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I ta ly 's landscapes of loss: historicalmourning and the d ia lect ical imagein C inem a Parad iso , M edi te r raneoand // Post inoROSALIND GALT

Cinema Paradiso (Giuseppe Tornatore, 1988), Mediterraneo(Gabnele Salvatores, 1991) and // Postino (Michael Radford, 1995)are strikingly similar films: released within a few years or each other,all are historical romantic melodramas, focusing on young Italianmen and set around the end of W orld W ar II In the context ofcontemporary European film production, all three can be consideredas heritage cinema, a genre characterized in part by modes ofproduction and distribution, but also by historical narratives,thematics of national nostalgia and spectacular mises-en-scene. In allthese three films, the mise-en-scene in question is landscape, whereimages of rural Italian and Mediterranean land and seascapes formone of the key pleasures of the texts How ever, these pleasuies arefar from simple, and the landscape image in postwar Europeancinema creates a nexus of meanings around representation andpolitics that is both culturally potent and inevitably tinged withsuspicion. Despite counter-examples such as neorealism, whichattempted to reclaim Italian space for an anti-Fascist identity, criticalunderstanding of the spectacular landscape image has combinedhistorical concern for the politics of its spatializing rhetonc with amore contemporary Marxist cntique of the aesthetics of style andsurface How ever, I would sugg est that landscape im ages in filmallow an investigation of this relationship of cinematic to political

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Frednc Jameson Postmodernism,or, The Cultural Logic ol LateCapitalism (Durham DukeUniversity Press 1995)Susannah Radstone.Cinema/memory/history Screen

vol 36, no 1 (19951 pp 3 4-47

3 Andrew Higson Re-presentingthe national past nostalgia andpastiche in the heritage film inLester Friedman (ed ) Fires WereStarted British Cinema andThatchensm (London UniversityCollege London Press 1993)p 119

space, insofar as landscape as a mode of spectacle provokesquestions of indexicality, the materiality of the profilmic. and thehistoricity of the image In analy zing the se three films. I wan t tothink about the specificity of landscape images in cinematic terms: toread mise-en-scene as an ideological articulation of space and as astaging of Italian history that is historically punctual and politicallycomplex

The appelation 'heritage film' is itself somewhat ideologicallyloaded many critics of the genre see it as reactionary , a reading thatis based frequently on a Jamesonian critique of the spectacular imageas nostalgic, sentimental and lacking in historical depth' SusannahRadstone. for example, reads Cinema Paradiso as postmodernnostalgia, offering a conventional pop-cultural version of historyinstead of a more genuine relation to the experience of the past 2 In amore general context, critics of the heritage film, such as AndrewHigson, offer an ideological critique in which the pleasures of thespectacular mise-en-scene gloss over any political edge thatnarratives of class conflict might have contained 3 Although thesearguments are theoretically different, there is implicit in each a senseof anxiety around the image, and around the spectacular image ashistorical. In opposition to this logic, my claim in this essay is thatthese three films deploy the spectacular pleasures of the Italianlandscape to construct a re-evaluation and a re-experiencing of Italianpostwar history, creating in the process a complex historicaltemporality and a dialectical relation to the landscape image

Before I discuss the question of the image, I want to look at therelationship between history and narrative in these films, for it is inthis relation than the foundations are laid for the visual strategies Iwill be tracing If these films are pop ularly viewed as offering arose-tinted view of the past, it is only a lack of attention to Italianpolitical history that allows critics to dispose of them in this way asapolitical or historically empty I want to argue instead that the filmsare doubly structured by a leftist reading of Italian political historyand by a displacem ent of this politics onto roman ce This structureoffers a reading not only of the postwar moment in which the filmsare set, but also of the historical moment of the late 1980s and early1990s, when the films were made, and from which specificperspective this projected narrative of romantic loss makes politicalsense

For Italy, the postwar years were a crucial period in which astruggle took place over Italian national identity, concluding in 1948with the formation of the First Rep ublic Th e breaku p of the unifiedantifascist Resistance, the defeat of the Communist Party (PCI) andthe victory of the rightist Christian Democrats (DC) speaks of amoment that is far from safely nostalgic for Italians, and is in factmore fraught than a reiteration of a fascism that can be universallycondemned. And, while fascism may have been a crucial topic for

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4 See for example The ConformistIBemardo Bertolucci. 19691Amarcord (Fedenco Fell 19731and Christ Stopped at EboltIFrancesco Rosi 1979)

Lawrence Gray From Gtamsci 10Toghatti the partito nuovo and[he mass basis ot ItalianCommunism in Simon Serfatyand Lawrence Gray (eds) Th eItalian Communist PartyYesterday Today and Tomorrow(We stport CT Greenwood Press1980) pp 21-36

See for example, Paul Gmsborg'ssomewhat leftist overview AHistory of Contemporary ItalySociety and Polit ics 1943-1988(London Penguin 1990) alsoNorman Kogan A PoliticalHistory of Postwar Italy (NewYork Praeger 1981) S J W oolfled ) The Rebirth of Italy1943-50 (New York Humanities

