation to desire. Lacking autonomy and control, however, the je is also characterized by mendacity. Mistaking itself for an identity rather than a constructed cultural signifier, the je thinks itself a unity rather than a collection of discourses. Thus, functioning to organize cultural discourse in relation to the moi’s fusionary drive, the identity formed by the je regulates and displaces desire. As Lacan argues, the je shapes “all those inflections which, in the life of the adult, the imaginary commitment, the original captation, can take on.” 27 It is therefore possible to see the inscription of the logic and structure of the je in the formal characteristics of focalization. As an organized collection of discourses, focalization can be either within or without a corporal unity. In addition, it forms an identity (the focalizer) through a dependence on cultural signifiers. Furthermore, by mediating the story, focalization inscribes

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the functioning of the je in its process: translating, shaping, and giving form to the actions and desires of the narrative. This structural process of the text intersects the subject at the site of the je: where the spectator either accepts or rejects the ideology of the text through Symbolic identification. Establishing the functioning of the je through Symbolic identification requires a reconceptualization of identification as a function of a split and dialectical process, rather than the unified and deterministic structure conceptualized by early psychoanalytic film theory (as discussed earlier with respect to Baudry and Metz, who eclipse the role of Symbolic identification by locating textual identification solely within “the unconscious” or the Imaginary).28 Although identificatory fusion is characteristic of the moi, the process of identification is formative of both the moi and the je. In describing his “Schema R,” Lacan distinguishes between identificatory processes as the movement away from the narcissistic and specular logic “in which the ego [moi] identifies itself . . . [and toward] the paternal identification of the ego-ideal.” 29 This movement represents the difference between Imaginary identification with the object world and identification with the abstract world of the Law and the signifier that structures Symbolic identification and the formation of the je. In Symbolic identification, therefore, the subject identifies with what Lacan refers to as “a certain organization of affirmations and negations, to which the subject is attached.” 30 In its overprivileging of the Imaginary traditional psychoanalytic film theory has bypassed that “certain organization,” collapsing the abstract position of the subject into the physical, “the all seeing subject” of the Imaginary. Lacan, however, maintains a distinction between the physical act of vision and the Symbolic positions that subjects come to take up through identification, asking, “must we not distinguish between the function of the eye and that of the gaze?” 31 In making this distinction, he argues: “In our relation to things, in so far as this relation is constituted by the way of vision, and ordered in the figures of representation, something slips, passes, is transmitted from stage to stage, and is always to some degree eluded in it— that is what we call the gaze.” 32 For Lacan, what is eluded in the relations to things constituted by vision is the abstract position or place—the dialectic of desire and lack—that orders perception. In this respect, Lacan argues: If one does not stress the dialectic of desire one does not understand why the gaze of others should disorganize the field of perception. It is because the subject in question is not that of reflexive consciousness, but that of desire. One thinks it

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is a question of the geometral eye-point, whereas it is a question of a quite different eye . . .33

In distinguishing the “different eye” of the gaze, Lacan reinvests the Symbolic as a fundamental aspect of identification. The disorganizing power of the gaze of the other stems from the constitutive role that the Other(A) exercises in the formation of the subject and the consciousness which registers perception. Thus it is that Lacan argues, “Psychoanalysis regards consciousness as irremediably limited, and institutes it as a principle, not only of idealization, but of misrecognition.” 34 What becomes significant for a psychoanalytic reading of ideology is not so much the look of the camera—its all-seeing position—but the gaze that it inscribes—the Symbolic place from which the objects are evaluated. The scene of morning preparation for the first day of work in Bicycle Thieves can illustrate this distinction. In this scene, Antonio readies himself in the bedroom while Bruno assists by working on his father’s bicycle. As Bruno prepares to leave for work with his father, he pauses briefly before exiting the room and glances at something out of frame. The film cuts to a medium close-up of a baby lying on a bed, wedged between pillows. It then returns to Bruno, who changes his direction: delaying his exit and going instead to the window to close the shutters. Prior to Bruno’s glance in the direction of the baby, the film makes an effort to ignore the presence of his younger sibling within the room. The establishing shot of the sequence relegates the baby to the lower left hand corner of the frame, its presence unacknowledged by either Bruno or his father. When Bruno first opens the shutters of the window, he walks in the direction of the baby. The camera, panning with him, brings the baby closer to the middle of the frame and thus closer to the center of interest within the frame. Before this can be fully achieved, however, the film resorts to a cheat cut, which reframes the baby off-screen while appearing to continue the pan with Bruno as he opens the shutters of the window. The plot therefore manipulates several elements to establish, but ignore, the presence of Bruno’s infant sibling. In establishing this cognitive neglect of the infant, the plot—through its focalization— creates a Symbolic position for the spectator whereby the neglect is not evaluated negatively. Rather, through Symbolic identification with the “gaze”—the Symbolic position from which the spectator views the events—the infant’s place as overlooked-then-attended is evaluated positively. Furthermore, analyzing the position of this gaze demonstrates the manner in which the Symbolic posi-

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tion can be independent of the physical position of camera presentation. As Marcus notes, the scene opens with Bruno polishing the bike from Antonio’s point-of-view shot.35 A failure to distinguish between Symbolic and physical could readily be maintained here. Borrowing from the physical point of view, the scene could be defined as Antonio’s perspective. The subsequent omission of the infant from the plot would thus reflect Antonio’s psychological state: his preoccupation with the first day of work. In this respect, Bruno plays so predominately in the scene because he is part of the preparations Antonio must attend to before he starts the job (i.e., Bruno must be dropped off at the gas station before Antonio can go to work). Thus, Bruno’s preparations are important to him. The infant does not figure in Antonio’s preparations and is overlooked. The end of the scene, however, abandons Antonio to concentrate on Bruno. At the end of the scene it is Bruno who stops, changes direction, and closes the shutters of the window out of consideration for the infant. With Antonio gone, the presence of the infant, and its needs, is made known through Bruno’s actions. The Symbolic position that has been constructed, the gaze that the spectator identifies with, is therefore that of Bruno, who, despite his chastising of his father for not complaining to the pawnshop, is identifying with Antonio. The gaze which looks past the infant with such ease thus reflects Bruno’s psychological position, his identification with his father. Antonio’s departure from the room provides the means by which Bruno’s gaze (which as Lacan argues is a desire on the part of the other) can be redefined and thus allow for a reconsideration of the infant.36 Another indication that the scene is constructed around Bruno’s gaze is the preceding scene (discussed earlier) of Antonio’s excessive shaking of Maria. The excess of the playfulness is demonstrated not only through the physical action, but also in Maria’s protest, when she tells Antonio that he is hurting her. The spectacle of the violent excess is not contained through Antonio’s gaze as just playfulness. Rather, the excess remains ambivalent, unsymbolized as either pure violence or pure playfulness. This Symbolic position with respect to the action is that of Bruno, even though physically he is not present. Though even Maria may not know what to make of Antonio’s actions here, it is Bruno who lacks the ability to make Symbolic distinctions and associations between violence, physical affection, and sexuality. The separation of Bruno’s gaze from the physical act of viewing is the distinction between narration and focalization and necessitates further elaboration on the manner in which textual focalization operates. In this respect, Bicycle Thieves is an instructive text because the focalization of its perceptual,

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Fig ur e 4. Antonio and Bruno prepare for Antonio’s first day of work. The film goes to great lengths to ignore the presence of the baby in the room as a means of articulating the cognitive orientation of the characters. courtesy of the museum of modern art, film stills archive.

psychological, and ideological facets is not readily apparent. The focalization’s position relative to the story is, significantly, not easily distinguishable. The narration seems to be restricted to Antonio’s point of view, suggesting that the focalization is internal to the story: conveyed through the character of Antonio. Spatially, the narration seems to conform to such a characterization. Rather than employing the bird’s-eye view afforded by external focalization, plot information in Bicycle Thieves is restricted to only those spaces that Antonio is in or is about to enter. Likewise, the plot consistently fails to provide simultaneous views of the narrative world: while Antonio and Bruno search one part of the city, the spectator has no knowledge of the others who are searching, nor of the thief ’s current activity, until Antonio comes upon them. Maria’s absence from the narrative after Antonio begins the search is motivated through this restriction. Finally, in its temporal dimension, the plot is restricted to the present, further indicating a limitation characteristic of an internal focalizer. The restrictions on space and time within the narration are extended to

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aspects of the psychological facet of focalization. The cognitive orientation of the focalizer, normally signaled by a difference between unrestricted and restricted knowledge, also demonstrates restrictions characteristic of an internal focalizer.37 With few exceptions, the narration in Bicycle Thieves restricts knowledge of the story world to what Antonio knows, suggesting that he is the internal focalizer. Indeed, the restricted nature of both the spatial and psychological facets of focalization seems to indicate that the position of focalization relative to the story is internal. The emotive component of the psychological focalization, however, does not support such a conclusion. Rimmon-Kennan describes the difference between external and internal focalization in its emotive transformation as a distinction between neutral or uninvolved narration (characteristic of external focalization) and subjective or involved narration (characteristic of internal focalization). Throughout its plot, Bicycle Thieves fails to provide the kind of subjective or involved narration that would indicate an internally focalized emotive component. Rather, the narration is more accurately characterized as neutral and uninvolved. Indeed, the style of narration in Bicycle Thieves largely strives for invisibility, prompting Bazin’s argument that the storyline disappears into the work.38 Although the accuracy of Bazin’s statement is questionable, the narration is nonetheless marked by its largely passive role. Techniques which signal more overt narrational styles or subjective narration, such as handheld camera work or the rapid editing sequences found in Rome: Open City, are absent in Bicycle Thieves. Furthermore, those points in the film where the narration takes on a more active role in imparting plot information mark movements away from Antonio and his emotional perspective, providing the spectator with information which does not register with Antonio (such as the interactions between the two boys begging and the well-dressed man). In addition, three brief scenes within the plot are inconsistent with the position of an internal focalizer: the opening itself, which begins with the bus coming down the hill into Valmeliana, the scene where the bicycle is stolen and the plot allows the spectator to witness the actions of the thief and his accomplices as they position themselves to carry out the theft, and the scene where Antonio attempts to steal the bicycle without knowing that Bruno is close by. Here the text departs from Antonio’s restricted knowledge and, in the process, exercises simultaneous views of different places characteristic of external focalization. These deviations from the restrictions inherent to internal focalization

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suggest that the text constructs an external position which restricts itself for rhetorical purposes, rather than an internal focalizer.39 Such a position would then be consistent with the failure of the emotive component to conform at all to an internal position. Further consideration of the emotive component also indicates an external position. In addition to the distinction between neutral and uninvolved versus subjective and involved, external and internal focalization function differently with respect to what RimmonKennan designates as the object of focalization: the focalized. With respect to this aspect of focalization, the film’s emotive component is in an external position, because, as Rimmon-Kennan argues, it “restricts all observation to external manifestations, leaving the emotions to be inferred from them.” 40 Thus, at no point does the film attempt to penetrate the consciousness of Antonio or any other character. Rather, emotions and attitudes are inferred from external manifestations. Many scholars have noted, for instance, the significance that De Sica placed on how Enzo Staiola walked: the disparity between Antonio’s long strides and Bruno’s attempt to keep up with small, quick steps functions to reveal the state of their emotional bond at different points in the film.41 Likewise, after the bicycle is stolen and Antonio returns to his worksite, his emotional state is conveyed through his external actions: his aimless attempts to finish with the poster, throwing the brush into the bucket, and slumping on the ladder. Antonio’s state of mind must be read through these actions as external manifestations of an interior mood. The scene closes with the camera moving in slightly on Antonio, emphasizing the emotion that plays across his face. The lack of any point-of-view shot within the sequence further marks the external position the film takes relative to representing Antonio’s consciousness. The conventions of cinematic narration in general do not provide for the easy accessibility of character consciousness found in literature. Even within these limitations, however, the images of Bicycle Thieves emphasize the external over the internal, as the withholding of Antonio’s point of view indicates. The exception to this external orientation can be found in the film’s music, which underscores nearly every dramatic moment. The music gives some access to the character’s consciousness by enunciating particular moods. This access to the interior mood comes from a position external to the diegesis, however, and thus reinforces the external position of the focalization. Further—and a more detailed Lacanian analysis of film music would be needed here—the kind of invisibility that the music score occupies is an important site for an investigation of modes of identification. The music in

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Bicycle Thieves rarely tries to dominate or order the image track, as contemporary music montage or appropriations of pop-tune scenes have a tendency to do. Rather, the kind of invisible or suggestive role that the musical score takes with respect to image and narrative begins to indicate that it functions more along premirror modes of identification—as pure effect that is attached to other modes of identification from a distinct external position. The external focalization of the text’s emotive component therefore assumes a position distinct from the character of Antonio. Indeed, the distinction is maintained in the text’s refusal to allow the external focalization to penetrate his consciousness. Nonetheless, much of the narrative seems oriented to Antonio’s perceptions, aligning him closely to the focalizer, if not making him the focalizing agent itself. In this respect, the focalization closely resembles a position which Dorrit Cohn describes as narrated monologue. This position “may be most succinctly defined as the technique for rendering a character’s thought in his own idiom, while maintaining the third-person reference.” 42 Cohn further describes this position as “the moment when the thought-thread of a character is most tightly woven into the texture of third-person narration.” 43 Although this definition is language-bound in its framework, the concept of what Cohn describes as a “fusion”— or close alignment—between two separate agents can nonetheless be adapted to cinematic narration. The emotive focalization of Bicycle Thieves remains external, but seemingly aligns itself closely with Antonio’s character as a means of rendering his emotional consciousness. The function of such a rhetorical position is to generate the necessary sympathy for Antonio’s position and validate or authorize his desire for self-fulfillment. As Cohn argues: “narrated monologues themselves tend to . . . attitudes of sympathy or irony. Precisely because they cast the language of a subjective mind into the grammar of objective narration, they amplify emotional notes . . .” 44 Within Bicycle Thieves, this amplification of emotional “notes” functions not only to construct the kind of sympathy necessary to validate Antonio’s desire, but also to articulate the distinction of psychological positions. This distinction is important for determining the rhetorical purpose of the external focalization in Bicycle Thieves, which is to construct a complex Symbolic position. Rather than being aligned with Antonio, the external focalization is aligned with Bruno, whose position is one of identification with Antonio. The sympathy generated for Antonio’s position is thus the sympa-

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thy of Bruno, who, identifying with his father, desires what Antonio desires. This construction reveals itself at those points in the narrative when that identification is suspended or compromised, as in the previously discussed scene where Bruno temporarily suspends his identification and attends to his infant sibling. The most explicit point in the narrative, however, is when Bruno’s identification with Antonio is compromised: when he witnesses Antonio stealing the bicycle. The articulation of what is for Bruno a tearing away from Antonio’s position occurs with a reaction shot of Bruno as he turns around in response to the commotion he hears. Bruno’s shock is emphasized by the camera moving in closer to register the expression on his face. The movement in is further accentuated by the additional camera movement laterally across Bruno, framing him first right of center then left. The next shot of Antonio trying to escape from his pursuers is subsequently defined as Bruno’s point-of-view shot. The events are registered both cognitively and emotionally on Bruno. Antonio (and for that matter the group that chases him) is unaware that Bruno has witnessed the pursuit through most of the sequence. Bruno is the only internal perspective with access to this knowledge. Likewise, the emotional effect of Antonio’s capture is registered on Bruno more than it is on Antonio. Antonio seems stunned and uncertain, his face almost expressionless, as he is surrounded and shoved by the group of men. Moreover, the film refuses to focus on him for an adequate amount of time to fully register outward manifestations of his emotional state. Rather, it cuts to Bruno’s anxious cries and desperate attempts to push through the crowd and reach his father. When the camera does focus on Antonio within the crowd, it does so from an angle which suggests Bruno’s physical point of view: almost at waist level to the men and looking up. The film thus brings together the camera’s physical point of view with the Symbolic position of the gaze as a means of emphasizing the latter. Indeed, the owner’s refusal to press charges after seeing the devastating effects the incident has had on Bruno demonstrates the degree to which Bruno’s perspective has come to subordinate all the others within the text. What is not so readily determined by a structural analysis of the text’s focalization, however, is the manner in which Bruno’s gaze solicits the Symbolic identification of the spectator. In other words, how is it the spectator comes to identify (symbolically) with Bruno’s position? The Lacanian framework established here posits an answer in the correspondence between the je identity established in the text and that of the spectator.

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The text organizes signifiers into the norms and values that regulate narrative drive through the construction of a je identity. The spectator identifies with that identity through Symbolic, rather than Imaginary, identification. Textual analysis which seeks to determine how the subject is engaged through the operation of identification must account for the relationship between the codes of the text—its ideology or evaluative system—and the identity of the subject’s je, contingent upon the introjection of specific norms and values in relationship to desire. In some manner, the text’s inscription of the structure of the je must organize an identity that corresponds to the spectator’s je identity in order to obtain Symbolic identification. Without Symbolic identification the processes of Imaginary identification, dependent on the je for “translation” and “shaping,” become disengaged. It is precisely this dialectical process between the je and the moi that prevents the spectator from being positioned or becoming the reflex reaction of the text.45 What a Lacanian analysis of Bicycle Thieves demonstrates is the manner in which this correspondence can occur at the level of structure. Furthermore, this structural correspondence is a primary instrument in transforming the social to the level of the individual. In taking up Bruno’s position, the spectator comes to identify with the disappointment in what Lacan describes as the failure of the paternal—its inability to “live up” to its Symbolic mandate. As Lacan argues: “the paternal function concentrates in itself both Imaginary and Real relations, always more or less inadequate to the Symbolic relation that essentially constitutes it.” 46 As his discussion indicates, the inadequacy of the paternal function results from the Symbolic—the inevitable failure of every signifier. Furthermore, this inadequacy, and its constitution in all three registers, determines that the resolution of the Oedipal complex circumscribes not only castration, but frustration and privation as well.47 In effect, then, what structures the evaluative system of the text and corresponds to the spectator’s identity is frustration and disappointment in the inadequacy of the father. As Lacan argues, “what is in question is the moment when the subject quite simply perceives that his father is an idiot or a thief . . . or quite simply a weakling . . .” 48 The disillusion and disappointment that results from the “moment” Lacan describes—the inadequacy of the paternal function—is precisely what structures the evaluative system of Bicycle Thieves. The scene which introduces Bruno articulates this position. While cleaning the bicycle for his father, Bruno discovers a small dent inflicted at the pawnshop. When Antonio seems unconcerned about the dent,

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Bruno fervently insists that “I would have complained.” Marcus notes that “Bruno’s rejoinder . . . registers an implicit criticism of his father’s passivity . . .” 49 In addition, however, it demonstrates a childlike belief in the absolute nature of the authority of the Law to ensure individual justice. It is this position which Antonio will adopt and which authorizes his frustration and disappointment with institutions to help him secure justice. The text’s negative orientation toward the police when they fail to assist Antonio demonstrates this position. The text evaluates the police negatively not so much because they are the Law, but rather because they fail to live up to their role within the Law. The Law is criticized from Antonio’s position only because it does not act upon and exercise its authority, both in the station and in the thief ’s house. The same position is articulated in the scene at the mendicant’s church. In its obstruction of Antonio’s pursuit of the old man, the bourgeois church shows more concern for decorum and what Marcus describes as “the wholesale approach to processing bodies and souls” than for helping individuals or responding to individual needs.50 The text constructs such a negative orientation toward the church because it obstructs individual justice rather than securing it. The irony results from the church failing to live up to its Symbolic mandate: the institution of Christ Jesus as champion of the poor and oppressed. The same kind of disappointment and criticism is leveled at the labor unions. The presence of an actual worker with problems and needs— Antonio—is an annoying obstacle to union activists plotting and debating political maneuvering in social crisis. In this respect, the text emphasizes the degree to which the Symbolic mandate of the labor union is all a show, articulated in Antonio’s relegation to a different space in the hall where a rehearsal for a performance is taking place.51 Antonio’s presence is again treated as getting in the way. The articulation of these scenes functions to induce a Symbolic identification with the structure of the inadequacy of the paternal function. What becomes significant for an ideological analysis, however, is the manner in which this identification occurs through the structural similarity between the social domains and individual identity. In appropriating the structure of the failure of the paternal function to define the social domains within the diegesis, the text provides the basis for a Symbolic identification with a specific ideological function. This is articulated in the film’s ending with Bruno’s restoration of Antonio’s dignity (Overby’s contention that it is a story of “grace lost and restored”).52

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With Bruno’s acceptance of his father’s failure to “fully live up to” his own place within the Law, the narrative establishes the “natural” acceptance of the legitimacy of patriarchy— despite its failures. Bruno’s place thus becomes the place of the historical spectator, who is asked to accept the legitimacy of Italian patriarchal-capitalist culture, despite its recent “moral” failures (e.g., Fascism) and its continued failures to “fully live up to” the Symbolic value invested in its function—its present inability to address social and economic problems within Italy. Antonio thus becomes the site for the restoration of patriarchy, and Maria, as the maternal, must be dismissed (as she is in the narrative) lest patriarchy “owe” anything to the maternal for its restoration or, even more threatening, become an option for reorganizing Italian culture after the fall of Fascism. Thus, as the narrative progresses, the vacillation that goes on with respect to Antonio functions to “admit” the faults of patriarchy, while at the same time seeking to restore its legitimacy. For this reason Antonio is neither idolized nor despised, but rather made necessary. In identifying with Bruno’s desire to restore Antonio’s dignity, the spectator comes to identify with the desire to restore the legitimacy of patriarchy. The restoration of Antonio’s position, despite his demonstrated insensitivity, is the site of the text’s translation into the structure of the individual of what is otherwise the political domain’s insensitivity to social conditions. Textual operations function to reestablish and reaffirm the legitimacy of patriarchal-capitalist culture, and the political structure it maintains, by “translating” failures and inadequacies as natural, inevitable, and ahistorical conditions which must be accepted and left to fate. The Symbolic position—the gaze—which structures the evaluative system of the text, the desire for restoring patriarchy’s legitimacy, anticipates its own failure by working into the narrative an ideological fantasy. The contradictions of patriarchy, its excesses, insensitivity, and incompetencies, are masked over through a comparison with an untenable alternative. The site of this untenable alternative is the site of the collective, which is defined through the structure of fantasy as an unstable and threatening domain—a potential source of anarchy that must be contained. Indeed, as earlier analysis has demonstrated, the narrative trajectory is defined through Antonio’s attempt to distinguish himself from the alienating/annihilating domain of the masses. Within the text, the collective is that site which always threatens: character, stability, and narrative itself. The collective is a fantasy of destruction

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and annihilation of subjecthood that patriarchy functions to contain. Despite De Sica’s assertion that the Italian cinema needed to show the truth about Italy, the radical potential of Bicycle Thieves is swallowed up in a fantasy where the collective is the problem, not the solution, and the answer is the restoration of patriarchy.

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4 La terra trema Subverting and Structuring Meaning

The structure that is reflected in the concept of Griffith montage is the structure of bourgeois society. Sergei Eisenstein 1 One by one they dry up, the branches of the tree, and fall away. Voice-over narration in La terra trema

In establishing a Lacanian critical theory for film analysis, the first two chapters of this book each focused on one of two interrelated principles: unity of discourse and relations to authority. This chapter centers itself around the third interrelated principle: recognition requests. Lacan’s work clearly posits the function of communication—the purpose of discourse—as recognition (probably the only thing that is clear in Lacan). In the seminar on the moi, he argues: “Speech is first and foremost that object of exchange whereby we are recognized, and because you have said the password, we don’t break each other’s necks, etc. That is how the circulation of speech begins.” 2 Lacan’s emphasis on speech as an object of exchange whose purpose is recognition is critical for understanding text-subject relationships and the historical specificity of those relationships. The previous examination of Symbolic identification demonstrates that before spectators can come to take up the position constructed for them by the text, there must be some basis for identification. What the analysis of both Rome: Open City and Bicycle Thieves begins to demonstrate is the man-

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ner in which the text, seeking to secure a mass audience, may establish the basis for Symbolic identification on the level of the structure of identity— over cultural categorical distinctions of race, class, and gender (to name only a few). In examining La terra trema, this chapter more fully explores the role of structure as it relates to the process of misrecognition and its relationship to the unity of discourse and relations to authority. In this respect, La terra trema distinguishes itself within Neorealist practice by rejecting the function of containment from its signifying practice. Indeed, despite Bazin’s assertion that Bicycle Thieves is “the only valid Communist film of the whole past decade,” 3 La terra trema evidences an expressive potency distinct from other Neorealist texts precisely as a result of its rejection of containment for a Marxist articulation of the alienating effects of culture under patriarchal capitalism. Concise analyses of the text’s unity of discourse and relations to authority demonstrate this point. The opening of the film itself establishes both the structure of classical narrative and the stylistic norms through which it will be subverted. As in many narratives, the opening of La terra trema serves an expositional function. The use of a voice-over narrator, however, emphasizes the operation of the film’s exposition. During the credit sequence the camera follows a small group of men as they walk through town in near darkness. Soon after they arrive at the shoreline, a voice-over narrator comments: “As always, the first to begin their day in Trezza are the fish merchants, who go down to the sea even before the sun has appeared from Cape Mulino.” 4 The narrator’s statement functions to ritualize the actions taking place within the image: emphasizing their recurring nature. The text’s emphasis on cyclical time and ritualized action will come to foreground the manner in which a specific economic and political system (namely the monopoly capitalism of southern Italy) appropriates ritual and tradition to maintain the structure of repression and privilege. Furthermore, analyzing the structural relationship between exposition and actional dynamics and the plot’s use of what Gérard Genette describes as iterative time demonstrates that the terms of cultural repression become articulated in the text through the consistent transformation of specific and concrete actions into the recurring action of ritual. This process can be determined in the introduction of Mara (and what will become the space of the Valastro family), with Lucia’s break from preparing for the men’s arrival, and in Antonio’s courting of Nedda. In the first example, the voice-over narration functions to construct exposition by the continued process of generalizing and placing of images as nonspecific. It

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describes the image of Mara walking through the courtyard as “a house like all the others, built of old stones, with walls as old as the fisherman’s trade.” What could function as a more specific element of the plot is instead generalized by the voice-over narration: it is a house “like all the others.” Furthermore, the voice-over narration attempts to link the house to the cyclical nature of the previous images by the claim that the walls are “as old as the fisherman’s trade.” A similar operation occurs with Lucia’s break from the house preparations. When she suspends her ritual cleaning actions to stare at something off-screen, Lucia is asked, “What are you looking at?” She responds, “Our brothers . . . I always think of them out there . . . like I thought of our father the day he didn’t return.” Lucia’s response transforms what might otherwise function as specific and concrete action into her own personal ritual performed in preparation for the men returning from the sea. Indeed, her response serves an expositional function that her actions do not fulfill: giving both character information about Lucia (her attitudes and concerns for her family) and plot information about the father (that he was lost at sea). In its operation, however, the exposition functions to repress actional dynamics, to contain the break with ritual caused by Lucia’s actions. Similarly, Antonio’s break with habitual and recurring action in his courtship of Nedda is ritualized and situated in cyclical time. The specificity of his action is transformed into nonspecific and recurring action—as a ritual in itself—through what Genette describes as an external iterative mode.5 The voice-over narration describes Antonio’s actions in clichéd expressions which ritualize the event, claiming: “If there is a respite, if there is a moment’s happiness, it is in thinking of one’s girl, and for a girl one can also go without sleep, because men are made to be caught by the girls as the fish in the sea are made for those who can catch them.” The generalizing or external iteration of the voice-over is clear. It functions to situate the specificity of Antonio’s desire, and this particular action, within a more generalized ritual. What might in other cases become the principal line of action—romantic union—is instead reorganized by textual operations as recurring and generalized action. Antonio’s pursuit of Nedda is but another instance of a “man caught by a girl.” The action therefore becomes iterative rather than singulative, providing character information about Antonio and the story world. Without the specificity of singulative narration, however, the action becomes removed from the linear structure necessary to advance the plot. The narrative’s reluctance to advance the plot begins to indicate the repressive function that iterative narration signifies within the text. By trans-

