The Earth figured: An exploration of landscapes in Italian cinema.

摘要

The dissertation explores the use of actual locations in Italian cinema, linking the post-war primacy of landscape, natural or urban, with the sense of place prominent in Italy's cultural and aesthetic heritage. Informed by historical precedents, the landscape is rendered as a vital humanized force in the restoration of personal and national identity. Setting the film-historical and theoretical rationale for the study, Chapter One defines key terms via notions of anthropomorphism and figuration of the profilmic in classical film theory. A geo-historical account locates the study in the particular conditions of Italy and its regional culture, focusing on the nascent period of Neorealism, and preparing for the following case studies.Chapter Two explores the narrativization of landscape in Roberto Rossellini's Viaggio in Italia (1954) as epic-digressive motions through the location, which infuses fiction with documentary values, poesis with actuality. The reciprocity of figure and landscape takes its cue from the engulfing Neapolitan environment, whose sites further suggest an affinity with Classical voyage narratives, travel accounts of the Grand Tour, and modern tourism. The act of filmmaking is itself associated with these paradigms.Chapter Three identified the aesthetic links and fertile contradictions between verismo and Neorealism at the core of Luchino Visconti's La terra trema (1948). The mythic resonance and anthropomorphic features of the location enhance Visconti's rendering of the Mediterranean landscape as a controlled stage, an already enframed set.Chapter Four traces Pier Paolo Pasolini's cinematic "consecration" of humble landscapes to embody "holy places" in Il Vangelo secondo Matteo (1964). After Byzantine and early Renaissance art, Pasolini represents his figures frontally against landscapes that reflect their iconic features. Pasolini's "pilgrimage" to and rejection of locations in Palestine in favor of Southern Italy reenact Christianity's transposition of the sacred and its aesthetic of incarnation.The epilogue proposes an alternative to the "figurative" grasp of cinematic landscape. Antonioni's earliest work already suggests a radical shift of perspective whereby the relation of figure and ground is reversed and the landscape abstracted as sheer topography. This modernization of space remains to be explored in future study.