Press 1972) Spencer M DiScala Italy From Revolution toRepublic second edition (BouldeiCA Westview Press 1998)

Italian cinema in the 1960s and 1970s, when the war was first beingreconsidered in European culture." I would argue that 1945-8 becamean equally compelling era in the early 1990s, when the postwarRepublic came under increasing pressure and finally, in 1992,collapsed altogether

For the Italian Left, the key historical question has not been 'howdid we allow fascism to happen 9 ' but rather 'what went wrong afterthe war 7 '. The partition of Italy produced a strong partisan coalitionthat, by the end of the war, was discussing with the PCI the role ofdemocratic socialism in the new order 5 As the new constitution wasdrawn up in 1946. there was a moment of unique opportunity inwhich political parties were being created anew, and to speak of anentirely new nation appeared to be no exagg eration This exhilarationwas most evident in the Left which, as the mainstay of theResistance, pushed successfully for a left-leaning coalitiongovern men t in 1945 But this spirit of optimism was short-lived Aswell as refusing to institute any of the government's more radicalplans, the US-backed DC ensured that ex-Fascists remained in theirposts and few major political changes took place 6 By 1948. the PCIwas losing popular support and in the April elections the DC won alandslide victory They w ere to remain in pow er, almost w ithoutinterruption, for the next forty-five years

The political impact of these years is explicitly present in thefilms, readable at the edges of the mise-en-scene and in theperipheries of the narratives Mediterraneo describes the feeling ofpostwar optimism among its rescued soldiers, verbalizing this conceptquite directly through the characters of La Rosa and Lo Russo Thu s,when La Rosa arrives by plane and tells the soldiers the news otM uss olin i's fall, Italy's division and of joinin g forces with the Allies,he adds , 'there is much to do, we can't rem ain outside of it Thereare big ideals at stake ' And even more directly expressing PCIsentiments. Lo Russo tries to persuade Farina to come back to Italywith him by telling him that Italy 'needs rebuilding from the groundup we 'll build a great nation, I prom ise you ' And in // Posimo,the nghtwing's fear of the PCI is visible in one shot of the village inwhich a DC election poster is seen towards the edge of the screen,its image a hammer and sickle, its slogan 'because this isn't youiflag'

However, the relation of the films to political events is notprimarily contained in these few direct references, but is structuredthrough a projection of politics onto roman ce In each film, themoment of political possibility can be thought of directly only as amoment of romantic possibility, which becomes a nostalgic narrativeof rom antic loss In Cinema Paradiso. Toto falls in love with theunr each able Elena his affair with her is brief, but he never entirelygets over her. In // Postmo the connection is more explicit, as thefilm's displacement of politics onto romance is enacted as the tension

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explanation of why they take the form that they do From thestandpoint of the 1990s, 1945 signifies the moment of possibility thatfails Th us, for films to reimag ine those years does entail a certainnostalgia, a yearning for the moment when a different outcome wasstill possible But, contrary to the criticisms that accuse the films ofusing nostalgia to produce a stable and reactionary relation tohistory, the combination of 1945 and 1992 sets up a dynamic relationbetween past and present, in which nostalgia subtends a historicaland political critiqu e This is why both Mediterraneo and CinemaParadtso include sequences set in the present, in which their postwarromances are nostalgically revisited from a place of present-day lossToto in Cinema Paradtso watches his old films of Elena, knowingthat he has never recaptured such happiness, and the lieutentant inMediterraneo returns to the island where he discovers that Vassihssahas died This loss is also articulated as directly political inMediterraneo, where the Communist Lo Russo has returned to theGreek island, deca des after promising to build a new Italy He tellsFarina, 'Life wa sn't so good in Italy They did n't let us changeanything So I told them. You win but do n't consid er me anaccomplice ' This moment acts as a coda to the character 's earlieroptimism, but the weight of the relationship between these historicalspaces cannot be borne by such direct references Instead, suchnostalgia for the moment of possibility, combined with knowledge ofits inevitable failure, can only be represented in a form able tostructure history in terms of loss and mourning, knowledge anddesire: in other words, as melodrama.

If the pleasures of the melodramatic narrative entail a mourningfor the losses of the historical Left, the pleasurable image in thesefilms does similar work. The anxiety around the image in thecriticism of these films contains a fear of the spectacular thatimplicitly looks to a formal realism to secure historical authenticityMise-en-scene does have a role within this discourse, that ofgrounding the narrative image accurately, but anything excessive tonarrative necessity casts doubt upon the seriousness of the enterpriseThus, for Jameson, the nostalgic image is too beautiful to be true,and for Higson the so-called "heritage shots' of aestheticallypleasurab le views 'fall out o f the narrative. Each claim abouthistoricity is based on a splitting of the functions of narrative andimage, a binary structure in which visual pleasure works only toundermine the possibly radical signification of the historical narrative

What is striking here is the extent to which this discourse ispredicated on the structures of feminist film theory and yetderadicahze s its conception of the image For clearly Hig son'sspectacular heritage shots that 'fall out' of the narrative owe a debt