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forming specific or concrete actions into the recurring actions of a ritualized way of life, the iterative narration subverts the linear movement of action by containing it within cyclical movement. Likewise, within the narrative world, cyclical time, ritual, and tradition itself are appropriated by the economicpolitical structure as a means of repressing the working-class fishermen and maintaining a system of exploitation. Specific or concrete plot actions which cannot be contained by the exposition and iterative narration often function as disruptions that break cyclical movement: threatening the stability of narrative structure as it threatens the stability of the repressive culture of the story world. This occurs in the scene where Antonio leads a riot against the wholesalers. The action of the dealers—itself a long-established ritual— demonstrates the manner in which ritual and tradition are appropriated by the economic/political structure as a process of containment: their collusion keeps prices down and works against the efforts of the young men to break with their constant exploitation. The dealers’ practices outmaneuver Antonio’s plans and function to contain the potential disruption. The dealers’ preestablished ritual thus operates to contain the linear movement of a specific action by binding it into the cyclical movement of their ritual. This process of containment fails, however, with Antonio’s disruption: he abandons the goal of procuring more for the catch in order to upset the entire economic process which maintains the fishermen’s exploitation. The crowd of fishermen, following Antonio, breaks into a riot and begins battling the dealers. Antonio’s inciting of the riot functions to break the containment imposed on the actions of the fishermen through ritual and tradition. The disruptive nature of the break is articulated by the speed with which the organized ritual between buyers and fishermen breaks down into mass violence. Here, too, however, the disruption that occurs through singulative narration—the riot—is ultimately contained by iterative narration. The linear movement inscribed within the fishermen’s break with tradition (and the subsequent riot it caused) is absorbed into the cycle of an established political tradition: the state’s coercive power functioning to support the ruling class (or, perhaps more accurately, agents of capital). Indeed, after the exercise of the iterative action of the police, the recurring actions of the fishermen’s ritualized way of life resume as if nothing had happened (with the exception of Antonio). The structural effect of this transformation of singulative narration into iterative modes is repression of the narrative de-

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sire organized around the collective goal of the fishermen to escape their exploitation. The transformation of specific into recurring action subverts the linearity inscribed within the classical narrative’s construction of a trajectory of desire. Within the classical narrative, as Genette and Sternberg demonstrate, iterative narration is subordinated to the singulative—regulating and stabilizing the specificity of linear action. La terra trema’s consistent transformation of singulative into iterative thus constitutes a subversion of classical structure by reversing the subordination of the two narrational modes. Furthermore, subordinating the singulative to iterative functions to repress narrative desire, rather than displace it along the narrative trajectory as in the classical text. The repression of the movement of desire, and its consequences for Imaginary identification, marks a significant site at which the text undermines classical narrative structure. Indeed, the film’s consistent repression of the movement of desire indicates a role for anxiety within its textual operations. A close examination of the plot’s structure demonstrates the functional characteristics of anxiety (temporal dimension, object loss, displacement of danger, redirection of desire) within its identificatory operations. To begin with, Imaginary identification with the movement of desire is arrested through a temporal dimension. The repressive structure of the iterative narration’s transformation of a linear trajectory into its own cyclical movement functions through the transformation of temporal structures. As argued previously, this transformation removes specificity from concrete actions. It is precisely specificity, however, which allows one action to be distinguished from another—a process of opposition which inscribes linearity within its structure. This linearity is then constructed textually within temporal terms: actions originate, progress, and end. By removing an action’s specificity, the text assimilates actions into an indistinguishable cycle. It thus denies the temporality to action by subverting linearity.6 The second functional characteristic of anxiety— object loss—also exercises a significant role in textual operations. The exposition’s repression of the movement of desire is constructed around object loss. Precisely because specific objects within the text function as objects of desire, their loss marks a site within the text that demands renunciation of specific desires. Thus, for example, with the loss of the boat, Antonio’s individual desire for “a life free of the bloodsuckers” must be abandoned—renounced—however unwillingly.7 Similarly, object loss is inscribed in the text at other sites: the barrels

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of anchovies, the house, and even the family members themselves (the loss of the grandfather, Cola, and Lucia). Each of these objects comes to represent a desire (mastery, certainty, constancy) that must be renounced. Object loss therefore functions within the text to repress narrative desire. It is at the site of object loss that the text inscribes the third characteristic of anxiety: displacement of danger. Repression of narcissistic drives constitutes a psychical danger to the structure of the moi (its intentionality). Freud therefore argues that anxiety functions to displace psychical danger away from narcissistic drives and onto the loss of the desired object itself.8 This operation functions within the structure of the text nowhere more clearly than with the loss of the boat. Both Antonio and Cola fail to recognize that the loss of the boat constitutes an enormous threat to the family’s security. Having mortgaged the house to pay for the boat, the family has lost both their capital investment (the boat is worth nothing now) and the means to pay off their debt (the boat now provides no income). Instead, it is the grandfather who recognizes this when he states: “It’s time we think of paying the debt.” The different responses to the loss of the boat articulate the boat’s displacing function. Antonio and Cola focus on the loss of their ability to obtain a better life. The loss functions to repress their desire, and their grief is directed toward the loss of that desire. This displaces the danger away from the security of the family—their inability to provide for themselves— caused by the loss of the boat. Rather than appropriating classical narrative’s transformation of social phenomena into an individual character’s desire, the plot structure of La terra trema subverts that structure by transforming social phenomena into individual object loss and displacement of psychic danger. The diegetic attention paid to the loss of the object itself—as in Cola and Antonio’s response to the boat, Antonio’s response to the anchovies, and Mara’s response to the house— displaces the spectator’s identification with psychical danger onto the object itself. The progression of the text also indicates the final characteristic of anxiety—redirection of desire—within its operations. With the repression of desire, the forward progression of the text is driven by the redirection of desire. After the boat is destroyed, Antonio’s desire to be free from the exploitation of the fish dealers no longer moves the narrative forward. This represents a significant subversion of the structure of classical narrative. Whereas in a classical narrative Antonio’s desire would advance the narrative (and find some kind of fulfillment in the end despite the setback) the plot structure in La terra trema refuses this structure. Rather, Antonio’s individual de-

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Fig ur e 5. “One by one they fall away . . .” Cola looks at his family one last time before departing. The film inscribes object loss into the narrative through the disintegration of the family. courtesy of the museum o f modern art , film stills archive.

sire is textually subordinated to the repercussions that patriarchal capitalism exacts from the family for their attempted rebellion. Narrative progression is structured as a conflict between Antonio’s attempt to retain his desire (as opposed to advance it) and the survival of the family. Antonio’s attempt to retain his desire is articulated at several sites: his foray into drunkenness, his refusal to work for Lorenzo, and, retroactively, his possession of distinctive clothing. The scene with Lorenzo, for example, makes clear Antonio’s desire for control. With his family disintegrating and starving, Antonio puts his own desire for mastery over the dealers above his desire to help the family. The redirection of this desire toward preserving the family is marked within the text at the point where Antonio gives up his better clothing for his older clothing and signs on to work for the dealers as a laborer. This action retroactively defines Antonio’s continued possession of distinctive clothes as yet another site of maintaining desire. His clothing is but one of numerous references to his time in the service. These references work

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to suggest that Antonio has lived outside the village and is thus not defined entirely by the social-Symbolic system of Trezza. Indeed, Antonio’s goal of breaking free of the system of exploitation is consistently defined diegetically as a result of his time abroad (as when Cola explains Antonio’s actions to his grandfather in these terms). Forfeiting his better clothing marks the point at which Antonio renounces his desire to become distinct from the cultural repression of Trezza and redirects it toward preserving what is left of his family. This act of renunciation ends Antonio’s self-destruction and secures his ability (and the ability of the family) to survive. The resolution of Antonio’s conflict between giving in to the dealers and preserving the family is a significant site for the text’s subversion of the structure of classical narrative. Rather than ending with the final possession of a desired object, the sequence ends with the final redirection of desire—a desire which does not so much obtain an object as much as prevent loss (of the family). Unity is achieved, but not the unity initially sought. Moreover, it is a unity which articulates the terms of subjugation through which it is achieved and thus denies Imaginary pleasure. Textual operations do not construct the redirection of Antonio’s desire toward preserving the family (constancy and wholeness) as a site of moi fulfillment. Rather, this redirection comes at the expense of the narcissistic structure of the moi. Neither does the narration attempt to validate the actions of the dealers as a necessary restraint to Antonio’s previous grandiosity and thus construct it as a positive Symbolic structure. Rather, the inscription of the structure of anxiety operates textually to redirect spectator identification away from the unpleasure of the threat to moi intentionality, but at the expense of an Imaginary jouissance. Textual operations do not reinforce the structure of the moi, but rather undermine its narcissistic intentionality by repressing the movement of desire through object loss. Constructing the redirection of Antonio’s desire as a subjugation denigrates the structure of the moi. This allows the spectator to accept Antonio’s position as necessary, without identifying with him. The result is a Symbolic acceptance of Antonio’s position (the structure of the Symbolic being that of separation and differentiation) without any Imaginary identification (nondifferentiation) in such an acceptance. An analysis of the identificatory operations of the text is thus a significant site for determining the film’s subversion of classical narration. The text’s construction of a detached, Symbolic acceptance of Antonio’s position without Imaginary identification indicates a separation of Imaginary and Symbolic identification as a means of encouraging a detached and analytical

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Fig ur e 6 . Antonio’s renunciation of his desire to live free of the “blood-suckers” is articulated through costume, as he changes into older clothes before signing on with his brothers as day-laborers. courtesy of the museum of modern art , film s tills archive.

spectatorship. The separation between Imaginary identification and the complex structure of Symbolic identification within the text becomes the focus of the second mode of analysis—relations to authority. Analyzing the text’s focalization demonstrates that the identificatory separation in La terra trema is achieved primarily through its external focalization. Indeed, the authority to translate both Antonio’s actions and the forces of repression that work against him rests within the external focalization. The primary indicator of the text’s external focalization is the use of voiceover narration. At no point within the narrative does the text attempt to lo-

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calize the voice-over commentary diegetically within one character. This constructs the voice-over as a disembodied voice external to the diegesis, “necessarily presented outside” of the diegetic space, as Mary Ann Doane argues.9 The voice-over’s commentary on narrative action thus functions as an external perspective, mediating between image and spectator. Moreover, the external position of this perspective gives it authority over internal perspectives. As Doane argues: “It is its radical otherness with respect to the diegesis which endows this voice with a certain authority.” 10 Pascal Bonitzer concurs when he notes: “Because it rises from the field of the Other, the voice-over is assumed to know: this is the essence of its power.” 11 An analysis of La terra trema’s focalization demonstrates that the position the spectator comes to occupy through Symbolic identification is precisely the field of the Otherpresumed-to-know. Through this identification, the spectator accepts the voice-over’s “translation” of narrative action, allowing for the beginnings of Imaginary identification with Antonio’s actions earlier in the text, but ending with a detached Symbolic identification. This is achieved through an external focalization that is articulated through the voice-over and its ability to align, but subsequently withdraw itself from Antonio’s perspective. This alignment is expressed through the statements the voice-over makes (evaluating the fishermen positively while criticizing the wholesalers) and the specific elements of plot and style that convey its external perspective. Early in the film, for example, the image track reinforces the voice-over’s privileging of the fishermen by excluding the wholesalers during such descriptions. By focusing on the activities of the fishermen to the exclusion of those of the wholesalers, the narration assigns a primacy to the former over the latter, which articulates the external focalization’s alignment with Antonio and the fishermen. The structure of the plot determines that the function of this primacy is to align the focalization’s external perspective with Antonio’s internal perspective in the first half of the film and thus “authorize” his desire. This alignment of the voice-over narration’s position and Antonio’s position is articulated several times within the film, but is clearly evident when Antonio and his brothers return to sea. Here the voice-over first describes the scene then, after a pause, continues: Look, he should try it himself, he, Tony, with his younger brothers and friends, face to face with the wholesalers and making the prices and seeing a little if this injustice can end. This is the idea that turns over in Antonio’s head.

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The film conveys the close alignment between the voice-over narration and Antonio by giving the external narration access to Antonio’s consciousness. As Rimmon-Kennan contends, this process “reveals the inner-life of the focalized,” in this case Antonio, “by granting an external focalizer . . . the privilege of penetrating the consciousness of the focalized.” 12 The act of penetrating his consciousness constructs a proximity between the voice-over narration and Antonio. That the two positions are distinct, but aligned, is demonstrated within the narration itself. Although the voice-over commentary penetrates Antonio’s consciousness, the narration itself does not represent his consciousness. Rather, the film’s narration maintains its external position, representing instead Antonio’s physical position within the story world. The distinction between Antonio’s internal position and the external position of the text’s focalization is significant for the text’s separation between Imaginary and Symbolic identification. Maintaining an external focalization allows for a Symbolic identification with the norms of the text separate from Antonio. This permits Symbolic identification with Antonio’s moral point of view without the kind of absolute authorization of his character that would form the basis of Imaginary identification. An external focalization allows the text to separate itself from Antonio’s perspective—and indeed even criticize him—while still maintaining consistent ideological norms. The separation of the two positions is clearly articulated at the site where the external focalization can no longer penetrate Antonio’s consciousness. This occurs in the scene after the purchase of the boat, when Antonio obtains another object of his desire: Nedda. In this scene, Antonio’s pursuit of Nedda culminates in physical passion. As the scene closes with the couple walking away, the voice-over asks: “What does your heart say to you, Antonio, now that you have everything you ever wanted? Every dream of yours is within reach.” By asking this question, however, the voice-over demonstrates that it has taken up a different position with respect to Antonio’s consciousness than it had earlier in the film. Whereas before the voice-over commentary was able to penetrate Antonio’s consciousness and articulate his thoughts, here it remains outside, unable to access or perceive. By refusing to penetrate Antonio’s consciousness (when it has already demonstrated its ability to do so), the focalization aligns itself with Nedda, whose ability to perceive Antonio’s thoughts is now severely undermined by the distance between them. The focalization’s shift away from Antonio at the moment when he ob-

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tains one of the objects of his desire is significant for understanding the film’s attempt to prevent Imaginary jouissance. Ragland-Sullivan defines the structure of jouissance as follows: “at an abstract level it [jouissance] could be described as the temporary pleasure afforded by substitute objects.” 13 Antonio’s temporary pleasure is what the shift in focalization withholds from representation. Precisely at the moment when the story comes to a character’s Imaginary jouissance with a substitute object of desire, the narration restricts itself, assigning itself to the position of “not knowing.” It thus prevents identification with a character’s Imaginary jouissance by withholding it from plot. By assuming this restricted position, the narration once again inscribes the structure of anxiety, which, as Lacan argues, appears at the place of the jouissance of the Other.14 The narration inscribes this structure by aligning itself psychologically with Nedda. Although she might “know” Antonio’s desires, she cannot know Antonio’s Imaginary jouissance, which the narration conveys by repressing Antonio’s fulfillment from representation, focusing instead on the psychological distance between the two that fulfillment of desire causes. In this manner the text prevents identification with the structure of jouissance by substituting the structure of anxiety in its place. What is particularly significant for analyzing relations of authority, and the manner in which La terra trema separates Imaginary from Symbolic identification, is that the external focalization, having shifted away from Antonio at this point of the text, maintains its distinction from his position. Indeed, from this point on the external position refuses to privilege any character’s perspective. Furthermore, the voice-over narration’s separation from Antonio in the second half of the film, combined with its implicit criticism of some of his actions, works to prevent Imaginary identification with his character. The subversion of an Imaginary identification with Antonio can be determined in one of the final scenes, where Antonio comes upon a group of men fixing the damaged boat. In both the pattern of presentation and its specific articulation, the narration refuses to absolutize (to use Jameson’s term) Antonio’s position into an Imaginary construction of wholeness.15 Here the voice-over’s repetition of Antonio’s phrase about the necessity of solidarity and being good to each other emphasizes the ideological significance of this perspective. Although the voice-over validates this perspective, it does not privilege it. The voice-over makes clear that, despite the significance of this perspective, Antonio (and by implication the spectator who evaluates him as a site for identification) must also consider his own role in the destruction

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of his family—that he must find courage inside himself, rather than measuring the actions of others by his failure. This “translation” of Antonio’s character by the authoritative norms of the text thus refuses the kind of absolute construction characteristic of the Imaginary. Indeed, rather than constructing an Imaginary character, the text here emphasizes the role his character plays as a site of organization for several textual processes. Antonio’s failure is more than the combined effect of the actions of individual identities: it is also the result of a repressive capitalist culture and the lack of consciousness, goodwill, and solidarity among the others. In addition, however, the narration concludes that Antonio must bear responsibility for how he negotiated a world lacking solidarity and goodwill. What this construction avoids is a translation of Antonio as absolutely “good,” thus disallowing the good/bad dichotomy characteristic of Imaginary constructions.16 Instead, the text differentiates between Antonio’s role and the others, and between Antonio’s earlier and later actions, establishing a Symbolic construction which avoids the absolutism of a “vanquished victor.” 17 Without this kind of Symbolic authorization of an absolute construction, the text prevents an Imaginary identification with Antonio’s position. The denial of an Imaginary pleasure indicates the place of the historical spectator within the text’s ideological operations. Precisely what gets transformed into the Symbolic structure of the text is the failure of the utopian impulse to translate itself politically and transform Italian culture. Rather, the reorganization of patriarchal capitalism from the fall of Fascism into the Christian Democratic coalition government demonstrates the constancy of the system as a mode of cultural organization. As a result of its ideological opposition to this structure, the film constructs the obtainment of constancy in a manner which refuses pleasure. The implied spectator that the text withholds pleasure from is its contemporary Italian audience, who experienced the disorienting effects of postwar Italian culture—an unstable period that was stabilized through the constancy of patriarchal capitalism. By withholding Imaginary pleasure from the constancy that Antonio achieves in the end, the film articulates its Marxist conclusion: no pleasure can be found in a Symbolic order which demands individual subjugation to exploitation. The structure of the film thus reflects not only a Marxist rejection of classical narration, but a Marxist rejection of the social formations that ground classical narration. The Symbolic position that the spectator takes up, the gaze with which s/he identifies, external to the diegesis, as the analysis of focalization has

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demonstrated, is the Other-presumed-to-know. Denied an Imaginary identification with Antonio, the spectator is afforded a place which validates Antonio’s desire to be “free of the blood-suckers,” but holds him accountable for failing to negotiate a world lacking collective consciousness. What the external focalization already “knows” is a consciousness that Antonio must achieve—the consciousness articulated in Gramsci’s “The Southern Question,” where he argues that “no mass action is possible unless the mass itself is convinced of the ends it wants to reach and the methods to be applied.” 18 It is this utopian consciousness that “knows” the collective transformation of culture will ultimately occur (probably after many individual failures) which is afforded to the spectator for Symbolic identification. In taking up such a position, the spectator can avoid the anxiety of a lack of Imaginary identification, through a Symbolic identification of a future gratification—a collective utopia to come, rather than a libidinized utopia of the individual that so grounds the pleasure of classical narration. If, as Eisenstein argues, the structure of bourgeois society is reflected in D. W. Griffith’s films, La terra trema represents a different structure: a position of consciousness that rejects capitalism, but must wait for collective transformation to reach its potential. This structural position afforded to the spectator for identification begins to indicate the key role that structure exercises in the organization and determination of signification. As demonstrated in discussions of Symbolic identification, the text must afford the spectator some basis for misrecognition in order to procure identification. What an analysis of recognition requests demonstrates is that the classical text, seeking to procure a mass audience, begins organizing that basis on the level of structure. What the spectator “recognizes” is a structure of identity that assigns meaning to the significations and operations of the text. Lacan’s concept of the point de capiton makes it possible to determine the manner in which structure (and in particular the structures of identity) becomes the site of organization that assigns meaning to an otherwise equivocal operation of signification. In formulating this concept, Lacan addresses the arbitrary nature of meaning, the result of its determination by the Symbolic and the signifier, and not the Real. Lacan thus argues that “signification . . . proves never to be resolved into a pure indication of the real, but always refers back to another signification.” 19 This is of particular importance for analyzing the film text since film, drawing as it does on the indexical sign, presents itself— or can be made to present itself—as an indication of, or emanating from, reality.

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What semiotics indicates, however, is that meaning, whether a function of the indexical sign or others, is still a function of signification and not determined by reality. The absence of the Real in the determination of meaning, and its referentiality to signification itself, results in what Lacan describes as the “incessant sliding of the signified.” 20 Such a concept is particularly important to La terra trema, where the shifting focalization creates the potential for a plurality of meanings competing against each other. As discussed previously, the film starts by subverting classical narration. Later it begins appropriating the structure of classical narration through the character of Antonio and his specific desires. At that point in the plot, the focalization aligns itself with Antonio, signaling this position by penetrating his consciousness. As a means of returning to a subversion of classical narration, however, the focalization withdraws itself from Antonio, and the trajectories of Antonio’s desires become denigrated. Despite a complex approach to focalization and to subversion and appropriation of classical norms, La terra trema maintains a clear narrative comprehension. Precisely what a Lacanian framework can contribute to narrative analysis is an understanding of the manner in which complex signifying practices can maintain intelligibility and control the potential sliding of the signifier(s). In the Lacanian view, what fixes meaning, determines the signified, is the point de capiton, the anchoring point which provides the totality around which signification organizes itself. As Lacan argues: “Everything radiates out from and is organized around . . . [the] signifier, similar to these little lines of force that an upholstery button forms on the surface of material. It’s the point of convergence that enables everything that happens in . . . discourse to be situated retroactively and prospectively.” 21 Zizek elaborates: If we maintain that the point de capiton is a nodal point, a kind of knot of meanings, this does not imply that it is simply the richest word, the word in which is condensed all the richness of meaning of the field it quilts: the point de capiton is rather the word which, as a word, on the level of the signifier itself unifies a given field, constitutes its identity: it is, so to speak, the word to which things themselves refer to recognize themselves.22

Lacan’s assertion that signification is never an indication of the Real determines that an anchoring point, that locus where the meaning of signification is determined, results not from a relationship of sign with reality, but, rather, from the properties of the signifier. Here, too, film makes a valuable illustration of this point. A narrative film with an emphasis on realism ap-

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pears to capture the reality of a specific space and time, yet this is a function of, among other things, codes of editing and their reception. Were the film composed of four- to six-frame shots that defied spatio-temporal continuity, the reality-effect could be severely compromised, if not eliminated. The “naturalness” of the realism in La terra trema and other Neorealist films (as well as narrative film in general) is due in part to the manner in which specific codes allow for a synchronic structuring of signification.23 As Lacan notes: “the signifier is constituted only from a synchronic and innumerable collection of elements in which each is sustained only by the principle of its opposition to each of the others.” 24 Precisely what allows a signifier to serve as an anchoring point—as that point which situates discourse—is its ability to present itself as “pure signifier,” as support of, and emanating from, the Real. Lacan thus argues: Try to imagine, then, what the appearance of a pure signifier might be like. Of course we can’t imagine this, by definition. And yet . . . [our] experience makes us constantly feel that these basic signifiers, without which the order of human meanings would be unable to establish itself, exist.25

The ability to present itself as primary, as a whole that emanates from the Real, allows a signifier to function as an anchoring point, organizing the relations between signifiers and meaning. Zizek elaborates this function: It is because the Real itself offers no support for a direct symbolization of it— because every symbolization is in the last resort contingent—that the only way the experience of a given historic reality can achieve its unity is through the agency of a signifier, through reference to a “pure” signifier. It is not the real object which guarantees as the point of reference the unity and identity of a certain ideological experience— on the contrary it is the reference to a pure signifier which gives unity and identity to our experience of historical reality itself.26

Zizek’s elaboration on the ideological function of the anchoring point in constructing historical reality is correlative to the manner in which the film text constructs itself as social discourse. What this analysis attempts to delineate is the manner in which the structure of identity functions within the film text as an anchoring point, as that which organizes signification and meaning and which textual signifiers and signification refer to and recognize “themselves” in.27 The structure of identity can be determined most readily in the text’s construction and evaluation of character. Indeed, as the work of Propp and A.-J. Greimas makes clear, the movement of desire within the text is inscribed at the site of character. Although La terra trema withholds this move-

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ment within the plot, eventually it does articulate such a structure through the character-identity of Antonio. It is at the site of his character that the working-class struggle to break free from exploitation is transformed into an individual desire. Through the structure of identity the character of Antonio organizes collective desires (his family, the fishermen, the spectators) into a single trajectory. The structure of Antonio’s identity, and the trajectory of his desire in its relation to other signifying structures in the text, becomes the principal site both for anchoring meaning within the text and for the subversion of the structure of classical narration and denial of pleasure to its spectators. The work of Propp and Greimas clarifies this anchoring function. In their narratology, action is assigned narrative primacy. Character is then the organization of discursive strategies which qualify and indeed translate and give shape to action and narrative movement. The structure of the relationship between desire and discursive strategies that Propp and Greimas formulate thus shares the logic of the relationship between the moi and the je (which might lend it the kind of “practical value” that Jameson describes). In Greimas’s approach, action, or function itself, has no identity independent of or divorced from the few key signifiers which give it “name.” His approach begins to make clear the anchoring function that “name” provides in the relationship between action, function, character, and narrative trajectory. A Lacanian critical method takes this structural characteristic of the text even further by demonstrating a commensurability between subject and character at the site of subordination to the signifier with respect to the structure of identity. The “identity” that the subject maintains is no less a fiction, and no less dependent on key signifiers, than the “character” which the text constructs. The legibility of narrative as an organizational structure, and its ability to mobilize pleasure, is grounded in the subject’s ability to identify with the process of narrative—its covering over of a lack of self at the site of character. Indeed, Lacan’s dynamic picture of a primary identity asserts the fictional nature of the “self.” The “truth” of the subject for Lacan is that there is no self, only a lack of self: a void which was filled through the introjection of part objects. What structures identity, then, is the effect of papering over a void, not an essence of self. The “self ” is thus the sum of those effects, which organize around the primary objects or “pure signifiers.” Narrative inscription of the structure of the moi constructs character in just such a manner. Frank Kermode, summarizing both Propp’s and Greimas’s approaches, argues that a preliminary situation gives rise to a function

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which “develops into a proper name; so it becomes a character, whose life and death have a narrative; and then the function is lost in the character.” 28 The “preliminary situation,” as Sternberg argues, is the site of the exposition and thus is formed through the relationship between signifiers (expositional material). The structure of the moi and of primary identity can be seen within the “loss” of function in character. What becomes “lost” is the “truth” about the identity of character: that it is an effect, not an essence. The text and the characters it constructs start from a void— existing as nothing— and come into being by an introjection, a putting in, of signifiers. There is thus no essence to character, only otherness: the relationship between a few “pure” signifiers. The movement of “function” toward “name” and “desire,” and away from the “truth” of nonexistence, is thus the paranoid structure of the moi, which is threatened by its alienation. As Lacan argues: “each time we get close, in a given subject, to this primitive alienation, the most radical aggression arises.” 29 The movement of desire, therefore, is thus the movement away from otherness and toward “name” and the Symbolic, where, Lacan asserts, it can be mediated as recognition.30 A Lacanian critical method thus delineates character as the site of the dialectical structure of the moi and the je: reducible not to its actions, but rather to the primary meaning which shapes desire. At the locus of character, therefore, are the Symbolic discourses and codes (the je) which regulate desire, but which in turn are determined by the primary identity within desire which moves the narrative forward. Character is not an “essence” as much as a site of organization. The multiple structures of desire which operate in and through the text find a primary site for signification in the locus of character. Through the unifying structure of identity, character functions to organize the discourses and codes which desire operates in and through. A Lacanian critical method should therefore analyze the identity traits and the drive attributed to a (main) character. As character (“function” with a proper name) moves in a direction away from its otherness and toward desire, actions and interactions take on the function of recognition requests: affirming or revealing the presence of the particular traits which “motivate” those actions. It is only through interactions with other characters and objects within the narrative that the character’s “identity” can be recognized and thus confirmed. The narrative’s movement forward, defined as the character’s desire, is thus no less the paranoid and specular structure of the moi. The identity of Antonio’s character can be defined through the structure of the narcissistic moi, which has important implications in the text’s

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denial of Symbolic identification. The movement of desire inscribed within Antonio finds its source in the structure of the moi: mastery, constancy, wholeness. In its articulation, however, the movement of desire is defined through the structure of identification with the phallic injunction. The desire to break free from exploitation, expressed within Antonio’s actions, is directed toward differentiation and separation—the Symbolic and the je— and not toward unity—the Imaginary and the moi. The relationship between Antonio and substitute objects of desire articulates this structure. Although Antonio’s desire for freedom from exploitation is represented through substitute objects of desire—the boat, Nedda, the thirty barrels of anchovies—it is always directed past the objects themselves, thereby denying the kind of Imaginary jouissance that results from union with substitute objects of desire. Thus, when Antonio’s desire for mastery leads to possession of the boat, the narration denies the final moment of possession— of obtaining the object itself—by omitting the action from representation. Antonio’s possession must be inferred from the text; possession of the boat is not directly depicted. Rather, what is depicted are the problems that result from the action. Antonio is almost immediately ostracized by his neighbors at the point where he tries to revel in the jouissance that the substitute object could afford him. His indifference toward this separation from the momentary fulfillment a substitute object affords him indicates that his desire is directed elsewhere, beyond union with an object and toward separation from his exploitation. Possession of the boat leads to obtaining another substitute object of desire, the barrels of anchovies, but here, too, the text denies Imaginary jouissance with a substitute object. The anchovies are first introduced by the text as so valuable an object as to be from providence. In the scene immediately following, however, the text modifies this construction. Mara qualifies their function as signifier when she says to Nicola: “Well, if luck helps us, Nicola, and the salting goes well, we’ll soon remove that debt from the bank . . . We have it here like a lump in our throat.” In Mara’s terms the anchovies do not function as a desired object—an object that provides pleasure in itself. Rather, the anchovies function as objects which can prevent pain and hardship. Indeed, it is not even their possession which can provide pleasure and joy for the family, but their dispossession—their ability to be sold and pay off the debt—that allows them to provide pleasure by preventing the hardship that debt could impose.

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In this manner the text already manifests a subversion of classical narration by problematizing the trajectory of desire toward substitute objects, disallowing objects of desire the ability to provide the kind of Imaginary jouissance characteristic of classical narrative. Within classical narrative, the (mis)recognition at stake in the movement of desire is a denial that primary identity is otherness: the structure of a few key signifiers, which are fixed, but realign themselves in response to ever shifting relations. Thus, the structure of the narcissistic moi (specifically mastery and constancy) finds its articulation in the character-identity of Antonio, but also shifts to and from the boat, the anchovies, Nedda, and retroactively—in a conflict between mastery and constancy—Antonio’s clothing. The analysis of character through the mode of recognition requests thus takes as its object the anchoring points or primary signification of the text: the “pure signifiers” which realign themselves through the movement of narrative. In addition to locating these anchoring points, however, a Lacanian method must delineate the misrecognition that is at stake there if it is going to transcend the limitations of earlier Freudian models, the search for the phallic symbol and the positing of “fixed” and objective meanings to the text. An analysis of misrecognition, however, necessarily inscribes the historical spectator as the site of misrecognition: a site that is constituted through the role of desire. In this respect, a Lacanian analysis relativizes the relationship between signification and meaning by introducing the role of desire. Lacan argues that “desire is instituted within the Freudian world in which our experience unfolds, it constitutes it, and at no point in time, not even in the most insignificant of our maneuvers in this experience of ours, can it be erased.” 31 Lacan’s position here is that desire overdetermines our structuration of the world, how we come to symbolize and understand it. As a result, meaning is grounded in, depends upon, the world as symbolized and the subject’s individual position relative to that symbolization at the site of the Other(A). Meaning, therefore, is both overdetermined by and a reflection of desire.32 Analyzing the text for primary signification, therefore, is not so much a reduction to some “final truth” as much as it is determining the site where “meaning” provides the subject with unconscious recognition, the sense of continuity that occurs when the Other(A) of the subject is confirmed. This “sense of continuity,” however, is none other than the functioning of identity—the covering over of the subject’s alienation through identification. The meaning of discourse—its truth value—is therefore bound up in its

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ability to confirm the identity of the subject: the fictions that cover over the “truth” of their lack in being. Ragland-Sullivan thus concludes: The fictions in an out-of-sight meaning system—the Other(A) — determine the socioconventional meaning of contracts, pacts, and laws from culture to culture. Meaning, then, cannot ultimately be identified with linguistic function only, for it is inherently relative, relational, structural, and “self ”-referential. 33

Meaning and pleasure are subsequently fused together in subjects’ ability to identify, to “misrecognize” their own “out-of-site meaning system”—their own Other(A) —within discourse. The significance of La terra trema thus lies in its subversion of the structure of classical narration by refusing to provide pleasure through identity “misrecognition.” One of the first methods by which the film subverts the classical narrative structure, as discussed earlier, is by withholding narrative. It is not until the voice-over narration penetrates Antonio’s consciousness and reveals his goal to be free from exploitation that a desire is specified that initiates a forward trajectory that the exposition does not immediately transform. As the plot advances, however, all of Antonio’s desires become denied or displaced, in a refusal to constitute the kind of textual jouissance of classical narration. This consistent denial of jouissance indicates that the desire organized around Antonio’s character is not the desire for unity, but rather for separation (from the cultural system of exploitation). The structure of desire inscribed within his character is therefore defined through identification with the phallic superego and the injunction to separation. The text marks this structure by reversing the movement of desire at the moment where it overtly withholds the construction of jouissance: in the love scene between Nedda and Antonio discussed earlier. Here a reversal of expectations occurs. The film starts out promising to be an epic saga— one man’s victory over the forces that would oppose him—but denies this expectation halfway into the story by reversing the structure of narrative itself. Rather than creating the movement of desire toward unity, the story is transformed into the deterioration of desire and its disintegration— of the “branches falling away from the tree.” In this manner the text subverts the structure of the classical narrative as a means of articulating a Marxist rejection of the idea of personal fulfillment through the acceptance of subjugation. The primary role that the superego injunction for separation plays in the structuring of identity therefore functions to articulate the fundamental ideological position of the text: an opposition to the idea of individual fulfill-

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ment through subjugation to cultural repression. It serves as the anchoring point for articulating the contradiction at stake in transforming the working-class struggle against exploitation into the structure of an individual desire. Indeed, the narrative logic of La terra trema forecloses any possibility for fulfillment in relationship to cultural formations organized around individual exploitation—through either rejection or acceptance. In addition, however, the primary role assigned to the separation injunction inscribes the primary role that separation formerly exercised in Italian cultural formations—most notably evidenced in the inability of the state to forge an Italian national identity. In the historical period of the film, regionalism traditionally defined identity in the Italian subject much more than nationality (as discussed in Chapter 1). Although economic structures and to some extent political formations certainly contributed the most to the separation into regionalism that defined cultural formations and individual identities, language—the agent of separation—became the primary ground for the expression of cultural division. Thus, ten years after the film Denis Mack Smith still observed that “the natural speech of most Italians has been dialect until quite recently, and most of the dozen or so dialects are largely unintelligible outside their particular district.” 34 The central role that cultural separation through language occupies in the Other(A) for the film’s contemporary audience is inscribed in the film’s use of dialect. The unintelligibility of Sicilian dialect to Italian audiences constructs a separation between the identity of the film’s contemporary mainstream audience—non-Sicilian—and the Sicilian identities constructed in the film. Although the well-documented intent of such a stylistic strategy is in the desire for greater realism, the effect for the film’s contemporary Italian spectators was nonetheless a separation through language between character and spectator that subtitles and the voice-over narration in Italian attempted to bridge over. Furthermore, the effect of cultural separation through the language of dialect is to place the trauma of the Fascist past between spectator identification and character. Separation between the film’s contemporary spectators and the character’s use of Sicilian dialect is the result of Fascism’s failed attempt to impose a national language. Indeed, language itself became one of the principal sites of the Italian population’s rejection of Fascism’s attempt to forge a national identity. Regional dialects prevailed despite the Fascist mandate for one common Italian language. In its use of language to reference the Fascist past, La terra trema incorporates a pattern established by Rossellini’s Rome: Open City, where, as Marcus notes, the use of dialect situates character with the

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people, while the use of nonregional Italian is used for social mobility under Fascism.35 In this manner, Rome: Open City establishes dialect as a rejection of Fascism. Pina, an anti-Fascist, speaks in dialectal cadences and colloquialisms. Marina, however, speaks nonregional Italian, complying with the Fascist injunction in order to achieve social mobility. Unlike Rome: Open City, however, La terra trema uses dialect to create separation, not identification. The use of dialect as a rejection of Fascism is reserved largely for the characters. The mainstream audience, dependent on the nonregional Italian of the voice-over and subtitles, cannot share the same position. The structural effect of the film’s use of dialect for its contemporary audience was to create separation between the film’s Sicilian characters and the mainstream Italian audiences (in addition to dividing spectatorship itself ). The gap between the Sicilian (southern) characters and the mainstream audience who depend on the “nonregional” Italian (northern) language transforms the separation between North and South over the effect of the Fascist past into the signifying practice of the film. As Geoffrey Nowell-Smith notes: The southern question is a permanent running sore in the body politic of Italy . . . No better served by Fascism than it had been by the previous regime, the South did not even enjoy the benefits of the resistance in 1943 –5. In the place of a spontaneous political upsurge, the South experienced only invasion and the return of banditry and the Mafia. The year 1945 found the South, and Sicily in particular, in the same state of poverty, apathy, primitivism, and corruption which had struck and horrified observers of the Southern Question at the time of unification 80 years before.36

A relationship to Fascism is thus profoundly different for Sicilian identity than it is for northerners. To the South, Fascism was but one of many overlords who maintained the same system of disenfranchisement. To the North, the Fascist past involved complex issues of complicity that needed to be repressed. A principal site for repression of the Fascist past became the Resistance. The historicization of the Resistance allowed northern Italians to repress the trauma of the Fascist past, and their complicity in it, by symbolically identifying with the Resistance as a unified, popular movement which performed the function of a cultural rite of purification. The translation of the Real event and effects of the Resistance into the Symbolic thus becomes a critical means for repressing Fascism. The Resistance as unity, as popular movement, is constructed within the

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film—through its absence—as a strictly northern translation of events. The site of this reference to the Resistance as structured absence is Antonio’s military service. Although the film makes several references to this military service, it denies any specific information about the nature of Antonio’s activities. There is no certainty as to whether he is a war veteran, whether he fought for Fascism or against it. Rather, the film constructs an opposition to northern translations of the Resistance with the signifier of southern participation in the military service. It then denies the spectator the ability to translate, and thus contain, this opposition term symbolically. Antonio’s military service is presented in the plot, but not translated within the operations of the text. It is, rather, a diegetic encounter with the historical Real that is not symbolized and, therefore, a site of anxiety over the historical past. Indeed, what La terra trema emphasizes is the continuity between the cultural repression and exploitation of the present and the Fascist past. The mise-en-scène, with its location shooting and long-take style, emphasizes the physical poverty, primitivism, and corruption which existed before Fascism and continues to exist in its aftermath—unchanged. Antonio and his brothers cleaning up on their return from fishing is one such example. The men’s sharing of basins, beds, and bread is emphasized by a wider framing that keeps them in groups. Further, the editing in the scene is incorporated to show the mobilization of the household upon the return, emphasizing the living condition of the characters over character itself. Further articulation of the physical conditions is seen in the symmetry between the long takes of the environment of Trezza, particularly the fariglioni that jut out from the sea, and the physical setting, the houses and courtyards made of stone— a symmetry which establishes the continuity between the rugged environment and the living conditions carved out of it. The mise-en-scène’s most explicit articulation of the continuity with the Fascist past, however, occurs in the co-op scene. During Antonio’s final subjugation to the exploitation of the dealers, the plot situates Raimondo, the senior and hence leader of the dealers, at a desk. On the wall behind Raimondo is the not very faded imprint of Mussolini’s name. The use of a close-up emphasizes an association between Raimondo and Mussolini, focusing on the contiguity between them to the exclusion of the rest of the physical space within the scene. In this manner the film emphasizes a continuity between the Fascist past and contemporary exploitation through cultural repression. In the process it exposes northern “translations” of the Resistance as means of repressing the Fascist past, a repression that allows “Fascism” to continue under a new

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“face.” The alienating effect of this construction for its contemporary audience is the parallel the film makes between the Symbolic identification that allows for the repression of complicity in the Fascist past and the Symbolic identification that represses their complicity in the system of capitalist exploitation which organizes Italian culture. Indeed, as discussed previously, the film’s ideological position rejects Symbolic acceptance of cultural repression as a means toward fulfillment. Rather, the film constructs Symbolic identification with the Law as subjugation to an Other’s desire at the loss of one’s own. In its rejection of the system of exploitation that defeats Antonio, the film rejects what is the very basis for its contemporary audience’s je identity. Thus, instead of confirming the identities of its contemporary audience, thereby providing Imaginary pleasure, La terra trema articulates the very alienation of its audience through their subjugation to the Law of culture.

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5 Bitter Rice The Return of the Repressed (Diva)

Viva le mondine! graffito on the arched entrance to the rice farm

By 1948, the practice of Neorealism had reached certain aesthetic impasses, as many critics have commented. The war and its aftermath had been symbolized, a process which Neorealism itself contributed to, and with that symbolization came a distancing characteristic of Symbolic operations.1 As the two previous chapters demonstrate, Bicycle Thieves and La terra trema overcame the “crisis of Neorealism,” and its “aesthetic impasse,” by shifting Symbolic praxis from the war to the anxiety of postwar Italy. Traditional scholarship, as well as contemporary criticism, situates Giuseppe De Santis’s Bitter Rice as part of this aesthetic process, though more as an example of Neorealist practice that appropriates other genres, especially from the American cinema, like the detective and gangster.2 In her discussion of the film, however, Mira Liehm argues that Bitter Rice “challenged the prudishness of the Neorealist period. Drawing heavily on cinematic eroticism, it marked, above all, the return of the diva, the star, the femme fatale.” 3 Using a Lacanian based model for ideological criticism, this project is less concerned with categorization than it is with situating the Symbolic praxis of the film as a response to, and participant in, the construction of Italian postwar society. The problem with situating Bitter Rice as either within or transgressing the boundaries of Neorealism is that it overshadows what is more prominently occupying the strategies of representation in the

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film—the role of representation and containment of the feminine. In this respect, Liehm’s argument that Bitter Rice is a kind of revisionist diva film places ideological struggle back in the forefront of the film’s analysis. In his characterization of the diva film and its central character, the femme fatale, Pierre Leprohon argues: “She takes the form of a force against which one is powerless, since she herself is dominated by something stronger than herself . . . the man she touches and condemns becomes the victim of a kind of holocaust.” 4 In addition to the diva’s destructiveness, however, Liehm notes that the femme fatale almost always dies in the end.5 What traditional histories of the diva film do not explore, however, is the relationship between these films and the conflicts within Italian culture over the traditional role of women and the social changes afforded to them as a result of increasing industrialization. The (relative) empowerment being afforded to women within Italian culture (the ability to earn wages, work in a man’s world, use contraception) is translated into the diva films and figured within the power that the femme fatale has over not only male characters but the diegesis as well. The reactionary impulse of the films can be determined in both the destructiveness of her being and actions and the necessity of her own punishment, via death, that she must receive as a result of taking on power and narrative control. In this manner, the diva films functioned to recontain the threat that women’s empowerment—and the modernization that helped facilitate it—represented to traditional Italian culture. In a similar manner, both the fall of Fascism and the extensive participation by women in the Resistance movement brought about new challenges to the patriarchal roles assigned to women in the postwar era. This threat, and its recontainment, is translated into the signifying practice of Bitter Rice. Indeed, this strategy of containment is evidenced in the very opening of the film. As the credits finish, the film dissolves to a close-up of a man in a suit and tie, with a hat upon his head. The man looks directly into the camera and begins speaking, describing the centuries-old tradition of rice production in Italy. Both the specificity of the discourse and the camera’s mediation exercise significant expositional functions. The specific description of rice production in Italy that the man gives first grounds the practice through an implied natural law: it is a centuries-old tradition and it is done in India and China as well as in Italy. The function of an appeal to natural law is demonstrated in the discourse that follows. The man next describes the area where rice is produced, the provinces of Pavia, Novara, and Vercelli, before introducing the object of the discourse and its ideological operations: Italian rice production’s dependence on exploited fe-

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male labor. This is introduced with the speaker’s description that millions of women have left an indelible mark on the region by planting and tending rice for “four hundred, five hundred years.” The repetition of the centuries-old tradition of female labor functions to provide an ideological framework through which to evaluate the speaker’s description. Indeed, his description of the work as hard and unchanging, with legs in water, backs bent double, and the sun beating down on the women’s heads, demonstrates the necessity for a Symbolic operation to render such conditions acceptable. Tradition, with its implication of natural law, is established first in the discourse, assigning it a primacy which later repetition affirms and providing the Symbolic framework for interpreting the conditions and exploitation that Italian rice production rests upon. The necessity of this ideological operation is confirmed by the conclusion of the discourse, which states that only women can do this work because it needs delicate and nimble hands, the same hands that patiently thread needles and rock cradles. That the ideological function of the discourse is to reinforce patriarchal exploitation of women is most evident in this conclusion. By referencing child rearing, the discourse of the speaker attempts to depict female labor in the rice fields as a natural extension of gender differentiation based on the separation of biological function. In this way, the pain and suffering of exploitation is as much the unquestioned fate of women as is the pain and suffering of childbirth. Absent any challenges to this discourse by other plot elements, the narrator, who is diegetically placed as a radio commentator, functions as primary exposition: establishing the ideological framework through which the story world is to be evaluated. Thus, although the focus of the discourse is the conditions of the workers, the ideological function of the discourse is to efface the exploitation within those conditions. In addition to the ideological specificity of the exposition, the structural relationship between exposition and actional dynamics in the opening also establishes the subordination or avoidance of social conditions. This is evidenced in the opening when the commentator tells the audience that they are going to hear from one of the many women traveling to work in the fields. After introducing the woman, the commentator tells the audience that “Severina Cerri will now give you her impressions of the needs and ideals of these workers.” The narrative thus raises the expectation that it will focus on the work conditions, here promising to get right to the heart of the matter: the needs and ideals of the workers. Before Severina has a chance to express

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these needs and ideals, however, the camera comes to rest, in medium shot, on two men waiting on the platform. The shift between shot scales—from a long shot of groups to a medium shot isolating two figures—signals the plot shift that is about to happen. Rather than hearing Severina’s impressions, the plot focuses instead on the conversation between the two men. Severina, standing in as a representative for the workers, has been abandoned by the plot for the two men and their impact on story events. Indeed, as the men converse it becomes apparent that they are police officers waiting to capture a felon. Although the plot has not shifted from exposition to actional dynamics, it has shifted within the exposition toward specificity and action. Rather than establishing the setting and environment of the story world, as it had been doing, the exposition begins to establish a framework for the upcoming narrative action. Thus, when the character Walter finally comes into frame wearing a long trenchcoat, pulling up his collar, and glancing nervously, his gestures can be read within the specific context established by the exposition: he is the person that the law enforcement officials are seeking to capture. Moreover, his gestures signal that the specific plot action has commenced. The shift between expositional modes indicates the manner in which the social conditions of the workers are subordinate to the actional dynamics of the text. When the exposition to establish the crime story begins, the social conditions of the rice workers are abandoned, pushed into the background where they function as setting: a context for dramatic action. Indeed, from this point on, the crime drama, and then the moral drama which appropriates it, takes control of the narrative, organizing the progression and the elements of plot to its conclusion/resolution. The moment in which the crime drama becomes subordinate to the moral drama occurs at the site/sight of the figure of Silvana. Early in the crime drama, Silvana is introduced as the object of everyone’s gaze, dancing enticingly to diegetic music. The camera does not remain on Silvana for an extended period, however. Rather, it soon cuts to a medium shot of Walter leading Francesca. The camera then cuts to the opposite angle in order to show Silvana through Walter’s admiring gaze. The shot begins in medium scale on Silvana’s dancing feet then slowly tilts up to reveal her legs (bare to the knees, with her hand lifting her skirt), her torso, and then her chest. When it finally reveals her smiling face, it quickly cuts back to the train, showing in long shot the police officers continuing the pursuit of Walter and Francesca.

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When Francesca informs Walter of their situation, however, he continues to direct his gaze at Silvana, refusing to avert it even momentarily to direct Francesca as to their course of action. The relationship between the ongoing action, editing, and the direction of gazes functions to assign primacy to the figure of Silvana and the subordination of narrative progression to her. The introduction to her figure, though assigned to off-screen space, has the effect of freezing Walter and Francesca in their actions, reducing them to a gaze. As a result, narrative progression retards in order to reveal the object of the gaze, freezing the actional dynamics for the sake of the camera’s investigation of the figure of Silvana. As Laura Mulvey describes: the presence of woman is an indispensable element of spectacle in normal narrative film yet her visual presence tends to work against the development of a story line, to freeze the flow of action in moments of erotic contemplation.6

In this respect, the figure of Silvana functions as a threat to narrative progression, a threat which narrative must work to contain. Even when the actional dynamics of the narrative displaces the figure of Silvana, as when it takes up the pursuit of the police, it functions more to articulate the primacy of her figure and its function as threat than it does to subordinate it. Indeed, the reintroduction of the pursuit demonstrates, through the figure of Walter, the subordination of action to the figure of Silvana. Walter refuses to assign primacy to the pursuit by his unwillingness to avert his attention from Silvana. The tension between narrative spectacle and narrative progression is resolved when Walter joins the two arenas: stepping into the spectacle Silvana’s figure creates in order to conceal his own specificity as figure within the diegesis. In joining the movement of narrative to the stasis of spectacle, Walter’s character functions to contain the threat embodied in the figure of Silvana. As spectacle, her figure moves against narrative, subordinating progression. When Walter enters into the spectacle, the threat is contained by transforming spectacle into narrative. This containment, however, does not subordinate Silvana to the narrative, but rather establishes her as the narrative. The dance with Walter, though a fluid harmony between characters, becomes an uneasy alternation of narrative control. Although Walter enters into the dance as the figure of narrative control—the principal element of narrative organization—he loses this position through the movement of the dance. At the point where he loses his hat and is recognized, he loses control of the narrative, which is now bound to Silvana. At this point plot elements

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are organized and presented in relation to her character. Indeed, Walter’s escape is now a function of how it effects Silvana, playing into the intrigue and excitement that she is looking for through American music and romance magazines. Figured as she is in the narrative, the film becomes a narrative of her figure. What becomes significant for an analysis of the relationship between exposition of social conditions and actional dynamics is the manner in which the narrative, structured around the containment of the figure of Silvana, overdetermines this relationship. The first two abandonments of narrative progression for exposition of social conditions demonstrate this point. The first occurs while Francesca and Silvana are on a train headed for the rice farm. While Silvana negotiates with labor contractors, Francesca goes to find a place to sit down. As she does, the camera pans from her and toward the other occupants of the car, revealing as it does the conditions of the car and the women who ride in it. Unlike a regular passenger train, it has no cabins or even seats. The first woman the camera comes upon is standing drinking from a bottle; her working-class clothing is in stark contrast to Francesca’s more refined white blouse. The camera next reveals one woman combing another’s hair, followed by a woman sleeping on the floor of the car, and then a woman tearing ravenously at a crust of bread with her teeth. Finally the camera comes to rest upon another woman sitting on the floor, applying makeup with the help of a small mirror. Unlike most of the other women, however, she wears a dress that bears an economic affinity to Francesca. As the camera comes to rest upon her, she looks up and suggests where Francesca should sit, commenting that the race horse who used the car before the women had defecated in another area. The significance of this sequence is the manner in which narrative progression has been subsumed into exposition on social conditions so soon after Silvana becomes the central organizing element of the narrative. It is as if the figure of Silvana, so clearly defined by the text as erotic spectacle, cannot hold the narrative. The degree to which narrative progression has been subsumed is articulated in the soundtrack, which buries the last remnant of Silvana’s presence, her off-screen voice, with the sound of women singing. As the camera explores one aspect of the women’s conditions after another, the narrative becomes further and further marginalized in its discourse: the figure of Silvana—having herself disrupted narrative progression and so recently come to assume narrative control—is unable to guarantee its resumption around her.

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Fig ur e 7. A narrative about Silvana’s figure. The film consistently subordinates its exposition of social conditions to the figure of Silvana. co urt e s y o f the m useum o f m odern art, film stills archive.

This problematic position is articulated by the plot when narrative progression does resume around Silvana and her negotiations with the labor contractors. Soon after the camera returns to them, Silvana—still speaking to the men—strikes a pose reminiscent of the pinup genre: hand behind the head, elbow up, knees bending. In itself, the gesture is antinarrative, both in its intertextual complexity and in its tendency toward erotic spectacle. Within the diegesis, however, the gesture functions to assist Silvana in getting (seducing) the labor contractors to conform to her will, allowing her to retake control of the narrative.

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It is precisely in this position of threatening narrative with erotic spectacle—but nonetheless functioning as the point of narrative organization and causality—that the figure of Silvana functions and thus overdetermines the relationship between exposition and actional dynamics. Indeed, the tentative ability of Silvana to hold the narrative earlier in this scene is not present in later abandonments of narrative progression for social conditions. Thus, when the film cuts from the journey on the train to the arrival at the rice farm, the absence of Silvana and the film’s attention to the other women function to describe the world within which Silvana is contained and from which she desires to break free. The next abandonment of narrative progression, introduced with the repetition of the film’s opening shot, confirms this function. In a manner similar to the film’s beginning, this sequence is introduced with the opening of the dike. The camera cuts in order to follow the flow of water into the field, revealing as it does the women stepping over the opening in the dike. As the shot continues, it closely mimics the first shot of the film, with its craning and panning. The function of this repetition is to reassert a claim that the film focuses on the social conditions of Italian rice production. In this sense, the repetition could serve as a threat to the narrative; however, plot events prior to the sequence function to contain this threat. The maneuvering between Francesca and Silvana over possession of the stolen necklace has established the rice fields as the arena where Francesca must succeed if she is to recover the necklace from Silvana. The elaboration of social conditions is subordinated to the ongoing action that will occur within the space. The discourse on social conditions is thus background information rather than the focus of the plot. It functions to provide information on character— describing Silvana’s conflict and desire to escape from the confinement of those conditions. In this manner it marginalizes the threat to narrative progression that detailed attention to social conditions could entail. Silvana’s desire to liberate herself from the social conditions the exposition establishes, however, bears only a cursory similarity to Bicycle Thieves, where Antonio Ricci struggles to differentiate himself from the unemployed masses. The major difference between the two is the manner in which the figure of Silvana, its threat and function as spectacle, assures her differentiation and control of narrative. Indeed, the manner in which this is assured is articulated in the plot within this sequence. As the laborers take to the field, Silvana hesitates, attempting to discover Francesca’s actions. Another

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worker, however, takes Silvana by the hand and leads her from the foreground of the frame into the background, the space of the masses. At this point, the plot abandons Silvana, emphasizing her merging into the masses, by cutting to Francesca and the group of scab laborers she leads. Silvana is able to differentiate herself and reassert narrative control, however, through her function as erotic spectacle. As the camera reveals the women working, it comes to rest upon a skid used to ferry the rice plants to them. Silvana enters the frame: first her legs, then up to her waist, pausing to emphasize the cut of her shorts around the thighs. Next her chest enters the frame, followed by her face. She offers to help the driver of the skid, who is eager to accept, touching her body as he vocalizes his agreement. Silvana is thus able to liberate herself from the line of rice planters—step out from the undifferentiated masses and reassert narrative control—by using her body as figure for desire. The figure of Silvana as threat to narrative progression but site of narrative organization and causality thus functions to overdetermine the relationship between the plot’s exposition on social conditions and actional dynamics. Abandonment of narrative progression for exposition of social conditions does not function to create object loss precisely because the exposition is mediated through the figure of Silvana—the agent of narrative causality and thus progression. As the plot advances toward its conflict and final resolution, the alternation between exposition and actional dynamics functions to organize the narrative as a morality tale around the containment of the figure of Silvana. The historical specificity of the morality tale, and the place of the historical spectator within its operations, can be determined within the text’s focalization. Indeed, what an analysis of the text’s focalization reveals is not an ahistorical necessity for containment of erotic spectacle, but precisely the historical necessity of the recontainment of the feminine within postwar Italian culture. What becomes significant for an ideological analysis is the manner in which the text attempts to procure identification with the necessity of containing the figure of Silvana. The bird’s-eye view that the plot establishes early on and maintains throughout the film indicates an external focalization. What differentiates Bitter Rice from Neorealist works examined here is the manner in which the external focalization rarely, if ever, aligns itself with main character. In Rome: Open City, for example, the external focalization aligns itself with main character(s) and against disruption (as discussed previously). In La terra trema,