12 Laura Muivey Visual pleasure t o Laura Mul vey . 1 2 b u t i n a s impl i f ied rhe tor ic in whi ch t he seand narrative cmema Screen moments of spectacular freezing can indicate only a blockage ofv ol 16 no 3 I 19 7 5 I, p p 6 -1 8 . , , , , , , . ,mean ing Not only is the context or psych oanaly tic theory lost, but in


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13 Rosalind Krauss 'Photography sdiscursive spaces landscape/view An Journal vol 42 no 4(1982) pp 311-19

14 For an example of this kind ofcriticism see Wheeler WinstonDixon Th e Transparency ofSpectacle Me ditations on theMoving Image (Albany NY StateUniversity of New York Press1998)

shifting the terrain from patriarchal images to historicalrepresentation, the ideological complexity of spectacle is left behind.For Mulvey. neither spectacle nor narrative are negative simply byrefusing meaning, but rather both operate as part of an intenselyproductive ideological system And in much feminist theoryfollowing Mulvey. the image is a privileged site of contestation, theplace where hegemonic meanings can start to break down. Thus,while questions of gender may be peripheral to the narratives ofthese films. I would argue that the structures of feminist film theoryare crucial to theorizing the relation they propose between histoncalnarrative and spectacular mise-en-s cene. Against H igso n's logic. Iwould claim that in tandem with analyzing these narratives in termsof mourning and melodrama, it is crucial to theorize as productivethe pleasures of their spectacular histoncal images

The chief locus of spectacle in these three films is landscape anItalian rural landscape in Cinema Paradiso and // Posttno, a Greekisland in Mediterraneo Each film was shot on location, and thenarratives take place within spaces coded as spectacular from thesequences in // Postmo in which Mano and Neruda talk on thebeach, to Toto's walks with the pnest along a road overlooking adramatic shoreline in Cinema Paradiso. And, in addition to thesenarratively motivated locations, there are many instances of shots andseque nces that are not motivated, lan dscape im ages that indeed 'fallout" of the narrativ e This is the case in Mediterraneo, whichincludes montage sequences of the vanous spaces of the island,unconnected from narrative, providing direct spectatonal engagementwith the pleasurable spectacle of landscape.Within the discourse on spectacle in contemporary film, there is aspecific anxiety around landscape images Land scapes are often readgraphically, in what Rosalind Krauss in the photographic contextcalls a mode rnist aestheticizing disco urse " T his can be valorized,say, in the context of art cinema, and indeed is central to the criticalconstruction of 1960s European art film where a nonreahst mise-en-scene is part of a claim to radicah ty In postc lassic al film, artcinematic visual strategies can be central to the location of films asquality products, as for example in the self-consciously aestheticvistas of The English Patient (Anthony Minghella, 1996). But thisexample demonstrates the ease with which the valorising impulse canslip into a fear of pictonahsm, producing an 'all style, no depth'criticism This fear of mise-en -scene, in which landscape beco mesreadable as a screen blocking a perceived narrative depth, is peculiarto a postclassical cinema in which visual excess has become linkedto claims of a 'dumbing-down' process, of deteriorating content "Once again, the image is the site of a lack, a falling away frommeaning.

The difficulty, then, is to think landscape outside of thisepistem ological bind to read it not as a sliding surface, an apo na of

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15 Giuseppe De Santis, Per unpaessagio italiano Cinemano 116 119411, pp 71-5Translation from David Overbey(ed ) Springtime in Italy aReader in Neorealism (Hamden,CT Acchon, 1979) p 78

16 See Mario Cannella Ideologyand aesthetic hypotheses in thecriticism of neo-reahsm Screenvol 14 no 4 (1974) pp 5 -60

meaning, but rather as a specifically meaningful form of spectacularimage. In order to begin to rethink landscape in this way, it isnecessary both to bring back to the surface the feminist work thatoffers a film-specific understanding of the structures underwriting theimag e, and to analyze w hat happens differently when the image isnot tied to a gendered body. If the female characters in the films can,in classical terms, be seen as images standing for desire, what canlandscape as spectacle stand for")

One way to address this issue is through the discursive context ofanother body of Italian films in which landscape became a privilegedsite of meaning - neo realism M ade mainly between 1945 and 1948,neorealist filmmaking is concurrent with the moment of politicaloptimism mourned by the 1990s films, and represents many of thesame geographical spaces. Furthermore, in neorealism, landscape isoften claimed to be central to the films' project of reclaiming Italyfor an antifascist identity Th us, for examp le, Paisa (RobertoRossellini, 1946) represents Italian resistance and liberation through aseries of narratives each set in a different geographical location,while La Terra Trema (Luchino Visconti, 1948) focuses on exploitedworkers in a rural Sicilian fishing village

Identifying neorealism with landscape images, director GiuseppeDe Santis argues that

If we consider that a great number of films among those mostvalued belong to a genre in which a landscape has a primordialimportance - White Shadows in the South Seas, Tabu, Que VivaMexico, Storm over Asia - then it is clear that the cinem a has aneven greater need to use the same element of landscape thatcommunicates almost immediately with the spectators who aboveall want to 'see' '5