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the external focalization aligns itself with the disruptive effects of the main character on the diegetic world; and even in Bicycle Thieves, the external focalization, while complex in its alignments, nevertheless aligns itself with the main character’s desire. From the beginning, however, the external focalization of Bitter Rice is organized around containing the threat that the feminine constitutes, of which main character—the figure of Silvana—is the most extreme example. The opening of the film, as discussed previously, initiates this ideological operation of containment through the figure of the radio announcer. The historical specificity of his function, however, occurs precisely within his historicizing. By emphasizing the history of female exploitation in Italian rice production and grounding it within “natural” gender distinctions, the discourse of the radio commentator effaces not only the exploitation itself, but the disruptions in history that have threatened this process of exploitation: industrialization, Fascism, and, more significantly, the fall of Fascism. The historicizing of the radio commentator implies a continuity that effaces not only the impact of the war and occupation on Italian rice production, but also the opportunities for challenging traditional gender roles that the crises brought on, especially in terms of the Italian Resistance. Postwar culture became a significant battleground for patriarchy to reassert its claims over women. Having opened up venues previously closed to them, it now had to find ways to coerce women back into traditional roles. In the United States this was accomplished through the discourse of patriotism and concern for veterans (and their joblessness). Postwar Italy, however, found itself in a far more vulnerable position with respect to reasserting patriarchal claims. As discussed previously, patriarchy had been too closely affiliated with Fascism and as a result suffered a loss of credibility. This association too severely compromised the discourse of patriotism for it to be an effective means of coercion. The opening sequence of Bitter Rice, however, demonstrates an area of Italian culture that could easily be coopted by patriarchy as an effective means of containment: Roman Catholicism. Despite the official church hierarchy’s collusion with Fascism, the church, for several reasons—not the least of which was lower clergy involvement in the partisan movement— managed to preserve its reputation and loyalty among Italians.7 The text’s inscription of Roman Catholicism as a mode of containment of the feminine can be determined at that point in the film just before Walter makes his entrance. As the film cuts from the two primary law enforcement officials to a

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group entering the platform, the most prominent figures are in the middle ground, a young woman and a Catholic priest. They give their tickets to a uniformed figure and then receive them back. As they walk on, they move toward the camera and pause for the priest to instruct his charge to look after the others. The significance of this small digression within the plot is the relationship it constructs between the church and women. What the scene stresses (if not also naturalizes) is the authority over feminine behavior invested in the church. The priest is instructing the girl precisely about his expectations of how she will conduct herself. Of particular significance here is the relative age difference between the two figures, which is minimal. Both the priest and the girl he instructs are young. His figure does not depend on the authority of age (and its signification of wisdom, experience, or father-figure), but, rather, solely on the authoritative position of the church within Italian culture. The “purity” of that authority, its ability to regulate the feminine, evidences the avenue left to patriarchy to reassert itself and recontain the threat of the feminine in Italian culture. In addition, the priest’s lack of age further functions to repress history, an important operation for the church to maintain its claim for moral authority: he is of neither the age nor the hierarchy of Fascist collusion. His regulation of the feminine, and implicit endorsement of female exploitation in Italian rice production, lacks a signifier that can articulate the collusion between Fascism and the church, allowing for the figurement of the church’s moral authority within Italian culture. The priest thus functions as a diegetic insertion, a figuring, of the text’s external focalization. Furthermore, the text’s ideological perspective is organized around the containment of the feminine in a manner consistent with, if not reflective of, the position of the church and its prescription for women, marriage, and the family. In their analysis of Casti Connubi, Pius XI’s papal encyclical on marriage, Elizabeth Clark and Herbert Richardson assert that “the church of the 1930’s portrayed itself as retaining the same ideals of sexual morality upheld by the bishop of Hippo (St. Augustine) over 1500 years before.” 8 Characterizing the church’s position toward women, Clark and Richardson argue: Although Pius was aware that women in contemporary society were permitted more civil and legal rights than they had formerly enjoyed, he wished women to use these in such a way that the traditional idea of the female role, especially the

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Cinema of Anxiety function of wife and mother, was not overturned. Women are reminded that, despite the rights now granted to them, they are to be in “ready subjection” to the chief of the family, the husband. Husbands and children are to be the center of their existence.9

It is against this position that the characters of the film, but most visibly Silvana, are evaluated. Indeed, it is against this ideology that Silvana is constructed and constitutes a disruptive threat, while Francesca achieves a measure of redemption through it. The ideology of the church with respect to women, marriage, and the family dominates the evaluative system of the film; however, it is largely a presence made of absence. The most visible trace of this absence lies at the site of the rice workers, whom the text clearly defines as outside the bounds of the traditional extended or even nuclear family. Indeed, the implication of the text is that the women who work the rice fields—who are in a position to be exploited— do so because they have failed to secure for themselves, or to submit to, the position defined for them as wife and mother. The scene of the rice-workers’ disembarkation at the farm demonstrates this point. After the trucks transporting the women to the farm arrive, a medium shot shows Silvana and Francesca climbing down from the truck and exiting the frame. When they leave the frame, the narrative shifts to the expositional mode, providing character information about the rice-workers. The information that is provided, however, centers around the sexuality of each character. The first woman is making a rendezvous that night with a soldier from her village, because, as she tells another worker, forty days is a long time. The next woman asserts that she has seen more soldiers than a retired general, claiming to know their regiment by their smell. Rather than breaking the bounds of Neorealist “prudishness,” however, this frank revelation of unregulated feminine sexuality functions as an implied causality, providing information on not only “who” works the fields but also “why.” The next character introduction evidences this causality. Commencing with a closer scale, this shot reveals two women climbing the stairs to the dormitories. As the two women ascend, the first tells the second that her boyfriend works on a nearby farm, where they met the previous year. She ends by stating that soon they will be married and will be able to spend all their time together. The relationship between the setting (the ascension of the stairs) and the hopeful discourse of the future bride articulates the film’s position with respect to the exploitation of the rice-workers: it is the fate of those who fail to secure a stable marriage situation (stable being

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defined as a husband who provides enough). The differentiation among the rice-workers is then defined by their relationship to this position. The older woman who brings her child is an example of what happens when a woman marries a husband who does not provide enough. Another who suffers a miscarriage functions as an example of the fate of a woman who fails to secure marriage and conducts sexual relations outside marriage. Still others function as examples of women who “play the field” rather than search for the proper husband. The assertion at the end of the film that the wedding before the end-of-harvest party is a first-time event both confirms the upward social mobility of the rice-workers through proper marriage and at the same time concludes with the comparison that the others (with the exception of Francesca) have simply failed to desire this course. It is against this “ideal” of proper marriage that Silvana is constructed and evaluated. Indeed, the cross-cutting between the medium shot of Silvana and the bride and her wedding party toward the end of the film provides a clear image to Silvana of the course that she has rejected. Prior to this scene, however, Silvana’s rejection of proper marriage is articulated in her relationship to Marco. The first site of this rejection occurs after Marco intercedes in the riot she helps instigate against Francesca. After convincing Silvana to return the stolen necklace to Francesca, Marco turns to leave. The film then cuts to a close-up of Francesca, who, gazing upon the parting Marco, walks slowly in the direction of his exit. As she does, she comes upon Silvana, who is also directing her gaze at Marco. Slowly, however, Silvana turns her gaze from Marco to Francesca and finally away from both the characters, turning her back completely upon Marco. The significance of this scene lies precisely within the character dynamics, which function to establish the poles of the Symbolic framework through which spectator identification will be directed. In his mediation between Silvana and Francesca, Marco affirms the rejection of the artifice of wealth (in the figure of the necklace), defining himself as being content with his position in the lower classes. In addition, he expresses a disaffection for and disbelief in jails, especially as a recourse for Francesca, noting that prison never saves anyone. Furthermore, Marco evidences a conviction of the inappropriateness of judging others. The significance of these traits for the ideological operations of the text is critical. Marco’s justification for rejecting prisons because they do not “save” people begins to indicate the close alignment between his character and the discourse of Christianity, which, in addition to emphasizing salvation, posits both a rejection of judging others and an ambivalent attitude toward prison

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(especially because of its historic role as an instrument of the state for political and economic repression).10 The construction of Marco’s character functions as a critical site for the text’s attempt to secure Symbolic identification: that place in the text where the historical spectator can (mis)recognize his/ her ideal ego. This function can be determined by the manner in which the text “idealizes” Marco. This idealization is evidenced in many ways, but certainly begins with his physical distinction from the other men in the film; most of them are haggard and worn, except for Walter, from whom Marco is distinguished by physical stature and prowess. This physical distinction is important in Marco’s construction as a working-class character. The system has not exhausted him: rather, his “abilities” allow him to transcend class limitations and find contentment. Thus, for example, his duty in the army is in a leadership role (though, significantly, not in the officer class), putting him in a position to exercise some control. In addition, the text makes several attempts to portray him as a man of intelligence and reason who can see the poetic in life (evidenced by his inscription on the dormitory wall and his mediation in the conflict in the rice fields). Lastly, the text reasserts his construction as a man of ability in several places, but clearly evidenced in the ending, where he becomes the capable man of action. Construction of class similarity between character and audience, coupled with the idealization of character, functions within the text to secure the Symbolic identification of the historical spectator. The affiliation of the character with the discourse of Christianity also contributes to the idealization of the character, but performs another important ideological function. These traits, aligned as they are with the discourse of Christianity, construct Marco as the site for patriarchal recontainment of the feminine through the discourse of Roman Catholicism. The idealization of his character functions to construct him as good object for feminine desire. Indeed, as the plot advances, it is the direction of desire toward Marco that provides salvation for Francesca and destruction for Silvana, who rejected such a desire. Silvana’s rejection of this desire, first introduced after the riot in the rice fields (as discussed earlier), is confirmed in her later scenes with Marco. In the first of these scenes, Marco explicitly asks her to join him and build a new life together in South America. Although Silvana does not explicitly reject the offer, the scene nonetheless evidences their opposite desires. Marco is lured to South America because it is virgin land, Silvana to North America because it is modernized, “electric,” as she describes it. In the later scene, this opposition of desires leads to Silvana’s rejection of Marco when he attempts

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to link the resolution of Silvana’s problems with the stolen necklace to her joining him. Here her rejection is explicitly stated. As she pushes Marco away, she tells him to go away and never see her again. Later, as the two speak to each other less emotionally, Silvana reiterates her lack of desire, claiming that she is not the one for Marco and that they would have made a miserable couple. The relationship of each of the principal female characters to Marco, and the Symbolic identification that is constructed around it, is thus a critical site for the text’s ideological operations. Although structured as the principal character, Silvana is also structured as threat to the narrative, creating disruption through her body as erotic object (it becomes the site of conflict between Walter and Marco) and through her desires (her desire for the necklace leads to the riot in the rice fields). The devaluation of Silvana’s desires, their associations with fantasy, and their destructive trajectories add to her function as narrative threat to prevent Symbolic identification with her character. The process of this devaluation of desire and its prevention of Symbolic identification is crucial to the text’s translation of social conditions in its signifying practice. The anxiety created by patriarchy’s precarious position within Italian culture as a result of its association with Fascism is translated in the text at the site of Silvana, who, as erotic object, threatens and disrupts narrative. Indeed, in those moments in the text where Silvana functions as erotic object, she resists symbolization, withholding narrative progression for a sustained gaze that denies temporality. It is only through defining her desires, rather than her function as object of desire, that the text can symbolize her character and thus provide traits that could facilitate Symbolic identification. The anxiety that Silvana represents, however, is withheld from the structure of the text through the prevention of Symbolic identification with her character. The threat and the danger that her desires represent are not authorized by the text. Devalued, they are not taken up by the spectator, who then avoids the necessity of decathexis or withdrawal of desire resulting from any loss of object or desire. Indeed, because the text attempts to prevent identification with Silvana, it disallows identification with either her frustration or the anxiety that results from the impossibility of her desires. Thus, although anxiety is present within the diegesis itself, it is absent from the signifying structure of the text itself. Rather than identification with anxiety, the Symbolic system of the text authorizes feminine desire and secures Symbolic identification at the site

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of Francesca. Although the text creates some obstacles to Symbolic identification with Francesca—most notably her criminal past—it nevertheless constructs her character in a manner which secures this process. By constructing her character as a maid, it situates Francesca in the working class, promoting a similarity between her and a large segment of the historical audience. Furthermore, like Marco, she has seen through the false promise of material wealth and desires something else (as elaborated in her scene with Silvana where she tells of her past). Also like Marco, she demonstrates leadership abilities and takes on the role of leader in several places in the text, associating her character with the structure of control. The obstacle to Symbolic identification with these traits, her criminal past, is overcome through her association with the Christian theme of the redemption of the fallen woman. This association is facilitated through costume at those points in the film where Francesca is the only character to cover her head with a white scarf in a manner referencing classical Madonna iconography. The association is further advanced through her abandonment of Walter and union with Marco, with whom she can rebuild her life. The redemption of Francesca thus exercises a significant function in the ideological operation of the text. By securing Symbolic identification with Francesca, the text seeks to direct desire toward the containment of the feminine within the traditional gender roles assigned through marriage. In this manner, the text directs identification away from the liberation of feminine desire and the threat it represents to traditional patriarchal culture and toward the recontainment of feminine desire. The function of the text’s external focalization—its organization and articulation of certain doctrinal and ideological norms of Roman Catholicism—thus lies within its authorization of a Symbolic identification with feminine containment and its devaluation of feminine desire. Feminine desire, if not feminine sexuality itself, is thus structured within the text as a primary signifier: organizing and overdetermining the function of the signifying elements which comprise the text. It is thus at the site of the text’s representation (or crisis of representation) of feminine desire and sexuality that the historical specificity of social conditions is translated into the signifying practice of the text. Indeed, as Lacan’s discussion of feminine sexuality demonstrates, the conflict within the text and the threat that Silvana comes to constitute stem from a crisis of representation—the limits, precisely, of patriarchal modes of representation. In his seminar of 1972 –1973, Lacan argues that

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Fig ur e 8. Francesca’s status as a fallen woman is transformed through her union with Marco. courtesy of the museum of modern art , film s tills archive.

when any speaking being . . . lines up under the banner of women it is by being constituted as not all that they are placed within the phallic function. It is this that defines the . . . the what? the woman precisely, except that THE woman can only be written with THE crossed through . . . There is no such thing as THE woman since of her essence . . . she is not all.11

Lacan’s insistence on the essence of woman as “not all,” with its implication that there is no such thing as “THE ” woman, results from his theory of the phallus (which he makes clear is not to be equated with the literal male organ) and the phallic function.12 What Lacan describes in his theory is that the phallus is a signifier or, rather, the signifier which introduces and anchors the Symbolic function. The phallus, as such, comes to occupy a position of both privilege and wholeness.13 The desire to possess the phallus is thus the desire for wholeness, which, he argues, is impossible, given the subject’s irreducible alienation. Lacan thus asserts that “man cannot aim at be-

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ing whole . . . once the play of displacement and condensation . . . marks his relation as subject to the signifier.” 14 What Lacan emphasizes in delineating the alienation of the subject and the fundamental “lack in being” is the lack of gender specificity in the process. For Lacan, gender identity is a function of cultural myths that the subject will come to identify and negotiate upon his/her subjugation to the Name of the Father and the Symbolic order.15 Included in these myths in patriarchal culture is that the male possesses the phallus. Lacan insists, however, that this myth— constructed around a signifier— depends on the woman for its support (since symbols function as a result of the opposition between signifiers and not through a relationship between the signifier and the signified).16 This is the position that Mulvey draws upon in her seminal article “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” when she argues: “The paradox of phallocentrism in all its manifestations is that it depends on the image of the castrated woman to give order and meaning to its world. An idea of woman stands as lynch pin to the system . . .” 17 What Lacan, and later Mulvey, argues is that, under patriarchal Symbolic orders, woman is defined as “not man” or in Lacan’s terms as “not all” (since the man, believing he possesses the phallus, possesses “all”). Because she does not possess the phallus, she possesses no thing (nothing), which is then projected onto her anatomy. It is for this reason that Lacan argues: “Of all the signifiers this is the signifier for which there is no signified . . .” 18 Thus, when he asserts that there is no such thing as “THE ” woman, it is a rhetorical position to illustrate the manner in which, under patriarchal modes of representation, woman is only defined in relation (opposition) to man. With no meaning outside that opposition, there is no such “thing” as woman, only what Lacan describes as an “empty set” (where the place of meaning should reside) that is assigned to the female gender.19 Since woman is assigned the place of “not all,” the “empty set”—the place that she comes to occupy—is the place of male fantasy: fantasies constructed around difference and loss. It is for this reason that Lacan argues that man takes on the woman in a fantasy meant to disavow loss: “it is the man . . . who takes on the woman, or who can believe he takes her on . . . Except that what he takes on is the cause of his desire, the cause that I have designated the object a.” 20 Furthermore, he asserts that this Imaginary function that woman fulfills is anchored in the Symbolic at the site of the Other(A). For Lacan, the Imaginary unity the male desires, projected onto the image of woman, is validated in the Symbolic by her designation as the place of the Other—the place of truth. Thus he argues: “By her being in the sexual relation radically Other, in relation to

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what can be said of the unconscious, the woman is that which relates to this Other . . .” 21 For Lacan, then, there is nothing inherent about sexuality, masculine or feminine, no “reduction to biological factors,” 22 but rather an overlaying of the Symbolic—a validation of Imaginary unity— onto the primary alienation in being. The Symbolic as place of “truth” is thus complicit in anchoring woman to a position of fantasy and male wholeness. As Lacan argues: That the symbolic is the support of that which was made into God, is beyond doubt. That the imaginary is supported by the reflection of like to like, is certain. And yet the object a has come to be confused with the S(O) . . . and it has done so under pressure of the function of being. It is here that a rupture or severance is still needed.23

Lacan’s argument thus concludes that the oppression of women, their reduction to a position of object and support of the male, results from Symbolic interpretation and projection onto the biological. The primary signifiers which organize the narrative trajectory of Bitter Rice function to validate this Symbolic collusion of the place of the woman. Silvana, introduced as erotic object, remains a threat to narrative stability precisely because she resists the position assigned to her through male fantasies of wholeness, articulated through the character of Marco. To accept Marco’s offer—his fantasy—is to accept a position that is limited to her support of him and his desire. There is no indication of her ability to possess any meaning beyond this function. The position thus constructed confirms Mulvey’s conclusion that once the woman subjects herself to (and fulfills) the position laid out for her by patriarchy, “her meaning in the process is at an end, it does not last into the world of law and language.” 24 The impossibility of woman taking on meaning independent of the male is translated into the film by the options that are afforded to Silvana within her moral struggle. While Marco represents the moral center to which she should aspire, the position she would occupy there is the position of nonmeaning and hence a position she resists. The alternative for Silvana, however, offers a rejection of a moral position, but still relegates her to a position of nonmeaning. By aligning herself with Walter, Silvana attempts to pursue her desire for escape from a life of working-class poverty and exploitation. In the process, however, she must subject herself to his desires and eventually come to occupy the position of nonmeaning. Silvana is only an object for Walter’s desires, sexual and otherwise. This is articulated in the text during the confrontation in the butcher’s

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shop. When Marco appeals to Silvana to abandon Walter, Walter attempts to reduce Silvana’s options as a subjection to one male or another, claiming: “She loves me. She does only what I want.” The editing, which includes reaction shots of Silvana, works to convey her anguish in her subjugation to an untenable position. What the plot makes clear, however, is that in the end she is reduced to a pawn that Walter has used in his plans to steal the rice. Silvana’s suicide, coded over by the text as an extreme moral repulsion against her actions, nonetheless articulates the logic within the position that the Symbolic order has defined for the woman: the place of “not all,” “the empty set,” the “zero.” Silvana’s suicide, signifying the loss of subjecthood, conveys the emptiness of the position—the lack of meaning and individual subjectivity—imposed on her by patriarchy. The ideological operations of the text thus function to re-cover the very limitations imposed by patriarchy that it articulates. This ideological function is accomplished through two major trajectories, each of which is closely bound to the identificatory processes discussed earlier. The first of these ideological operations is the sanctioning of the position of woman under the Symbolic of patriarchy. This sanctioning occurs through the character of Francesca, who finds jouissance by acceding to Marco’s desire. His final acceptance of Francesca in the butcher shop allows her to become fulfilled (however temporarily), thus providing her with the courage to face down Walter and Silvana. The scene thus articulates the jouissance that Francesca has found in becoming the object of Marco’s desire— the support for a wholeness in being that he originally sought from Silvana as erotic object, but transferred to Francesca upon recognizing her virtue. The film’s ending, showing Francesca and Marco walking off together, draws upon the logic of narrative closure to suggest the permanence of their union and the fulfillment that Francesca finds in taking up her position of subjugation. In this manner it attempts to sanction the position assigned to women under the Symbolic of patriarchy as the place of wholeness and fulfillment, denying the subjugation and lack of meaning that such a position imposes. In addition to sanctioning the position defined for women under patriarchy, the film re-covers the position that it has exposed by the manner in which it manages the threat of Silvana’s desire. In justifying her involvement with Walter to Francesca, Silvana states: “We’re marrying. I told you I was sick of poverty.” By defining Silvana’s desire past Walter and toward something more, or in excess of Walter himself, the text maintains the structure of her desire that it has constructed throughout. Silvana’s desire is consis-

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tently defined as a desire to transcend her class and the position assigned to her. She is not content with her economic status, nor with being an object for male desire. The text thus defines Silvana’s desire through the structure of what Lacan argues is a jouissance “beyond the phallus.” 25 In his discussion of feminine subjectivity, Lacan argues that if woman is excluded by the Symbolic order, assigned to the position of nonmeaning, she nonetheless possesses “in relation to what the phallic function designates as jouissance, a supplementary jouissance.” 26 Lacan’s designation of a jouissance that is beyond the phallus attempts to reclaim what is beyond the constraint of the Symbolic, to reclaim the meaning outside of language that exists in the Real. His reference to this beyond as mystical (filled as it is with cautions) rearticulates his position that the Symbolic imposes its own reality on existence, in a sense, making its own world. As Lacan argues: The symbolic order from the first takes on its universal character . . . As soon as the symbol arrives, there is a universe of symbols . . . however small the number of symbols which you might conceive of as constituting the emergence of the symbolic function as such in human life, they imply the totality of everything which is human. Everything is ordered in accordance with the symbols which have emerged . . . Everything that is human has to be ordained within a universe constituted by the symbolic function.27

Thus, when Lacan refers to the woman’s jouissance beyond the phallus, he is describing the meaning of woman that exists in the Real, but beyond the nonmeaning which the patriarchal Symbolic imposes upon her. The mystical character of this jouissance lies in its irretrievability into language and, subsequently, knowledge, since to do so would be to impose the very limitations of the Symbolic that it transcends. It is for this reason that Lacan argues that “there must be a jouissance which goes beyond. That is what we call a mystic . . . It is clear that the essential testimony of the mystics is that they are experiencing it but know nothing about it.” 28 For Lacan, the “truth” of the woman, and the jouissance specific for her, lies only beyond the dynamic of a fundamental alienation that language, the Symbolic, and the existence it imposes attempt to re-cover. It is for this reason that Lacan concludes: “might not this jouissance which one experiences and knows nothing of, be that which puts us on the path of ex-istence?” 29 Clearly the most challenging aspect of this jouissance for the ideological limitations that the Symbolic imposes on the woman is the idea of a truth— or meaning—that exists beyond the Symbolic and language. Bitter Rice constructs such a challenge around Silvana’s desires, articulating an exposure

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of the ideological limitations imposed by the Symbolic order of patriarchy that the text must work to re-cover. The manner in which the text accomplishes this is through the process of linking Silvana’s desires to fantasy. The scene on the train with Francesca articulates this construction. When Francesca first comes upon Silvana, the latter is hiding behind a copy of Grand Hotel magazine. As the two converse Silvana asserts to Francesca: “These magazines don’t invent stories. They’re true!” Later, she sits in fascination as Francesca tells her about the life she led as a maid in the world of wealth, confirming to Silvana that “it happens to all sorts.” What the text makes clear, however, is precisely that “these stories” are not true. The lack of value of the stolen necklace—it is fake— does more than function as a convenient plot device. Rather, it works against myths surrounding the glamour associated with jewel theft (as evidenced, for example, in Ernst Lubitsch’s 1935 film Desire). The necklace is false as a means of asserting that the beliefs that people like Silvana construct around them are false as well, belonging to the world of appearance and fantasy. The glamour that Silvana associates with the world of Grand Hotels and stolen jewelry is countered in the film by a more involved and far less elegant image of theft: the stealing of the rice harvest. As opposed to Silvana’s fantasy, the film constructs the image of thievery as destructive, toilsome, and firmly rooted in the environs of the working class rather than the salons of the upper class. The film thus affirms (and thereby rejects) Silvana’s belief as fantasy by offering instead a harsher view of “reality.” The insistence on Silvana’s association with fantasy is articulated in the text in the dormitory scene between Francesca and Silvana after the disruption in the rice fields. As Francesca tells about her experiences in the world of the upper class, Silvana listens with interest and attentiveness. The perspective of Francesca’s discourse, however, is the emptiness and illusory nature of that world, a point which Silvana, too intent on confirming the “reality” of her fantasies, fails to grasp. Silvana’s desires for a jouissance beyond the phallus are thus bound by the text to the realm of fantasy and nonreality. In this manner the text re-covers the ideology it has exposed and articulated by assigning the Real beyond the Symbolic (articulated through Silvana’s desires) to the arena of fantasy and affirming the universe of the Symbolic as reality and wholeness (through the character of Francesca). It thus binds identification with jouissance beyond the phallus to fantasy and death and thus forecloses any possibility of escaping the limitations imposed by the Symbolic.

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6 Senso Degenerate Melodrama?

. . . a moth or a fly at the window. Do you not notice? Lt. Franz Mahler

In 1954 Luchino Visconti’s Senso splashed across the screens of Italian movie theaters in vivid Technicolor. It was an Italian film made in color, a stylistic choice that dramatically announced the death of Neorealism. A cinema that had been born in the everyday poverty of the working and middle classes of Italian society had now graduated to the world of international financing. Not coincidentally, then, Senso reversed several Neorealist practices seen in Visconti’s La terra trema as well as De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves. De Sica rejected an offer of American financing for the latter film that was tied to the condition of casting Cary Grant in the leading role. In making Senso, however, Visconti obtained international financing and cast Farley Granger as the leading male.1 Furthermore, where Bicycle Thieves takes place on the streets of contemporary Rome, focusing on the plight of an ordinary working-class family, Senso is set as a costume drama in the houses and villas of the ruling class in Venice during the Risorgimento. The contemporary settings and working-class characters so vital to Neorealist practice were abandoned for historical melodrama of the ruling class. What seems like such a thorough departure from Neorealist norms by one of its leading practitioners created much debate. Critics across the ideological and political spectrum bemoaned or praised Visconti’s stylistic

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choices, yet each camp grounded its conclusions using Neorealism as the standard by which Senso was judged.2 At the time of Senso’s release, however, Neorealism was almost ten years old. The sense of immediacy so crucial to its aesthetic had already undergone one evolution, from representing the anxiety of the war, occupation, and the fall of Fascism (as in Rome: Open City) to representing the anxiety of living in postwar reconstruction (as in Bicycle Thieves and La terra trema). By 1954, however, even the postwar era was no longer an immediate experience. The referendum on the monarchy had been decided eight years previously, with Alcide De Gaspari’s successful elimination of the left from the government occurring only one year later, a move Paul Ginsborg describes as the end of anti-Fascist coalition government.3 In its place came the majority of the right which would stabilize and stagnate the political landscape of the country and the government itself. Indeed, as Elisa Carrillo notes, “Between 1953 and 1958 immobilism became the dominant feature of Italy’s Christian Democratic governments.” 4 By 1954, then, the immediacy of postwar experience— of life under a culture in transition—had given way to an established politics of parliamentary government, which, though internally volatile, managed to close off any possibility for political transformation. The need for a Neorealist cinema to symbolize and recontain the anxiety of a culture caught in the balance and threatened by instability had, by this time, declined significantly. Senso’s departure from or betrayal of Neorealism should thus be read as a specific response to the changing conditions that Neorealist practice organized itself around— conditions which no longer existed by the time of Senso’s production. The significance of a film like Senso—which so clearly holds complex relationships to an established signifying practice—for a text-based psychoanalytic ideological critique is the reexamination of the relationship between text and culture. Rather than taking a determinist approach, which in some ways sees the text as a reflection or symptomatic of the culture under which it is produced, a Lacanian analysis recontextualizes the relationship dialectically: as a specific signifying encounter with the social symbolic system that both produces and is produced by the text. In this respect, Senso can be read as an attempt to transform Neorealism again, to reconstitute a signifying system of immediacy and anxiety within a culture lacking both. This lack within culture is articulated within the film’s signifying practice as a dialectic between immediacy and distance. Indeed, for the contemporary audience this dialectic is established within the very opening, as the use of Technicolor immediately asserts the film’s distance

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and aesthetic difference from standard Neorealist practice. The desperate financing, low budget, and search for film stock which characterized Rome: Open City are immediately exorcised by Senso’s use of color, which demands, at the very least, a large budget.5 Distance and immediacy are further articulated by the very structure of the plot, where the relationship between exposition and actional dynamics advances the plot, but at the same time functions to distance the narrative conflict. Both the opening of the film—which establishes this relationship—and the credit sequence which precedes it articulate this process, as they share the same diegetic space: a scene from Giuseppe Verdi’s Il trovatore, finishing with Manrico’s aria “Di quella pira.” As Manrico raises his sword and moves downstage to the footlights, the camera follows then continues, revealing first the orchestra then the audience—largely made up of Austrian soldiers— on the main floor. Later, the film cuts to a medium shot of a man in tuxedo and top hat, walking among Austrian soldiers in their dress uniforms. As in many expositional modes, the shift from the establishing long shots to the more exclusive medium shots signals a shift toward specificity. The character’s actions confirm this specificity: he looks over his surroundings uncomfortably, suggesting a degree of uncertainty and a lack of the habitual and recurring (if not a definite shift itself from the exposition to the actional dynamics of the plot). The next two shots confirm that this shift has taken place. The first is a medium shot of the upper tier, rendering its occupants in more detail than the earlier long shot. This quickly gives way, however, to the opposite angle, showing the backs of the people as a man in black cape and top hat taps on the shoulder of a man facing the performance. The other man puts his hand behind his back and receives a stack of handbills. The handbills are soon passed through the crowd to the front of the box as ladies begin to take tricolored bouquets of flowers (in the Italian nationalist colors of red, white, and green) out from beneath their dresses. Despite the smooth efficiency with which the actions are taken, the opening clearly shifts between expositional modes and actional dynamics. The intertitle which follows the credits establishes the time of the story, while the slow and elaborate panning of the space of the theater functions to establish the space of the action. The clandestine nature of the actions defines them as out of the bounds of normal opera spectatorship, thereby confirming their specificity and function as actional dynamics. That the actions involved in the handbills and tricolored flowers function within the plot’s actional dynamics is further confirmed as the plot advances.

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As the scene from Il trovatore ends, the audience in the theater applauds enthusiastically. This enthusiasm, however, is transformed into political protest when a woman in the upper tier shouts, “Foreigners out of Italy,” followed by tricolored bouquets and handbills (printed on red, green, or white paper) showering the largely Austrian audience below. Shouts of “Long live Italy” and other political /patriotic slogans are heard as the entire theater becomes engulfed in political demonstration. The transformation of the crowd’s enthusiasm into political action begins to problematize the relationship between the exposition and the actional dynamics. The demonstration takes not only its cue from the opera but, as the scene makes clear, its inspiration as well. Thus, the function of establishing what Millicent Marcus has described as a “spectacle within a spectacle” is to transform the exposition into the actional dynamics itself, remaking the space of allegory into action.6 This transformation, however, marks a significant reversal of Neorealist practice. In La terra trema (as discussed earlier) the exposition functions to transform actional dynamics into the exposition itself, inscribing the structure of anxiety within the plot. In Senso, however, the opposite occurs, as actional dynamics, however retroactively, transforms the exposition (here the initial setting) into the specificity of the plot action. In this reversal, the text marks the absence of anxiety from the sphere of culture through its absence in the structure of the text. The transformation of exposition into actional dynamics functions instead within the immediacy-distance dialectic that structures the signifying system of the film. By transforming the exposition into actional dynamics, the plot combines the space of allegory with the space of action, sweeping all the elements of the story world into revolutionary struggle. The exposition’s transformation is evidenced in the undermining of narrative containment characteristic of its function. Without the expositional function, the narrative erupts into a massive spectacle, subsuming all of the diegetic space within its sphere and thus producing a sense of immediacy to the scene. The plot’s first use of shot/reverse-shot, however, signals a return toward narrative containment and a movement away from political spectacle by subsuming both the crowd and the space of the theater into individual characters that can support narrative identification. This movement occurs when Livia Serpeiri, who will become the main character, looks out into the pandemonium and spots her cousin Roberto Ussoni on the floor of the auditorium. Roberto sees her gaze and returns it, throwing her a bouquet of tri-

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colored flowers. Livia’s gesture of kissing the bouquet after she catches it functions to suggest a kind of romantic interest between the couple—a suggestion that the narrative will leave suspended (and permanently) by the introduction of Franz Mahler. The introduction of Mahler, and its suspension of the Livia-Roberto interest, reestablishes a distance between the spectator and the text, asserting the dialectic of the film once again. In addition to suspending the interaction between Livia and Roberto, however, Franz offers an interpretation of the outburst, commenting to his fellow Austrians: “This is the kind of war that suits the Italians: showers of confetti to the sound of mandolin.” Consistent with the structure of the dialectic, however, Franz’s comment effects both immediacy and distance in its function in the text. Although it functions to suspend interest in Livia and Roberto, it provides a clear allusion to the relationship between historical representation and its contemporary context, referencing ethnic prejudices and accusations whose power to incite is possible only with the weight of history and its contemporary parallels. Franz is a member of the Austrian military, which currently occupies the Veneto area of Italy. In their diegetic context, his disparaging comments on the fighting ability of the Italians carry the judgment of centuries of the occupation of Italy by foreign armies. The significance of the statement, however, is in the extradiegetic parallels to the film’s contemporary context. The Austrian attitude that Italians are more inclined to the spectacle rather than to the substance of fighting finds its support in a contemporary parallel to the figure of Mussolini and his infamous threat of 8 million bayonets as a metaphor for military prowess. The enormous failures of the Italian military in the African wars of colonialism and in World War II demonstrated that Mussolini’s threat was only a part of his posturing, the bella figura which lacked substance. Franz’s contempt for Italian fighting ability, coming as it does from a Germanic figure, thus references Nazi Germany’s attitude toward Italy, linking past myths of Italian fighting ability to more contemporary accusations and, in the process, figuring the relationship between the film’s history and its present context. Franz’s observation, however, also functions to inscribe distance within the structure of the plot. To begin with, his observation attempts to symbolize, and therefore contain, both the political and narrative threat engendered in the spectacle through the Symbolic function—which, as Lacan argues, enforces “the distance of a certain prescribed order.” 7 Indeed, despite the fact that Franz’s comment causes an outburst from Ussoni, its function as

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Symbolic containment is evidenced diegetically by the manner in which the demonstration draws to a close. What was a pluralistic event, a mass demonstration by the Italians against their Austrian occupiers, becomes contained by its transformation into the specifics of individual action (Ussoni’s challenge to Mahler). Here, too, the exposition functions to establish distance. Although the effect of Mahler’s statement on Ussoni is rendered in medium close-up, the actual confrontation with Ussoni’s challenge is rendered in long shot. As Mahler walks away from the challenge, the camera abandons both of them to pan up to Livia and her reactions to the event. Although the camera action functions to once again link the spectacle of the theater to the audience itself, this abandonment of the conflict between Ussoni and Mahler further serves to both foreground and foreshadow the plot’s abandonment of this specific conflict as the principal narrative conflict. Indeed, the camera soon cuts to a reverse angle of Livia, abandoning both Mahler and Ussoni entirely to concentrate on her preparations before she enters into the space of action. As she walks out into the foyer her own voice serves as voice-over, commenting on the narrative action as past events. With the voice-over, the plot confirms that the conflict between Ussoni and Mahler is not primary, but, rather, is subordinated to the figure of Livia. Its function is therefore limited to the effect it has on her future actions. The articulation of plot thus establishes distance within the immediacy of action by retroactively assigning the actions and disruptions of the opening scene to a subordinate position within the narrative. Revolutionary struggle, even as figured within the characters of Roberto and Franz, functions only as an elaborate pretext for the principal narrative interest: the melodrama centering around Livia. This subordination is foregrounded diegetically when Livia comments to Mahler: “I don’t care for it [opera] offstage, or for people who act like melodramatic heroes.” The incongruity between Livia’s own actions and her statement, however, draws attention to the manner in which not only revolutionary struggle (and its repression) but history itself is subordinated to Livia’s melodrama or what Geoffrey Nowell-Smith describes as “degenerate melodrama.” 8 In his work on defining the melodramatic mode, Peter Brooks argues: “The expressive means of melodrama are all predicated on this subject: they correspond to the struggle toward recognition of the sign of virtue and innocence.” 9 For Brooks, then, the melodramatic mode is characterized

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by the manner in which narrative is organized around the sign of virtue and its struggle toward recognition. In this respect, Nowell-Smith’s description of Senso as degenerate melodrama accurately characterizes the film’s narrative organization. Rather than depicting the struggle toward virtue, narrative progression in Senso functions in opposition: as Livia’s virtue degrades further with the plot’s advance. In a manner not unlike Visconti’s earlier film La terra trema, Senso appropriates a particular narrative form (melodrama) only to reverse its structure as a means of establishing a distanced spectatorship. This reversal is evidenced in the lack of conflict or moral struggle in Livia’s movement toward romantic liaison. There is a pronounced lack of clear motivation within the scene where Franz and Livia spend the night together walking the streets of Venice. Earlier in the scene, Livia dismisses Franz and attempts to walk away from him. When he insistently follows, she continues to reject him. It is only through a deus ex machina (Livia comes upon a dead Austrian soldier in the canal) that a space is opened up for Livia to accept Franz’s company, if not Franz himself. As Marcus notes, the function of this deus ex machina is to advance the plot in favor of romantic union over the specifics of resistance to the Austrian occupation: Franz uses the death of the soldier as a means to win sympathy from Livia and further his advances.10 Here, too, however, there is an absence of struggle with whatever conflict Livia has regarding Franz. The plot neither examines nor explicates her motivations for staying out on the deserted streets with Franz. Rather, her voiceover merely reflects: “We walked a long time together through the deserted streets. My prejudice was vanished . . . the time did not exist anymore. Only the pleasure of not admitting . . . what I felt in hearing him speak . . . in hearing him laugh.” The absence of a moral struggle—precisely what determines the film’s effect as a degenerate melodrama—is thus accomplished by the exposition’s refusal to clarify, or translate, the internal operations of Livia’s character. Indeed, there are several aspects of her character which are never explicated: the age difference in her marriage, the underlying relationship between her and Roberto, and, subsequently, her actual interest in saving him from exile (political or romantic). The effect of this refusal to explicate or translate is to distance Livia’s character by withholding the means for Symbolic identification. The anxiety that Livia experiences throughout the film as a result of union with Franz is thus lacking from the structure of the plot itself.

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Fig u r e 9. Livia walks through the streets of Venice with Franz. Her reserve toward him is conveyed through her dress, with its tight lines and drawn hair and veil. A deus ex machina provides the means for her to accept him. courtesy of the m useum o f m odern art , film stills archive.

Rather than encourage identification with anxiety, the plot withholds inducements to identify with Livia and thus distances the spectator from her anxiety. In this respect, the film can be seen to reverse the relationship between spectator and text within Rome: Open City. In the latter (as discussed previously), the film encourages identification with character, building the spectator’s investment in character, only to remove the character from the narrative, forcing a decathexis and redirection of spectatorial desire. Senso, however, discourages identification with the main character, sustaining a distance between character and spectator through the film. There is no loss and subsequent decathexis within the process of the film characteristic of

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Rome: Open City. Rather, the absence of the structure of anxiety, replaced by a distance between main character and spectator, signifies the distance in social conditions between the two films: the anxiety of war and of revolutionary struggle has been consigned to the past. The exposition’s aversion to “translating” Livia’s character is not the only means by which the plot establishes distance between the spectator and main character. The plot’s focalization is structured to prevent a Symbolic identification which authorizes Imaginary identification and jouissance, structuring instead a detached and analytical spectatorship. Analyzing the plot’s focalization demonstrates this point. Rather than creating a proximity between spectator and character that is characteristic of the classical text, the external focalization in Senso constructs a separate position for its spectators that allows them to judge Livia negatively. The groundwork for this position is laid in the opening of the film, in the elaborate panning shot of the auditorium of La Fenice. The cut that precedes this shot serves to separate the space of the orchestra seating, which is made up largely of the Austrians, from the tier seating, made up largely of the Italians in the auditorium. The elaborate nature of the pan, with its back and forth motion, extreme angles, and length of time, serves to draw attention to itself as plot function—as a process of presentation. The continuity inscribed within its workings emphasizes the continuity of space in the tiers, drawing attention to the space as the space of the Italians—the space of the collective where revolutionary struggle will take place. The camera’s fascination with the space that it attempts to join together through a pan, however, ultimately rests on the architecture of the space as segmented into levels, a separation that costume will further emphasize. As the camera moves higher across the space, differences in costume articulate class difference, with the upper class seated in the boxes of the lowest tier and the middle to lower classes standing close together in the highest tier. As the scene plays out, the function of this segmentation of space by class, and the panning shot which emphasizes it, becomes even clearer. The relationship between camera movement and mise-en-scène articulates the process of collective struggle: organization and direction come from the upper class (from leaders like Ussoni), action itself from the lower classes (all of whom remain nameless in the narrative). In this manner, revolution is tied to nationalism and diverted from class struggle itself, ensuring the process of transformismo from the very beginning. Most significantly for the normative system of the text, Livia is a part of that class which will transform the class struggle into a nationalist struggle, a

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transformation whose function is the very preservation of class structure. What is essential for the evaluative norms of the text is that, despite its revisionist treatment of the Risorgimento and the myths that surround it, the primary ideal of the text is collective struggle. Against this ideal, which Livia herself alludes to when she expresses her disdain for off-stage melodrama, Livia’s character is measured and found lacking. Her relationship to the normative system of the text, however, is not readily apparent, as a result of the subterfuge through which the external focalization of the text operates. Specifically, Livia’s voice-over narration seems to provide access to her psychological orientation. In addition the narrative is organized around her character, all of which works to indicate an internal focalization. A closer analysis, however, demonstrates that the plot is rendered through an external focalization, with the pretense at internal focalization serving a rhetorical function: the inscription of the film’s immediacydistance dialectic. By constructing the appearance of internal focalization, the text seems to offer the kind of immediacy between spectator and character that internal focalization can establish, only to contradict that relationship and establish Symbolic distancing through the process of external focalization. The primary indicator of the text’s external focalization is its “bird’s eye view” of the narrative.11 This position is not so much the view of simultaneous actions in different narrative spaces, as in Rome: Open City. Rather, in keeping with the facade of internal focalization, the plot mostly limits the external focalization to the spatial boundaries of character, not the perceptual. It is here that the external focalization is afforded a bird’s-eye view. Two scenes between Livia and Franz demonstrate this point. The first occurs in the room they share for their romantic liaisons. In this scene, Franz walks about the room, while Livia remains in bed. The first indicator of the external focalization comes from Franz, who talks about all the little noises in the room: the rustle of curtains, the sound of moths against the window. As the rest of the scene plays out, Franz’s allusion to the moth articulates the position of the spectator with respect to the characters. In so intimate a setting, whose justification is passionate liaison, little is imparted to the spectator as to the emotional involvement of the characters. Franz and Livia say nothing to each other about their feelings or their passion. Instead, a psychological game of one-upmanship seems to characterize the discourse, disguising the emotional positions and involvement of the characters. The spectator, like the moth against the window, can only see the room and its

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external physical elements—the internal orientation of the characters is made almost impenetrable. The confirmation of the external position of the focalization occurs toward the end of the scene when Livia gives Franz the elaborate locket she has been wearing, in which she has just placed a lock of her own hair. While Livia does not see his reactions to her gift, the spectator does (from the point of view outside the window that the moth might have). This discrepancy in the range of knowledge between the spectator and Livia with respect to Franz’s reactions is a key indicator of the plot’s external focalization. What the plot makes clear is that Franz’s interest in the gift lies in its status as an object of value rather than a token of affection. Indeed, once it is in his possession, he has little interest in Livia. She interprets this disinterest as part of the psychological one-upmanship they have been engaged in previously, yet the plot later confirms to both the spectator and Livia herself that Franz’s interest centered around the material object, as demonstrated when Livia finds the lock of hair, without the locket, in Franz’s quarters. This manner of revealing Franz’s inner nature through external observation is repeated later in the film in the granary scene where Franz coyly lures Livia into his plan to obtain a fraudulent discharge with her money. Through facial gesture, the plot reveals that Franz is monitoring Livia’s reactions as he drops his hint; as in the earlier scene in the rented room, his actual intentions are confirmed by his contact with Livia’s wealth. When she hands over the money for the revolution to Franz, spilling much of it on the ground, he places his head in her lap and speaks words of endearment while at the same time frantically picking up the money. The insistence of Livia’s presence for external revelations of Franz’s character is a significant aspect of the text’s external focalization. Information about Franz’s intentions, as well as his character in general, is visible to the naked eye and not the privilege of omniscient narration. Rather, Livia’s character has access to this information, but refuses to see it or—more accurately—incorporate it. Even when she has no choice but to see into Franz’s character—as when she comes upon the lock of hair—she is too obsessed with her melodrama to withdraw her affections. In this manner, the text disallows sympathy for Livia by giving her the means to avoid Franz’s betrayal and usury. Livia knows that he is a rogue, but prefers to cling to fantasy and illusion. Livia’s unwillingness to accept what she knows about Franz thus places her in a separate Symbolic space from that created for the spectator, who is

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Fig u r e 10. The effects of Livia’s degenerate melodrama visibly register here: gone are the tight lines of face and clothing, the tied-up hair and veil. courtesy of the museum of modern art, film stills archive.

encouraged by the external focalization to judge Franz negatively. The separation of these Symbolic spaces thus creates a distance between the character and the spectator, who, rather than identify with Livia through the Imaginary, is encouraged instead to judge her negatively through the Symbolic. This Symbolic separation is articulated in the text by Livia’s journey to Verona. Dressed in flowing black robes with a sheer black veil over her face, she enters her carriage at dawn in front of the villa and is driven off. As the carriage makes its way through the Italian countryside, the film emphasizes Livia’s withdrawal from it. To begin with, her voice-over narration reflects her belief that she has left her home and her people forever, a statement that will be emphasized in the mise-en-scène. Livia sits alone in the carriage with black shades drawn over the window. The striking hues of the Italian countryside are shut out as she withdraws into her melodramatic fantasy: rereading a letter from Franz within the confines of the carriage. The degree to which Livia has withdrawn from the world is articulated when the carriage crosses over into Austrian territory. This moment is excluded from the im-

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age track, reduced only to extraneous outside noise that attempts to crowd in on Livia’s reflections on the letter. Here, too, the film asserts its degraded melodrama over history, consigning the Risorgimento to offscreen space—a momentary obstacle which barely intrudes upon Livia’s pursuit of her fantasy. Indeed, the position of this scene within the plot indicates the text’s assertion of melodrama over history. Livia’s departure to Verona occurs after Ussoni’s attempt to engage his forces in the battle of Custoza. Even in light of the governmental censorship that occurred with respect to this scene,12 the plot abandons the historical specificity of the battle—its aftermath and implications within the movement—to resume Livia’s degraded melodrama. The historical “facts” of the battle are consigned to off-screen space (moments of fleeting dialogue), its specificity as class struggle repressed. The narrative thus supplants history for Livia’s journey, a movement which takes place on three planes: the physical (going from Aldeno to Verona), the individual-psychological (Livia’s deterioration into fantasy and madness), and the social-psychological (Livia’s movement from una Italiana vera [a true Italian] to una Veneta [her regional identification and thus her abandonment of national unity]). The text’s negative evaluation is not limited to Livia, however. There is a consistent refusal to construct a positive position from which to authorize Imaginary identification. Neither the collective nor Ussoni, for example, comes to fill that position. Indeed, despite the fact that Livia’s journey is in the opposite direction from the collective, the external focalization does not encourage Symbolic identification with this position either. Rather, through the character of Ussoni, the text makes clear that the collective struggle, inaugurated in the text through the opera, never leaves the realm of fantasy and melodrama: from the beginning, the collective struggle is coopted into the movement for national unity, exchanging revolutionary struggle for organization and direction from the upper class. The segmentation of space according to class within La Fenice signifies this relationship. Ussoni, a member of the upper class, moves within the space of the auditorium floor. His apprehension as he walks through the crowd is the result of his position as organizer of the demonstration that will occur. The actual carrying out of the demonstration, however, is conducted by the middle and lower classes, who occupy the highest tier. The historical argument of the plot is thus articulated through the space of La Fenice, which maintains the topographical as well as dialectical structure of the national unity movement. The actual collective basis for the movement, its support and power base, is the lower class, who nonetheless look to the up-

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per class for leadership and direction. Through its articulation of space Senso concludes that the process of transformismo—the Italian term which expresses the ability for class structure to maintain itself through political restructuring—is assured by the structural origins of the struggle for national unity which preserved the very relationship between the classes that collective struggle seeks to dismantle. It is in the context of the preservation of this relationship that both Ussoni and the working class are evaluated negatively. Even though Roberto goes against his class and works to preserve the revolutionary aspects of the struggle, the text does not take up a position that is sympathetic to his character. Rather, like the working-class members that he leads, Roberto fails to see that the process of transformismo is already assured. As a result, his character functions as a political double of Livia. Whereas she retreats into a world of erotic and melodramatic fantasy, withdrawing increasingly further from the reality that surrounds her, Ussoni lives in a world of political and melodramatic fantasy, failing to see the political reality entrenched around him. Indeed, the introduction of his character establishes this as his primary trait. A leader of the underground, he unnecessarily exposes himself and potentially the movement when Franz, an insignificant Austrian officer, insults the Italian national identity. Roberto’s exaggerated reaction is conveyed in the dramatic camera angle which registers his outrage and his response. His challenge to a duel further underscores how far into melodramatic ideals and away from historical-political reality he is, a fact that is brought home in the text by the ease with which he is arrested and exiled. Even his confrontation with the general of the regular military forces (edited out by the censors), in which Ussoni reveals the generals’ motives as class based, fails to modify this construction of his character. Rather, like Livia finding the lock of hair, it serves to underscore the degree to which Roberto refuses to accept the political circumstances confronting his ideals. Unable to bring his irregular military forces to bear on the battle of Custoza, Roberto nonetheless enters into the battle himself. The events of the battle, however, are impervious to the kind of idealism and dedication that he brings. This is articulated in the plot by the artillery brigade, who echo his earlier bravado as they attempt to make a stand against the advancing Austrians, unaware that they are being charged from the rear as well. Furthermore, as the intertitle in the opening and then later Count Serpeiri make clear, not only are the idealism and enthusiasm for national unity irrelevant to the political events, but so is the battle of Custoza—the unification of

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Italy being determined more by external pacts between countries than by the battles against Austria. The text’s external focalization thus refuses to align itself with any character, preventing Imaginary identification authorized through the Symbolic and establishing instead a Symbolic distance between character and spectator. It is therefore significant to understand the relationship between the external focalization and the characters within the diegesis. Unlike earlier Neorealist works, where external focalization aligns itself with characters (as in Rome: Open City) or aligns itself with characters only to withdraw itself later (as in Bicycle Thieves or La terra trema), in Senso the external focalization resists aligning itself with character altogether. Thus, even though the highest normative ideal of the text, the point from which all other actions are evaluated, is the class struggle within the movement for national unity (the site of the collective) the text refuses to align itself with the members of the working class itself. They are either as politically naïve as Ussoni (like those who turn to Livia for leadership) or oblivious to the struggle (like those who go about their daily chores as the war rages on about them). The significance of this nonalignment with character is the manner in which it allows the normative system of the text to remain abstract and removed from the events of the diegesis, as intangible as history itself. That the authoritative position of the text is withheld from the characters and removed from the diegesis serves to diminish the influence of all the characters and their actions on the dramatic events that occur. Even within the degraded melodrama that occurs at the expense of history, the major conflict in the struggle over virtue—Livia’s choice between Franz and the Italian patriots with respect to the money she is entrusted with—is superfluous to the diegetic world. For all its internal divisiveness within Livia, there is no consequence for the action: no masses killed for want of arms or food, no public exposure of her betrayal. Indeed the general’s refusal to accept Ussoni’s group makes clear that her actions are irrelevant to the ongoing events. Even the count himself, the primary signifier of transformismo, does nothing to shape narrative events. Despite all his deal making, first with the Austrians then with Ussoni and the patriots, the count is not in a position of power with respect to the events within the diegesis. Rather than shape events, the count reacts to them. Unlike classical narration, therefore, the external focalization in Senso does not function to authorize (and in the pro-

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cess promote identification with) the actions of characters as they control and orient narrative events. The structure of the plot refuses to allow any character to take control of narrative events or the diegetic world. The external focalization, therefore, evaluates all the characters in terms of their inability to understand how little their actions influence or control events. The Symbolic position created for spectator identification through external focalization does not seek to authorize characters, but rather to promote a historical judgment of characters, the social set they represent, and the social process under examination. The abstract nature of the external focalization thus functions to articulate a Marxist evaluation of the social process of the Risorgimento as the Symbolic position of the text. Thus, as Livia degenerates into melodramatic romantic fantasy and Ussoni into melodramatic political fantasy, the spectator is symbolically detached from both, identifying instead with the evaluation of the text that no character influences the sweeping events of the diegetic world. Indeed, as the introduction to the film makes clear, Italy itself as political entity is not as much in control of events as are the European countries making shifts in their alliances. Even here, though, the text does not conclude that the level of the political determines events of the narrative world. As Franz’s observation about the end of a world implies, events of the narrative occur as a result of Europe beginning to change from mercantile-colonial capitalism (where Italy remained in a position as the third world of Europe) to industrial capitalism. The place of the historical spectator in this process—the historical specificity of this Symbolic position— can be determined at that site where both the external focalization and the Symbolic position it constructs function as a specific signifying response to social conditions. In this respect, NowellSmith’s observation that “there is an implicit parallel between the events of 1866 and those of 1943 – 45” merits further analysis.13 Indeed, it is not difficult to see that the Austrian soldiers of Senso stand in for the occupying forces of Nazi Germany in 1943. Furthermore, as Nowell-Smith points out, both the Risorgimento and World War II contained populist uprisings that failed to carry over into political movements or were co-opted by larger political entities—the former by the Cavour government, the latter by the Allies. The position of the historical spectators, therefore, is constructed around their historic position within the aftermath of transformismo. Thus, in Senso, the events of 1943 –1945 are not the Real—as social formations and events attempt to present themselves—but, rather, already history: already a matter of interpretation. As a Symbolic encounter with the effects of those social

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events, Senso attempts to translate not just the Resistance and events of 1943 – 1945, but their representation—their construction as history. The Risorgimento is not the only hallowed historical event under reexamination: within this parallel, Senso asserts that the Resistance was as superfluous to Germany’s withdrawal as the nationalist movement was to Austria’s retreat some sixty years previous. In this respect, Roberto Ussoni is just as much a corrective to Rome: Open City’s Manfredi as he is to the Risorgimento itself. As with La terra trema, then, Senso seeks to impose the Symbolic position of the text between the historical spectators and their translation of the Resistance as a culturally purifying or penitential act, insisting that the liberation of Italy, as in the past, was the result of external political machinations independent of Italy itself. Moreover, by constructing this polemic, the film articulates the basis for transformismo: the cooptation of class struggle into largely irrelevant political struggle. The social condition with which the text is a Symbolic encounter is thus not the Resistance but its aftermath: Italian culture after the process of transformismo. It is from this position that the signifying praxis of the text examines the Risorgimento and the Resistance as sites of undeveloped class struggle. The film’s inscription of Gramscian theory with respect to its examination of the Risorgimento, a stylistic choice that several scholars have commented on, serves more than a rhetorical function. With its insistence on larger social processes as determinants, and its deemphasis on individual actions and ideals, Senso inscribes Gramsci’s position with respect to not only revolution but the political stagnation of Italy. In his writings from prison, Gramsci argued that, conditions in Western democracies being what they were, a direct assault upon the state was doomed to failure.14 As a result, revolutionaries in Western democracies needed a separate and distinct strategy from the one followed by the Bolsheviks in the Russian Revolution. Rather than a “war of movement,” Gramsci argued for a “war of position,” where the working class would gradually establish political and cultural hegemony within society. He concluded that such a process would make the seizure of power unnecessary, if not historically obsolete. In his capacity as leader of the Italian Communist Party, Palmiro Togliatti maintained this “war of position” during the armed struggle for liberation, insisting that all other goals of political and social transformations be subordinated to national unity. Thus, he wrote in 1944, “the insurrection that we want does not have the aim of imposing social and political transformations