Th is formulation is telling, for it imp lies the next question wh at is itthat these spectators above all want to see, and what it is thatlandscape shows them'' The obvious answer is that landscape worksas part of neoreahsm's discourse of authenticity, that along with non-professional actors, real locations show the unmediated truth of ItalyHowever, even without critiquing the ideological basis of this versionof realism.16 it is clear that within De Santis's own discourse,landscape does not show what the spectators want to see. but ratheroperates sim ilarly to the fetish For what the spectators of neorealismabove all want to see is, depending on your ideological position, thetruth of human ity or the truth of exploitation Not. in any case, thetruth of geography W hat landscape does show is its own visibilityas a scene or a vista it exists to be looked at, and in its owntransparency stands in for a truth that cannot be so easilyrepresented

It is significant that this claim defining landscape's role asfulfilling a desire to see should com e from De S antis. a director

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17 Linda Willi ams Hard CorePower Pleasure and the Frenzyof the Visible (Berkeley and LosAngeles CA University ofCalifornia Press 19891

18 Andre Bazin What is Cinema?Volume II trans Hugh Gray(Berkeley and Los Angeles CAand London University ofCalifornia Press 1971)

whose most famous film is Bitter Rice (1948). in which what is seenis not so much the truth of Italy as the breasts and legs of actressSilvana Mang ano A double slippage takes place here, both from thelandscape to the body and from realism to spectacle, and while DeSantis writes about the national importance of representing landscape,the film was criticized for its spectaculanty, banned in Italy, andbecame a cult object in Europe and the USA In this instance, thefetish quality of what the audience wants to see is quite clear, andthe image of Mangano's stockinged legs as she stands in the neepaddies combines 'truths" about body and landscape. The spectacularbody that operates as stand-in for the truth itself is again a structureanalyzed in feminist theory, here reminiscent of Linda Wilhams'sargument that in pornography the excessive visibility of the body isitself a fetish, standin g in for an imp oss ible truth of pleasu re " Themetonymic link from landscape to the female body is a standard one.and Bitter Rice exploits this patriarchal connection of woman tonature So too do the recent films in Mediterraneo, two of thesoldiers fall for a shepherdess who lives in a rural idyll in themountains, and Vassihssa is frequently framed in relation tolands cape But if w e can read this link in the other direction - thatis , to read the Italian landscape as fetishized in a similar way to thefemale body - then this might open up a useful way ofunderstanding land scap e's function Land scape, like wo man, isimagined to be immediate, to communicate directly to those whowant, above all, to see

I want to examine this discourse of visibility and immediacy,which structures the landscape spectacle as a kind of fetish, and totheorize how it produces an affective rhetoric that is also imbricatedwith historicity In order to do this, I wou ld like to think aboutlandscape as a central part of theonzations of the cinematic index.From the Lumieres' rustling leaves to Bazin's analysis ofneorealism 18 . images of landscape have been privileged signifiers ofcin em a's capacity to touch upon the real It is this discourse also thatunderwrites De Santis's call for a paesaggio itahano Of course, thisclaim on the real can be disputed in a number of ways, and I wantto keep in mind my reading of De Santis, that the idea of the 'truth'of landscape operates as a fetish, standing as a figure for a desirethat is hidden in plain sight Ho we ver, in orde r to unders tand howthese films structure a relation to history through this mode ofapparent immediacy, it will be important to account for the affectivepower of the landscape image, a power which is grounded in theability of these cinematic images to short-circuit representation

In Theory of Film, Kracauer gives an example in which an actuallandscape offers a unique experie nce of the cinem atic He citesBlaise Cendrars's 'hypothetical experiment' , imagining ' two filmscenes which are completely identical except for the fact that one hasbeen shot on the Mont Blanc while the other was staged in the

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19 Siegfried Kracauer Theory ofhim the Redemption of PhysicalReality (Princeton NJ PrincetonUnive rsity Press 1997), p 35

20 Ibid p

21 Based on his discussipn in theArtwork essay one couldconclude that Ben|amm precludesany experience of the auratic incinema However as MiriamHansen argues this negativity isexceptional and in his laterwriti ng Benjamin is moreconcerned to find the auraticwithin the modern, as part of hisattempt to theorize historyoutside of progress See MinamHansen Benjamin cinema andexperience "the blue flower inthe land of technology" Ne wGerman Critique no 40 (1987)pp 179-224

studio. His contention is that the former has a quality not found inthe latter Ther e are on the mountain, says he, certain "em anatio ns,luminous or otherwise, which have worked on the film and given it asoul" '19 Here, the mountain fulfils a similar - although not identical- role to that played in Bazin by the sequen ce shot or deep focus bypreserving the integrity of profilmic space, it operates fundamentallynot as mise-en-scene but as a guarantor of the medium's ontologicalstatus. In common with Bazin, this conception of realism is tied totemporality, in which the affect - or the 'soul' - of the imagederives from its ability to preserve that which was there, themateriality of an object in time