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in a socialist or communist sense. Its aim is rather national liberation and the destruction of Fascism.” 15 Togliatti continued to lead the party in a war of position through the liberation of Italy and the formation of the new state. Indeed, in many respects, it is within the context of 1954 and the entrenchment of parliamentary government that the war of position really began for the Italian Communist Party. As Ginsborg observes, in 1954 the party reached its highest membership: “however, [this] masks the real isolation of the party in Italian society, where the intense propaganda of the Cold War had stigmatized them as the lepers of the nation.” 16 Furthermore, he concludes that 1954 “was not a period of innovation in terms of general strategy. The party’s perspectives for the transition to socialism continued to be based on political coalition and class alliances.” 17 The translation of the position of Togliatti and the Italian Communist Party in the aftermath of transformismo is inscribed into the signifying system of the text in the narration’s insistence on larger social processes as determinants and its deemphasis on individual actions and ideals. Senso makes clear that the Risorgimento was not a failed revolution precisely because the agrarian working class was without revolutionary consciousness, as well as without political and cultural hegemony. In structuring Symbolic identification through the process of the narration’s external focalization, Senso insists that the historical spectator identify with this Gramscian position by foreclosing the feasibility of other positions. The Symbolic position of the external focalization alone is the place of knowledge within the text, linking all others to either psychological fantasy (as in the case of Livia) or political fantasy (as in the case of Ussoni). Indeed, the degree to which Franz’s character is able to gain lucidity and complexity within the evaluative system of the text is determined by his ability to understand how events are being shaped by larger social determinants and how these are shifting. In constructing such a position, however, Senso, much like La terra trema, forecloses the possibility of the pleasure afforded through Imaginary identification in favor of a detached and analytical Symbolic identification with an ideological position. The ideological function of this strategy is to inscribe the relationship between the historical spectator and the Real effects of social conditions within the structure of the text itself. The text affords no place for the spectator to occupy with respect to pleasure because there is no such place within the social conditions of the postwar (but pre– economic resurgence) period within which the film is situated. Within these conditions the revolutionary potential of the Resistance could not reach its potential, and the “war of position” with respect to transforming the state and the capital-

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ist mode of production could only wait for an entrenched system to exhaust itself. The Real effect of social conditions is thus a lack of hope for individual jouissance because the possibility of collective fulfillment is historically foreclosed. The only option the text and social conditions can afford to the historical subjects is Symbolic recognition of their alienation. The degree to which the process of transformismo has so thoroughly foreclosed the possibility—and hope—for a collective transformation of Italian culture is inscribed in the text at the execution of Franz. Livia’s action of sending Franz to a firing squad—though coded as the result of betrayal— nonetheless functions to confirm the Imaginary limitations placed on her desire. For, as Lacan argues, the only outcome of desire locked within the constraints of the Imaginary is “the destruction of the other.” 18 Livia’s destruction of Franz is thus not the result of a “betrayal” as much as it is determined by a narrative logic that defines betrayal as the term limit of nonrecognition of desire. As Lacan further argues, “desire is susceptible to the mediation of recognition, without which every human function would simply exhaust itself in the unspecified wish for the destruction of the other.” 19 Precisely what the text affords to Livia is the lack of recognition of her desire: Franz refuses to take his place in her degenerate melodrama. Her desire is thus limited to the structure of the Imaginary, the articulation of which fails to induce Imaginary identification. Like La terra trema, Senso leaves no position for the spectators to assume with respect to pleasure, only the Symbolic recognition of their alienation. The execution of Franz, constructed as it is, functions to reverse the signifying operations of Rome: Open City, structuring instead a recognition of the subject’s position within a history with no possibility of collective transformation of Italian culture. The collective possibilities engendered in the Resistance—transposed into Rome: Open City in the figure of (among others) Don Pietro—allow for at least a vision of a moral transformation of society. With Don Pietro’s execution, the film offers the possibility that the Resistance youth who identify with the priest will return to Rome and contribute to a rebirth of Italian society based on the ideals and sacrifice of the Resistance. In Senso, however, no such image arises. As opposed to a partisan hero, Franz is an Austrian deserter whose own side shoots him, a reversal of Don Pietro, upon whom the Fascist soldiers refused to fire. Moreover, the actions of Livia after Franz’s execution function as a correction to the Resistance youth of Rome: Open City. Whereas the image of the Resistance youth seems to offer the promise that the social ideals of the priest will live on, no such collective redemption

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is afforded to Franz. Livia’s frantic calling out of his name confirms that his existence beyond death will be limited to a highly subjective memory. As a reversal of the execution in Rome: Open City, Franz’s execution by firing squad is the text’s translation of how far social conditions have changed from revolutionary possibility to the complete entrenchment of transformismo. No image of the possibility of collective transformation is offered, at least in part because no such image is needed by the spectator, the question of how Italian culture will be rebuilt having long been settled through the parliamentary process. The execution of Franz is thus the corrective to Rome: Open City, denying the image and the discourse of hope for a collective transformation of culture. Both Neorealism and the culture of revolutionary potential which spawned it had passed into history.

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7 Psychoanalysis, Cinematic Representation, and Cultural Studies

With the passing of time Italian neo-realism has become not only historically remote, but conceptually nebulous. That something existed— or happened—which at the time received the name neo-realism, remains undoubted. But there is an increasing uncertainty (not to mention indifference) as to what that something was. Geoffrey Nowell-Smith 1

In his discussion of American film capital and Italian Neorealism, Michael Silverman warns against the dangers of essentialism, of treating Neorealism as a kind of entity unto itself. Engaged in a polemic against traditional film scholarship, Silverman points to the manner in which essentialism allows Neorealism— ontologically—to become the cause of its own creation: influencing, as it does, the very films which comprise it.2 Silverman’s position reflects a kind of Foucaultian perspective that is echoed by one of the practitioners of Neorealism itself, Vittorio De Sica. In discussing his position within Neorealism, De Sica argues: “It’s not like one day we sat at a table on Via Veneto, Rossellini, Visconti, myself and others and said, ‘now let’s create neorealism.’ ” 3 By displacing the focus on Neorealism as a thing in itself and using it instead as a test case for revising psychoanalytic film theory, this study has abandoned the concerns of traditional Neorealist scholarship, which argue issues of scope, causality, and impact. Rather, this study demonstrates

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a diversity in the relationships between individual films of Italian Neorealism and the subversive utopian impulse within Italian culture that found strength in the fall of Fascism and the rise of the Italian Resistance. The “new realism” of Italian cinema did not so much betray this impulse as constitute a variety of signifying practices constructed around it. While the signifying practices of individual films exercise strategies of containment, Neorealism as a whole could not be said to have caused this containment. The “increasing uncertainty” that Nowell-Smith points to is precisely what occurs when cultural containment is confined to only one arena—such as film—rather than examined as a complex hegemonic process. Indeed, while the destabilizing effects of the war created a space for revolutionary potential, it would be a grave oversight to ignore the manner in which it also created the means for a transition from one mode of production—industrial capitalism (which had exhausted itself by the 1930’s)—to the next mode of production— consumer capitalism (though admittedly consumer capitalism did not dominate the Italian social system until much later than in the United States and other countries). The vitality of an emerging mode of production engendered the means to recontain a subversive utopian impulse long before Neorealism could betray it. The preceding detailed analyses of select films within (and on the periphery of ) Italian Neorealism focus on strategies of containment not so much to prove something about Neorealism as to demonstrate that a text-based mode of psychoanalysis can make crucial contributions to studies of representation and the ideological processes they engender. At least one such issue, as discussed earlier, is the manner in which challenges to and subversions of dominant signifying norms—such as classical film narrative— do not in and of themselves constitute radical critique, as is the case, I argue, with Rome: Open City, Bicycle Thieves, and Bitter Rice. Cultural studies in general have long since concluded that adopting the language and modes of representation of the dominant constitutes a form of ideological acquiescence if not a form of cultural colonialism. This argument was put forth with respect to cinematic signifying practice by Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean Narboni, who argue: The situation is the same at the level of artistic form . . . [with] films [that] totally accept the established system of depicting reality: “bourgeois realism” and the whole conservative box of tricks: blind faith in “life,” “humanism,” “common sense,” etc. . . . [they] do not effectively criticize the ideological system in which they are embedded because they unquestioningly adopt its language.4

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What has not been so clearly evidenced in cultural studies, however, is the manner in which problematizing or subverting the language of the dominant will not necessarily engender radical ideological critique. Indeed, from Comolli and Narboni to early feminist work like Mulvey’s, the concept of rejecting the language of the dominant and, to use Mulvey’s term, “the destruction of pleasure as a radical weapon” have attracted a strong theoretical following, but have not been subjected to the kind of scrutiny they warrant.5 The value of text-based modes of analysis lies precisely here, in their ability to analyze both signification and the structures of signification which determine meaning and set the boundaries and possibilities for radical critique. In its analysis of both Rome: Open City and Bicycle Thieves, this study demonstrates that within signifying structures and the process of signification a strategy of acknowledgment—the articulation or imaging of problem, default, or crisis— can be a principal strategy of ideological recontainment. Furthermore, this study demonstrates that this is indeed a major ideological strategy of each film. In the former, as discussed earlier, the devastation of the war and the issue of collaboration are articulated by the text in a strategy of containment that includes displacing Fascism onto occupation for the purpose of sanctioning a patriarchal-capitalist culture that will rise from the ashes of war in the form of a Christian Democrat coalition government. In Bicycle Thieves, the social problems of unemployment and the ineptitude of government, unions, and the church are all imaged, but as a means for demonstrating the necessity and legitimacy of patriarchal capitalist culture. Furthermore, these strategies of containment are achieved through the process, or structures, of signification: the subversion of the expositional function and disruption of identification in Rome: Open City and the complex shifting of focalization and Symbolic identification in Bicycle Thieves. Within the “horizon of expectations” of their reception, to employ Hans Robert Jauss’s concept, Rome: Open City and to a somewhat lesser extent Bicycle Thieves can be seen to mount an intensive assault on the language of the dominant, as many traditional scholars have pointed out. The manner in which this subversion of the dominant is ultimately recontained, however, is beyond reception study, pointing toward the necessity of psychoanalysis as a fundamental coordinating framework for narratology, reception study, and Marxist critical theory. Combined, these methodological approaches can approach textual analysis as a means of delineating how textual strategies (and the norms they may subvert) address a historical spectator through signification, at the level of identity and through the operations of desire, for

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the purpose of ideological persuasion and consent. It is through these operations that, for example, films like Rome: Open City, Bicycle Thieves, and Bitter Rice can exercise subversion or challenge to established norms as strategies of acknowledgment for the purpose of recontainment. What might otherwise appear to constitute a radical critique in its subversion or challenge to dominant norms is recontained through the process of the narrative, the articulation of its signifying strategies, and its relationship to the spectator. Although Rome: Open City, Bicycle Thieves, and Bitter Rice each refused a classical Hollywood ending— especially the happy ending—and each could be said to have at least problematized the relationship between narrative and pleasure, each fails to constitute a radical ideological critique. This stands in stark contrast to La terra trema and Senso, both of which construct their radical critique at the site of refusing to provide the kind of narrative jouissance so prevalent in classical narration. The difference between the two groups of films lies in the manner in which different signifying structures mobilize Symbolic identification. In all of these films, Symbolic identification functions to allow a detached spectatorship—a vehicle for identification detached from the unpleasure of anxiety. In the former group, pleasure is withheld but recovered in an implied future outcome: the Resistance youth in Rome: Open City, Bruno’s salvific act (or his own future) in Bicycle Thieves, and the restoration/redemption of Francesca in Bitter Rice. With La terra trema and Senso, however, this Symbolic identification is at the expense of dominant culture and its myth of the jouissance of the subjugated, integrated, and subsequently whole being. The spectator can escape unpleasure through identification with the place of the Other(A)—the place of knowledge and authority—more than through the recognition of his/her own Other(A), but only by seeing through the myths of dominant culture. For La terra trema, this means the spectator must see through the impossibility of fulfillment within cultural formations organized around individual exploitation; for Senso, the inability of the individual to effect social change, to make history. The anxiety that each of these films structures, by threatening the continuity of the Other(A) of its historical spectators, is thus contained through an identification with the authority of the Other(A), its place as guarantor of knowledge and truth (or in Lacan’s terms the place where there is a mythical someone “supposed to know”). The denial of pleasure is thus exchanged for the containment of unpleasure. The signifying practice of both La terra trema and Senso constitutes radical critique, but at the expense of pleasure, raising important questions for psychoanalysis and the study of culture with

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regard to pleasure, ideology, and cultural change. Specifically, the question remains as to whether ideological critique is necessarily at the expense of pleasure. Here a psychoanalysis grounded in textuality and committed to a coordinating role makes important contributions. In his classic investigation of Lacanian psychoanalysis, Fredric Jameson examines Freud’s work with jokes as one of psychoanalysis’s fundamental frameworks for textuality. The significance of studying Freud’s work on jokes as a precursor for entering into the Lacanian oeuvre is not coincidental. Lacan’s work repeatedly turns to The Interpretation of Dreams, Jokes and Their Relationship to the Unconscious, and The Psychopathology of Everyday Life as the core of psychoanalysis.6 Significantly, each of these works is grounded in textuality—if not signifying process—and its relationship to the individual. Lacan’s work provides the means to refocus on textuality as it relates to the functioning of identity. Such a refocusing provides the means to address the important issues of pleasure and ideological critique. A libidinal attachment to the signifier, so clearly brought out in Lacan’s work, but less so in Freud’s, can nonetheless be fathomed in Freud’s discussion of children’s language development. Freud argues that during the period in which a child is learning how to handle the vocabulary of his mother-tongue, it gives him obvious pleasure to “experiment with it in play” to use Groos’s words . . . Little by little he is forbidden this enjoyment, till all that remains permitted to him are significant combinations of words.7

Still somewhat overdetermined by what he sees as the development of the superego, Freud’s discussion nonetheless references the subject’s Imaginary attachment to words—the word as a thing that can be played with in combinations of alliteration and assonance—and Symbolic attachments—in the significant combinations that allow access to the adult world. Furthermore, Freud establishes the groundwork of the effects of the signifier on the formation of identity when he evidences the dialectic of recognition within the process of signification, as the now (in)famous discussion of fort-da suggests. Lacan’s work, in addition to further elaborating the dialectic of recognition at stake in signification, demonstrates the continuity between identifications and language located at the site of the Other(A). Jameson’s discussion, in however a fleeting manner, examines the possibility of detaching this continuity without creating anxiety or unpleasure. Thus, in what Jameson describes as the poetic process, the function of textuality is no longer to maintain this continuity, but to engage subjects in formal play—

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to inscribe them in a trajectory, aesthetic or otherwise—that allows for the disengagement of the defenses necessary for decathexis of the signifier. The textuality of the poetic process, in a manner similar to what Freud describes in the joke-work, functions as subterfuge to allow the cathexis invested in the signifier to transfer elsewhere. In this respect the formal play of poetry functions in a related manner: providing pleasure through the transfer of the signifier, its formulation of new associations and oftentimes evacuation of literalness. It is in this moment of pleasure achieved by the transference that the subject can experience—however momentarily—the arbitrary nature of the signifier, its artificiality, without cause for anxiety. What a psychoanalytic framework demonstrates, therefore, is the possibility of the transformation of cultural signifiers—itself a potential means of ideological critique, resistance, or rejection—without the necessity of alienation. In this respect, a psychoanalytic model offers the potential for social change, allowing it to overcome limitations of earlier Marxist critical theories, while incorporating their contributions into the analysis. It is not difficult, for example, to see in texts like Rome: Open City, Bicycle Thieves, and Bitter Rice the process that the Frankfurt School describes, where cultural texts are impositions “of the forms and categories of mass production onto the domain of thought, imagination, and consciousness,” to use the concise summary of Lawrence Grossberg.8 Indeed, as the analyses here demonstrate, the discourse of patriarchal capitalism—in the form of Christian Democratic coalition— can be determined in Rome: Open City as well as in Bitter Rice, where it is combined with the containment of the feminine. The problem with textual determinism—where the purpose of analysis is to find the determinants of representation—is not that it has no viability (it certainly does), but, rather, that it cannot address how such discourses or determinants of representation find their mark with the spectator— perform the ideological task assigned (or at least attributed) to them. Here the coordinating role that psychoanalysis can perform becomes indispensable for analyzing the structure of signification as a social process intersecting the structure of individual identity. Psychoanalysis returns to ideological critique a dialectical model, where the production of texts can be mediated through the operations of the spectator they address. In this respect, Italian Neorealism is an important domain of investigation whose lessons and implications can make important starting points for other areas of media studies—the dramatic growth of U.S. Afro-American television programming being an immediate example. In each case, groups of texts which present themselves as alternative texts can be seen as either

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compromised and contained or appropriated through the language of the dominant. What psychoanalysis provides cultural studies is the means for determining how these texts are finding their audiences—why their ideological operations resonate, persuade, and win acceptance. In this respect, psychoanalysis, with its insistence on the dialectic of identity, makes another (though certainly not its final) contribution. Ideology and ideological operations are conducted in and through the Symbolic, which, as Lacan asserts and Zizek so clearly emphasizes, is incomplete and unable to fulfill (since ultimately the symbol cannot become the thing or a thing in itself, and conversely the thing cannot become the symbol). The implications of the limitations of the Symbolic for ideological critique are an important lesson in resisting the tendency toward totalizing the ideological operations that analysis and interpretation uncover—an orientation that finds its source in the operations of the Imaginary. In other words, no ideological operation can be complete, can manage to defuse or recontain entirely. Here Jameson’s work on the political unconscious makes a considerable contribution when he argues that both the impulses which must be managed and the textual or aesthetic incentives offered for their abandonment or reformulation engender the utopian impulse. As Jameson notes: Marxist analysis of culture . . . can no longer be content with its demystifying vocation to unmask and to demonstrate the ways in which a cultural artifact fulfills a specific ideological mission, in legitimating a given power structure, in perpetuating and reproducing the latter, and in generating specific forms of false consciousness (or ideology in the narrower sense). It must not cease to practice this essentially negative hermeneutic function . . . but must also seek, through and beyond this demonstration of the instrumental function of a given cultural object, to project its simultaneously Utopian power . . .9

Jameson’s assertion that such dual objectives return to criticism a positive hermeneutic contains much potential for a field like cultural studies that is still waiting to realize its potential within mainstream culture. As Jameson so accurately notes, the negative hermeneutic— exposing ideological operations—is essential, but its contributions are ultimately limited. The analysis of ideological operations can demonstrate to individuals how consciousness is colonized by this or that cultural practice or text and therefore—in a sense—free hearts and minds, but the lesson goes no further: it does not teach how to live free, how to image collective possibilities and consciousness. If cultural studies is going to have an impact on transforming systems of inequity and oppression, it must provide those lessons

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and recover, or rather uncover, images of the utopian impulse and collective potential that narrative works so hard to contain. The earlier discussion of Rome: Open City, for example, demonstrates how the utopian impulse is effectively recontained by its reformulation through the structure of the individual and individual renunciation. What is also important for ideological critique, however, is the remainder of that process, the historical dimensions through which the Symbolic mandate will find its failure and, as Zizek asserts, determine the fantasy that will seek to compensate for it. The closing shot of Rome: Open City provides at least an indication of both. Throughout the film the structure of individual renunciation is articulated at many sites, as discussed earlier. What the film refrains from imaging, however, is the organizing site of renunciation and hence the allegorical function of Christianity and Christian iconography within the film. In contemporary Italian culture the function of individual renunciation would find its organizing site within the system of patriarchal capitalism, rather than some form of Christian egalitarianism. Recontaining the utopian impulse is thus also achieved by the refusal to image this organizing site. Its allegorical replacement, however, is also historically unable to support the Symbolic mantle assigned to it. The image of St. Peter’s cathedral in the final shot serves an allegorical function but cannot be separated from the hierarchical institution it serves and the evolution of Christianity from small faith communities living in common to an organization of principalities. The Resistance youth, bound together in their shared suffering and commitment to the ideals of the slain priest, will find no collective egalitarianism in a church paranoid about communism, women, and the lower classes it attends to. The fantasy that arises from the inevitable failure of Italian society to transform itself with such radically egalitarian ideals is then imaged in Bicycle Thieves, where the collective is the problem, not the promise. Even in its denunciation of the collective, however, Bicycle Thieves images the potential of the collective for social transformation. This is evidenced in the film’s tacit lack of faith in the state’s ability to control the masses, articulated in the police station with the routine jumble and scramble to mobilize for riot control and in the scene involving the finding of the thief, where the police officer frankly admits to Antonio Ricci that there is not much he can do in the face of the collective (they could all lie for the thief ). Here there is a begrudging acknowledgment that, unified, the collective is a most powerful agent of social will. Indeed, the criticism the film levels at unions and the

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church for their hypocrisy belies a wish that unions would be for the workers and that the church would be the champion of those in need. Furthermore, Bicycle Thieves alludes to the kind of individual fulfillment through material culture that is just out of Antonio’s grasp, but never really images that promise within the film. The one site in the film that evidences the comfort of material culture—the restaurant scene—is critical of the pretentiousness and lack of humanity to be found there. There is an uneasiness in Bicycle Thieves over the promise of material culture and its replacement of the more collective traditional Italian culture—a wariness that is evidenced in the magnitude and insensitivity with which the Italian economy must first be transformed. The film’s mandate that individuals ultimately will be able to transcend these limitations through recognition of and encounters with the truly transforming—unconditional love—finds its expression in the final scene, where Bruno’s anguish over his father transforms and contains collective will (the angry mob disperses in the face of Bruno’s agony). The historical limitations of this mandate are evidenced in an inability to image a transformation of material culture and Italian society’s seemingly inevitable movement toward it. Bruno’s actions can restore to his father his place of dignity, but they are not a means of transcending the lack of dignity and individual worth that comes from taking one’s place in the economic cog of material culture. The family as site of collective organization, commitment, and willing sacrifice is not yet a means for revolutionary potential to realize itself. The fantasy that rises in the failure of this mandate can be seen both in La terra trema—where personal sacrifice for the sake of the family will clearly not change contemporary society—and, as Millicent Marcus asserts, in Il posto, where the main character (who would be Bruno’s age) inherits the soulless material culture society struggling to erect itself in Bicycle Thieves. In each of these, the absence of collective consciousness is the site of a profound lack, the void that must be filled. The potential for filling that void is evidenced dialectically in La terra trema, even if it is not achieved: the collective potential of the fishermen is demonstrated but not realized, and the transcendent is imaged in the simple kindness of the girl who speaks with Antonio as he examines his boat. The necessity for a positive and negative hermeneutics is also demonstrated—indeed, dramatically so—in Bitter Rice. Here the implications of negative hermeneutics weigh heavily: the threat of the feminine is recon-

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tained through punishment of the transgressor (Silvana) and redemption of the penitent (Francesca). The historical limitations of the film’s Symbolic mantle are imaged in the wedding scene, where the proud parents and happy couple provide credibility for the life Silvana seeks to escape. Behind the facade of the celebration, however, is the omnipresent rice field, where the young woman may well return, next year or in the future, kept out only by the demands of child rearing and not through economic mobility. Indeed, the image of woman’s tenuous place in society through her position in marriage pales by comparison to or—at the very least—fails to vanquish or diminish the collective spirit and potential of the women workers who unite behind the fallen Silvana in both compassion and solidarity. Their Symbolic gesture offers a powerful image of the potential of collective organization and action: the little that each gives becomes a bountiful aggregate. Although narrative operations may seek to punish Silvana for her unbridled sexuality and refusal to submit, the image of collective solidarity and action manifesting itself is not so contained. Left undisturbed, it functions as a barely recognized promise of potential waiting to be realized. Senso also effectively recontains images of collective solidarity and action, necessitating a recovery of Symbolic excess as well. As discussed previously, the text refuses to construct the character of Roberto as a heroic figure, defining him (and his actions) instead as naïve and immature— especially in a political sense. This is emphatically brought home by the manner in which the collective that his actions inspire—the artillery crew—is soon to be wiped out by counterattacking forces. The excess that stands out from this containment, however, is the ease with which Roberto abandons his class interest for the good of the collective. The manner in which he stands in stark moral contrast to the Count cannot be completely covered over as youthful naïveté and stands as a haunting specter of revolution from within to the privileged class. Further, the film draws a parallel to Roberto’s revolutionary enthusiasm with the aforementioned artillery crew. Though Roberto’s leadership will lead the men nowhere in terms of revolution or their own survival, the ease with which they pick up his zeal for the struggle evidences a potential for collective solidarity and action. In addition to the problematics of representation, then, at least part of the pervasive indeterminacy of Neorealism that Nowell-Smith speaks of is due to the lack of a dialectical hermeneutic that can recover what remains after strategies of containment have completed their operations. Certainly, Neorealism found itself in a period of revolutionary potential, yet, as argued earlier, it also found itself in a period of transition from one mode of produc-

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tion to another, a process which enhances revolutionary potential while at the same time creating a wealth of resources for its containment. What a psychoanalytic investigation of Neorealism contributes to studies of representation is an awareness that the dialectic of identity, as well as the dialectic of textual operations, is far too unstable a process to complete the “colonization of consciousness” that earlier media theories ascribed to it. Here, too, it is not so much that “colonizing” theories have no validity as that they leave out an important part of the process. The hegemony of corporatized media—as in contemporary U.S. culture, where even the Public Broadcasting System (PBS ) is given over to a Byzantine-like bureaucracy which feeds itself more than it produces programming and leans overwhelmingly toward mainstream texts— demonstrates that the colonization of consciousness is at the very least an ongoing process of economic institutionalization. What a dialectical hermeneutic demonstrates is the necessity of recovering the positive if cultural studies (and theories of representation) are going to play a role in effectively resisting such hegemonic forces. The value of “gatekeeper” theories is that they demonstrate the degree to which alternative images and ways of thinking are effectively silenced. A dialectical hermeneutic provides the means to recover them within the margins. A new psychoanalysis committed to its dialectical principles and to coordinating other theoretical paradigms provides a central place for the complex role of the subject, the operations of identity, and the dynamic of desire, whose continual functioning and demand for recognition constitute the bedrock of demand for the supply of social texts. For studies of representation and cultural studies in general to create greater inroads and have more of a voice in mainstream culture, they must be able to intercede in the process of demand: to assist or play a role in transforming the demand for social texts as a demand for the utopian impulse.

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Notes

Introduction 1. 2. 3. 4.

5. 6. 7. 8.

Christopher Norris, Deconstruction: Theory and Practice, 24. Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction, 117. Ibid., 117. See, for example, Jean-Louis Baudry, “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematic Apparatus,” Film Quarterly 28, no. 2 (Winter 1974 –1975); Jean-Louis Comolli, “Technique and Ideology: Camera, Perspective and Depth of Field,” in Film Reader 2 (1977); Janet Staiger, “Mass Produced Photo-Plays: Economic and Signifying Practices in the First Years of Hollywood,” in Wide Angle 4, no. 3 (1980); and David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristen Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960. See Thomas Elsaesser, “Film History and Visual Pleasure,” in Cinema Histories, Cinema Practices, ed. Patricia Mellencamp and Phil Rosen. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 207. See, for example, Chapters 1 and 2 in Theresa Brennan, History after Lacan. Ellie Ragland-Sullivan, Jacques Lacan and the Philosophy of Psychoanalysis, 58.

1. Revisiting Psychoanalysis and the Cinema 1. Charles F. Altman, “Psychoanalysis and Cinema: The Imaginary Discourse,” Quarterly Review of Film Studies 2, no. 3 (August 1977). 2. Edward Buscombe, Christine Gledhill, Allan Lovell, and Christopher Williams, “Why We Have Resigned from the Board of Screen,” Screen 17, no. 2 (1976): 106 – 109.

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Notes to Pages 11–17

3. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book I: Freud’s Papers on Technique, trans. John Forrester, 262. 4. Todd Gitlin, The Whole World Is Watching: Mass Media in the Making and Unmaking of the New Left, 2. 5. Fredric Jameson, “Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan: Marxism, Psychoanalytic Criticism, and the Problem of the Subject,” Yale French Studies 55/56 (1977): 338. 6. Ibid., 339. 7. Engaging the desires of the subject is thus understood as the process by which the film text becomes the object that desire is directed toward. 8. Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts, 126. 9. Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan, 19. 10. Ibid., 314. 11. The clearest image of this mode of identification is perhaps the manner in which people identify with the pure effect of instrumental music (without lyrics). The sense in which they “become” or “take up” the music they hear is an identificatory process that finds its source in premirror identification. 12. Lacan, Ecrits, 251. 13. Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema, 49. 14. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 153. 15. Ibid., 152. 16. As with many of the terms and concepts Lacan employed, the “Other” signifies several different kinds of operations and relationships defined by the developmental context. The designation “Other(A)” was developed by Ellie RaglandSullivan as a means of distinguishing between, for example, the (m)Other and the object petite a. See Ellie Ragland-Sullivan, Jacques Lacan and the Philosophy of Psychoanalysis, Chapters 1 and 2. 17. Lacan, Ecrits, 141. 18. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954 –1955, trans. Sylvana Tomaselli, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, 155. 19. See, for example, Lacan, Ecrits, 285. 20. See, for example, ibid., 67. 21. See, for example, Lacan, Book I, 166 –170. 22. Lacan, Ecrits, 19. 23. See, for example, Lacan, Book I, 282, and Ecrits, 138. 24. Lacan, Book I, 166. 25. Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts, 198. 26. Lacan, Book II, 169. 27. This is not to maintain a cultural determinism, however. The subject’s identity through culture is itself overdetermined by the individual “history” in the formation of what Lacan terms the moi. See, for example, Chapter 8 in Book I and Lacan’s discussion on intersubjectivity in Chapter 15, Book II.

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Notes to Pages 18 –19

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28. Stephen Heath, “Narrative Space,” in Questions of Cinema, 27. 29. See, for example, Metz, The Imaginary Signifier; and Jean-Louis Baudry, “The Apparatus: Metapsychological Approaches to the Impression of Reality in Cinema” and “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus,” in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader, ed. Phil Rosen. 30. In “Narrative Form in American Network Television,” in High Theory/Low Culture, ed. Colin MacCabe, 103, Jane Feur argues that “the ‘implied spectator’ of television is not the isolated, immobilized pre-Oedipal individual . . . but rather, a post-Oedipal, fully socialized family member.” 31. Ann Friedberg, “Theories of Cinematic Identification,” in Psychoanalysis and Cinema, ed. E. Ann Kaplan. 32. Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, “A Note on Story/Discourse,” Edinburgh Magazine 1 (1978): 26 –32. 33. See, for example, Barbara Klinger, “Digressions at the Cinema: Reception and Mass Culture,” Cinema Journal 28, no. 4 (Summer 1989); and Noel Carroll, Mystifying Movies: Fads and Fallacies in Contemporary Film Theory, 75 –78. 34. Nowell-Smith, “A Note on Story/Discourse,” 26 –32. 35. Thomas Elsaesser, “Primary Identification and the Historical Subject,” CineTracts 11 (Fall 1980): 43 –52. 36. Lacan, Book I, 125. 37. Any subject, of course, has the ability to resist or reject the Symbolic identification which the text constructs; however, to assume such a position is to foreclose the Imaginary pleasure the text constructs from the continuity between specific identifications and language. I will return to this point later in this discussion. 38. Rather, traditional psychoanalytic film theory implies that subjects construct themselves as ideal unities through identification with the unity of discourse. This process is ahistorical since any unified discourse could be used as a basis of identification. 39. Culture’s fundamental role in mediating the text-subject relationship, however, is precisely what precludes the possibility of a text establishing uniform spectator response with respect to pleasure. There are numerous positions the subjects can take vis-à-vis subjugation to the Law and the Symbolic Order in the formation of their identity. As a result, introjection of the Law (culture)—the specific basis for continuity between identifications and language—is a variable process which some subjects will come to accept and others will reject, as a matter of identity. This makes the basis for Symbolic identification variable within any given culture and precludes uniform spectator response. 40. Seymour Chatman, Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film, 150. 41. Ibid., 150. 42. Elsaesser, “Film History,” 69 (emphasis added).

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Notes to Pages 20 –23

43. See, for example, Bill Nichols, ed., Movies and Methods, Vol. 2, 15. 44. Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 34. 45. See, for example, “The Ego’s Era,” in Theresa Brennan, History after Lacan. 46. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959 – 60, trans. Dennis Porter, 98 –143. 47. Fredric Jameson, The Ideologies of Theory, vol. 2, 149. 48. Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 286. 49. See, for example, William Downing, Jameson, Althusser, Marx: An Introduction to The Political Unconscious, 84; as well as Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16, no. 3 (Autumn 1975), where Mulvey appropriates psychoanalysis for a feminist analysis as a means of “examining patriarchy with the tools it provides.” 50. Ragland-Sullivan, Jacques Lacan and the Philosophy of Psychoanalysis, 223. 51. Given the individual contingencies that play into the construction of identity, the possibility that an individual subject will identify with a subculture rather than a dominant culture is always a distinct one. The value of a concept like the Other(A) is its insistence on the identifications with the signifying pacts of a collective in order to construct and maintain identity. 52. The collective potential of the heterosexual coupling, frequently one of the major goals within classical film, is contained and redefined within the structure of the individual through the ideology of patriarchy, which defines (and limits) woman as object of male desire. Narrative structures thus promote a sense of the male protagonist’s wholeness in the end: it was he who controlled narrative and obtained the object (the woman) in the end which will make him whole. 53. Indeed, even in those films which define the achievement of wholeness more collectively, as, for example, with the protagonist’s integration with the collective, the structures of identification still promote an individual jouissance for the spectator. 54. Lacan, Ecrits, 316. 55. See, for example, the discussion in Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 110 –129. 56. Lacan, Book I, 262. 57. Lacan, Ecrits, 150. 58. Lacan, Book I, 66. 59. Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts, 167. 60. Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 127. 61. Ibid., 133. 62. Indeed the revisionist work of Slavoj Zizek has focused on Hitchcock and/or Hollywood, as with Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out, though, as the title suggests, there is some examination of non-Hollywood film; Vicky Lebeau’s recent Lost Angels: Psychoanalysis and Cinema examines recent Hollywood films.

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Notes to Pages 24 –31

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63. See, for example, Denis Mack Smith’s discussion in Italy: A Modern History, 5. 64. James Hay, Popular Film Culture in Fascist Italy, 5. 65. Paul Ginsborg, A History of Contemporary Italy: Society and Politics, 1943 –1988, 17. 66. Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 291. 67. Ibid., 291. 68. Clearly, however, the focus of this book is directed toward developing and applying a model and cannot address this particular concern. 69. P. Adams Sitney, Vital Crises in Italian Cinema: Iconography, Stylistics, Politics. 70. See Millicent Marcus, Italian Film in the Light of Neorealism; and Pierre Leprohon, Italian Cinema, trans. Roger Greaves and Oliver Stallybrass. 71. See, for example, Mira Liehm, Passion and Defiance: Film in Italy from 1942 to the Present, 84. 72. Lacan, Ecrits, 90. 73. Lacan, Book II, 306. 74. Ragland-Sullivan, Jacques Lacan, 61.

2. Rome: Open City 1. Quoted in Roy Armes, Patterns of Realism, 69. 2. Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, Luchino Visconti, 33. 3. See, for example, Ben Lawton’s introduction and discussion with Giuseppe De Santis in Antonio Vitti, Giuseppe De Santis and Postwar Italian Cinema. 4. See, for example, Lacan’s discussion of the Symbolic in Book II. 5. Stephen Heath, “Jaws, Ideology, and Film Theory,” in Movies and Methods, Vol. 2, ed. Bill Nichols, 513. 6. Ibid., 513. 7. Heath, “Narrative Space,” 36. 8. The degree of this disruption is, however, historically, culturally, and individually contingent. Certainly, for example, American spectators of the 1990’s have inherited the cultural legacy that has responded to Jean-Luc Godard and other figures who challenged classical norms through narrative disruption. In addition, these spectators routinely engage a system of television which regularly breaks narrative diegesis for the insertion of paid programming. Within their “horizon of expectations,” then (to use Hans Robert Jauss’s concept), the degree of disruption is probably not very high. While there are figures predating Neorealism who also challenged classical norms through narrative disruption (Sergei Eisenstein being one) it would not be accurate to project contemporary levels of accommodation back onto Italian spectatorship. Rather, it is likely that the spectator the text addresses experiences the sequence disruptively. 9. Luigi Chiarini, “A Discourse on Neorealism,” in Springtime in Italy: A Reader on Neorealism, ed. and trans. David Overby, 149. 10. See, for example, Part 4 in Overby’s introduction to Springtime in Italy; Peter

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Notes to Pages 33 –36

Bondanella’s discussion in Chapter 2 of Italian Cinema; and Marcus’s discussion in Chapter 1 of Italian Film. 11. The literary basis of Sternberg’s work, however, does not allow for a fully accurate characterization of the relationship between exposition and actional dynamics in narrative film. In literature the substitution between the two modes occurs through the medium of language, making the relationship, at the level of plot, a substitution occurring in a strict linearity. In narrative film, however, this substitution occurs through several matters of expression. It should thus be characterized more as a balance in favor of one over the other. This allows for dissemination of information in a vertical accumulation in addition to the horizontal linearity of plot. 12. The German officer’s eagerness to answer the phone plays up the numerous possibilities that the call represents. It could be a friend of Manfredi’s, who might be tricked into giving up his location. It could also be one of the members of Manfredi’s circle, who could be lured into a trap. When Marina begins asking for Manfredi, the first possibility continues to hang over the scene. 13. In this respect, narrative drive as outburst, break, or disruption can be understood as a lack of expositional containment. 14. This is not to argue that the structural relationship between the moi and the je has determined the functional relationship between actional dynamics and the exposition. Establishing a correspondence between structures is an attempt to move away from causality. It is not a matter of whether the psyche determined narrative or whether narrative determined Lacan’s model. Rather, what is significant is identifying a correspondence between structures as a means of mediating between the boundaries of the social and the individual. 15. Lacan, Ecrits, 19. 16. Lacan, Book II, 326. 17. Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller. 18. Jameson, “Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan,” 373. 19. See, for example, Edward Branigan’s discussion of narrative in Chapter 1 of Narrative Comprehension and Film. 20. Lacan, Book I, 170. 21. Roland Barthes, S/Z, 90. 22. Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folktale. 23. Crane discusses the power of plot within narrative in “The Concept of Plot and the Plot of Tom Jones,” reprinted in Narrative/ Theory, ed. David H. Richter. 24. See, for example, David Bordwell and Kristen Thompson’s discussion of narrative and desire in Film Art: An Introduction. 25. Lacan, Book II, 100. 26. Ibid. 27. Ibid., 44. 28. See, for example, Lacan, Book II, 155.

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Notes to Pages 36 – 43

165

29. See, for example, Lacan, Ecrits, 2. 30. Jameson, “Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan,” 365. 31. Lacan, Ecrits, 73. 32. Jameson, “Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan,” 373. 33. Sigmund Freud, Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety, trans. Alix Strachey, 64. 34. See, for example, Ragland-Sullivan, Jacques Lacan, 270. 35. Jacques Lacan, “Aggressivity in Psychoanalysis,” in Ecrits, 28. 36. See, for example, Lacan’s discussion of anxiety as related to symbolization in Book II, 164. 37. This type of opening gap is fairly typical of most narratives. What is unique about this opening and its inscription of anxiety is that all of the characteristics of anxiety are present in this sequence (and the others), something that is not necessarily the case with other narrative gaps or disruptions. 38. With Marina’s disruption, the search for Manfredi is delayed. In Laura’s disruption, Manfredi’s desire to connect with Francesco is suspended by the intrusion and its function of introducing a new character and further defining character relationships. 39. Certainly, Manfredi’s involvement in the wartime Resistance brings him into threat of physical danger, but Francesco’s conversation with Pina indicates that the risk of physical danger is undertaken to avoid an even greater danger: the individual psychical helplessness that occupation represents. 40. Indeed, the term “occupation” vividly demonstrates what is at stake in a conception of culture as the domain of signification. In a social organization that justifies and perpetuates inequity, which institutionalizes powerment/disempowerment, “occupation” is nothing more than a failure in cultural signifying practices, whereby individual subjects “see” an “other” in positions of power and their own disempowerment as a result. In this respect, the only thing real about occupation (it is a signifier) is, as for all signifiers, its effects. 41. The manner in which the film stabilizes around these characters in the first half is evidenced in the meeting between Pina and Manfredi. Whereas the earlier substitution of the exposition that introduces Marina creates disruption and confusion, Pina’s sequence with Manfredi unobtrusively substitutes different expositional modes that clarify the ongoing progression of narrative: filling in gaps (explaining where Manfredi went after escaping the Germans via the roof ), explaining character action (why he came to the building), introducing new characters (Francesco), and establishing character relationships (both characters know Francesco but do not know each other). Thus, within this brief exchange between Pina and Manfredi, the exposition unobtrusively shifts several times. Furthermore, although there are several different types of expositional information, they all serve to clarify the narrative. This is in marked contrast to Marina’s exposition, which served to disrupt the narrative by confusing the action. 42. As in Bicycle Thieves, it is a redirection from adults to children, from the past to

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166

Notes to Pages 43 – 47

the future—a redirection that serves an important ideological function (as discussed below). 43. For a full treatment of women’s participation in the Resistance, see Chapter 6, “Women of the Resistance,” in Maria de Blasio Wilhelm’s The Other Italy: Italian Resistance in World War II . 44. This peril is then parodically articulated later in the film through the figures of the children, when Marcello is told by Andreina that women can also be members of the Resistance. 45. Much more work needs to be done on the representation of women in Neorealism, work that is beyond the scope of this limited study. Here it is worth noting, however, the manner in which Pina’s character is constructed sympathetically and Marina and Laura’s characters are constructed negatively. Neither of these constructions is independent of the issue of class. Pina is content with her working-class situation (a “good woman” is content with what she has), while Marina and Laura are judged negatively for their upward mobility. 46. Indeed, it would be possible to argue that the institutionalization of Christianity by the Roman state was a successful containment of a subversive threat by the process of appropriation. For a more thorough reading of the subversive nature of Christianity and the early Christian movement, see Ched Meyers, Binding the Strong Man; or Rosemary Radford Ruether, Sexism and God-Talk: Toward a Feminist Theology, for more information on the containment of the subversive aspects of Christianity. 47. Bondanella, Italian Cinema, 41. 48. And, as Don Pietro predicted, through prayer, since Don Pietro suffers and prays for Manfredi during the torture. 49. For detailed analysis that leads to this conclusion, see Vincent F. Rocchio, “Cinema of Anxiety: A Lacanian Reinvestigation of Italian Neorealism.” 50. Marcus, Italian Film, 38. 51. The efficiency of such a construction for securing the identification of a mass audience lies in its ability to include those who do not assume the Symbolic identity the text addresses. Anti-Fascists and others who did not “see” themselves as guilty of complicity could take up positions of vindication, self-righteousness, and empathy against “those” who are to “blame.” This kind of inclusiveness of identities toward one Symbolic position is crucial for popular success. 52. Francesco here uses the words “tutti si illudevano,” which is the third person plural and thus does not include himself and Pina. If it were inclusive, to say, for example, “we were all deluded,” the verb would have been “illudiamo.” Despite this designation, the sequence still fails to define Francesco and Pina as prewar anti-Fascists and thus suggests a level of complicity with prewar political structures. 53. The source of such guilt would be the result of internalizing the prevalent dis-

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Notes to Pages 47– 61

167

course of blame about Fascism. In Italy, 1943 –1945, 103, David Ellwood notes that Winston Churchill stated publicly that “when a nation has allowed itself to fall into a tyrannical regime it cannot be absolved from the faults due to the guilt of that regime, and naturally we cannot forget the circumstances of Mussolini’s attack on France and Great Britain when we were at our weakest, and people thought that Great Britain would sink forever . . .” Ellwood further suggests that Churchill’s sentiments were reflected, if not vocalized, in the conduct of officers administering the Allied occupation of Italy. There was thus no lack of public discourse on guilt which could be internalized. 54. This is a reversal of the misrecognition that took place earlier in the film with the Austrian soldier. In that scene, Don Pietro’s misrecognition of the soldier’s identity brought on a fear of death when the latter removed his pistol from its holster. In the execution scene Hartmann’s presence leads to the expectation that Don Pietro might be spared, given the disgust with all the killing that Hartmann articulated just prior to the execution. 55. Sitney, Vital Crises in Italian Cinema, 35. 56. Giuseppe Mammarella, Italy after Fascism: A Political History of 1943 –1963, 76.

3. Bicycle Thieves 1. André Bazin, What Is Cinema? Volume II, trans. Hugh Gray, 58. 2. Ibid., 49. 3. See, for example, Michael Silverman, “Italian Film and American Capital,” in Cinema Histories, Cinema Practices, ed. Patricia Mellencamp and Phil Rosen; and Frank Tomasulo, “Bicycle Thieves: A Re-reading,” Cinema Journal 21, no. 2 (Spring 1982). 4. David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film, 206. 5. Tomasulo, “Bicycle Thieves,” 5. 6. See, for example, Chapter 6 in Meir Sternberg, Expositional Modes and Temporal Ordering in Fiction. 7. It is the presence of all four of these functional characteristics which determines the structure of anxiety within the loss of narrative drive, and not the loss of narrative itself. 8. Freud, Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety, 64. 9. Liehm, Passion and Defiance, 76. 10. Marcus, Italian Film, 64. 11. Tomasulo, “Bicycle Thieves,” 3. 12. Overby, Springtime in Italy, 10. 13. Marcus, Italian Film, 66; Bondanella, Italian Cinema, 59. 14. Shlomith Rimmon-Kennan, Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics, 71. 15. Ibid., 72.

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168

Notes to Pages 61–74

16. See, for example, Chapter 4 in Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film. 17. Mieke Bal, “Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative,” excerpted in Narrative/ Theory, ed. David H. Richter. 18. Branigan, Narrative Comprehension and Film, 100. 19. Rimmon-Kennan, Narrative Fiction, 81. 20. Sitney, Vital Crises in Italian Cinema, 94. 21. Rimmon-Kennan, Narrative Fiction, 81. The bracketed statement is my own. 22. Ibid., 74. 23. Ibid., 74. 24. Marcus, Italian Film, 62. 25. Rimmon-Kennan, Narrative Fiction, 74. 26. Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts, 198. 27. Lacan, Book I, 219. 28. See, for example, Jean-Louis Baudry, “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus”; and Metz, The Imaginary Signifier. 29. Lacan, Ecrits, 197. 30. Lacan, Book I, 167. 31. Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts, 74. 32. Ibid., 73. 33. Ibid., 89. 34. Ibid., 82. 35. Marcus, Italian Film, 59. 36. Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts, 115. 37. For a more detailed discussion of the cognitive dimension of focalization, see Rimmon-Kennan, Narrative Fiction, 79. 38. Bazin, What Is Cinema? 60. 39. Rimmon-Kennan, Narrative Fiction, 79. 40. Ibid., 81. 41. See, for example, Bazin, What Is Cinema?; Bondanella, Italian Cinema; and Marcus, Italian Film. 42. Dorrit Cohn, Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction, 100. 43. Ibid., 111. 44. Ibid., 117. 45. Indeed, rather than being positioned, the spectator is in a continuing process of negotiation with the text, which provides incentive for and inducements of Imaginary pleasure in exchange for Symbolic identification. In this respect, the text must enjoin the subject at the level of the Symbolic— correspond to the Symbolic organization, or je identity of the subject, if Imaginary modes of identification are to be engaged. Likewise, the subject must come to take up or identify with the Symbolic system of the text to obtain Imaginary pleasure.

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Notes to Pages 74 – 83

169

46. Lacan, Ecrits, 67. 47. Lacan, Book VII, 307. 48. Ibid., 308. 49. Marcus, Italian Film, 60. 50. Ibid., 65. 51. See Sitney, Vital Crises; and Marcus, Italian Film, for a discussion of the irrelevance of “the people” in the consciousness of the union organizers and performers. 52. Overby, Springtime in Italy, 10.

4. La terra trema 1. Sergei Eisenstein, “Dickens, Griffith, and the Film Today,” in Film Form, trans. Jay Leyda, 234. 2. Lacan, Book II, 47. 3. Bazin, What Is Cinema? 2: 51. 4. All translations, unless otherwise noted, are my own, taken from the Italian screenplay and the film. 5. Genette’s discussion of iterative narrative in Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method functions to delineate the manner in which the narration of recurring and nonspecific actions manipulates plot temporality. To begin with, Genette makes a distinction between external and internal iterative. The former concept refers to iterative sections which extend the “temporal field” beyond the scene itself. The concept of internal iterative is then used to describe when recurring action “extends not over a wider period of time but over the period of time of the scene itself ” (119). In addition, what Genette describes as iterative narrative’s distinguishing characteristics— determination, specification, and extension— further delineate the manner in which plot temporality is manipulated through the narration of recurring action. 6. The scene of Antonio and his brothers returning from the storm is another example that demonstrates this operation. In this scene, they set out to sea in their newly purchased boat and get caught in a storm. The plot, however, works to transform the specificity of this narrative action. Throughout the scene the storm is ritualized, placed in a cycle of events. It is introduced by the ringing of the town’s bell (a practice used to warn of coming storms), and the plot focuses on the local shoreline, where the surge and recession of the pounding surf emphasize cyclical and generalized action over specific and linear processes. Furthermore, the voice-over narration attempts to place the events within cyclical time. In addition to describing the storm as the cycle of the sea, the voice-over narration undermines the distinguishing feature of this storm by stating that “almost no one thinks of [Antonio and his brothers] anymore.” With the fate of Antonio and his

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170

Notes to Pages 83 –94

brothers removed from the townspeople’s minds, there is nothing left to differentiate the storm from any other. It is, rather, just a small part of the unbroken cycle of life in Trezza (indeed, life in the town seems unchanged when the narration comes upon it). In this way, the linearity of the storm as specific action is transformed into the structure of cyclical temporality. 7. One could conclude that constructing the storm as “cause” of Antonio’s failure severely weakens the film’s Marxist position—relying on chance and not the capitalist system itself. The film’s specific construction of the story world weakens such a conclusion, however. In a reversal of the capitalist ideological formulation of risk as the justification of inequity, the film assigns the risk of the fishing business to the fishermen, rather than the dealers. As a result, the system is able to appropriate even nature itself to ensure its perpetuation. It is from within this framework that Raimondo’s parable of the worm and the stone takes on its significance. 8. See, for example, Chapter 8 in Freud, Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety. 9. Mary Ann Doane, “The Voice in the Cinema: The Articulation of Body and Space,” in Film Sound, ed. Elisabeth Weis and John Belton, 168 (second emphasis in the quotation added). 10. Ibid., 168. 11. Pascal Bonitzer, quoted in Doane, “The Voice in the Cinema,” 168. 12. Rimmon-Kennan, Narrative Fiction, 81. 13. Ragland-Sullivan, Jacques Lacan, 271. 14. Mirto Golo-Stone, Lacan Study Group notes, L’angoisse, New York University (unpublished). 15. For a further discussion of how Imaginary constructions within the text “absolutize” themselves, see Jameson, “Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan.” 16. See, for instance, Jameson’s description of the Imaginary in ibid., 357–371. 17. See Liehm, Passion and Defiance, 82. 18. Antonio Gramsci, “The Southern Question,” in Selections from Cultural Writings, ed. David Forgacs and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, trans. William Boelhower, 36. 19. Lacan, Ecrits, 126. 20. Ibid., 154. 21. Lacan, Book III, 268. 22. Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 95. 23. The manner in which the structure of identity organizes the film text can be determined by analyzing narrative’s organization of the image flow. In his description of shot/reverse-shot in “Narrative Space,” Heath argues on page 54 that “a reverse shot folds over the shot it joins and is joined in turn by the reverse it positions; a shot of a person looking is succeeded by a shot of the object looked at which is succeeded in turn by a shot of the person looking to confirm the object as seen . . .” The effect of the shot/reverse-shot sequence Heath describes is the

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Notes to Pages 94 –96

171

maintenance of continuity: a perspective of intelligibility which becomes interpreted as a unified discourse. A Lacanian framework, however, demonstrates that this unity of discourse is precisely only an effect: the successful regulation of moi paranoia. The logic which structures the shot/reverse-shot sequence is the specular logic of the moi. Limited to its specular logic, the moi can only experience itself in relation to other objects and the gaze of others. It is precisely this specular logic which confirms the identity of the moi— experiencing itself via specular relationships with the object world and, thus, regulating its paranoid demands for recognition. Heath’s argument draws attention to the necessity of the third shot (the confirmation shot) within the shot/reverse-shot sequence. What is confirmed, however, is not so much the object of the look but the identity of the look. Within the sequence, the original shot functions as a source of identity: providing the specular image of a corporal unity. By defining the reverse-shot as the look of the identity established in the first shot, the sequence inscribes the specular logic of the moi, which can only experience itself in relation to external objects and the gaze of others. The return to the original shot is therefore a confirmation of the source of identity as it has experienced itself in relationship to the external image or the gaze of the reverse-shot. The intelligibility of such a sequence is an effect: the result of inscribing the specular logic of the moi and its paranoid request for recognition. Spectators read such a sequence—shot/reverse-shot/original shot or identity/object/identity— “naturally” because it corresponds to the logic and the structure of their own psychical organization. This “natural intelligibility” organizes the image flow and thus allows the construction of multiple points of viewing to be regulated and contained: defined by its relation to identity. Heath recognizes the crucial role that specular logic and identity play in the organization of the image-flow when he argues on page 44 that “the spectator will be bound to the film as spectacle as the world of the film is itself revealed as spectacle on the basis of a narrative organization of look and point of view that moves space into place through the image-flow; the character, figure of the look, is a kind of perspective within the perspective system, regulating the world, orienting space . . .” Narrative organization of look and point of view is thus constructed around the pure signifier of the structure and logic of the moi. 24. Lacan, Ecrits, 304. 25. Lacan, Book III, 200. 26. Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 97. 27. Ibid., 95. 28. Quoted in Roy Schleifer, “The Space and Dialogue of Desire: Lacan, Greimas, and Narrative Temporality,” in Lacan and Narration, ed. Robert Con Davis, 874. 29. Lacan, Book I, 170. 30. Lacan, Book II, 171.

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Notes to Pages 98 –122

31. Ibid., 222. 32. See, for example, Lacan’s concise critique of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution in Book I, 177. 33. Ragland-Sullivan, Jacques Lacan, 180 (emphasis added). 34. Mack Smith, Italy: A Modern History, 2. 35. Marcus, Italian Film, 39. 36. Nowell-Smith, Luchino Visconti, 35.

5. Bitter Rice 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

10.

11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

See, for example, Lacan, Book I, 169. See, for example, Bondanella, Italian Cinema, 82; and Marcus, Italian Film, 79. Liehm, Passion and Defiance, 78. Leprohon, Italian Cinema, 35. Liehm, Passion and Defiance, 19. Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Visual and Other Pleasures, 19. A more complete treatment of this issue can be found in D. A. Binchy, Church and State in Fascist Italy. Elizabeth Clark and Herbert Richardson, Women and Religion: A Feminist Sourcebook of Christian Thought, 226. Ibid., 226. Although Casti Connubi was written in the 1930’s, Clark and Richardson conclude (227) that “starting in the middle 40’s, Pius XII delivered a number of speeches on women’s roles in which he stressed the spiritual equality of men and women, and acknowledged the new social role of women, but nonetheless firmly upheld the more traditional attitudes toward family life.” Matthew 7 : 1–5, on not judging others. See, for example, Luke 4:18, itself an allusion to Isaiah 61, for the ambivalent attitude toward prison. In addition, the stories of John the Baptist, especially Matthew 14:3 –12, demonstrate the propensity to use prison as a political weapon. Jacques Lacan, Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the Ecole Freudienne, ed. Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose, 144. See, for example, Jacques Lacan, “The Signification of the Phallus,” in Ecrits, 285. The phallic signifier’s relationship to wholeness results from its introduction of the Symbolic, which, as Lacan maintains, functions as a totality. See, for example, Book II, 29. Here Lacan argues that “everything that is human must be ordained within a universe constituted by the symbolic function.” Lacan, Feminine Sexuality, 82. See, for example, Jacques Lacan, “A Love Letter,” in Feminine Sexuality, 150. Lacan, Feminine Sexuality, 151. Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure,” 14. Lacan, Feminine Sexuality, 151.

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Notes to Pages 122 –145

173

19. Ibid., 167. 20. Ibid., 142. 21. Ibid., 151. 22. Ibid., 75. 23. Ibid., 154. 24. Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure,” 14. 25. Lacan, Feminine Sexuality, 145. 26. Ibid., 144. 27. Lacan, Book II, 29. 28. Lacan, Feminine Sexuality, 147. 29. Ibid., 147.