Kracauer goes on to discuss what happens to the landscape imagein a historica l film He re, he arg ues , there is a conflict in which theindexical landscape image undercuts the historicity of the narrative,breaking the spectator's belief in the diegetic world. His example isCarl Dreyer's Day of Wrath (1943), which contains a "problematicmixture of real trees and period cos tum es' Thu s, 'The trees formpart of endless reality which the camera might picture on and on,while the lovers belong to the orbit of an intrinsically artificialuniverse No sooner do the lovers leave it and collide with nature inthe raw than the presence of the trees retransforms them intocostumed actors >2 In this m oment of sp litting, the indexicahty of thetrees short-circuits the representational meanings of the narrativespace and, in doing so. momentarily replaces historicity withtempo rality, the time of filming instead of the time of the story Thisstructure informs the Italian films, where the spectacular landscapevistas are readable as indices, pulling against the historical codes ofthe mise-en-scene

As Kracauer points out, this effect is at its strongest with a distanthistory, so does not produce shock in the more recently-set Italianfilms. Rather, the effect of splitting is refracted across the surface ofthe text, producing a friction. (An exemplary moment would be thescene in Cinema Paradiso where Toto and Elena try to hitch a lift,the pastness of their car momentarily undercut by the effect of thewide shot of a mountain range behind them ) Nonetheless, this ideaof a conflict within the frame opens up a productive space withinthese texts, a tension within the landscape image between itsnarrative and indexical properties In order to understand how thistension constitutes an experience of historical mourning that extendsthat of the films' melodramatic narratives, Kracauer's indexicaltension needs to be articulated with a quite different theonzation oftempo rality and the real. Benjam in's conc ept of the aura One ofBenjamin's most notoriously difficult concepts, the auratic alsoderives from a momentary effect of the real, but this effect demandsto be thought of in terms of temporality and history, experience andpolitics21What is striking in the context of my reading is that Benjamin

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22 W alter Benjamin A small historyof photography in One WayStreet and Other Writ ings, transEdmund Jephcott and KmgsleyShorter (London Verso 1985)p 250

23 Hansen Benjamin cinema andexperience, p 211

24 Ibid p 212

25 W alter Benjamin Central ParkNew German Critique no 34(19851 p 41

repeatedly defines the aura via the imag e of a landsca pe In 'A sma llhistory of photography' he asks

What is aura, actually' A strange weave of space and time: theunique appearance or semblance of distance, no matter how closethe object may be W hile resting on a sum m er's no on, to trace arange of mountains on the horizon, or a branch that throws itsshado w on the obs erver . . that is what it mea ns to breathe theaura of those mountains, that branch n

As in the Italian films, the privileged signifier of an affective real isimagined as a long shot, a distanced view of a natural landscapeAnd, as in the films, this image stands in for something else, bothexplicitly, where the definition of aura in a historical object isdisplaced by Benjamin onto a natural one, and implicitly, where, asMinam Hansen argues in her reading of the concept, a humanrelation is displaced onto the auratic object n

Hansen points out the seeming disparity between Benjamin's initialdefinition of the aura in terms of the reciprocity of the gaze and hisexample that is not human but inanimate. She asks what the humanelement is in the auratic experience that allows us to apply it tonature Her answ er is 'that forgotten hum an elem ent . is nothingbut the material origin - and finality - that humans share with non-human nature ' u In other words, the mountain and the branch remindus of ma teriality, temp orality and thus ultimately of death Theexperience of the aura through landscape offers a sense of history inthe abstract, of the pure sense of time, its passing and itsinexorability, the shiver of absence that such seeming presenceimplies And while for Benjamin this expe rience is dep ende nt on thepresence of the physical space of the landscape, I would argue that itexists in these films, and that rather than defining the spectator'srelationship to the apparatus, as in the bourgeois art object, the aurahere has become an internal textual effect. The landscape imagediffuses across the surface of the films an experience of historicaland tempo ral loss It is this abstracted loss that grou nds the affectivestructure of the films' mise-en -scen e the landscap e of the mou ntain,the branch and the tree continually breaks out of representation,reminding the spectator that the historical moment of the narrativeshas passed and can only be looked back on belatedly, from adistance

However, if the aura operates to abstract the relationship of thesubject to temporality, that relationship is nevertheless always in factsocial and its abstraction is necessarily a deflection Benjamin alsodescribes the aura 'as a projection of a social experience of peopleonto nature'.25 The landscape image must not be seen as some kindof immanence, but rather is only able to signify as an abstractionwhen it is, alread y, part of a conc rete history Th us, the lan dscap eimages of the films could not produce such an effect of auratic loss