6. Senso 1. Although not Visconti’s first choice, Granger was nonetheless an American leading role figure who could “ensure” a certain level of box office returns. 2. See, for example, Marcus, Italian Film; Liehm, Passion and Defiance; and Bondanella, Italian Cinema. 3. Ginsborg, A History of Contemporary Italy, 112. 4. Elisa A. Carrillo, “Christian Democracy,” in Modern Italy, ed. Edward R. Tannenbaum and Emiliana P. Noether, 95. 5. This is not to imply that Senso was the first big-budget film either within the bounds of Neorealism or outside them. Whereas other Neorealist films had large budgets, however, stylistic choices were made to hide this fact. See, for example, Bondanella’s discussion of Bicycle Thieves in Italian Cinema. 6. Marcus, Italian Film, 183. 7. Lacan, Book II, 169. 8. Nowell-Smith, Luchino Visconti, 83. 9. Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination, 28. 10. Marcus, Italian Film, 175. 11. Rimmon-Kennan, Narrative Fiction, 77. 12. For more information on the governmental censorship of Senso, see NowellSmith, Luchino Visconti; Angela Dalle Vacche, The Body in the Mirror: Shapes of History in Italian Cinema; and Luchino Visconti, Senso. 13. Nowell-Smith, Luchino Visconti, 90. 14. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. Q. Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, 238. 15. Palmiro Togliatti, quoted in Ginsborg, A History of Contemporary Italy, 43. 16. Ginsborg, A History of Contemporary Italy, 195. 17. Ibid., 195. 18. Lacan, Book II, 170. 19. Ibid., 171.

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Notes to Pages 147–153

7. Psychoanalysis, Cinematic Representation, and Cultural Studies 1. Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, “Cinema Nuovo and Neo-Realism,” Screen 17, no. 4 (Winter 1976 –1977): 111. 2. Silverman, “Italian Film and American Capital.” 3. Quoted in Gian Piero Brunetta, Storia del cinema italiano dal 1945 agli anni ottanta, 367. 4. Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean Narboni, “Cinema/Ideology/Criticism,” Cahiers du Cinéma 216 (October 1969). Cited here from Movies and Methods, Vol. 1, ed. Bill Nichols, 26. 5. Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” 6. See, for example, Lacan, Book I, 280. 7. Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relationship to the Unconscious, trans. James Strachey, 153. 8. See the section on “Critical Theory” in Lawrence Grossberg, “Strategies of Marxist Cultural Interpretation,” in Critical Perspectives on Media and Society, ed. Robert K. Avery and David Eason. 9. Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 291.

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Index

actional dynamics: characteristics of, 72, 164; and narrative movement, 72, 78; relationship to exposition, 74; as corresponding to the moi, 79 —and Rome: Open City, 73 —and Bicycle Thieves, 113 –114, 117, 120, 125 —and La terra trema, 162, 163 —and Bitter Rice, 213 –215, 217, 219, 222 —and Senso, 253 –256 Altman, Charles, 9, 159 anxiety, 25, 51, 151; definition of, 51, 82; and Post-war Italian Culture, 55 –56, 105, 128; and plot structure, 82, 167; characteristics of, 83; and Lacan, 83, 88; as signal, 83 —and Rome: Open City, 41– 42, 45 – 47, 50, 165 —and Bicycle Thieves, 54, 56, 57–59 —and La terra trema, 83 – 86, 90, 92, 102, 150 —and Bitter Rice, 119 —and Senso, 133 –134 Armes, Roy, 163

Bakhtin, M.M., 2 –3 Bal, Mieke, 61, 168 Barthes, Roland, 34 –35, 164 Baudry, Jean-Louis, 3, 18, 66, 159, 161, 168 Bazin, Andre, 53 –54, 70, 80, 167, 168 Bondanella, Peter, 45, 59, 163 –164n, 172n, 173n Bonitzer, Pascal, 88, 170 Bordwell, David, 3, 36, 54, 159n, 164n, 168n Branigan, Ed, 35, 61, 164n Brennan, Theresa, 6, 10, 21, 159n, 162n Brooks, Peter, 35, 132 –133 Buscombe, Ed, 9 capitalism, 3; and the cinema, 3; as cultural system, 6; and Italian culture, 6 –7, 44, 148; structures of, 21; and narrative structure, 60 —and La terra trema, 80, 85, 91–92 —and Senso, 142 —and Bitter Rice, 152 —and Rome: Open City, 152, 154 Carrillo, Elisa, 128

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182 Carroll, Noel, 18 Casti Connubi, 115 celibacy: signifier of, 45, 49 character: and narrative movement, 35 –36, 95; and relationship to focalization, 61, 63 – 65; and representation of consciousness, 71; and narrated monologue, 72; and movement of desire, 95; and structure of identity, 95 –97; as effect, 96 –97; as site of dialectical structure, 96 –97; analysis of, 98 —and Rome: Open City, 40; and definitions in, 33, 45 – 46, 102; and process of displacement in, 37; and expositional function in, 38, 165n; and redirection of identification in, 43 – 45, 49 –50, 134 —and Bicycle Thieves: and identification in, 56, 58, 60; and structure of desire in, 60; and evaluative system in, 61, 77; and attributes in, 64 – 65; and focalization in, 69, 71–72 —and La terra trema: and expositional function in, 81, 103; and desire in, 84, 93, 95, 99; and focalization in, 89 –91; and identification in, 90 –91, 101; and Imaginary jouissance in, 90; and definitions in, 96, 98 —and Bitter Rice: and expositional function in, 108, 112, 116 –117; and narrative containment in, 109; and plot organization in, 110; and focalization in, 113 –114; and dynamics in, 117; and class similarity in, 118; and idealization of, 118; and Symbolic identification in, 118 –119; principle in, 119; construction of Francesca in, 120, 126;

Cinema of Anxiety and fantasy in, 123; and jouissance in, 124, 126 —and Senso: and exposition in, 129, 133, 135; and main, 130; and identification in, 133 –134, 137–138, 142; and focalization in, 135 –138, 140 –142; and organization of narrative in, 136, 142; and fantasy in, 139; and definitions of, 156 —and Il Posto, 155 Chiarini, Luigi, 31 Christian Democratic Party (DC), 50, 91, 128, 149, 152 Christianity, 166n —in Rome: Open City, 45 – 46, 154 —in Bitter Rice, 117–118, 120 cinema, 3 – 4, 9, 28; German, 24; and narrative, 30; Italian, 53, 77; Neorealist, 127–128 cinema studies, 3, 9, 14 Clark, Elizabeth, 115, 172n CLNAI (National Resistance Committee for Upper Italy), 25 cognitive psychology, 4, 10 Cohn, Dorrit, 72 collaboration, 40 – 43, 46 – 47, 50, 149 Communism: representation of, 44; and the church, 154 Communist Party (PCI), 50, 143 –144 Comolli, Jean-Louis, 148 costume, 120, 127, 135 cultural containment, 24, 148 cultural instability, 26 cultural repression, 41, 80, 86, 100, 102 –103 cultural studies, 2 –3, 5, 10 –11, 148 –149, 153 –154, 157 culture: American, 6, 157; post-war Italian, 6, 24 –26, 28 –30, 148, 154 – 55; and identity, 17; Italian, 24 –26, 37, 49, 54, 76; and alienating effects of, 80

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Index —and La terra trema, 91, 103 —and Bitter Rice, 106, 113, 114 –115, 119 —and Senso, 128, 143, 145 –146 Custoza: battle of, 139 –140 Darwin, Charles: and theory of evolution, 172n de Blasio Wilhelm, Maria, 166n decathexis, 49, 119, 134, 152 DeGaspari, Alcide, 128 De Saussure, Ferdinand, 2, 9 De Sica, Vittorio, 26, 71, 127, 147 desire: of the subject, 4, 15; and discourse, 7, 157; dynamics of, 7, 28 –29, 35, 121–123, 145; movement of, 37, 95 –96; structure of, 37; redirection of, 38; narrative, 65 – 66; and relationship to the je, 65 – 66, 74, 95; and the gaze, 66 – 68; and the moi, 95 –96; and the Symbolic, 98 –99; feminine, 118, 120; operations of, 150 —and Rome: Open City, 36 –37, 44 – 49 —and Bicycle Thieves, 54, 56, 58, 60, 62; and the character of Antonio in, 72; and the character of Bruno in, 73, 76 —and La terra trema, 82 – 86, 95, 99 –100, 103; and the character Antonio in, 81, 88 –92, 97–98 —and Bitter Rice, 113, 117; and the character Silvana in, 112, 118 –119, 123 –126; and the character of Marco in, 124 —and Senso, 134, 145 deus ex machina, 133 displacement: and the je, 17, 28, 37, 65; and narrative, 18; and anxiety, 39, 41; and relationship to the subject, 122

183 —and Rome: Open City, 34, 41, 42, 47 —and Bicycle Thieves, 54, 56 –58, 60 —and La terra trema, 83, 84 – 85, 99 —and Bitter Rice, 109 disruption: and the discourse of the je, 28; narrative, 30 –31 —and Rome: Open City, 30 –33, 38 – 43, 149, 163n, 165n —and Bicycle Thieves, 54 –56, 58 –59 —and La terra trema, 80 – 81 —and Bitter Rice, 113 –114, 119, 126 —and Senso, 132 diva, 105 –106 Doane, Mary Anne, 88 Eagleton, Terry, 3, 159n ego, 5 – 6, 14 –16, 28, 34 –36, 42, 66; structure of, 6; and anxiety, 38 –39 Eisenstein, Sergei, 79, 92, 163n Elsaesser, Thomas, 3 – 4, 18 –19, 163n exposition, 32, 96, 149, 164n; characteristics of the expositional mode, 33; function of, 33; and relationship to the je, 37 —and Rome: Open City, 33 –34, 38, 43, 165n —and Bicycle Thieves, 54 – 60 —and La terra trema, 80 – 83, 96, 99 —and Bitter Rice, 106 –108, 110, 112 –113, 116 —and Senso, 129 –130, 132 –133, 135 fantasy, 22 –23, 154 –155 —and Bicycle Thieves, 76 –77 —and Bitter Rice, 119, 122 –123, 126 —and Senso, 137–142, 144 Fascism, 24 –26; reinterpretations of, 24; collapse of, 28, 42, 91, 114, 128, 148; and super-ego anxiety, 46 – 48, 50, 166 –167n; and patriarchy, 76, 106, 114, 119; and the church, 114 –115

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184 —and Rome: Open City: and representation of culpability for, 37, 46 – 47; and the plot’s displacement of, 41, 46 – 47, 149 —and La terra trema, 101–103 focalization, 61– 62, 64, 68; and narrative, 61, 64; and ideology, 62; characteristics, 64 – 65; and correspondence to the je, 64 – 65; ideological facet of, 64; and symbolic identification, 64 —and Bicycle Thieves, 60, 64, 67–73, 149 —and La terra trema, 87–90, 92 –93 —and Bitter Rice, 113 –115, 120 —and Senso, 135 –137, 139 –144 framing: and anxiety, 42, 47, 50 Frankfurt School, 152 Freud, Sigmund: and continuity of works, 5; and concept of repression, 6; and concept of ego, 15, 34 –35; and definition of anxiety, 38 –39, 57, 84; and textuality, 151 Friedberg, Ann, 18, 161n gaze, 66 – 67 —and Bicycle Thieves, 67– 68, 73, 76 —and La terra trema, 92 Ginsborg, Paul, 25, 128, 144 Gledhill, Christine, 9 Gramsci, Antonio, 2, 7, 92, 143 Greimas, A.J., 95 Grossberg, Lawrence, 152 Hay, James, 24 hegemony, 7, 12, 23, 143, 157; and hegemonic processes, 7, 9 –10, 148; and Fascism, 50 hermeneutics, 155 horizon of expectations, 149

Cinema of Anxiety identification, 17, 26, 32, 79 – 80; prelinguistic, 4; and psychoanalytic film theory, 12 –14, 18 –19; and the Imaginary, 13, 21; premirror, 13 –14, 160; and identity, 15, 17, 21; and the moi, 16 –17, 36; Symbolic, 17–19, 21–22, 24, 53, 150 –151, 161–162n; Imaginary, 18 –19, 21–22; and Italian culture, 30; structural, 34 –35; and its role in securing mass audience, 166n; and its relation to Imaginary pleasure, 168n —and Rome: Open City, 40 – 47, 49 –51 —and Bicycle Thieves, 53 –54, 57–58, 61– 62, 64 – 68, 71–76 —and La terra trema, 83 – 84, 86 –92, 97, 99, 101–103 —and Bitter Rice, 113, 117–120, 126 —and Senso, 130, 133 –135, 139, 141– 142, 144 –145 identity: as fictive, 4; and the subject, 4, 12; and the ego, 6; and texts, 12, 17, 19, 41; and the premirror stage, 13, 15; and culture, 17; and masking of alienation, 17, 99; and Symbolic identification, 19, 53, 73 –74; and the Symbolic, 22, 37, 151–152; Italian, 24, 47, 100, 102, 140; and process of negotiation with texts, 41, 150; and logic of, 63 – 64; and focalization, 65; structure of, 79, 92; and recognition, 92; and structure, 92, 95 –96, 152; functioning of, 99, 151; and the super-ego, 100; and gender, 122; dialectic of, 153, 157; Lacan’s concept of (see Lacan and concept of identity); and the Other(A) (see Other(A) and identity); and repression (see repression and identity)

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Index —in Rome: Open City: structures of, 47 —in Bicycle Thieves: structures of, 60, 74 –75 —in La terra trema: structures of, 95 –98, 101–103 ideology: and language, 3; and hegemonic processes, 7; and cultural texts, 17; Lacanian criticism of, 22 –23, 67, 151; and the Symbolic, 22, 153; and Symbolic identification, 66, 74; of the Roman Catholic church, 116; of patriarchy, 162n; and focalization (see focalization and ideology) Il Trovatore, 129 Imaginary, 13 –15, 28, 65, 153; and misrecognition, 4; and identification, 13 –14, 18 –19, 21, 66, 74; and pleasure, 19 –20, 22, 25, 161n, 168n; and unity, 19, 122; and desire, 22, 145; and libidinal attachments, 22, 151; and fantasy, 23; and discourse, 28; and narrative, 34, 37, 170n; and the moi, 36; and psychoanalytic film theory, 66; and woman, 122 —and La terra trema, 86, 90 –91, 97, 103, 144 —and Senso, 135, 138 –139, 141 Italian cinema, 53, 77 Italian culture: 24, 37–38, 100, 154 –55; post-war, 6, 24 –26, 28, 76, 113; and resistance movement, 29 –30; and patriarchal capitalism, 76, 91, 103; and patriarchy, 106, 119; and Roman Catholicism, 114 –115; and transformismo, 143 –146; and utopian impulse, 148 Italian film, 24 Italy, 77, 80, 102, 106; post-war, 6 –7, 49, 105; and patriarchy, 114; and govern-

185 ments, 128; and history of occupation, 131, 144, 166 –167n; unification of, 140 –143 —in Bicycle Thieves: represented, 56, 76 iterative narration, 80 – 83 Jameson, Fredric, 12; and Lacanian theory, 14, 91; and interpretation, 20; and structural limitations, 21; and utopian impulse, 25; and narrative, 34, 37, 91, 95; and Freudian theory, 36, 151; and Marxist critical theory, 45, 153 Jauss, Hans Robert, 149, 163n je, 16, 37, 74, 97; characteristics of, 16 – 17; relationship to moi, 28, 95 –96; and the Symbolic, 37; definition of, 65; and identity, 65; and structure, 65; focalization (see focalization); correspondence to exposition (see exposition, correspondence to); and Symbolic identification (see identification, Symbolic) —and La terra trema, 103 jouissance, 19, 21; and narrative film, 20, 22, 37; definition of, 90; structure of, 90; and women, 125 —in La terra trema, 86, 90, 97–99, 150 —in Bitter Rice, 124 –126 —in Senso, 135, 140, 150 Kermode, Frank, 96 Klinger, Barbara, 18, 161n Lacan, Jacques: and concept of discourse, 4, 28, 35, 53, 79; and concept of recognition, 4, 35, 79; and concept of the signifier, 4, 11, 29, 93 –94, 122; and dialectical theory, 5, 12, 17, 20,

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186 151; and return to Freud, 5, 12, 151; and concept of language, 11; and language, 12, 22; and developmental stages, 13 –15; and theory of identity, 13, 60 – 61, 64 – 65, 95, 151; and cognitive model, 14; and concept of the Other(A) , 14, 122, 150; and concept of consciousness, 15, 67; and theory of personality, 15 –17, 32, 34 –37, 42; and theory of identification, 18, 66; and concept of alienation, 20 –21, 96, 121–122; and history, 20; applying theories of, 23; and theory of anxiety, 39, 42; and concept of the gaze, 66, 68; and concept of the paternal function, 74; and concept of jouissance, 90, 125; and concept of the point de capiton, 92; and signification, 93 –94, 151; and concept of desire, 98, 145; and theory of feminine sexuality, 120 –123, 125; and concept of Symbolic function, 132, 153 Lacanian psychoanalysis, 4 – 6, 10 –11; and the study of film, 4 –7, 9, 170n; and Neorealism, 7; as critical method, 12 –14, 17, 19, 22; and history, 21–22; and analysis of texts, 23, 27–28, 128, 170n; and criticism of ideology, 23, 29 –30, 32, 53; and this study, 27–28, 53, 73, 79; and focalization, 62 – 64; and music, 71–72; and narrative analysis, 93, 95 –96; and earlier Freudian models, 98; Fredric Jameson’s study of, 151 —and Bicycle Thieves, 74 —and Bitter Rice, 105 Lacanian psychoanalytic film theory, 10; in the 1970s, 4, 13, 15, 19, 30 –31 La Fenice, 135, 139 language, 2 –3, 5, 11, 15 –17; continuity between identifications and, 18 –19,

Cinema of Anxiety 21–22, 49, 151; film as a series of, 18; and Italian culture, 25, 100 –101; and the je, 65; and narrated monologue, 72; and women’s subjugation, 123, 125; and the Real, 125; and the dominant, 148 –149; and childhood development, 151; and Lacan’s concept of (see Lacan and concept of language) Lebeau, Vicky, 162n Leprohon, Pierre, 106 Liehm, Mira, 57, 105 –106 Lovell, Allan, 9 Mack Smith, Denis, 101 Mammarella, Giuseppe, 50 Marcus, Millicent —and Bicycle Thieves, 46, 58 –59, 64, 68, 75, 169n —and Rome: Open City, 46, 58 –59, 100 –101 —and Senso, 130, 133 —and Il Posto, 155 Marx, Karl, 2, 9 Marxist critical theory, 5, 10 –12, 26, 149, 152 –153; and representation of, 80, 91–92, 100, 142 Marxists: representation of, 44 – 45 melodrama: organized around the struggle of virtue, 132 –133 —and Senso, 127, 132 –133, 137–142, 145 Metz, Christian, 10, 14, 18, 66 Meyers, Ched, 166n mirror stage, 13, 15, 18 mise-en-scène —and Bicycle Thieves, 53 —and La terra trema, 102 —and Senso, 135, 138 misrecognition, 25, 67, 80, 92, 98 –99 moi: characteristics of, 15 –17, 28, 37; and mirror stage, 15; definition of, 16, 34; as paranoid, 16; and discourse, 28;

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Index and recognition, 28; and structure of, 28, 42, 84; and form, 35 –36, 74; and narrative structure, 35 –37, 95 – 97; irreducibility of, 36; and neutralizing function, 36; and drive, 65; and identification, 66 —and La terra trema, 86, 97–98 Mulvey, Laura, 109, 122 –123, 149 Mussolini, 25, 103, 131 Name of the Father, 15 –16, 122 narrated monologue, 72 narration, 61– 62, 68, 70; cinematic, 22, 61, 71–72; classical, 150 —and Bicycle Thieves, 54 –57, 68 –71; and narrated monologue in, 72 —and La terra trema, 79, 82 – 83, 86 –90; and voice-over in, 80 – 82, 88 –91, 101; and its subversion of classical, 86, 92 –93, 95, 97–99 —and Senso, 136 –138, 141–142, 144 narrative: and containment, 7, 30 –34, 154; and ideological functioning, 7, 103; and identification, 18 –19; process of, 18, 31–32, 37, 95 –96, 150; master, 20, 23, 34, 37; classical Hollywood, 22, 24, 37, 148; cinematic, 30 –31; conventions, 31; and structure, 32 –37, 95; and the Imaginary, 34; and the Symbolic, 34; drive, 73; and realism, 94; and action, 95; and character, 95 –96, 98; and movement, 95, 98; and the diva genre, 106; as organized around the melodramatic mode, 132 –133; and pleasure, 150; and focalization (see focalization); and the moi (see moi and narrative structure) —and Rome: Open City, 31–34, 36 –38, 103; disruption in, 31, 38 – 43; movement in, 36 –37, 59;

187 redirection of desire in, 43, 45 – 46, 48; logic in, 44 – 45 —and Bicycle Thieves, 53, 58, 72, 76 –77; drive, 54 –56; effect in, 54, 60; movement in, 54, 56 –58, 76; structure in, 54, 62 – 64, 66; space, 56, 60, 69; as object in, 57, 59; replacement of, 57, 59; containment in, 58 – 60; premise in, 62; and identification in, 72 –73; and music in, 72 —and La terra trema, 88, 93; and subversion of classical in, 80, 83 – 86, 98 –100; movement in, 81, 84; and desire, 82 – 84; space, 82; stability in, 82; and voice-over in, 88 —and Bitter Rice, 107–108, 123, 156; and control in, 108 –110, 112 –113; and the figure of Silvana, 109 –113, 119, 123; progression in, 109 –113, 119; and spectacle, 109; and subordination, 109; expositional modes in, 116; and disruption in, 119; and closure in, 124 —and Senso, 131; conflict in, 129, 132; containment in, 130; and identification in, 130; threat to, 131; action in, 132; organization in, 133, 136; progression in, 133; and external focalization in, 136; events in, 141–142; logic in, 145 Neorealism, 7, 24 –30, 147–148, 152, 156 –157; transformations, 53, 105 – 106 —and Senso, 127–128, 146 Nichols, Bill, 162n No of the Father (see Name of the Father) Norris, Christopher, 5

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188 Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey, 18, 101; and Neorealism, 29, 147–148, 156 —and Senso, 132, 142 Oedipal stage, 15, 34, 74 off-screen space —and Rome: Open City, 38 —and Bicycle Thieves, 55 –56, 58 – 60, 67 —and La terra trema, 81 —and Bitter Rice, 109 –110 —and Senso, 139 Other(A) : definition, 14 –15; and continuity between identifications and language, 17–19, 21–22, 151; and misrecognition, 25; and separation, 49 –50; and identity, 50, 99; and the gaze, 67; and meaning, 99; and woman, 122; and identification, 150 —and La terra trema, 101 Overby, David, 58, 75 PCI (Communist Party), 62 penance, 45 – 46 penitential, 48, 143, 156 phallic signifier, 15, 28 phallus, 56, 121–122, 125 –126 Pius XI, 115 –116 poetic process, 151–152 point de capiton, 92 –94 premirror: as stage, 13, 15; as identification, 14, 72 Propp, Vladimir, 36, 95 –96 Ragland-Sullivan, Ellie: and concept of the ego, 6; and concept of the father, 15; and relationship between modes of identification, 21; and concept of the moi, 28; and concept of jouissance, 90; and relationship of Other(A) to meaning, 99; and concept of the Other(A) , 160n

Cinema of Anxiety Real, 4, 11, 14; and jouissance, 21; definition, 22, 26; and anxiety, 26; and Neorealism, 28; and the Resistance, 29, 102; and Fascism, 42 – 43, 48; and paternal function, 74; and the signifier, 92 –94; and meaning beyond language, 125 –126 —and Senso, 142, 144 reception studies, 4 recognition: and language, 2, 4, 17; and identity, 4, 99, 151; and the Symbolic, 4; and the moi, 17, 28, 37, 171n; and culture, 19; and discourse, 28, 35, 79; and form, 35; and narrative drive, 37; and text-subject relationships, 79, 157; and structure, 92; and movement of desire, 96, 144; and melodrama, 132 –133; and alienation, 144 –145 —and Senso, 144 –145, 150 relations to authority, 28, 60, 79 – 80, 87 repression, 6; and identity, 6; primary, 16; and language, 17; of history, 20, 102 –103, 132; and cultural signifying practices, 32; and the redirection of desire, 39; cultural, 41– 42, 80, 100; and the signifier of occupation, 41– 42; and narrative desire, 82 – 85; political, 117–118 Resistance (Italian), 6 –7, 102, 114, 148; and Neorealism, 29; as signifier, 29 –30, 102; and women’s participation in, 43, 106, 165n —and Rome: Open City, 36, 42 – 44, 50 –51, 145, 165n; Resistance youth in, 43, 47– 49, 145, 150, 154 —and La terra trema, 102 –103 —and Senso, 133, 142 –145 Richardson, Herbert, 115, 172n Risorgimento —and Senso, 127, 136, 139, 142 –144

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Index Roman Catholic Church: and Fascism, 114; and women, 115 –116 —in Rome: Open City, 44 – 45, 49, 154 —in Bicycle Thieves, 62, 75, 149, 155 —in Bitter Rice, 114 –116, 118, 120 Rossellini, Roberto, 26, 29, 100, 147 Ruether, Rosemary Radford, 166n St. Peter’s Cathedral, 49, 154 Silverman, Michael, 147 Sitney, P. Adams, 27, 50, 62, 169n Southern Question, 92, 101 Staiger, Janet, 3 Sternberg, Meir, 32 –33, 36, 40, 83, 96; literary basis of the model, 164n structure: and meaning, 2; of identity, 4, 12, 15, 37; and the individual, 6, 22; and continuity, 18; and identification, 22, 32, 34, 113; of fantasy, 23; of Fascism, 24; and textual signification, 24; and the social domain, 26; of plot, 28; of relationship between the moi and the je within discourse, 28; and Symbolic identification, 74; of Griffith montage, 79; and signification, 92, 149, 152; and the text, 92, 95 –96, 152; and character as dialectical, 96; desire, 96; and primary, 98; of the je (see je and structure); of jouissance (see jouissance, structure of ); of the moi (see moi); of narrative (see narrative); and the Resistance (see Resistance as signifier) —and Rome: Open City, 31–32, 37, 41– 43, 45 – 47; temporal in, 31; of Lacan’s theory of personality in, 34; of anxiety in, 38 –39; of penance in, 46, 48 – 49; and moral and ideological in, 47; and individual renunciation in, 49 –50,

189 154; of internal splitting in, 49; of the Other(A) in, 50; of the individual, 154 —and Bicycle Thieves, 74; of identity in, 53, 64; of anxiety in, 54, 56, 58; of narrative in, 54; of point of view in, 55; of classical style in, 56; of object loss in, 56 –57; of the paternal function in, 75 –76; of fantasy in, 76; of the individual in, 76 —and La terra trema: of classical narrative in, 80, 83 – 84, 86; of identity in, 80, 86, 95, 97; of privilege in, 80; and the process of misrecognition in, 80; of repression in, 80; of narrative stability in, 82; of plot, 83 – 84, 88, 91–92; of anxiety in, 86, 90; of Symbolic identification in, 87; and its subversion, 93, 95, 99 –100; of desire in, 99 –100 —and Bitter Rice: of anxiety in, 119; of the text, 119; of control in, 120; of desire in, 124; of jouissance in, 124 —and Senso: of the plot in, 129 –131, 133, 142, 144; of melodrama in, 133; of anxiety in, 135; of class in, 136; of the national unity movement in, 139; of the Imaginary in, 145; of privilege in, 156 super-ego, 6 —and Rome: Open City, 46 – 47, 50 —and La terra trema, 100 Symbolic, 11–12, 26, 29, 92, 121–125; and Lacan’s cognitive model, 14; order, 17, 19, 21–23, 121; mandate, 23, 74 –75, 154; function, 37, 105, 121, 125, 131– 132; and the gaze, 67– 68, 76; and the paternal, 74; and desire (see desire and the Symbolic); and the je (see je

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190

Cinema of Anxiety and the Symbolic); identification (see identification, Symbolic); and ideology (see ideology and the Symbolic); and narrative (see narrative and the Symbolic); and recognition (see recognition and the Symbolic) —and Bicycle Thieves, 72 –73, 76 —and La terra trema, 86 – 88, 91, 97–98, 102 —and Bitter Rice, 107, 117, 119, 123 – 126, 156; and woman in, 121–125 —and Senso, 137–138, 141–144, 156

“THE” woman, 121–122 Togliatti, Palmiro, 143 –144 Tomasulo, Frank, 54, 58 transformismo, 135, 140 –146

unity of discourse, 28, 32, 79, 161n, 170n —and Rome: Open City, 30 –31 —and La terra trema, 80 utopian impulse, 25, 148, 153 –154, 157 —and Rome: Open City, 30, 43 – 44, 49 –50 —and La terra trema, 91–92 Verdi, 129 Visconti, Luchino, 26, 127–128, 147, 173n Williams, Christopher, 9 Zizek, Slavoj, 10, 22 –23, 94 –95, 153 –154, 162n