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26 Walter Benjamin The ArcadesProtect trans Howard Eiland andKevin McLaughlin (Cambridge,MA and London The BelknapPress of Harvard University Press1999) pp 462-3

if this structure of temporality did not also, and at the same time,involve a projected experience of an actual historical loss. The samehistory that is projected onto the romance narratives is also refractedacross the landscaped mise-en-scene, and the spectacular images thatcould be perceived as merely touristic are rather imbricated with thesocial logic of Italian political loss and thus interpellate the spectatornot as a tourist but as a subject in mourningThis effect is perhaps most visible in the final shots ofMediterraneo and // Postino, both of which cut or track from a sceneof characters in mourning to long shots of the landscape. These shotsunderline the connection of landscape to the romance narratives,tying the abstract auratic effect of temporality in the landscapesthemselves to the specific experience of historical loss expressed bythe characters in the preceding sequen ces Thu s, in Mediterraneo, thefinal scene includes Lo Russo's repudiation of political will,completing the shift from his desire to build a great country to hisadmission of defeat, and comes directly after the lieutenant'sdiscovery of Va ssi hss a's death The camera tracks left from the nowold men to reframe on the mountains, where the auratic break isimm ediately readable in terms of this narrative mourning // Postinoincludes an even more explicit binding of affective landscape tomourning work, when Neruda finally hears the dictaphone tape thatMario had made for him before his death The tape contains M ario 'sattempt to record the island, to capture in sound that which can onlybe an image, the sea, the cliffs, the sky These im ages are onlyvisible to Neruda and to the spectator in the knowledge of Mario'sdeath, and hence their technological presence (doubled by recording)is tied to the irrevocable pastness of their production.

The ultimate effect of this both/and logic, by which the landscapeis coded simultaneously as immediate and as referential, is to formwhat Benjamin terms a dialectical image For Benjamin, thedialectical image is crucial to a theonzation of history outside ofnarratives of progress In The Arcades Project, he says

It is not that what is past casts its light on what is present, orwhat is present its light on what it past: rather, image is thatwherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now toform a constellation In other words image is dialectics at astandstill For while the relation of the present to the past is purelytemporal, the relation of what-has-been to the now is dialectical:not temporal in nature but figural. Only dialectical images aregenuinely historical . i m ag es M

Here, history is conceptualized as a political and experiential momentin time, a space in which past and present can be brought intoconjunction, to form a dialectic relationship in which a historicalconstellation can be imagine d anew My claim for these films is thatlandscape functions as such a dialectical image, forming a critical




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27 See for example FrancescoCasetti, Le neorfiahsme Itahenle cinema comme reconquete derriel CmimActwn no 60 (1991)pp 70-78 Mira Liehm, Passionand Defiance Film in Italy from1942 lo the Present (Berkeleyand Los Angele s CA and LondonUniversity of California Press19841 Millicent Marcus, ItalianFilm in the Light of Neoreahsm(Princeton, NJ PrincetonUniversity Press 1986)

28 Giuseppe De Santis. 'Italieruralite et neorealismeCmimaAction no 36 11386)pp 60-61

reading of the Italian postwar history of 1945 and 1992 by setting upa productive tension between two opposing operations of mise-en-scene

The first element of this structure is precisely the auratic the forcewith which the landscape image ruptures representation, and henceproduces an affect of pure temporal distance, of materiality and itsloss. Conceivable, as I have suggested, as a crossroads of the aura,the indexical and of Kracauer's trees that break belief in a historicalnarrative, this mode evokes the real insofar as the landscape imageoffers to stand in for an experiential truth The affective p ow er ofthis mode is predicated on its ability to break out of signification,and to produce an emotional effect not from any specific matenalitybut from its displac em ent onto abstract space and time Ho wev er, atthe moment of this representational break, the landscape image alsomoves in exactly the opposite direction, for this image of temporalloss necessarily recalls that which it has deflected: the socialnarrative of an actual history and its material losses, the time of1945 as felt in 1992 And this history connects the landscape mise-en-scene to the films' narratives, where both produce a spectatonalposition that repeats the emotionally-charged cathexis of mourningThe 'real' history of the failure of the Italian Left both entails and isentailed by the auratic 'real' of the image, their contradictory formaloperations binding a historical narrative and temporal experience intodialectical tension

If the spectacular landscape promises in its visibility to show thetruth of Italy, the corollary of asking what meanings this truth standsin for is to ask why this fetish, this particular kind of image, shouldbe able to carry such significatory w eight In other wo rds, what isspecific to these landscapes that enables this dialectical structure tohold 7 To consider this question, it is necessary to return to De Santisand the stake of Italian neoreahsm in representing a national politicalspace in the 1940s It wo uld be possible to produce a fairlystraightforward historical reading of the importance of landscape inItalian culture in general and neor eahs m in particular many of thestandard works on Italian cinema cite the influence of novelists suchas Verga and Silone on neoreahsm's focus on rural life 27 De Santishimself connects the use of landscape to the politics of the wartimeLeft, claiming that the rural setting of many neoreahst films made acrucial space in which to represent the peasants and workers whohad formed the first mass resistance to Fascism.28

Meditermneo, Cinema Paradiso and // Postino contain numerousreferences to som e of the key texts of neoreahsm from the openingshots of the bay in // Postino, in which fishing boats are seen atsunrise in a picturesque long-shot, which directly references thelandscape of La Terra Trema, to more diffuse references such as thejob advert in // Postino that recalls Bicycle Thieves (Vittorio De Sica,1948), or the sentimentality of Cinema Paradiso 's version of

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childho od that again cites De Sica These references con struct ahistorical logic whereby landscape sets off a metonymic chain,linking the historical narratives of the films both to a cinematic and apolitical history, and furthermore, to a national-cultural history oflandsc ape to which n eorealism itself laid claim But if thisintertextual logic explains why landscape might offer a privilegedmise-en-scene of postwar history for Italian cinema, it is not thewhole story, for the historical space between the neorealist landscapeand its reiteration in the 1990s is also part of the dialectical image,forming another circuit of its both/and bind

To reference neorea lism is to make a certain truth claim for theimage, a claim that in the late 1940s was both formal and politicalAngela Dalle Vacche describes the project of neorealism as to "shoot

2 9 A n g e l a D a i i e v a c c h e T h e B o d y in the present tense',29 and this attention to the historical moment ismtueMmo, shapes oiHlsm definitional of the political power of a film such as Robertoin Italian Cinema (Princeton NJ , , , ^ , , . ^ , , . .P n n c e t o n u m v e r a t y P r e s s 1 9 92 1 Rossel l ini s Rome, Open City (1945) However , b y ci t ing this imageP 103 fifty years aft er th e fact , neorealism h a s become i tsel f histoncized

and a gap i s opened up so that th e image can no longer standdirectly fo r truth, b u t rather connotes a certain history of t ruth- tel l ing.Neoreal i sm h a s been cal led, ' t h e reposi tory o f par t isan hopes fo r

3 0 M a r c u s p x iv social justice in the postwar Italian state', 30 and as such, it is also achro nicle of the failure of those hopes For con tem pora ry films toreference its politics is inevitably to take on the difference of thishistorical perspective Cinema Paradiso includes a scene nearlyidentical to one in La Terra Trema, in which a group of men waitfor casual work, but the Communist is stigmatized and fails to get ajob. But whereas in the earlier film this injustice could be read as acall to action, in Cinema Paradiso the inevitable failure of suchaction is already known and the historical process located in the pasttense This doub led relation ship to political and filmic history is partof the dialectical image, for it is not merely an ironised rejection ofthe political 'truth' of neorealism The ideological and cinem aticcodes of the 1940s are at once still the basis of Italian leftist identityand were as false then as they are now The films cannot fail to referto neorealism. yet must cite its impossibility at the same time as itsnecessityIn addition to this textual logic, the dialectic within which thelandscape image signifies both indexical truth and a metonymic chainof specific historical mean ings also involves a geop olitical logic Justas the Benjaminian structure of abstract temporal loss in the auramust also displace a concrete social loss, so the spatial form of thetree and the branch also implicates a specific content, a geographicalplace with social and textual legibility. The location of all three filmscan be broadly defined as the South Cinema Paradiso is quitegeographically specific, describing Giancaldo as a village on thesouthern coast of Sicily, in // Postino, the island is a fictionalizedversion of Capn, and in Mediterraneo the location is not Italy at all1 7 0 S c r e e n 4 3 2 Summer 2002 Rosalind Gait I taly s landscapes of loss



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but a Greek island, placing the Italian characters further south stillThese locations can be read as more references to neorealism. formany key neorealist films are set in the South, including La TerraTrema. Amu Difficih (Luigi Zampa. 1948) and In the Name of theLaw (Pietro Germi. 1948). and take as their main theme the povertyand oppression of the southern peasa nts But this reference is onlypart of a complex web of meanings within which the image of theSouth operates in Italian politics and culture, and through whichconcepts of a singular national identity are problematized

Foremost, the South in Italian terms connotes the North/Southsplit, in which the South has historically been posed as a peripheralspace within the Italian state The political, economic and culturalsplit between the north of Italy and the south did not begin withWorld War II. but it was in the war years that it developed astructuring influence on national identity and political debate W hilethe country was partitioned, the South enjoyed a relatively secureperiod with a prewar style conservative government, while the Northendured heavy fighting and formed the stronghold of the partisanmovement, a coalition of Communists. Socialists. Liberals andChristian D emo crats This political divide remained after the war,with left-leaning coalitions and the PCI gaining support in the North,and the South becoming the bastion of the DC

In addition to this party political geography, the postwar years sawa massive divide develop in terms of wealth, as industrializationrapidly changed the North, leaving much of the South rural andimpoverished. The subsequent magnification of the differencesbetween the regions means that even in the postwar years, andcertainly by the 1990s, any representation of a southern locationimplies not only a rural landscape but a poor and. from a leftistpoint of view, politically-distant on e This perceived distanc e of theSouth, its peripheral status in postwar Italy, has also conventionallybeen thought of within a discou rse of pnm itivism the racist cliche ofNo rthern Italians is 'after Ro me , Afr ica' And this idea is not limitedto folk wisdom, but recurs in historical and political analyses inwhich the South is considered to be less 'European* than the rest ofItaly

The idea of the South, then, becomes the nub of many problemsof Italian national identity, and it is this imbrication of geographicalwith historical categories that the films' locations in the 'South' playupon On the one hand, to the extent that the films construct aheritage image of picturesque rural life, they could be read as takingpart in this discourse of primitivism. albeit in a contemporarytour istic, rather than over tly racist registe r Cer tainly , the signifiers ofsouthernness in the landscape are those of the rural and thepremodern. focusing in both Cinema Paradiso and // Postino onbarren countrys ide, scrubby hills and villages The rhetorical distanceof this particular kind of rural landscape is emphasized in

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Mediterraneo, where the location is not Italy but a fantasy South, aGreek island where the signifiers of southernness can be exaggerated,forming a kind of Mediterranean typage within which all thechara cters are enabled to 'find their roo ts' This proces s is madeclear in a sequence that begins with a picturesque long-shot of thebay, and then tracks left to Farina sitting beside the lieutenant, whois draw ing the landscape The lieutenant has already forged aconnection to the island, both by his drawing and through his claimfor a shared ancient Greek heritage M ean wh ile, two soldiers fromNorthern Italy sit on a hilltop, watching the sun set over the water,in an image that condenses their regional identification with mountainlandscape and the picturesque qualities of the fantasmatic South

However, as with the question of landscape in heritage cinema,what could be misread as touristic spectacle is, in these films, part ofthe construction of historical loss, where the specificity of thesouthern locations is tied to the films' nostalgic and melodramaticnarratives To to 's loss of Elena coincid es with his rejection of Sicilyfor the mainland, and his painful return to Ginacaldo at the end ofCinema Paradiso is figured primarily as a return to the space of theSouth Physical distance collapses onto temporal distance, whereToto's journey to Giancaldo seems almost like time travel to anolder Italy Th e modern viadu ct by which he arrives hovers abo vethe landscape, leaving the Sicilian hills themselves visually separatefrom encro ach ing mod ernity In this way , while this 'distan t' orexotic South can only be conceptualized as such from the position ofthe North, the unmarked 'European' part of Italy, that North canonly mourn the site of its own historical loss by projecting it onto itsprimitive other

There is another double bind in this projection, in which thepremodern southern landscape stands, in a geographical and historicalslippage, for the nostalgic past of a socialist Utopia manque For ifthe exotic pnmitivism of the South allows it to stand for a space ofhistorical desire, its regional history forces a split on exactly thoseterms W hile the South provid es a necessary space for the fantasy ofpolitical potential, it simultaneously offers a reminder of how andwhy the historical mo men t of 1945 went awry for the Left TheSouth was never a space of leftist activism and. as is depicted in //Postmo an d Cinema Paradiso. it offered little promise forCom mun ists in the postwar years Thus, the southern locations of thefilms reiterate the structure of the dialectical image, its pristinebeauty connoting at once the time before the political changes of theDC years and the inevitability of those change s No stalgia can onlybe visualized at a remove, but it is displaced onto the precise placethat historically refused radical political change.

This geographical logic also contains a 1990s perspective Wh ile!the North-South divide is certainly an ongoing political and culturalissue during the intervening years, it became politically central once

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31 Walter Benjamin Konvolut N[Theoretics of knowledge theoryof progress] , trans Leigh Hafreyand Richard Sieburth Th ePhilosophical Forum vol 15nos 1-2(1983-41 p 18

32 Benjamin The Arcades Projectp 388

more in the wake of the mam pulite scandals Northern resentm ent atsupporting the economically weaker regions was given an explicitvoice with the rise of the Northern League, a new political party thatsought to speak for a submerged regionalism, and whose appeal wasimplicitly, and sometim es explicitly, racist So it is at the mom ent atwhich the films are looking back to the inception of the modernNorth-South dynamic that this relation again contributes to Italy'snational crisis Just as the N orth -So uth split took on increasedweight at the beginning of the Cold War, so its ideological powerwas renewed in the wake of the Cold W ar 's end In order toreimagine the nation, it would be pressing to rethink the history ofthe split And w hile in 1945 the South constituted a problem for theLeft, by the 1990s it offered a contrast to the post-Cold Warnghtward swing of the urban voters who embraced Berlusconi's free-market rhetoric and the Northern L eagu e's racism It is for thisreason, perhaps, that it is the South, and not the North, whichbecomes the desirable object of a leftist nostalgic gaze in the 1990sFor Benjamin, the dialectical image enables a radicalizedrelationship to history, in which the present as much as the past canbe reimagin ed, re-experienced and critiqued In Co nvolu te N of Th eArcades Project, Benjamin discusses history and the dialectic, andclaims. "The materialist presentation of history leads the past to placethe present in a critical condition',31 and in Convolute K he considersthe idea of awakening as, 'An attempt to become aware of thedialectical . turn of rem em bran ce' E What remembrance enables inthese films is a relationship to the past that is both critical andemotional, distanced and immediate, and indeed cannot be onewithout invoking the other Furtherm ore, the relationship to historymust come from a particular point in the present, for both thedistance of the past and the closeness of the present are necessarycompon ents of rememb rance At the moment preceding the mampulite scandals. Italian political culture was indeed in a criticalcondition, and by enabling a re-experiencing of the loss of leftisthopes in the 1940s, these films return to the stakes of the ItalianRepublic at the moment when it finally became possible to imagineits end


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